Head of Animation Amy Smeed

Get to know Amy Smeed, head of animation on Disney's Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon. Smeed discusses the process of creating the character of Moana and the importance of truly understanding and knowing your character as well as acting out scenes.

Eric: Hi, I’m Eric Conner senior instructor at New York Film Academy, and in this episode, we feature an animator who helped bring a number of Disney’s recent hits to colorful life, including Tangled, Big Hero Six, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen before she became head of animation for the terrific Moana. We are talking about Amy Smeed. Her discussion with our students focused on the nuts and bolts of animation, as well as her contribution to Moana. If you haven’t seen it, please try to. It’s really quite lovely. Here’s the trailer.

Clip: Maui, shapeshifter, demigod of the wind and sea. I am

Hero of men.

What.

It’s actually Maui, shapeshifter, demigod of the wind and sea, hero of men. I interrupted. From the top. Hero of men. Go.

I am not going on a mission with some little girl.

This is my canoe and you will journey to

I did not see that coming.

The ocean is a friend of mine.

First, we’ve got to go through a whole ocean of bad.

Eric: Before Miss Smeed was helping lead the charge on animating the world of Moana, she was just a college grad looking for a job, any job.

Amy Smeed: I came in a completely different way than most people come in. I graduated school and I didn’t think – my dream was to be a character animator. And I didn’t – my reel wasn’t strong enough to be a character animator at that time. So I basically took any job that I could get. I mean, that fit within my talents. But so they were hiring for this job called scene set up, which was kind of a job where, we did lots of different things, but it was basically to help scenes go down the pipeline. So I kind of went in a different way. And then I would take our character rigs, which at the time were from the film Dinosaur. So I’d take Dinosaur rigs and I would come in on weekends and stay late and I would just work on tests and get feedback from the other animators around me. And then it took me about four years. But then on Chicken Little, they started up a trainee program. Again, they, Disney has a great training program. At the time I was there, they stopped that training program for I want to say it was about three or four years because.

Craig: That’s a long time.

Amy Smeed: Yeah and they didn’t start it back up until Chicken Little. So then I applied for that and luckily I got the position.

Eric: Miss Smeed spent close to two decades with Disney Animation, where she learned to make sure her rough animation passes for her directors were never too rough.

Amy Smeed: I tend to go pose to pose to pose, and it’s the traditional way of thinking where you are taking all your key poses and then I tend to do all my keys and my breakdowns and then I’ll show it to the directors. We tend to show most scenes around three times to the director. We show a rough blocking pass, which are my key poses, and then we get notes from the director and then I’ll put it on ones and then I show it to the director again and then get more notes and then I polish everything up. One kind of tip, I would say, you need to make sure there’s enough information in that rough blocking pass for the directors and supervisors to know, acting-wise, where you’re going. So I always have all my facial expressions in there and my acting elements. I don’t want to put too much information because I could potentially be wasting a lot of time if they have massive notes and I’m, and I have to start over or start off a big chunk of it. And it is a fine line, but I definitely want to make sure I’m spending enough time on that rough blocking pass, because if I’m not, the director is not going to understand where I’m going with the scene and then I’m going to get even more notes. So, yeah, there’s that balance of what’s too much and what’s too little. Ultimately, you don’t want to be wasting time, but you do want to make sure that your acting passes are really clear and they know where you’re going.

Eric: Working for the most legendary animation studio in history means that Miss Smeed has learned how to contribute within a large, very well oiled creative machine.

Amy Smeed: At Disney the way it works is, they write it and then it goes to our story department and they storyboard out the entire film and then we screen it at the studio and then anybody can give notes. And then the screenwriter goes back, I believe, with also the story artists, the directors. And then they’ll talk about what changes do they want to make. The first iteration of Moana was very different from the film that you guys saw because they’re making so many changes at each story pitch, if you want to call it that. Typically, I want to say there’s probably 8 to 10 screenings before the film is made. And even as we’re animating it, they can still be writing. So John Lasseter will usually say, I really like this sequence, I really like this sequence, so we can start animating on those and then they can still be iterating on the first act or the last act or the middle. But yeah, basically after it goes to story and it’s about to go into animation, it goes into our layout department and they’re the cinematographers of the studio. During this time, the actors and actresses are reading those lines. I can’t start my scene until the line has been read because when you’re acting out a scene, you could say, Craig, I’m going to go to the store, or I could say, Craig, I’m going to go to the store. My acting is going to be completely different, so I can’t start until that line is there. So that’s kind of how that process works. And then we can start animating.

Eric: Amy Smeed’s animation passes includes the process of flipping, looking at the movement as if through a mirror to make sure it’s flowing organically and correctly.

Amy Smeed: So once I block out the scene, then I’ll go back to frame one and I’ll work it out in phrases. So if a phrase is 40 frames then I work on those first 40 frames and then I go to the next 40 frames, I flip, oh, this is useful – something I’m trying to think of all these things. This was something Byron did on Tangled. Actually I think he did it on Bolt, too, the first time. So sometimes your eye gets adjusted to a pose and you think it looks OK and then you flip it. And if it looks weird and awkward, it’s because it is. So I think sometimes and I mean, I used to do this like, wow, this just looks weird the other way. OK, I just won’t look at it that way. Well, it’s because the pose isn’t holding up. So if it looks weird from, you know, like a physical way then it probably, the weight is off or something is off there. So I’m constantly flipping my poses and then I flip it the way it should be. And then when I’m working on ones, I try not to flip it too much at the beginning because now my eye is going to start getting adjusted to the flipped way. So I’ll work it out on once and then once I’m fairly happy with it, then I’ll flip it and play it flipped and I’m doing that more for the timing sense of the scene. And there are some times where things will stand out to me like, oh, this is a little bit too slow or too fast. And then I’ll make adjustments, texture is something that’s really important in a scene. And what I mean by texture is, sometimes like if I’m talking to you and I’m acting out a scene and there’s no texture, I’m not doing anything. Yeah, right. Like, I’m going through.

Craig: This is like that independent activity that you’re doing while talking to me. Yeah.

Amy Smeed: Yeah. So I what I want to do is like there’s maybe something, it’s like music where you have the beats of something and there might be something a little bit quicker and slower and.

Craig: Like there’s a rhythm, yeah.

Amy Smeed: Yeah. So that’s something important to think about when you guys are blocking out your scenes and thinking about the acting and performance of something that I think is important, that sometimes gets overlooked. Entertainment in a scene and entertainment can be something funny, whether it’s a line, whether it’s a situation, but it can also be something that moves you in a different and an emotional way.

Eric: The philosopher Kierkegaard once said life can only be understood backwards. Well apparently the same is true for animation. Even in their wholly constructed universe, Miss Smeed and her fellow animators need to ground their storytelling in reality and emotion, including how to make the performances and characters shine.

Amy Smeed: We spend so much time on the acting and the performance of our characters when we are in studio time, which is sometimes a very short amount of time, which is between films, we often have actors and actresses come in. We have acting coaches come in and they teach us about acting. And one of the acting coaches, her name is La- Oh gosh I just said her name. Now, I think I’m a little nervous. Werner Laflin, Werner Laflin. She taught us about building the backstory of a character. And if you can build the backstory of a character. So, for instance, if you have a character that’s, you know, twenty one years old, think about what got her to her point in life. So what happened when she was five? Maybe she was left in a grocery store or whatever the thing is. But you make up stories for these characters. That way when you are creating a scene, you’ve built them up. And so you can naturally come to know what’s going on in their head and what they’re thinking.

Eric: Part of Amy Smeed’s job is becoming the character she’s animating. Even if that means only focusing on delivering one line.

Amy Smeed: I spend a ton of time planning out my scene because animation is so time consuming, so, you know, there’s twenty four frames per second. If you’re not spending the time up front planning your scene, you can potentially be wasting a ton of time. So it depends on the scene and how complicated it is. But I would say for an average scene, I spend close to a day prepping for it. And so for me personally, what I do is – I am given the line. We’re always given the line before we can animate it and I memorize it. So I say it over and over and over in my head, and then we have an acting room. So I go into our acting room and I act out the scene. Something I have to be careful of, though, is for Moana, for instance. Moana’s 16. Clearly I’m not 16, so I don’t want I want Moana to look like me, but something that I find when I’m acting out the scene is sometimes there’s maybe something my eyebrows do, maybe there is a hand gesture I’m doing. Sometimes with body mechanics, if I’m walking around doing something complicated, I want to study that and figure out what’s driving that action. And then I’m always caricaturing that performance. I never want to take my timing or my spacing or even really my poses, but I am analyzing it and trying to get acting beats that I like. So I will act it out, I would say at a minimum, probably 20, and it’s probably more like around 40-ish times. And then I go through all of that reference and I save out my favorites. And then I really dig through all of that. And I take notes and I’ll say, OK on take one I loved my eyebrows from frames forty to forty five. On take two, I really loved this little hand girly thing I did or whatever. So I take those notes and then I refer back to it as I’m animating.

Eric: According to Miss Smeed, an education in animation without acting training is incomplete.

Amy Smeed: Our studio at Disney, we spend so much time on performance. When I went to school, we didn’t have acting classes, which kind of blows me away why they didn’t teach that. So everything I’ve learned acting wise has been through people at work that I’ve learned from or just studying film. We’re constantly watching films and studying actors and actresses that we love. And what is it that we love about that? And for me, my – I love animating emotional scenes. So I would you know, years ago, I like stepping through and seeing like, what is it in a facial performance? Subtle scenes, a lot of it is coming from the face. So I would kind of step through and I would do that with a lot of live action films. I try to push myself a bit when I’m in the acting room, but I’m also trying to be natural to my myself who I am.

Craig: Remain truthful. Yeah.

Amy Smeed: Yes. So then what I do is I’m, even though I’m analyzing that footage, when I’m posing out my scene, I’m always pushing my poses always. So if I’m acting out a scene and I’m sitting like this, depending on who the character is, I’m going to add more rhythm and twist.

Eric: Tilt, rhythm and twist only becomes more complicated when designing the character’s body mechanics in the action filled Big Hero Six.

Amy Smeed: Body mechanics are so hard, it’s hard for almost everybody. There were shots I was doing on, I think it was a Big Hero Six where, and we were in preproduction, we were doing some character test and I think I was doing some stuff with Wasabi. And they wanted his style to be Kata movement, which is kind of like a karate and kung fu. I don’t know a lot about martial arts, but it was called Kata. And so I, you know thank goodness for YouTube. So you just look up, you know, I would Google that and then I would find all sorts of different things would come up from, you know, world champions and stuff like that. So I would study what they were doing and their body mechanics. So if it’s something action oriented, I remember studying parkour for something. I’m trying to remember what scene that was for. That might have also been Big Hero Six. So if I can’t physically do it, then I will search for it somewhere else. But yeah, body mechanics. Don’t feel bad about that because it’s hard for everybody. Most of our department, if you ask most animators, do you want to work on action or acting? Almost all of them will say acting. And obviously there’s body mechanics in acting as well. But full body scenes are definitely more complicated and take a lot longer than waist up shots.

Eric: This appreciation of performance helps animators visualize the actor’s unique personalities in their characters and, well, they don’t come much more unique than Dwayne the Rock Johnson in Moana.

Clip: I’m here because you stole the heart of Te Fiti and you will board my boat and sail across the sea and put it back.

Yeah, it almost sounded like you don’t like me, which is impossible because I got stuck here for a thousand years trying to get the heart as a gift for you mortals so you can have the power to create life itself. Yeah. So what I believe you were trying to say is thank you.

Thank you?

You’re welcome.

Amy Smeed: I will say something that we did take from Dwayne Johnson was the eyebrow, the people’s eyebrow. Right isn’t that what they call it? Yeah, like it’s funny because I don’t know, he’s amazing, but I don’t follow, I think did that come from wrestling? OK, I was with Hyrum and he’s like, you know, the people’s eyebrow. I’m like, oh is that what that’s called. But so that eyebrow thing we did take from him. But there’s, we didn’t want to overdo it and put it in too many times, but there’s I can’t remember how many times, four or five times. When the actors come in, that’s all recorded. We have access to all of that. And so we can look at that and say, oh, Dwayne did this thing or Auli’i did this thing and try to put that into our animation. For me, my favorite part is coming up with the performance and acting myself, even if I’m doing a male character, because I’ve done lots of male characters as well, it’s still a really fun thing for me to do. Not to say I never look at the reference because I do just to see if there’s something in there. I don’t always for every scene, but some I definitely do, especially the beginning of the film when you’re figuring out the characters, but I think a lot of it we are so detailed and so frame by frame and where I was saying we don’t typically let the computers give us any in-betweens. There’s always something like the timing of a blink or something that we’re art directing. And the lashes. We’re dragging the lashes typically as they blink. So we’re art directing everything.

Craig: Right down to the lashes. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Eric: Besides working with The Rock, Miss Smeed was so appreciative of animating this movie since it had a strong female lead, beautifully played by newcomer Auli’i Cravalho.

Amy Smeed: I have a daughter, she’s nine. So for me as a parent, it inspired me on that level as well to get to work with a character that is so brave and courageous. And Auli’i was amazing. I don’t know how many of you have seen anything from her, but just her as a person, what she brought to the character was really great. She’s just such a nice, sweet person. And she came to talk to our entire animation department and we found that reference. So like I was saying earlier, with the Dwayne stuff, we could frame by that. She’s very expressive with her hands and her face, she has awesome facial expression. So but yeah, getting to work on a film with a female character that is so brave and courageous like that was really special and it meant a lot to me. We do tons and tons of research for all of our films. It’s something that John Lasseter deeply, deeply believes in. So our directors and producer and production designer, they went to the Pacific Islands many times meeting the people and finding out more about the culture. And we had a lot of people come into the studio. There’s a man named Nainoa Thompson who came in talking about navigating and wayfinding and what that means to him. And so there’s scenes where they’re doing this. And what they’re doing is they’re measuring the distance here. And so if you do a hand gesture like that, that’s not right. You’re lining this up with the horizon line. So having people come in and I wouldn’t have known that. I don’t know anything about wayfinding or navigation, but it’s something that I think makes it more special for us getting to work on a film like that, because we’re learning about another culture and hopefully we’re representing it well.

Eric: Miss Smeed is also a symbol of representation herself, becoming the first woman in Disney history to be the lead animator of the lead character.

Amy Smeed: I have been at the studio for about 19 years. And the interesting thing with taking this position was, I love animating. I love sitting at my desk behind my computer and just animating. So I was fine animating the rest of my life and I was happy with that. And then I had some people ask me, you know, this position’s coming up. You should think about putting your name in the hat for that. So I ended up interviewing with the directors, Ron and John, John Musker and Ron Clements. They directed films like Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Princess and the Frog. They’ve done a ton of films. So for me to work that closely with them was just a huge dream come true. But also, I was very nervous about that because I thought, I don’t want to screw up their movie. So yeah I ended up interviewing for it and my title was co-head of animation on the film. My partner was Hyrum Osmond. Hyrum came to the studio, I think it was on Bolt. So I’m not sure if you remember Hyrum, but he and I, we bring different things to the table and he was a great partner to have. And it was just such an amazing experience. And I’m I’m so glad that I did put my name in the hat for it and that I went for it. But it was a big deal for me to do. For myself, it was hard for me.

Eric: Amy Smeed noted that animation tends to have fewer women behind the scenes, which she hopes her students could help change.

Amy Smeed: There’s not many female animators at the studio. There’s actually not many female animators that are even applying. So all of you female character animators, make sure you apply. I have been really fortunate because since I’ve been at the studio, I’ve had really good leadership that has always treated us all the same in my opinion. So I myself have not run into anything and I feel really fortunate and really lucky for that. So it’s interesting to me because when I go talk to animation schools, I see lots of females. But then when I’m in reel reviews, there’s not very many women applying. And so I don’t know why that is. I’m trying to figure that out a little bit. But there have been other female supervising animators. Not many, but I remember traditionally Ellen Woodbury was a supe on one of the traditional films, I’m not sure which one. My friend Becky, you know Becky. Yeah, she was a character supervisor on Anna. So there have been females that have been character supervisors. But for the title head of animation, that’s one where there haven’t. But like I said, I don’t know that there’s ever been any that have ever put their name in the hat for it because there are so few females in our department.

Eric: Once Amy Smeed became the head of animation for Moana, her big challenge was managing a large, talented group of designers to stay on the same digital page.

Amy Smeed: So on Moana, we had close to one hundred animators and we do something at the very beginning. So all of the animators had rolled off of Zootopia. And then coming onto Moana, we do something, we call them chalk talks, where we sit with everybody and we go over Moana. How would she sit? How would she stand? What is her acting? We have the character rig, so we’ll bring the character rig up and we have something called the picker page which has all the controls. And so the supervisors can say, you know what, I really love this control for getting a band in her spine. I don’t use this one too often because it gives her a hunchback or whatever the thing is. So they kind of go over all of those controls and also acting. And we do several of those before we start animating or up front in production to try to keep her, we call on model, the character on model, so that Moana looks like Moana no matter who’s animating her. And then that’s part of the job of the head of animation and the character supes. And then for me, one of my fun meetings I got to go to was seeing all the character design work. So they would basically put up a bunch of drawings on these boards and show them to the directors. And the directors would say, oh, I really like this one. I like this one, maybe not this one because I don’t like this. And then they show more drawings and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of drawings were done of Moana. And every character is slightly different because sometimes they might just get there quicker. The directors might gravitate towards it for some reason much quicker. But once it goes into the modeling phase, typically the character design doesn’t change too much. With Hei Hei on Moana, his design changed a bit because he, at the start of the film, was very ornery and kind of an angry bird. And he almost got taken out of the film. I don’t know if you guys know that part. He almost completely got taken out of the film.

Craig: Wow, that would be criminal.

Amy Smeed: Yeah. And then Jared, the screenwriter, got sick for like three or four days. But it was his, like he was going to write him out of the film. And then Adam Green, who is our character supe, and then some of the story artists were like, no, we have to find a way to keep Hei Hei in this film. So they brought his IQ level, way, way, way, way down. And they storyboarded out that Kakamora sequence where she snatches him up, puts him in her mouth and that whole action thing. And John Lasseter loved that. And then Hei Hei got put back in the film, and the reason is because he makes Moana’s journey more complicated.

Eric: I, for one, am thrilled that Hei Hei made the cut. Just as important as finding the perfect animal sidekick, Miss Smeed also had to ensure that Moana was dressed for success.

Amy Smeed: So, for instance, like Moana skirt, we knew she’s going to be doing some high action stuff and they were still working on story so we weren’t exactly sure what, but we knew it was an adventure and they were showing designs of different types of skirts. And so then for me, in animation part of my job is to say, this skirt is not going to work for her to be – she can’t jump off cliffs in a pencil skirt. So, not that a pencil skirt was ever one of the options, but it is like we do have to look out for stuff like that or like.

Craig: You have to keep things functional.

Amy Smeed: Yeah, we have to think about what is going to restrict the characters from doing some sort of action or and in some cases, you can use that as a challenge to make it something interesting that the character has to.

Craig: Push yourself even further.

Amy Smeed: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it depends on what the character is and what they’re doing.

Eric: Getting Moana’s hair to work was an additional challenge, even for an animator who had previously tangled with Rapunzel.

Amy Smeed: Hair is so difficult to do in CG animation. Yes, it is so hard and interacting with hair is a different level, right.

Craig: Even worse.

Amy Smeed: But on Moana, we’re like she’s a teenager and she needs a touch her hair and, you know, she has long hair and there’s times where she needs to it get out of the way or put it up in a bun or whatever. So if she’s interacting with the hair then we will pose it. We actually worked on some software to be able to do that more easily on Moana. So we will pose out that hair and then we give it to our tech anim department, who is amazing. And then they will actually do all the magic part of sometimes the in-betweens and that sort of thing and get it to go down the pipeline. If the character is not interacting at all and it’s just, you know, me sitting and it’s is blowing in the wind or whatnot, we sometimes will do draw overs if there’s something specific that we’re looking for. But generally tech anim takes care of all the hair and the cloth. But there are times where, to plus a pose, where we want the hair posed a specific way. We will do draw overs for tech anim.

Eric: The perfect dress, the hairdo, the comedic sidekick chicken. They’re all there to help service the same thing, the story and to make sure the audience believes in and emotionally connects with Moana.

Amy Smeed: When you are in a supervising position, we don’t get to animate a whole lot because we’re spending so much time with the directors and with the animators on the floor helping them with their scenes. But the grandmother Tala stuff right before her death. Those scenes are so subtle and it’s, you have to kind of get to the core of that emotion. And that’s where, like for me I study a lot of live action film of those moments to try to get to what is it about them that makes the character cry or makes me cry when I’m watching that and I try to learn from that. And for me, when I’m acting out a scene, I try to get myself to that point. Sometimes I watch something really sad, a movie that’s really sad and I cry really easy, so it’s not that hard. Or I think of a moment in my life that was sad. So I try to put myself into that and then I act it out. So on Tangled I was doing some of the stuff where Flynn was dying, well he was dead and then she’s singing over him. There’s a long scene where she’s singing over him.

Clip: Heal what has been hurt. Change the fate’s design. Save what has been lost. Bring back what once was mine.

Amy Smeed: And I wanted that scene so bad and I was so lucky that I got to do it, so when I went into the acting room, I had a grandfather that had passed away like a year before that, and the way everything happened was not the best. So I was thinking about that. So then I was acting it out and I was seeing what was happening in my throat as you’re crying and seeing some of the things that happened in your eyes and then I was taking that and putting that into my scene. So I try to get to that point, if I can. There’s times, too, where you can’t force it. And that’s where I’m like, OK, what is what’s a movie that I cry at every time? And so I try to watch that little part. Anything you can do to kind of get yourself to that spot.

Eric: It seems that Miss Smeed’s only issue with working on Moana, like working on all her films, was at some point she had to say goodbye.

Amy Smeed: On Frozen, I mostly animated on Anna. And I loved her character. I loved everything about Anna. And at the end of it, it’s hard because it’s it’s kind of like you’re losing your friend to the same thing with Rapunzel, same thing with Moana, where you towards the end of the film, you know what they would do in every single situation. You know how they would stand. You know how they would move their feet or whatever it is. So it’s a weird feeling because you’re excited about the next project and you’ve probably most likely worked a lot of hours to finish the film. But then, yeah, you’re not getting to work on them or see them until they’re on the big screen. So it’s kind of weird because you do get to know them so well.

Eric: Though before Miss Smeed said goodbye to our students, she gave some great practical advice for starting a career in animation.

Amy Smeed: So, reels. Sometimes people feel like I have to have a three minute long reel and I’m going to put everything in there. You don’t need to do that. Don’t worry about how long your real is. It is important to have a couple performance tests that are showing acting with dialogue. And it’s also important to make sure there’s some sort of full body test or whatnot that’s showing a character going through some sort of body mechanics physics, because we need to make sure that you guys have an understanding of body mechanics and physics and all of that. So I would say at least a couple full body or action, something that’s showing full body, and then at least a couple acting tests. And I would say be happy with what you’re putting on there. We don’t always know where people are at in their career or in their studies. So sometimes people will want to put everything on there and they might have three or four really strong pieces and they might have two or three that are not so great. And we don’t know, oh, is that their latest? Is that what they started out with? So it’s good to have stuff on your reel that you are happy with and putting your best foot forward, I would say. But like I said, it doesn’t have to be really long. It’s it’s.

Craig: It’s quality over quantity.

Amy Smeed: Exactly. Thank you. We look for performance. So acting tests, that’s super important to have on your reel. We put so much importance on performance and acting. So I think that’s the most important thing you can have on your reel. And then full body tests. But really, we just look at a reel so I mean, people submit a resume. But really the most important thing is your reel. Your reel of animation tests. We don’t care if it’s lit. We don’t care if it’s, you know, fancy paint textures.

Craig: Play blasts?

Amy Smeed: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are they are showing play blasts and that’s totally fine.

Craig: Does it matter?

Amy Smeed: No, not at all. Yeah. I mean, I would say people coming out of school, they’re always play blasts or most of the time play blasts. Yeah, it’s people that have been at other studios where they’ll tend to show what’s.

Craig: More rendered things. Yeah. It doesn’t make any difference to you guys because you’re looking at performance, not render quality.

Amy Smeed: Totally. Yeah, we’re purely looking at the performance of the characters. Yeah. So that’s the most important thing, is your reel.

Eric: So for those looking to work in animation, start animating. We want to thank Amy Smeed for bringing so many wonderful films to the screen and to my kids Bluray collections and for sharing her story. And thanks to all of you for listening.

This episode was based on the Q&A, moderated by our animation department chair, Craig Caton-Largent. He’s worked on such films as Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2 and a whole bunch others. And you can hear his interview on another episode of The Backlot podcast. He is fantastic. To watch the full interview or to see our other Q&As check out our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilm Academy. This episode was written by me Eric Conner. Edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. Produced by Kristian Heydon and myself. Executive produced by Jean Sherlock and Dan Mackler. A special thanks to all our staff and crew who made this possible. To learn more about our programs, check us out at NYFA.edu. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. See you next time.

 

Academy Award-Winning Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski

In this episode, we sit down with Janusz Kaminski, an Oscar-winner from his work as the cinematographer on Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Listen along as he speaks about his start in the industry and working with the legendary Steven Spielberg.

Tova: Hi and welcome to The Backlot. I’m Tova Laiter, moderator and director of the New York Film Academy guest lecture series. In this episode, we will take an in-depth look at one of my great guests and hear about his experience in the entertainment industry. And now, Eric Conner, will take you through the highlights of this Q&A.

Eric: Hi, I’m Eric Conner, senior instructor at New York Film Academy. And in this episode, we bring you an Oscar winning cinematographer. If you’re a lover of cinema from the past 30 years, well, you have definitely seen his work. Lincoln, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Saving Private Ryan, Jerry Maguire. He’s a DP who went from shooting Cool as Ice, starring Vanilla Ice, to Schindler’s List in a short two years. And he’s been Steven Spielberg’s goto cinematographer ever since. We are talking about Janusz Kaminski. Mr. Kaminski came from Poland to the United States 40 years ago with little knowledge of the country or its language. Though his solution for learning English quickly was, well I’ll just say inventive.

Janusz Kaminski: I came to America in 1981. I spoke no English. I went to Chicago first and I started learning English little bit for a year and a half. Then I started dating my teacher. That was really helpful. Jill Rosenheim. She dumped me. She said, if you were somebody I would have marry you, she ends up marrying Joel Horovitz. Broke my heart. But nevertheless, I managed to go to film school. So I went to Chicago, got my B.A. in Chicago, moved to Los Angeles in 87, went to AFI. And when I was in AFI, I started working for Roger Corman as a gaffer little bit shooting B camera, shooting second unit, you know, then eventually I went outside Roger Corman, shot a feature. Come back to Roger Corman, shot a few features and I did a couple of television films. And I was just gradually getting ready to have an interesting career. I was just about to do Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That movie was already given to me, which was my first bigger budget movie. And then, of course, simultaneously I met Steven and as he was making Jurassic Park one, I was making Huckleberry Finn. And after that, I made a movie with him, which is Schindler’s List. Right? So Roger Corman was great because in two years I’ve probably done 25 movies as a gaffer and I shot three or four movies for him, you know, which is really interesting experience. Right now that kind of organization doesn’t exist anymore. During that time, in the early 80s and 90s, there were some independent studios, you know, Cinetel and Roger Corman, and there was another one, Motion Picture Corporation of America. So there were few independent entities that would make this low budget semi-exploitation movies. You know, I don’t know how you start right now. I have no idea, although some of the interns that I’ve had, they became bonafide, some photographers and they’re making, you know, okay. Living in them, making movies, you know. So there is this entire world of independent cinema that I have no contact with, you know, although I did win Spirit Award.

Eric: Working for Roger Corman, the legendary producer of over 400 low budget movies, is one of the best hands on experiences a filmmaker can get. Just ask Ron Howard. Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, and the countless other directors who worked with him. But Janusz Kaminski also deepened his education of cinema by attending a traditional film school, too.

Janusz Kaminski: I went to Columbia College, which is very much of a hands on school. It’s a relatively formal school where you don’t have to commit to any particular field. You know, I happen to like cinematography simply because it was the first thing I’ve done. When someone says you’re good at it, you know, you’re coming back from Eastern Europe, you know, you’re not being rewarded as a child, you know. And someone said, you good at it. Right? And I just fell in love with it and gave me very much of a concrete profession. You know, as an immigrant, you need a profession. You cannot be director because you’re unemployed. Right? Unless mommy or daddy puts the money in. Now you can make your own films, right? With little digital camera and stuff like that. You still need a good story. Right? So but as a cinematographer I learned about electrician and camera assistant. It was horrible camera assistant. Very good electrician. Very good grip. Very good dolly grip. So I had a concrete profession that would allowed me to go and do a commercial during my school year and make 250 bucks and my rent was 280. So it’s pretty good, right? It was all about making little bit of money so you can pay the rent. And believe me, nothing changes. You still just making the money to pay the bills.

Eric: And part of this learning process requires making mistakes. A lot of them.

Janusz Kaminski: There are always mistakes. You learn from mistakes. You know, I’ve made a career out of mistakes. Out of focus, you know, shaky camera, you know, flares, all that stuff, you know. A shutter that’s weird, you know. Mistakes, if you have a movie that makes sense to apply the mistakes, you know, you could tell a nice story. But you learn that if you put a half filter and it’s red and looks great in the sky. But then you tilt up, everything changes, right? Or you pan across the red filter goes across someone’s face, you know. Oh I better don’t do that no more again.

Eric: A great way to avoid some of the mistakes is working with the right people. For a cinematographer that means finding a trustworthy gaffer, the person who is most responsible for realizing the DP’s vision.

Janusz Kaminski: The scope is way too large. You can’t really demand every light to be placed on the set according to your desire. So you have a gaffer who is knowledgeable, who is interested in doing lighting, and he gets some gaffers who are more intellectual and others are much more, you know, technical and just do the lights. And then on the shooting day or day before you talk about the specifics of each scene and you change the light, in particular, the lighting of the main section of the scene, or you adjust the lighting or you do the lighting with the gaffer on the given day, right after the rehearsal. But if you lighting three city blocks, you know, you can’t really generalize. You know, don’t make a backlight. I don’t want to be backlight-ish or you say I want a backlight. I want this to feel romantic. I want to be blue-green.

Eric: And of course, a great DP will be somewhat limited if the director’s not on board as well.

Janusz Kaminski: For me, it’s very important that he tells good stories, you know, whatever that story is. Doesn’t have to be linear story. But I just like a director who is interested in storytelling, not necessarily in just entertaining people, but telling the stories, you know. And sometimes you get the chance to work with other directors outside Steven who are good storytellers and sometimes not. And I don’t want him to be my friend. I also want the director to respect me, respect my work and realize my contribution and realized my years of experience and not to be afraid. And the fear is a paralyzing thing for many directors. I want him or her to have good aesthetics or whatever it means.

Eric: That Steven he’s alluding to? Steven Spielberg. I think you’ve heard of him. It’s a remarkable collaboration that’s now spanned over 25 years, twenty films, five Oscar nominations, and two Oscar wins. And it’s a union that began thanks to Mr. Spielberg’s love of television.

Janusz Kaminski: I shot a little movie directed by Diane Keaton. That was I think 1990. It was a television movie. He likes television, you know. And that’s the way he connects with the world by watching television. He loves television. And he saw it on television. He really liked the movie. Stephen liked the work called my agent. We met and he offered me to do a television movie for his company. Television movie directed by Gregory Hoblit called Class of ’61, which was a civil war movie that deals with the West Point graduates in 1861. And after that, he offered me Schindler’s List. So pretty much like that. I was a really hard working boy when I was in film school. So it wasn’t just like he found me on the streets of Krakow, you know, and brought me to America. I mean I was here for 13 years and I’ve shot six, seven movies, you know. So I was rather experienced. I just didn’t have that little push. You know, he’s the most hardworking person that I’ve ever met. The moment we finish the movie within two weeks from the wrap, he’s got a pretty good final cut. So he works weekends, he works during lunch, he works after work. All the fame and the money he deserves. The other ones not necessarily deserve, but he really deserve it.

Eric: Most people would be completely intimidated working with a true titan of cinema for the first time. How could you not be? But Janusz Kaminski didn’t overthink it.

Janusz Kaminski: I was pretty naive when I started working with Steven. I really didn’t know what it meant for my career and for my life in general to be associated with him and work on the movies with him. So I was very naive. Now I’d be very scared. But at that point, I was just, you know, I saw another filmmaker whose work I admired and liked. I knew that I’ve got something offered to him that he liked and admired. So that was the base of our relationship, which was trust, a little bit of infatuation with each other’s work. And that relationship evolved in a bit of a friendship that lasted since 1993. I mean, obviously, I knew that his visual sense was superb and still continues to be superb. And I like the cinematographers he worked with but I wasn’t really intimidated or or afraid or felt out of the league. I just knew that I have to do good work. And that’s what he respected. You know, good work. Whatever that means, good work.

Eric: I think it’s fair to say Schindler’s List is more than just good work. The movie won a slew of Oscars and remains one of the most heart-wrenching stories ever committed to film, only deepened by its stark and gorgeous use of black and white. For Mr. Kaminski, it was a major step forward for his career while returning to where it all began.

Janusz Kaminski: Well, I mean, it was very emotional simply because I’ve not been to Poland for 13 years. I left as a young fellow with pretty much zero in my pocket and I came back with Spielberg to make a movie. And I left during the communes. Came back at the early stage of democracy. It was very emotional, very much interested in being in Poland. And I learned a lot about Holocaust. You know, we as the Poles, we’re not being taught about Holocaust. You know, we’re being told about the Second World War and the destruction that the war created on various ethnicities, such as Gypsies, Slavs, Germans, Russians, and Jews. But we were not really focusing on Holocaust or Jewish people, right? So that was extremely revealing experience. You know, it was very emotional at first. And then pretty quickly, I realized that it’s basically it’s the same country that it used to be. You know, I still have the same sentiment to some degree. My generation is the generation that is running the country and your generation will improve the country. Right now, it’s still a little bit tough. There’s some great people there, 40 million people. You’re bound to find some great people.

Eric: One of the film’s most indelible images is Oskar Schindler, noticing the girl in the red coat. It’s the only bit of color in a sea of black and white. A remarkable visual moment that actually began with the book.

Janusz Kaminski: It was not my idea. The movie’s based on a book and the little girl in the red dress was written into the novel right? Steven wanted to retain that aspect simply because it was metaphorical and created this certain symbols. And, you know, as you know, symbols, their interpretation is very individual, right? Technically, how we’ve done it, we’ve done it with shooting a color film. And then the image would be rotoscoped, which I don’t know if you guys know, but each frame would be hand painted and the color was was taken out and then each print was hand spliced because obviously you cannot print color negative and black and white negative on the same print stack. So each print was hand spliced at least in the primary market. And that’s the technique. That’s how we achieved the brief moments of color in black and white movie. Now, the meaning of it, whatever you think it is.

Eric: At this point, Janusz Kaminski preparing for a film with Steven Spielberg is a streamlined process. A little conversation about what they’re going after and for Mr. Kaminski knowing what to avoid.

Janusz Kaminski: Well, the preparation is very simple. We go look at the locations, him and I once. And then he comes back and we shoot the movie. That’s the preparation. We may look at one film or we may not. That’s the preparation, really. Lately, when he’s doing big movies like Indiana Jones, he would spend weeks and weeks and weeks in animation studio where he would do the previsual – previsual-ation. What it’s called, you know, he gets like a, like a animated storyboards, you know. So that’s what he would do. That’s his preparation. But you know, he just, sometimes we just don’t talk at all. I don’t know, I mean we don’t we don’t go to intellectual about things. But between Steven and I, very little preparation. We don’t talk much about it. Very little until I start doing the tests very early of tests where I’m doing some test and I’m beginning to show him certain things. And the way I, I work is not necessary that I know what this movie will look like. But I definitely know that’s not going to look like like a Robert Redford film. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but it’s not going to look like that. So I work by elimination. I eliminate what I don’t want this movie to look like. It’s the trust, you know and knowing that the guy who you’re working with is the guy that is really good for your movie. But there’s another way of working. You can sit and break down every single shot, create storyboards, create visual references and I’ve done that. I’ve done that with Cameron Crowe on Jerry Maguire. Where we sat through the entire movie and we did shotlist list and he did storyboards and stuff like that.

Eric: Part of Mr. Kaminski, his preparation is revisiting the imagery from his stories’ time frames, how people remember and identify those eras. He found that especially useful when capturing the 1970s for Munich.

Janusz Kaminski: The whole color palette. You have to work with certain color that represents the 70s and of course, what represents the 70s are the movies of the 70s. It’s Vanishing Point, Panic in Needle Park, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, French Connection. French Connection, I think was one of the bigger influences because of the color. But then you’ve got The Ipcress File, which is pretty amazing film. And then you get Get Carter. So a lot of inspirations. Not necessarily that I was borrowing the scenes, but all those great movies in the 70s that basically made me wanting to come to America because my perception of America was built based on watching American movies from the 70s. So I kind of remember what that felt. You know what that felt when I was sitting in Poland watching movies in the 70s so I kind of imagine what America must have been. So when I was just watching this movie here I’m thinking, wow, this movie really feels like the 70s. Oh, it takes place in the 70s. So I felt just for me, I succeeded in creating or recreating that kind of a feel of the 70s, you know. And the cars. I mean it’s not that hard to create period look. You put a couple of cars. You put people in funny haircuts and wardrobe, and you’ve got a sense of the period, right? What’s interesting is to restrain yourself from going too far. Like what Harry Savides did in the movie with Denzel Washington about the drug dealer. What was it called? American Gangster. I think Harry did a fantastic job. He totally restrained himself. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t really showing off. And he really conveyed that period. Nobody paid attention to his work because it was just so right and so perfect, you know, so you have to be little bit flashy so people can look at it and see, wow, this is it good work, you know.

Eric: Though there are limits to this research, especially for films set before photography, or if he wants to get certain shots that nobody dared capture in real life.

Janusz Kaminski: What influences me are the images that hopefully were taken during that particular period. Right? I mean, of course, you’re talking about 1890 and slavery there are not that many photos and the images were very deteriorated or period movies. But if you’re talking about Second World War, there’s a very large library of images that you can use as your resource, right? But the problem with those images is that, you know, if you’re a combat cameraman and you’re sitting there in the field, you’re not going to be running with that camera because you’re going to get shot, right? So you sit behind a rock or behind some kind of obstruction. You’ve got a long lens and and you capture the images that way. Well, we were not creating dangerous situations, so I was able to come up with visual style that allowed the audience to feel like they participating in the war. So the camera was hand-held. Usually the camera was just one single camera following the actors. You know when the actors fell down, the operator would fall down, that kind of stuff. The explosions were happening left and right. So you had this immediacy of the war that frequently combat cameraman would not be able to convey simply because they would not exposed himself to that kind of a danger. You’re looking at documentary footage and of course, you understand intellectually how powerful the war was, but you’re really not feeling emotionally what that war feels like. And then again, our recollection of periods, you know, that, you know, 1890,s warm, 70s, fluorescent and ugly. That kind of stuff. So war is usually black and white, particularly the Second World War. But they just discovered recently a large library of George Stephenson’s color movies, and they were amazing. It’s amazing to see war in color. And I did an interview a few years ago about the beauty of the war and war an be beautiful. Well intellectually it cannot be beautiful because people are dying and all that stuff. But visually, it’s a stunning experience. Explosions, blood, colors, you know, and the grit. You know, it’s just really, really visually stimulating. It’s not beautiful. It’s just visually stimulating, the war.

Eric: Janusz Kaminski also takes color inspiration from where his various movies are set, which helped audiences orient themselves during Munich‘s globe trotting set pieces.

Janusz Kaminski: Greece was very yellow, which is very interesting, this movie to play with the colors because you have to let the audience immediately identify where they are. So if you’re not using some strong, very strong visual metaphors I guess, you will lose the audience. So the first explosion was very yellow. Then we go to France, it’s a bit more bluish. Then we go to Israel, it’s very steel blue, you know, that kind of stuff. Italy is very warm and fuzzy. France is very warm and fuzzy. So using those visual cliches that we as the people identify with specific countries, you know. Israel, warm, sunny, you know. Iceland, you know, all day you get light, you know, dark, and at night, you know, blah, blah, blah. Russia, gray and smoky, you know, France, you know, bluish kind of, you know. So, yeah, you let the gaffer do as much as he can on his own, because if he doesn’t, then you’re going to fall behind and you have to do more work. So surround yourself with the best people you can work less. And I want to work as little as possible. You know, except when I’m on the set, then I work as much as I can, but I don’t, I don’t like preproduction. I like going on location scouts and walking. Let’s talk about the sequences from inside the car and shooting through the back window and seeing the people. Then you rack focus to the mirror in the foreground and that mirror sees. It was a bit of a nightmare because you have to constantly balance and you lose light in the mirror. You lose it in the glass. And you have to light the people outside and you have to light the people inside. It becomes problematic.

Eric: When determining the look of each film, Mr. Kaminski actively tries to avoid the obvious choices or clichés surrounding the use of color.

Janusz Kaminski: Color is a part of the artistic expression, right? Up to some degree, black and white is much easier because you don’t have color, so you don’t operate on that level. When you have color, you have to organize colors and make some kind of a story. Right? And Storaro was like the first cinematographer who really brought the whole intellectual concept of using the color in movies. Right. And he was not inventing the genre. Anybody who reads a little bit about psychology will realize the influence of certain colors on our behavior. He was just the one who verbally explain it to most of the viewers what he was doing in terms of the colors. So blue is sad, red anger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m more interested in what happens when you change things, you know. Where you don’t make the blue to be sad, but blue could be happy as well, right? What happens when you do a period movie and rather than having beautiful period images, you go into hand-held and you do it really gritty and ugly right? I’m interested in those things, you know? So I use color, I know color, and I try to organize color in in some kind of a manner that tells the story. But it’s also to go against the cliches and against the expected results, you know.

Eric: Many cinematographers prefer to have complete lighting control on their sets, but Janusz Kaminski enjoys the creative challenges and prefers the limitations of a practical location over a soundstage.

Janusz Kaminski: Particularly in Malta, some of the stuff that was shot at the safe house was really difficult because it was just basically a rundown building with not really great access to the windows and stuff like that. You just simplify, you just make a one light that’s really hot. Let it bounce from the walls and makes a interesting style statement and also works for you in terms of the storytelling, you know. It’s better on location than in the studio because in the studio I’ve got all the freedom, all the equipment. Not necessary at the time, but all the freedom to move the walls and so forth. But you don’t have is actually the limitations and you don’t have the background, no matter how much you work on putting artificial background outside the windows it’s always tiny bit looks artificial, you know. Locations are great. I love locations. Actually more than the studio.

Eric: Perhaps no collaboration with Spielberg was more challenging than Saving Private Ryan. Janusz Kaminski found himself throwing away many of the conventional rules of filmmaking and just kept waiting for the legendary director to call him out on it.

Janusz Kaminski: Well you do tests and you know, all that stuff that seems to be unprepared was very prepared and very rehearsed for one reason. You know, it takes about a week and a half to lay all the explosives. So if you blow it, you just blew it. You don’t have a take. So it was very much rehearsed. Everything was rehearsed. What was not rehearsed was the speed of the actors as they’re traveling through the scene. And just, you know, everything happens slightly different when you, when you actually have explosives blowing up next to you and you get the stuff flying, everything gets a bit more adrenaline. In terms of the visual preparation, I have done very extensive tests in terms of how I’m going to manipulate the image, what is the technique I’m going to use, to what extent I will manipulate the images so they still look like you can follow this story but they so disjoint that you almost feel like you’re looking at something that’s documentary, you know. So I knew what I can achieve, what I had to do, not necessarily convince the director, because the director was very easy to be convinced, but to make him to fall in love of it. And he did, you know, which was great. You know, actually, there was one instance when we started making the movie, which is the Omaha landing. We shot for three days and we didn’t get the dailies for three days. And Steven usually looks at the scenes where he’s got the entire scene filmed. And I’ve seen the dailies and I knew that we were verging little bit on student filmmaking here in terms of what I was doing, because the images were very disjointed and look closely, look oh there goes Tom Hanks, you can’t even see him. And I was still, you know, working out on the treadmill. I had my treadmill losing weight. You know, his assistant comes in and says, Steven wants to talk to you. And he had his own editing room assembled on the location. So I’m going All right. There we go. See you later. And he just loved what we’ve done. And he says, can we do it more? I said yeah. What did you do here? I did this. Okay, let’s do it more. Okay, let’s do it more. And that’s what you want from director. You don’t want director to say, whoa, this is scary. I don’t know. Will the studio like it? You know, you want the director to really like what you’re giving him or her, you know. And that’s when you fly. That’s when you become the most productive and free. And I think that’s Steven’s trademark. He gets what’s best in people because he doesn’t allow us. We’ve got it. But he gets what’s in us. And he positively reinforces our desires to be better. And I think one of the good traits of the director is to hire great people who can make the movie for you. Of course, if they make a really bad movie, you tell them, well, you know, I told him not to do it. But if the movie is good, yep, we all did it.

Eric: Around this time, Janusz Kaminski began experimenting with what’s known as bleach bypass. It’s a process that enables the silver of the film to be retained in the emulsion, which then changes the color palette. Notable examples include Minority Report, War of the Worlds, and Ready Player One. It’s a unique process which Mr. Kaminski gravitated towards because the story called for it.

Janusz Kaminski: I think during the Amistad, which was 1996, I was looking for a way to de-beautify the image. You know, it’s a slave history. It will be totally wrong to have, you know, beautiful firework with pretty warm colors while the guys are getting chained up and locked up in the prison, right? So I started investigating different processes. And the practice that I started using is not the practice that really was invented for me. It was invented for Storaro hence why his movies look so great, because he was the only one who was doing it for so many years. And once they did little test, I realized, wow, I’ve got a little bit of advantage over other guys because it just becomes so much more beautiful. The whole images become more interesting, more beautiful. They have unique quality. The color saturation becomes different. The shadows become different. Everything becomes more velvety, more gorgeous, you know. There are problems with it. But you learn that if you do it. And pretty much since 1995, every single movie I’ve done was with bleach bypass.

Eric: While staying true to the needs of each story, Janusz Kaminski still manages to put his own visual stamp on each film he shoots. As he explained, even Steven Spielberg himself is guilty of that, too.

Janusz Kaminski: Well I think each story has its own representation. Of course, I’m the one that puts my own little imprint. Not consciously. I’m not sitting there thinking, OK, this is what I’m going to do, because that’s what I do. It’s just, I express myself through cinematography. And it’s apparently to you and others, it’s very obvious that there is a certain resemblance from one movie to another or certain motifs or elements from each movie to another. But at the same time, you know, he makes essentially the same movies. You know occasionally, when he makes Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds. But War of the Worlds is nothing but guy with strength to connect with his kids, you know. Schindler’s List is about guy who who discovers humanity. E.T. is about this little kid who discovers tolerance. So, I mean, all these movies are essentially, they’ve got very similar theme. And few years ago we watched Baretta and I think he directed a couple of Baretta, I think. And I was just laughing as we doing the same shots. I mean, the same shots as in Baretta. So, you know, we don’t really change dramatically. We just refine certain things, you know? But, you know, as a filmmaker, I think he he expresses himself through directing even when he’s making these high budget, extremely commercial movies. There is still part of him that he allows the viewers to learn about. It’s the same to my work.

Eric: Well, if it was good enough for a 70s cop show, it’s good enough for Bridge of Spies. Though the art of filmmaking has changed a great deal in the five decades of Steven Spielberg’s career. For instance, nowadays, very little filming is actually done on film.

Janusz Kaminski: I think digital is getting better. I think it’s, in Europe it’s the norm. Nobody has the money anymore to make movies on film. It’s getting better. People are saying it’s fantastic, you know. And what’s interesting is we’re not comparing it anymore. Digital has its own language and you tell the story and the images, they don’t necessarily look like film. But they look great, right? And now you do something on film with the DI. You know, it looks like bad digital. That’s going to be the norm. You know, in five years, there’ll be no more film, you know. It’s like the typewriter. Bye bye. That’s my take, you know. But what do I know? I have very little experience with digital.

Eric: So what parting words of wisdom does one of Hollywood’s biggest cinematographers have for the next generation of storytellers?

Michael Pessah: I know you make it look easy, but you’ve had incredible longevity to your career.

Janusz Kaminski: Not much longer, baby. All these young people coming up. And I will die, by the way, so they will be opening. That was my thing when I came to Hollywood. I’m thinking, all those guys will eventually die. Well, they dying, but I’ve made it a bit sooner. We will die off and there will be opening. Half way serious, half way joking. Tremendous amount of room at the top.

Eric: Well, Janusz Kaminski is not going anywhere anytime soon, except maybe back to set. His next to Spielberg collaboration’s are already in the works. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and a remake of West Side Story. We want to thank Mr. Kaminski for speaking with our students. And thanks to all of you for listening.

This episode was based on the Q&A moderated and curated by Tova Laiter, co-moderated by Michael Pessah. To watch the full interview or to see or other Q&As, check out our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilmAcademy. This episode was written by me, Eric Conner. Edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. Produced by Kristian Heydon and myself. Executive produced by Tova Laiter, Jean Sherlock, and Dan Mackler. A special thanks to all our staff and crew who made this possible. To learn more about our programs, check us out at NYFA.edu. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. See you next time.