Meet Don Starnes | Director of Photography

We had the good fortune of connecting with Don Starnes and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Don, what’s one piece of conventional advice that you disagree with?

The most common advice of the moment is a misreading of post-modernist philosophers that, in summary, goes something like this: nothing is real and it’s all about you.

This sort of thing would be fun to debate in a dorm room or at a café on the Rive Gauche, especially after having actually read Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes. However, these ideas are a terrible basis for decisions and choices in real life. We developed language to describe reality; it turns out that language can’t actually create reality.

Storytellers always have a reason. Sometimes storytellers are giving you a gift, such as entertainment. Sometimes they are out to extract something from you, like money, attention or power. Sometimes they mean to do both.

Post-modernists are storytellers who are trying to create an alternate reality for themselves through language. I find that they are usually trying to get away with poor choices. I haven’t seen it go well.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’m a humanist, meaning that I’m passionate about human stories. Stories are essential to the human mind. I find that a lot of other story tellers content themselves with plot (what happens next) and are less interested in stories (why people do things). I try to photograph movies, in every frame, to give the maximum insight into the human story that we’re telling.

I worked my way up in the movie business from a film loader to a Director of Photography. Along the way, I intentionally detoured into sub-careers that would teach me things about filmmaking that I wanted to know: assistant film editing, rental house technician, working at a film lab, still photographer, graphic designer. I’ve met a number of old, accomplished filmmakers: they all seem to agree that you won’t live long enough to master all of filmmaking— they are constantly learning. All art forms are probably like this.

None of this is easy— we all have to constantly prove ourselves. I photographed an interview with Martin Scorcese— he said that he still needs to prove himself to earn the opportunity to make new films. So, be of good cheer: you’re not alone in this.

I overcome challenges with constance and hard work:

I’m always the same— sincere, principled, focused, dependable. It’s so much easier that way. I learned the hard way how to turn down work that would require me to change these or that is otherwise unlikely to succeed. I constantly look for the right people to work with.

I never give up— I track my few simple goals like an indefatigable blood hound. I constantly evaluate and adjust my approach to the ever-changing environment of the objectives, but I keep working toward them, literally every day.

Filmmaking has taught me to be open to reality and to try to notice as much as I can. In filmmaking, this is necessary to make it through an arduous production day and to make the truest movie that you can. Counterintuitively, the best way to make fiction is to stay as close to reality as you can.

Stories are made up of characters: fallible, essentially individual people, who all have their own problems and reasons. Stories are simplified models of reality, which we create in an effort to understand and/or deal with reality, for better or worse.

It’s been very helpful in my life to think of real people as characters, each with their own essential properties, who behave inevitably for their own perfect reasons.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My friends are usually interested in people, food and nature (like me). So, I’d first bring them to a quintessentially LA thing: a networking event, preferably at a movie studio or movie equipment rental house, where we’d nosh and talk with friendly, interesting people. I’d take them for street tacos in Boyle Heights, and then we’d bike along the LA River in Frog Town. We’d take the Metro E line out to Santa Monica, hang out on the beach, and catch a bus to Venice to walk along the canals. Another day, we’d get some pie at Knowreality Pie and hike up the Hollywood sign. We’d have drinks on the rooftop at Perch in DTLA. We’d spend much of a day among the camellias at Descanso Gardens, and listen to a concert there in the evening. And, because this has been a thrifty itinerary so far, we’d have great dinners at Bestia, Musso & Frank, Otoño and Jitlada.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Shoutout to Hal Trussell, a producer and creative director in Los Angeles. A long time ago, I was a 26 year old Second Camera Assistant on a TV movie and he was the Director of Photography. A DP doesn’t usually have much interaction with a 2nd Assistant: he probably said about 30 words to me. But he was enormously influential to me: I learned much of what I know about the job from that shoot with him.

Hal had worked his way up in the business; most of his DP work had been on low budget genre movies (such as The Naked Cage and Night Train to Terror). He had a thoroughly realistic understanding of the movie business. But he conducted himself as a gentleman, was precise, efficient and professional, and always found a way to artfully tell the story. He deeply appreciated skilled craftspeople: when our excellent 1st Assistant Peter Kalisch pulled off a nearly impossible focus pull, Hal quietly told him matter-of-factly “Peter, you have a gift.” I got the sense that Hal felt that all stories deserve this sort of work, and didn’t worry that he wasn’t shooting an academy award worthy picture. When I hear stories of rogue Rônin in feudal Japan, I think of Hal.

There’s pretty much no chance that Hal remembers me, but I try to be like Hal and my other mentors every day that I work.

Website: http://donstarnes.com/

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