From Hollywood Hedonist to Activist in Aotearoa

A conversation between editor Tony Forster and TOM BURSTYN:

“Cloud South Films is the midlife lovechild of NZ-based, Emmy-nominated, multi-award-winning Canadian cinematographer Tom Burstyn and New Zealand journalist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. They describe themselves as escapees from the fantasy world of feature filmmaking and corporate media.” (From www.cloudsouth.co.nz)

I first knew of Mister Burstyn when Vanya Bailey interviewed him about the Viper camera for our October 2005 issue. Turned out this Canadian cinematographer had a long-time connection with NZ—in fact, he now has dual citizenship. But I didn’t get to meet him until the premiere of his remarkable film This Way of Life, at the International Film Festival this year. A long café chat confirmed my desire to do a story about his “mid-life change of career from highly paid, highly stressed feature film & TV cinematographer in Hollywood to a two-person (husband & wife) team of activist doco filmmakers.” When I happened to be in Napier for a short film job, I took the chance on my half-day off to drop by the reformed doco maker’s home for another chat.

Obviously, the main focus of this interview will be about being a successful Hollywood cinematographer, and then – By the way, is that the word you prefer when you describe yourself?

Cinematographer, cameraman, yeah. Cinematographer’s a little pretentious, but what the hell.

Director of Photography sounds slightly more...

Up oneself?

Yeah! But ‘cameraman’ just seems too prosaic. At least with photographer or cinematographer there’s some recognition of the artistry involved. I like that, but DP or DOP seems to be the most commonly used here. Then there’s ‘lighting cameraman,’ which comes from England, doesn’t it?

I think it’s a British term; DP is an American term. DOP is used in Canada.

Which is where you were born – and you initially trained with their National Film Board?

I got a summer job when I was 15 as an apprentice at the National Film Board; I worked for the two months summer vacation for them. I originally wanted to be an art photographer, and after my summer with the Film Board, I realised that the pleasure I took out of filmmaking as opposed to photography was the group effort. I really enjoy that communal push that happens when you’re a filmmaker, as opposed to the lonely, lonely struggle of the photographer. So I was hooked, and it was a great fun summer, I remember. It was 1968 or 69, and I got into the experimental film circuit that was growing in Montreal at the time. I got no formal training – it was very sloppy work, that experimental filmmaking stuff, very chaotic, but very passionate; and it was years before I got a paid job as an assistant. I think I was fired as an assistant four times because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and so I just kicked myself upstairs and called myself a cameraman, and started shooting little movies and looked up.

I was a hopeless assistant, and I’m still in awe of somebody being able to translate a distance from here to there onto the barrel of the lens—I can’t figure out how they possibly can do it, but there you are.

Oh, when you see focus pullers doing it intuitively, it’s magic.

Yeah, it’s a great talent. Anyway, that was it, I started there and moved to Toronto after that, and I teamed up with John Laing in Montreal, and that’s how I came to New Zealand.

I’d made a documentary about an artist, and John came along and saved me from myself and cut the film. He was working at the Film Board at the time, and through a mutual contact, we met and he agreed to cut our film, probably for free—I can’t imagine I paid him anything!—and we became fast friends. Then we co-directed a bunch of other films, and then John and Robyn returned to New Zealand – and about a year later I got a call to come and shoot The Lost Tribe, and that’s when I fell in love with New Zealand. It was a great experience, it was that passion, that chaotic passion reborn again, but this time with some discipline.

I remember guys like Mike Hardcastle, camera operator—he was brilliant. Before that, I couldn’t understand why anybody would want a camera operator when I could do it perfectly well; and then I got there and I learned what a camera operator really did—I learned that it’s an incredibly creative and busy job.

And Allen Guilford was pulling focus for us, may he rest in peace. He was also great at his job, and Donny Duncan was second assistant—it was a great team, great team. I went home after that on a cloud, it was such a fantastic experience. I remember after we’d wrapped the show everybody showed up at the studio every day wondering if there was something we could shoot, and it always ended up in some drunken brawl, but yeah, it was a great film! And then I came back for Mr. Wrong a few years later.

I shot a bunch of commercials, I met the guys at Mopix, Nigel Hutchinson and Ian Gibbon. I shot commercials for a bunch of years, four or five years, I think.

So you were flipping back and forth between North America and here?

Every time the weather started getting cold in Canada I’d come back here and have a summer—it was great. But recently, I’ve been managing to get all the way through to spring here, and then I get a call and have to go and spend winter there.

Our documentary business doesn’t quite support us yet, and it’s so easy for me to go—I haven’t tried very hard but I haven’t had much luck landing gigs here, although I just did This Is Not My Life. But over the years, obviously, I’ve built up a lot of contacts so that I can just pick up a job over there. The pay is way better, I have to say, and the exchange rate helps even more, so one three- or four-month gig pays for a lot of documentaries and a lot of time off. So that’s what we’re doing now.

It’s becoming more and more difficult over there. In the last few years, the business has really taken a downturn, both in the amount of money for the making of a film; but worse, in the quality of the material that we’re doing. My main avenue of work is high-end television and mid-level independent features; and the features have gone from being an interesting story—a romantic comedy, or some kind of little drama—to these wannabe films which are riots and action, Kung Fu, cops, that kind of shit. For a few million dollars, you can’t copy Transformers or any of those films, but that’s the expectation. No heart, little craft.

I just got off the phone—I turned this guy down in Los Angeles, this young guy whom you know is struggling; but I respect the effort he’s put into his project. He’s written a film about post-financial-fall America, when the rich are still wealthy and the middle class have joined the poor in the soup kitchens, there’s no law, and the Police have become the security guards of the wealthy. It’s a very interesting premise, and I was really very excited to read the script, just to see what the political and social implications were, what the message was. But what he’s done is set up the story just as an excuse to make a film about a riot. In the entire film, the Evil Banker appears for about five seconds just to set up the story, and we don’t understand how the Evil Empire’s come to perpetrate this disaster—all we get is an excuse for the disaster to happen, so that now we can follow this guy protecting the innocent and helpless blonde as he struggles through the crowds of the unwashed rapists and pillagers.

It’s just such a pile of shit!

And when I questioned him on it, he was completely unaware that that’s what he’d done! He’d taken advantage of the possibility of making a social statement and just created an excuse to do a low-rent action film, and also with no idea how long things take to shoot. You know—“I got a great idea for this shot, the guy jumps out the window and the camera falls with him and we, you know…” So I said, “How long do you think it will take to do that shot?” He said, “I dunno, I never thought of it.” He’s got 26 days to make this film that is 95 pages of pure unadulterated action, gunfire, pyrotechnics, car stunts—oh, fuckin’ wake up!

And the fact is, that’s the kind of calls I’m getting—I’m not interested, I don’t want to make gratuitous films anymore.

Television’s the same, you know; it has come down to gratuitous crap—with rare exceptions. Last year I did a film called Tin Man, which was a science fiction interpretation of The Wizard of Oz. It was a very intelligent film, and very well executed; the director had some experience, he had the knowledge and the passion, and we were able to work through the budgetary restraints with creative ideas, and it was exhilarating. The rest of it is just toilet, it’s horrible.

At least some good things are still able to come through the morass.

So the idea of starting my own work becomes more and more—I’m driven to it by the mindless stuff that you do back there.

You started out working with the Film Board of Canada, which is basically a documentary organisation, and then there was a progression after a certain amount of time into bigger budget stuff, drama, in America rather than Canada. So how long did that last?

Well, for years. I moved to Los Angeles in the early 80s.

And it was very exciting—Hollywood Boulevard, the stars in the pavement, all that; equipment houses, the studios, the people—the one thing about Hollywood is that if you phone somebody, they call you back. The idea of losing some great talent discovery is too scary for an executive or a producer not to take that chance to return your call. Maybe there’s some diamond in the rough waiting.

So I got to meet people, but I didn’t have the social wherewithal to understand that that was the case; I was always the very superior artist, pure of heart: “I won’t prostitute myself for that crap.”

I had a lot of breaks at the beginning; I turned down Look Who’s Talking—it’s ancient history now, but I turned it down to do a television movie with my friend, the up-and-coming director—because we were gonna be a team, and we were gonna go on together to make great, truly great films! And of course, the truly great director, the moment he got his break, hired an A-list cameraman, left his friend in the dust.

So I had a couple of lessons—took me a long time to learn them; I had to repeat a few times! But I had a lot of fun, did a lot of traveling, did a lot of work. Over the course of the 15 years that I spent in LA, I think I averaged three to four films a year—it was just going, going, going, and you kind of forget about what you’re doing; you’re just doing it. You’re rolling over with the crew and you get on to the next one, and then the next one, and it was pretty brutal—and you blow your money too.

Yeah?

You drink good wine… You just blow it because everybody else is blowing it, and that seems to be the way to live…

I met a couple of people in the time over there that I thought were upright citizens, but I wasn’t able… One of those guys whom I admired very much, whom I thought was a really honorable gentleman, the moment he got his break… He was a gaffer, so a working guy, and we became very close friends (and I don’t have very many close friends).

Like everybody else in Hollywood, he had a script, and his script hit—and overnight he went from gaffer to director. I remember the first thing that I noticed was that his wife got a makeover. She was a regular person, she never paid much attention to her makeup or any of those things, but all of a sudden she had the big hair and the big eyes and the push-up bra and the tight clothes, and I thought, Wow, what’s she done, what’s going on?

And then he stopped being my friend, because he had to be, you know. He got to make his film, and the studio—it was a studio film, so it was a “real movie”—so he had to choose his crew, his heads of department, from the studio-approved list. I get it, that’s the way it works, and I said to him, “It’s cool, no problem”; and then he made another film…

I called him one day and I said, “Hey, you know our friendship? I got work, I work all the time, but our friendship is worth more than the job; I’d love to work with you, but I value the friendship more than the employment. So if you’re feeling bad about not hiring me, why don’t we just get over it and be friends?” But he was too deep into it… His first film was successful, and then he signed a three-picture deal with the studio. One after another, they all flopped, and the last one was a huge flop. It was with Bruce Willis, and Willis took over.

He told me this later. Subsequently, when his career was in the toilet and he had no work, he was unemployed and he was selling his Lexus and his horse ranch and all those things that he’d collected, he became my friend again. It was very funny. He told me that Bruce would show up with these rewrites that had nothing to do with the script, they only had to do with him being on camera more often; him being more heroic or whatever.

It didn’t make sense to the story, but the studio backed the money, they took Bruce’s side; the film didn’t make sense and became—hey, a flop!

And that was the end of this guy, and now he’s not in the business anymore, he’s writing a novel. I think he was smart enough to save some dough, and he bought a nice house and sold it and got some more dough out of that, and now he’s living outside Los Angeles. He’s made himself a little golden parachute, but he did not succeed in the business.

When I started, I remember, I was having a rough time in university, I didn’t like it, I wasn’t paying any attention, I wasn’t doing well, and I wanted to leave. I wanted to become a filmmaker, and I came home one night, to my parents’ house, in a drunken stupor and I woke them up. I was so passionate—I woke them up and there was a pot of coffee in the kitchen I’d made, and I sat them down in the kitchen. I gave them this big speech about how cinema changes the world, and how I had to leave school to start making cinema so I could help to make the world a better place.

Oh my God, the ravings of an idealistic teenager! My parents are very forthright people; my father gave me his blessing—he didn’t think it was going to support me in a fiscal way at all, but he let me go, he endorsed it, and I promptly forgot my great promise.

So now, some 30 or 40 years on, I’m trying to make good on that promise.

I like it!

Well, the truth is, the technical wherewithal is here, so that Barbara and I can go out, we can get on a plane with our entire equipment package and not even have excess luggage; we can put our entire equipment in the back of a rental car or a taxi cab and we can make a film that is technically good enough to project onto a huge screen.

So what else do we need? We have the editing facility in the shed at the back of the house, the camera in one box plus a tripod, and we’re off—and all of that is buyable—you can buy it on a credit card.

You know, when I made that big speech to my parents, a 16mm camera, which was the only way to go, was 35 or 40 thousand (US) dollars, a second-hand one was 25 thousand dollars. You get a lens for it, buy the film, send it to the lab, find a Steenbeck somewhere—there was no way you could do it without some kind of funding from somewhere.

We used to have this friend, Yurij Luhovy, a great filmmaker fuck did he have balls! We were cutting at night; we had this editing room in old Montreal, and Yurij would show up whenever we were done—didn’t matter if we wrapped at three in the morning, we’d tell him and he’d show up with a shopping bag full of film; and he’d sit down at our Steenbeck while we were home sleeping to cut his great Ukrainian documentary.

It took him years to make, and he painted houses so that he could pay for the processing. He shot this film, drove across Canada in a 1600 cc Datsun—that in itself is a fuckin’ feat! He visited every Ukrainian community in Canada—the country’s 5,000 miles wide, but he said he drove tens of thousands of miles just to hopscotch to every place, and then he’d keep the film in the freezer and develop it when he had the money for processing, and then he’d edit like that, bouncing from cutting room to cutting room.

That’s dedication; but it’s not constructive, it’s just a hurdle. It’s not as if it makes you a better filmmaker; all it does is slow you down. Now today, cameras are small and cheap, you can go out and shoot your film—all you have is an excuse or lack of talent to keep you from achieving your goal.

So that’s the exciting thing. Now I don’t have the courage to do it Yurij’s way, but finally, now that the technology’s accommodated me, I’ve decided to shift over to fulfill the original plan.

In Auckland, you mentioned a specific instance when you were in LA that jolted you into a “What am I doing here?” moment—it was when you were looking at a car?

Oh, my life was a disaster, I was just bouncing around. I supported my ex in great luxury, and I was working my arse off basically, and I’d given my car to the next-door neighbour. It was an old 1979 Volvo, a piece-of-shit station wagon that ran perfectly well, and I went away on one of my four-month gigs, I loaned him the car cos he’d crashed his, and when I came back I sort of realised that it was his car now, and so I gave him the car.

I don’t know how it happened, but I was in a daze—completely—and I ended up sitting in the driver’s seat of a brand-new Audi Quattro Crossroad fuckin’ flash station wagon, and the salesman was there smiling at me and nodding his head and everything I said to him was funny or smart—it was just Hollywood, everybody there is full of shit.

I was actually thinking about buying this car—it was a $US 80,000 car—and I remember, finally I came to my senses and I told the guy I’d just go home and think about it for two seconds—and you know, the moment I left his sphere of influence, I got it.

What was I doing! Buying an $80,000 car? I was already over my head in debt!

One of the reasons I had to leave Hollywood is because I’m very susceptible to those kinds of influences. I love a good meal in a restaurant and a flash car and a fancy apartment and all those things. And yeah, it’s hard to say no when they’re dangling all that in front of your face 24/7. The women I went out with were the same, it was the whole Hollywood thing. There were all these pneumatic babes with the high heels and the tight dresses and the mindless conversation, and I was just floating along in that whole world, and it was fantastic, but I have to say—I sleep better now. I used to lie awake in bed wondering what was wrong—“Why can’t I sleep, why is this so weird, why is everything so weird?” I finally came to my senses, and got outta town. I had to leave, I couldn’t change. Continued next issue!