In Czech director Jana Hojdová’s raw, brazenly honest documentary, “Robert Richardson: The White Devil,” the legendary director of photography finds himself in a curious position. After decades capturing a plethora of towering films: “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Casino,” “Kill Bill: Volume I & II,” “Shutter Island,” “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” and many more—the three-time Academy Award winner finds himself in front of the camera.
In “Robert Richard: The White Devil,” which, after six years of filming had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the cinematographer forms an unlikely friendship with Hojdová that began when the Czech filmmaker emailed him with a request to interview him for her Master’s thesis. What started out as a simple project soon evolved into a personal excavation of the filmmaker that involved searching through his personal archive of home movies, storyboards, scripts, and journals. The result, partly born from Hojdová and Richardson hunkering down during COVID, when a lockdown kept the filmmaker from returning to her country, is a truthful summation of an artist, a father, and spouse—one that features words from his long-time collaborators Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to show the heavy toll achieving cinematic greatness can often exact.
Robert Richardson sat down with RogerEbert.com during KVIFF, where he was on hand to receive the festival’s Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contributions to world cinema. He reflects on his archives, the weight of winning Oscars, and the cautionary tale he hopes this film provides.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In the film, you mention that when Jana [Hojdová] reached out to interview you for her Master’s thesis, you responded to her because the questions she sent were personal, not technical. Most creatives today would prefer to shy away from the personal. Why did that draw you in?
I found that’s true when I do most interviews. Even when I would do the ACR articles, American Cinematographer, they’re constantly searching for questions about the lighting, this, that, or what have you. I’d rather you interview the production designer, the editor, the director. You can talk to the gaffer.
I don’t want to just talk about what lenses I chose. I prefer you to talk about the things that inspired us to want to make this movie rather than how we shot it. So, when I got the first series of questions from Jana, I was all in.
How long did you correspond before you met her?
A couple of years. She told me she has 400 pages worth of our conversations.
She could make a docuseries!
She wants more. She has her thesis, and she wants to make it into a book.
This film began as her written thesis. How did it jump from that framework into a documentary?
Well, initially, we hadn’t met. She actually traveled across the States and ended up meeting me in New Zealand. I was finishing “Adrift” with Baltazar [Kormákur] and Shailene [Woodley] when she arrived. And while she was there, she asked more questions and did some shooting behind the scenes. I was like: Shooting behind the scenes? What are you doing? [he responds as Jana in a hesitating voice] Well, I’m, I’m, I’d like to, would you? I told her to get it out. What do you want to say?
She wanted to make a documentary. By that point, I’d already told her everything about my life, so I thought, let’s go for it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But six years later….
Six years and COVID later! She arrived to interview you at your Cape Cod home for what she thought would be a week or two, but ended up having to stay with you for three months because of the lockdown in the Czech Republic. What was it like having the camera follow you around?
What was great about it was that I had a downstairs, which you see in that scene in the documentary when we’re walking down, and I had archives that included boxes that I hadn’t looked at in years. Suddenly, she was yanking out some of the films I’d been searching for that my grandfather had shot in 16mm. We had a boys camp and a girls camp on the water, and he had done a lot of work with the camera. So, I bought a projector and we put it up and started to look at that footage. She also found boxes and boxes of tapes, from Hi8 to cassette, to et cetera, et cetera. She’s watching all those and she’s making me even project them on the wall. And when she started, it never stopped. She just did not stop. She took all my books and pulled them out of all the boxes and put them up on shelves. So for me, it was like a plus because with her doing that, I didn’t have to do anything.
The scene that you’re talking about, when you enter into your basement, all the boxes are lined up in a row, and later we see you sitting in front of shelves, now filled with contents of the boxes, with you holding your journal.
Before she arrived there were only boxes and some empty space. The boxes also had DVDs, laser discs, and books. I bought shelves and then she put up four of these shelves and started to fill all the books in—they’re all film books.
The journal you’re holding is one of you personal diaries. Throughout the film, there’s also a lot of home movies shot by you of your wife at the time and your daughter. Were you conscious of keeping a personal archive?
I just never threw stuff away because a lot of them are family tapes. They just get stored because, at a certain point, you lose any way of actually moving them over. You’ve got a MiniDV, and then your sizes change, your Hi8, your this, your that. But I always carried a camera. I filmed everything all the time.
Oh we know! There’s so much home material shot by you.
And sometimes it’s too much! But a lot of those things allow you to witness how some things started. They are little films there that I made with cuts in the camera. I also had footage of my father; I had John Lennon’s voice.
You also have storyboards in your basement, like there’s a moment where you pull out the storyboard for “Platoon.” There’s also another moment when you talk about when you were hired on “Casino” and you sent a ten-page memo to Scorsese with suggestions.
Scorsese basically said he received my notes and he would never read them. Though, he did offer that when he finished the script, he would send me every shot. When I first got his phone call after the memo, in fact, I thought I was getting fired.
You thought you had crossed some creative boundary?
I don’t know. I had asked the AD, who he had worked with on many different films, and the producer, who is now his ex-wife, Barbara De Fina, and they told me to send it.
They laid a trap for you?
I don’t think he did. I think she might have. But I don’t know what happened.
You talked about always having a camera on you, and like I said, you have these diaries. It seems like every day of your life you’ve either manually journaled or digitally journaled. Where does that desire to keep a record of your life come from?
It stems from two different worlds. The camera is the way I want to see all the time. I just love having a camera and seeing through a camera. It’s often a way of protecting myself from the event. Keeping me back here. [puts his hand over his face like a lens] Not over there. The journals are always devoted to the film. So as you start, it’s like pre-prep and this and that. And then you do Polaroids. So back then, that’s how you calibrated your lighting, with the Polaroids through gray scale. I would take pictures of things and then make notes.
But then there would always be the thought of how the day went and what happened on that day or what was the attitude. Sometimes it would be a series of very personal things. Sometimes observations about people that were on the set. They just collided into each other and then they meshed. That’s just the process I went through. But it was not intentional, like I want to record my life—it was more like this is how I live. I shoot all the time. I’m either making a film and then making notes about the film, or I’m at home taking pictures and or on vacation or whatever. Now we do it with this [he picks up my phone]. You shoot all the time. I’m sure you do. It’s the same idea. Except if you have a video camera.
There’s a moment in the film where you talk about the stages of winning Oscars where the first one is for recognition and then the second one people are afraid of you. What did you mean by the “afraid of you” part?
The first nomination actually is the opening to people respecting you. I got a second one with “Born on the Fourth of July,” and then when the first came through with “JFK,” there was this: Ah, okay. Then you get called more and that’s when Marty began to consider me, along with other directors, like Rob Reiner. You’re moving up the ladder and getting acceptance from certain directors. I worked with John Sayles on two films and then suddenly I’m with a different director and a different sphere and with more money in budgets and this and that.
But when you win that second one, then only a certain tier of directors wants to make a call. People are more assured: He’s a two time Academy winner. Would I feel comfortable asking Meryl to do my movie? He must cost a fortune. We can’t call him. When it’s your third, you might as well just go hang yourself for a while until a topnotch [director] shows up, somebody who really is not afraid of anything.
That’s actually happened before. I did “A Private War” with Matthew Heineman, and it wasn’t even a vague question mark. Just come on, let’s make this low budget film. Even Baltazar doesn’t care. I mean, he’s a serious man. He just didn’t care what my accolades were. He just wanted to work with me. Those are the kind of people you need. Because it starts to take away the question marks people have about you: Can I handle this? Do I want to deal with this? What kind of person are you? Are you an asshole? People worry about what your attitudes are.
They’ll say: I hear he’s an asshole. He’s really hard on this crew. Thank you. My crew has been with me for 40 years. How hard could I be? Quentin [Tarantino] said that I’m really hard on my crew. Well, Quentin, those people have been with me for 20 years before they even got up to you. I might have been an asshole and I didn’t see it. It’s highly likely he’s correct.
In the film, Quentin mentions that you softened to your crew in between “Kill Bill” and “Inglorious Basterds.” Do you think you changed?
Here’s what happened on “Kill Bill.” We decided to shoot the film three perf. I didn’t know Quentin well enough at the time, and the producers didn’t help with this decision. We did three perf because you save almost one quarter of your budget because you’re three perfs versus four. But he likes to print everything and then project it. With three perf, that doesn’t work. You can project three perf, but it’s a much more complicated situation. So, I now take that upon myself as an issue. Because it’s great for going to the DI, but he’s a printer. You can print, but you have to go through a whole different process: three perf, then you make a dupe, and so forth. That whole process was different for him and he prints every take that he selects. So, that caused a friction between us that we got through, but it was not so cool.
I assume you’ve seen the film…
I haven’t! I’ve seen various parts of the film in different manifestations. I haven’t seen the final mix or formatting of the film.
Do you have a hope of what other people will think when they see the film?
I do. I want it to say that when you make a career choice and you do it with utter abandon, my life is what happens. Here are the consequences you’re going to run into. They’re not all positive. You’re damaging people along that route. Marty says it very beautifully at some point in the movie where he says: You’re going this direction and you hope the other person comes this direction with you. It doesn’t happen.
Quentin says something like: When you’re climbing Mount Everest, no one else is going with you on that trip. I think that’s the case. During that time the loss of my family was what was taking place. I lost all my family and relationships with my daughters that I’ve never retrieved. To this day, the two oldest daughters are still angry at me. I hope this makes others know that you can make choices. But if you do take them, you take them and you live with them. You commit to it.