A Talk with Ed Lachman

The American Ed Lachman is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile cameramen. His early career coincided with the heyday of the New German Cinema of the 70s. He worked with Werner Herzog (Stroszek), Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. Later he served as DOP on such US blockbusters as Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich with Julia Roberts. He has also stood behind the camera for some of the most successful US indie movies, such as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Todd Haynes’s  I‘m Not There and Robert Altman’s last film, A Prairie Home Companion, and he both shot and co-directed Larry Clarks Ken Park. Ed Lachman’s opus encompasses 62 documentary and fiction features.



Ulrich Seidl is known to be a perfectionist. At the same time, he is open to creative input from people who know what they’re doing. Were you prepared to help shape the film’s content?

Ed Lachman: Well, Ulrich is very good at telling stories visually. He creates tableaux that allow the audience to enter a world from the outside, almost like someone entering a room and looking around, or walking down a street. In some ways he lets the viewer be the camera, and then he uses a hand-held camera to get even closer to his protagonists so that the audience is even more involved.

Did you have to improvise a lot, in terms of your work as cameraman?

Ed Lachman: Yes, there was a certain amount of improvisation, and I think that’s where the strength of his images comes from. They’re not overstylized, glossy pictures, they’re images that he wants us to believe. There is no contradiction between what you see and what you feel for the protagonists. It’s all organic. I think that Ulrich’s films capture some of the fragility of human experience, and that the camera must also capture it.

Seid’ls images are often provocative. Was it easy for you to enter this bizarre universe, or did you have problems?

Ed Lachman: No, not at all. I think that people don’t always realize that these images are metaphors. That’s one of the strengths of cinema, how you’re able to tell a story with visual metaphors. And how images convey ideas and go beyond what you are seeing.

How do you deal with Ulrich Seidl’s curiosity for bringing to light the most intimate secrets of his protagonists?

Ed Lachman: To me, Seidl reveals private moments of people that you don’t necessarily want to see, moments that you may experience yourself. I think that’s what makes his storytelling so effective. For me, in fact, he’s a very moral director. His storytelling is very moral, without being moralistic. I think that’s something very difficult, and I don’t think there’s been a director since Kieslowski who’s done that. He shows things with his own personal kind of morality, without preaching to the viewer. Seidl allows viewers to use their own intelligence to choose how they view it.

What’s involved for you in following Seidl as he walks the very thin line between documentary and narrative fiction film?

Ed Lachman: Strangely I think all films are documentaries. Because even in a narrative film, where you set up the camera and arrange the lighting, and the actors say the same lines, no two takes or movements are ever identical.

Seidl is known to be a director who’s not very talkative on set. What is it like working with intuitive, “quiet” directors like him?

Ed Lachman: It’s a question of mutual understanding. You can talk till the cows come home and still not understand each other. You don’t communicate only through words. What I find interesting about his work is that he explores the boundaries of film. Traditionally we think of film as conveying the illusion of reality. But what is the reality of the illusion? I think that he questions what the reality of the illusion is. Or is reality the illusion? maybe he’s much more interested in that: Is reality the illusion?

That’s one of the paradoxes of Seidl’s work. What you’re saying sounds very theoretical. But on the other hand there’s the sheer carnal energy of his films...

Ed Lachman: True, and I think that’s what so many people find so disturbing. They’re unsure: Is it supposed to document a kind of reality, or is it a narrative element? But I think that if you want to tell a story you have to explore both sides. And, as I said earlier, he holds up this mirror to us in which we can each see ourself. That’s the strength of his work, and what makes his work so unique.