Desperately seeking Lachman

Ed Lachman, ace cinematographer and indie directors’ best friend, receives a BAM tribute.

A warm breeze drifts through a fourth-floor office window as Ed Lachman thumbs through private photographs of Heath Ledger. In one, the actor looks serious, deep in thought. In another, he’s smiling in a diner booth, possibly reacting to Charlotte Gainsbourg. Now he’s in character, behind shades and a thick pop attitude. These images are “exposure checks,” on-set Polaroids that a careful cinematographer will take before shooting gets under way. Captured during the production of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, they carry a totemic quality.

“The cameraman is the first audience,” says Lachman, 60, lost in his looking. “Many times, the actor will sometimes glance over at me, just to make sure they’re really there. What’s nice is these photos are so personal. Heath was very generous in spirit. They’re just images.”

It’s a tribute to Lachman’s own approachability that Ledger came to him with talk of his directorial debut, script in hand and visual ideas percolating. Such is the ritual with Lachman, who, over three decades, has accumulated a client list that constitutes a definitive picture of independent cinema: Haynes (also on Far from Heaven, Oscar-nominated for its cinematography), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides), Wim Wenders (Tokyo-Ga), Larry Clark (Ken Park), Paul Schrader (Light Sleeper) and Steven Soderbergh (The Limey). Beginning Friday 9, “The Cinematography of Ed Lachman,” a selective 12-film survey unspooling at BAM, should alert many to the unifying talent standing directly behind the camera.

“I’ve always tried to seek out directors who care about images,” Lachman explains. “Not all of them do—and that’s fine. Some might have other concerns: the acting, the words, whatever. But I’ve been lucky to work with people who understand that in order to create your own world, you need to create your own language.”

In helping celebrated auteurs find their own visual approach (a process the New Jersey–born Lachman describes as “European”), he taps into an education in traditional arts and theory acquired at Harvard, Columbia and Ohio University. “My background was in painting,” Lachman says. “But in taking art appreciation, I realized that images have an abstraction that can allow people to enter an interior world. In writing, it’s easier: You enter the interior world with a few sentences. Setting up a scene, however, you need a few paragraphs. In film, you have the exact opposite problem. I was instantly hooked.”

His intuitive process—sifting through visual references and offering a director options galore—gets high marks from Susan Seidelman, director of 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, an early Lachman Hollywood project and Seidelman’s second feature. “I was worried that I would get lost,” she recalls by phone. “Especially at that time for women—there weren’t so many of us. What often happened was this: You do an interesting little independent film, and then you go do your first Hollywood movie and get overwhelmed by men looking over your shoulder. But Ed wasn’t overbearing. He really approached the film as a painter or a poet would.

“Susan was totally open,” Lachman recalls. “There was a great trust between us.” (The cinematographer also remembers an incredibly fun Madonna, who “didn’t think she knew everything”; he shot her first screen test in his downtown loft.) Lachman’s personal aesthetic has been well employed by another woman director with a career on the rise, Sofia Coppola, whose The Virgin Suicides cast Lachman as a great enabler. “She made all the choices and was a very fast learner,” he says. “We looked at Badlands. And the Japanese New Wave. The wonderful thing about Sofia is that she’s open to ideas, but has the confidence to relax in presenting her own.”

Why do all these arty directors come to him? “I’m not sure they do!” Lachman says with a laugh. “I’m sure I’ve lost gigs because directors think I’m trying to do their job. The smart ones understand: Look, here’s a guy with ideas, someone I can interface with. Todd [Haynes] says he chose me because he liked that I wasn’t dictated by one style, that I was open to finding the clues and telling the story. I’ve been very lucky to be noticed like that.”

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