Heaven Drew Me In Part 1
Heaven Drew Me In Part 1
The most beautiful film ever made. Full stop.
Smart Friends, Unlikely Filmmakers
One of the first films I ever worked on was a short documentary about a small town in the Dominican Republic. My friends – a husband and wife – had won The $25,000 Pyramid, a popular TV Game Show. Instead of spending their prize money on a vacation or a new car, they decided to fund a documentary.
Their film was about a little-known community of Jewish immigrants who had been allowed to settle in the Dominican Republic during World War II. The island’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo – infamous for his human rights abuses – agreed to take in Jewish refugees, allegedly expecting favors from the U.S. in return. But there was a catch.
Trujillo sent these refugees to an undeveloped, isolated part of the island. The new arrivals, mostly Germans and Austrians, were educated professionals – teachers, writers, business owners, musicians. They had no experience farming, yet here they were, stranded in a Spanish-speaking tropical climate with no clear way to survive.
So, they adapted.
After years of struggle, they learned to raise cattle. They built homes. They married into Dominican families. Eventually, they formed a cooperative that became the largest and most successful cheese business on the island.
We went to document their story. The town – and our film – was called Sosua.
You Call This Work?
This was my first paid gig outside the U.S., and from the moment I arrived, I knew – I never wanted to do anything else. I assumed every future shoot would be this satisfying (even if they didn’t all come with an ocean swim at the end of the day).
Since I was the only one on our tiny crew who spoke Spanish – I’d learned during my time in the Peace Corps in Chile – I became the bridge between the producers and the locals. And since I had never attended film school, I didn’t know the proper etiquette of a proper film set. I assumed that being the cameraman just included being involved in every creative decision.
That assumption stuck with me. I went years operating under the false belief that cinematographers often played such a hands-on role in shaping a film. Without realizing it, I gained a reputation – not just as someone who could capture beautiful images, but as an immersive collaborator with good ideas to boot.
Edit Room Awakening
Back in New York, we began editing the film in a small midtown studio. If the shoot had been magical, the edit was equally so. Seeing the film come together – piece by piece – only deepened my obsession with filmmaking.
John Mullen, the owner of the editing house, introduced me to other filmmakers working in the building. I spent hours watching them edit, absorbing everything I could. In one room, a team was cutting a documentary about Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota medicine man and spiritual leader. Twice a week, the director, Mike Cuesta, would come in to give the editor notes. I learned more just sitting in the back of that room than I could have in an entire year of film school.
Heaven on the Cutting Room Floor
In the big edit room, John was cutting a trailer for a 35mm feature film. Seeing that film stock up close – each frame more than twice the size of our 16mm footage – was like stepping into another world. I had never seen images so beautiful. I’m not sure I ever will again.
The film was called Days of Heaven, directed by a relatively unknown filmmaker named Terrence Malick.
One day, John gave me a few of the frames that had literally fallen on the floor of the editing room. I kept them in an envelope and guarded them like the sacred treasures they were to me.
Watching the trailer come together was like discovering a hidden masterpiece in an old attic – unexpected, breathtaking, and impossible to look away from. Later, when I saw the film projected in a theater, it was overwhelming. I walked out into the sunlight feeling like my eyes had been opened to a new way of seeing.
Journal
Frame by Frame Devotion
The film wasn’t a commercial hit, maybe because it was slow and …
Each day on any film project, no matter how well-planned, unexpected moments appear – like glittering gems that might catch my eye. A look. A delay. A question I hadn’t thought to ask. Most of Days of Heaven was shot during what I later learned was called “magic hour” – that brief window at the end of the day when the light turns ethereal.
contemplative, but The Village Voice called it “the most gorgeously photographed film ever made.” It won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, thanks to Néstor Almendros, Haskell Wexler and Terry.
Later in my career, when I might be giving cinematography workshops, I brought out that sacred envelope. As students held the film strips up to the light, I talked about the discipline Terry and his crew had to achieve those breathtaking images.
Understanding the Magic
The beauty of Days of Heaven didn’t just happen. Those images weren’t the result of luck or pretty landscapes. They were earned – carefully constructed by a crew that understood the language of film the way a musician understands scales.
Had I been on set back then and overheard the crew talking, it would have sounded like a foreign language:
“Swap out the 5277 and the N9. Build again with 79 and N6. In ten, pull the 6 and use the ND3.”
Only years later did I realize what I’d been listening to. They were working with film stocks that had different sensitivities to light—faster stocks as the sun dropped lower in the sky. And they were removing neutral density filters—NDs that had been cutting the bright sunlight earlier—so the film could keep seeing even as the world dimmed.
Like alchemists, later when the film got to the lab, they played with exposing it longer in the developing soup as needed.
It was a quiet ballet of precision and timing, built on deep knowledge of exposure, color temperature, and the narrow window of magic hour. Every art has its own language. Film is no exception.