Hello. My name is Justin McLuhan. I'm here today with Will Sloan. You're listening to

the Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about probably one of the most famous

cinematographers ever to work in cinema, Vilmosh Zygman.

The man who created beautiful ugliness.

Is that how you would associate his work, especially his most famous stuff?

I think so. And you know, it's something that I only fully realized this week, because we don't

do cinematographers a lot on this podcast. We did an episode some time ago where we talked about

James Wong-Hau and Christopher Doyle. Yeah, we put two of them together. Yes, exactly. And what's

tricky about cinematographers, we all know that the cinematographer is one of the very most important

jobs on a film set. As a filmmaker myself every now and then,

the cinematographer is the most essential partner on the team.

You know, in interviews, you'll hear directors say that,

you know, it's like a married couple being with a cinematographer

because the director's vision is going through the cinematographer,

and on a good set, the cinematographer is just as collaborative

about how the images should be captured and, you know, angles and other stuff like that, that

he's not just a tool.

I think the challenge of talking about a cinematographer on a podcast like this is

cinematographers are at the service of the director. So it can be tricky sometimes

unless it's, you know, one of the real famous cinematographers to point to the through line.

Find the, uh, the O'Tooer theory of cinematography, if you will. Gordon Willis likes to have

black parts on the screen. That's right. He likes shadows,

...