Cinematographer Gordon Willis talks about Godfather

I just simply picture things a different way. And in some cases it caused a ruckus now and then. Because it's like saying, well, we can't do that because that's never been done before. Well, I never did it in that spirit. I just simply did it because I liked it. His imprint on the film was indelible when Godfather came out. I mean, that was a job of cinematography. You know, that everybody couldn't help but notice. A lot of things that I do with overhead lighting or a lot of things with that form of lighting actually came out of a necessity to deal with Marlon Brando in a given kind of makeup. It was an example of designing something to make one person work and it was extended throughout the rest of the movie. I got a lot of criticism because they said, well, you can't see Brando's eyes. There were times in some of his scenes where I deliberately did not want to see his eyes so that you saw this mysterious human being thinking about something or about to do something but you didn't really know what the hell was going on. Gordon, the Prince of Darkness. I haven't examined underexposing a lot because I'm terrified of it. But with people like Gordon who know just how much to do it and all that kind of thing, he has made an art of underexposure. I may have gone too far a couple of times. I think there was a scene between Al and his mother. It was played by Morgana King in part two. I did one scene I went too far. I think I went too far a couple of times. It wasn't the fact that it was so dark. It was the fact that the studio said, how are we going to show this at the drive-in? That's what you all had to say. You've got to put a light in. You've got to see the people. You've got to see the people because it's a drive-in. It's a drive-in. It's a drive-in. Well, the drive-ins were going out. That didn't mean much to us. When I shot Godfather 1, my decision to use yellow in the movie, the movie was very yellow, yellow-red. Gordon was kind of brassy feeling. The reasons for that were because I thought it was right. But yellow broke out in the motion picture business related to period movies for a long time after that. It's not one thing that you do from a visual point of view that makes anything work. The art direction has to be right. The wardrobe has to be right. The shot structure has to be right. And the lighting has to accommodate whatever it is you're introducing related to filtering, etc. So you can't just do one thing. There's no mistaking Gordy Wilson. The magnificent thing that he's done is the fact that he came back to it after several years and came right in and he put the three together. It's almost like, my gosh, they never stopped making the picture, which is, I think, a tribute.