Where the Magic Happens: On Set with Mary Ellen Mark

Mark photographed on the sets of Roma, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Day of the Locust, Tristana, The Missouri Breaks, Night Moves, Mississippi Mermaid, The Blues Brothers, Heat and Dust, Rumble Fish, Sleepy Hollow, Showgirls, Fur, Che, Sweeney Todd, Agnes of God, and many others, immersing herself in each of these worlds as deeply as she did her most searing and unflinching documentary work. Perhaps films offered a kind of psychic relief. Mary Ellen Mark: The Book of Everything (Steidl), a recently published three-volume set of Mark’s work, is arranged chronologically, revealing how nimbly she traveled from her toughest jobs to then spend sometimes several weeks on set, how she approached each with equanimity, how one influenced the other. “Doing documentary projects,” she once said while working on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, “it’s almost like doing a movie, [where] you’re casting your own subjects.”

The pictures Mark was hired to produce were primarily used by the studios for publicity, disseminated to publications and media outlets, intended to convey in still form the feeling of the motion pictures and the personas of the actors and filmmakers. Her photographs of François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel are as indelible as those of performers who became major, mainstream celebrities in the U.S.—Mark photographed Patrick Swayze in a slip dress. The first time I paged through Seen behind the scene, I was struck by how familiar the pictures were to me, almost delusionally so, especially the ones from films I would not see until years after their making. I grew up in rural North Carolina, removed from the world of art-house cinema. In fact, one of Mark’s most famous images—a 1990 photograph, commissioned by Life magazine, of a young girl in a kiddie pool, taking a deep drag off a cigarette—was shot ten miles away from where I lived and was made when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t aware of its existence until years later. These were pre-internet times. There were two twin theaters in town, one of which has since become a church, and with a few exceptions (Tootsie and Trading Places, for example), the films Mark photographed were not shown. Books and magazines were my cultural lifeline; retrospectively I realized that it was primarily through Mark that I absorbed films I had not actually watched, that her set photographs and portraits were such powerful transmitters, they not only shaped my understanding of the people who made them but brought the films themselves to life.

Mark learned to avoid the first week of filming—too chaotic. She aimed for the times when most of the stars would be there, when the location itself presented good possibilities for pictures. Sometimes, particularly in her first years of photographing on set, she might be given weeks of free rein to photograph almost everything she wanted behind the scenes and between takes, including some wonderfully candid and carefree frames. “You don’t have to take that many pictures, just wait for the right moment,” she wrote. A group picture of much of the core cast of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest eerily replicates the dynamic of the film but was the product of a lucky accident, Mark later recalled. “They were shouting at each other and at something behind me. Jack Nicholson leads the picture and makes it work.”

“In her photographs she captured the familial bonds that can quickly form among cast and crew on location and made significant personal connections of her own.”

Francis Ford Coppola remembers Mark “dressed in army fatigues, sloshing around in the mud shooting pictures” on the set of Apocalypse Now; her photographs of Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando are some of her most striking and memorable pictures. Mark had met Brando several times, first on the set of The Missouri Breaks. He insisted on being asked permission before a photograph was taken; the first time, he said no. On the last day of shooting she approached him again and he allowed her a few minutes—there happened to be a fence nearby, and Mark, thinking quickly, made use of it. Later, she recalled, if she had taken even twenty minutes, she feared she’d lose him altogether. When they were reunited on Apocalypse Now, Brando again insisted on being asked permission. By this time, Mark had earned a certain degree of trust. “I knew the idea had to be his. I had heard he was fascinated by insects. There were these jars of bugs being used in the film. I set them down near him and he picked them up and started posing with them. He even put them on his head. He made those pictures happen for me. He had an incredible face. That helps, that beautiful face. And he knew exactly how to be in front of a camera.”

Mark, whose charismatic persona is well known, who knew exactly how to be behind the camera and how to lure people in front of it, was a master of eliciting those moments, whether it was with subjects as cognizant and performative as Brando or Nicole Kidman, or with ones as tightly bound to their best-known characters as Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger, who refused to shed his signature eye mask. You get the sense that Mark was as much an actor as some of her subjects were: together they engage in a kind of dance. She formed lasting relationships with many of the actors and directors too. Donald Sutherland, whom she photographed in the bath during takes between his role as Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust, recalled sailing with her on a lake during the making of Klute, as Mark clutched her cameras close to her chest. She photographed the birth of one of his sons: “I can only see her silhouette in my memory, a gelatinous silver silhouette, and those black eyes watching from just above the black camera body before the two hands holding it moved to obscure them and the shutter opened and closed.”

In her photographs she captured the familial bonds that can quickly form among cast and crew on location and made significant personal connections of her own. She met Martin Bell on the set of Miloš Forman’s Ragtime. On several occasions, Mark’s film work allowed her to reunite with her longtime good friend Candice Bergen, whom she’d first met in a photography class when she was a graduate student and Bergen an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania; when Bergen married Louis Malle, Mark photographed their wedding. When Mark was commissioned to make a portrait of Bergen’s father, the famous actor and ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, her editor specifically wanted him portrayed alone, without his dummy Charlie McCarthy. But Bergen was “visibly uncomfortable,” Mark recalled, and finally his son, Chris, suggested bringing out Charlie anyway. In a hallway Bergen bent to unpack the dummy from his suitcase, and Mark instinctively began to photograph. The moment is rare and fleeting—she captured it in just a couple frames—and genuinely loving, like a father tenderly caring for a child. It’s also delightfully, weirdly jarring (the “child” of course is fully suited, with his painted but malleable puppet’s grin). The suitcase containing Charlie reflects dappled sunlight from the wall of lattice. Like Mark’s portrait of Fellini, this is a picture of an artist visibly reckoning with his creation.

Mark’s particular attraction to the work of spectacular and surrealistic directors like Fellini and Buñuel either seems unusual or makes perfect sense for a devoted documentarian and portraitist. She photographed Buñuel’s Tristana: a leather-gloved Catherine Deneuve elegantly echoing the gestures of the diminutive director; and Buñuel with brow furrowed in thought and smoke, having a cigarette with an actor between scenes. The actor is in full costume as a uniformed member of the Civil Guard, and Buñuel is in civilian clothes, but somehow, in tri-corner cap and beret, they feel kindred—Mark magnifies the interaction and relationship. Her 1971 portrait of Buñuel at home in Mexico City echoes the unsettling and joyous dimension of his work: Mark pictures him with dog in lap, shot glass and cigarette in hand, as his wife Jeanne playfully comes up behind him as if to push him out of his chair. Her tongue sticks out, and his apprehensive, expressive eyes—of course it is Buñuel, so it is all about the eyes—channels the essence of his films.

Perhaps because Fellini was Mark’s favorite director, she found a way to preserve an aura of enigma around him. After Satyricon, Mark photographed him on the set of Roma. “Fellini’s world was extraordinary; every day something amazing would happen,” she said. “Sometimes he would get angry and yell at everyone on set. And then he would apologize.” In her portraits of him, there is almost always something obscured—as in the shadowed portrait from Satyricon, or in the picture where he’s horsing around with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, his eyes closed, “pretending to sleep” during the making of the film. She captures him in profile touching up a painting of himself, and with a half-shadowed face cycling around on a child’s bicycle and standing on the muddy road, wearing a white mask, on the set of Roma. It’s possible to wonder whether she didn’t subconsciously allow a bit of secrecy to linger in her frame—signifying the things we can never fully see.

Over time, as filmmaking practices changed, the so-called magic of cinema became more and more difficult to visually reproduce. When Mark started out, she wrote, “I was able to make candid shots that would be virtually impossible now with green screens, blue screens, and video assists.” Tim Burton, whom she photographed while he filmed Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Planet of the Apes, has acknowledged the importance of those surreal and impromptu instances, such as when “you might find yourself alone, deep in thought, on a pink boat in a chocolate river, surrounded by dozens of Oompa-Loompa puppets.” Burton is seen in her frame, hunched and hands turned inward on his hips, coaching Paul Giamatti on the physicality of Limbo, his orangutan character. But such moments became scarcer to find. By around the mid-1980s, the rising phenomena of celebrity brought with it an obstacle course of publicists, agents, and managers—all of which limited both the kind of open access and the time Mark had often experienced. On the set of Babel, Mark photographed Alejandro González Iñárritu smoking alongside a headphone-wearing Cate Blanchett as they review a scene, expressions intent but unreachable. Scenes like these were more common as the gulf between Fellini’s dance and the changing cinematic landscape became palpable and directors largely disappeared behind monitors. As tantalizingly unclear as that shadowy imprint of Fellini on his film is our understanding of exactly where art comes from, the unsolvable mystery that will never cease to captivate and elude us.

All photos © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation