With the movie “No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos,” local filmmakers director James Chressanthis and associate producer Ashley Wells Lewis have created something that transcends the term “documentary” and produced a film that is about much more than its title subject.
With more than 140 films between them, Hungarian cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond largely defined the counterculture film movement of the ’70s and early ’80s (the American “New Wave” of cinema), capturing the zeitgeist of the disillusioned and disenfranchised. They worked with seminal directors of that time, including Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby and Steven Spielberg.
But more than a celebration of these two cinematic geniuses’ work, “Laszlo and Vilmos” is the story of their remarkable and enduring friendship.
“Laszlo and Vilmos were two acquaintances whose friendship was forged by adversity,” Chressanthis said in an interview with The Malibu Times. “They arrived on these shores penniless and became great artists. When Vilmos accepted his Academy Award for ‘Close Encounters (of the Third Kind),’ he thanked America for giving him a second chance.”
That second chance occurred when film students Kovacs and Zsigmond escaped during the Soviet crackdown of Hungary’s 1956 revolution, literally running through fields to the Austrian border with contraband footage of Soviet atrocities hidden in their pants.
Once in America, the two refugees with the funny names worked odd jobs to afford a 16 mm camera and then worked their way into shooting “B” movies with titles like “The Sadist.”
America offered them opportunities little seen in Hungary. “No one would teach cinematography to the working class,” Zsigmond says in the film.
When the ’70s rolled around, they started shooting iconic films like “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Deliverance,” “Heaven’s Gate,” and “The Deer Hunter.”
“One of the problems I had was selecting which of their films to include in my movie,” Chressanthis said. “Their body of work is huge. And even though they had completely different personalities, they always cooperated with each other in a relationship based on true brotherhood.”
Chressanthis, originally from Philadelphia, was a student at the American Film Institute, where he first met Kovacs 23 years ago. He interned with Zsigmond on “The Witches of Eastwick” and has been compiling a documentary in his mind on the two filmmakers ever since.
Lewis met Chressanthis when she produced and he shot a documentary called “A Bridge for the Children.” After sitting next to Zsigmond at an AFI tribute in 2006, she said to Chressanthis, “This would make a great story.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing for years,” Chressanthis said.
Kovacs and Zsigmond approved and they began to assemble interviews with actors and directors who had worked with the pair. When Barbra Streisand got on board (Kovacs shot Streisand’s “For Pete’s Sake” in 1974), the project took off.
In making the film, Chressanthis said, “I consciously shot ‘Laszlo and Vilmos’ to have a different look from their films. We mixed up mediums, using 20 different formats before it was transferred to 35 mm. We had the archival stuff, Panavision Genesis HD, Digi-Betacam, Super 16, Super 8. Vilmos asked why not just shoot it on mini-DV, but I knew I didn’t want to compete with their own look.”
Chressanthis and producers Lewis, Tony Frere, Zachary Kranzler and Kian Soleimanpour had no problem lining up actors and directors who had worked with the two cinematographers. Karen Black, Peter Fonda, Haskell Wexler, Tatum O’Neal, Jon Voight and Richard Donner are some who reminiscence in the documentary about working with the pair. Their anecdotes bespeak profound respect for Kovacs’ and Zsigmond’s talent.
Sharon Stone sums up Kovacs’ approach to cinematography saying, “Kovacs proved that light has a quality that’s not just visual.”
Director William Richert declared, “Vilmos can smell light.”
The documentary chronicles the cinematographers’ personal lives as well. Kovacs returned to Hungary in search of a daughter born to him there and to find Zsigmond’s old girlfriend.
As Chressanthis said, “The imagery of their best movies reflects a lot of their lives. As in ‘The Deer Hunter,’ Laszlo returned to a war zone to help a friend. ‘Paper Moon’ has an illegitimate daughter. Road movies like ‘Easy Rider’ were about discovering America.”
Kovacs died in July of last year, before the documentary was finished. He was 74.
“I knew it was a possibility because Laszlo hadn’t been in great health,” Chressanthis said. “But he was enthusiastic about our progress and reunions with different directors. He came out to Panavision to go over some old photos we found in a shoebox somewhere and he loved them. I think that was the last time I saw him.”
Zsigmond, who is now 78, was devastated by Kovacs’ death. “We were like brothers,” he says in the film. “We would give up jobs for each other.”
“Laszlo and Vilmos” screened at Cannes as a work-in-progress and is under consideration for this year’s Academy Awards.
Chressanthis said his greatest compliment came from Kovacs’ widow, Audrey, who declared, “You got their love story right.”