Among the working lighting designers of the world, few names carry the cachet as the name Jules Fisher. His 18 Tony Award nominations have netted him eight shiny statues dating back to 1973. His work extends beyond Broadway and into the realm of film (School of Rock, Chicago, A Star is Born), ballet, opera, television and concert lighting (Rolling Stones, KISS, David Bowie, Whitney Houston). But to speak to the self-effacing man you might never guess that he has met with any success, as he is quick to praise his design partner, Peggy Eisenhauer. Ironically, it is Fisher whom Eisenhauer credits with inspiring her early in her career. Together, they form the design firm Third Eye Studios. Our interview started in their offices in New York and culminated over the phone, as it is quite challenging to pin them down.
PLSN: How did the two of you start working together?
Jules Fisher: Peggy and I joined forces when she came to me as an assistant. I have no qualms in saying that she was so good that after a few years I said, “Look, let’s be partners.”
We can both do better lighting, we feed each other, we challenge and test each other, and, to this day, we are always discussing the merits of a certain lighting method. It’s an odd partnership—how do two people sit down at a lighting desk? It’s not easy. She sets the cues, and she’s very musical. So I think her musicality has distinguished our lighting in recent years. And that’s what’s you see in the movie Chicago, or what you will see the movie Dream Girls, which is coming out. [Scheduled for release in December 2006–ed.]
Peggy Eisenhauer: I was a big fan of Fisher’s growing up in New York and seeing all of Jules’ work. One of the reasons I went to Carnegie Mellon was because he went there. So, I was a huge fan of his and he came to the school to lecture when I was a sophomore. A professor of mine at the time, Bill Nelson, was Jules’ professor because he had been there for, like, forty years. I was destined and driven to come to New York and dying to know Jules and work with him.
Do you find that working together helps you?
Eisenhauer: You’ve understated it. It’s our reason for being partners, in a way. We can provide each other with inspiration when we are lacking it. It’s hard to find inspiration perpetually. In a way, we have back-up inspiration and that is a great gift. It can be lonely if you don’t have someone to tell it to. I’d have a hard time working as a lighting designer if I didn’t have a brilliant mind next to me to ask, “How do you feel about this choice or idea?” I guess that’s my specific problem, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Do you get the job done any quicker because there are two of you?
Fisher: I’d like to think so. But we never get it done sooner because we want to be there too long. There is a famous line about musicals in the theatre: “You’re never done lighting a musical, it just opens.” And we’re culprits. So is it faster? I’d like to think it is, because we do better work than if it’s one of us, but our indulgence is that we want to do better lighting with each new opportunity. And lighting takes time. It takes time because of technology, the very technology that is to save us time, because you have so many more parameters to control now.
What are some of the changes you’ve seen it the theatrical lighting industry over the many years you’ve been at it?
Fisher: I’d like to do a study and compare light levels from the ‘50s to levels today. Today, it’s much brighter. But, can we see better? No—because we see by a more important component, contrast. If we can’t see more, what’s the value in it?
Unfortunately, we’ve gotten used to it. It’s an expectation, and we keep asking the manufacturers for more. I go to see some Broadway musicals and it’s almost hard to look at them, it’s so bright. Peggy and I say it’s like a parking lot. You lose nuance. Once you get to a certain brightness, then raising the level five percent on a dimmer, you can’t see the change. On a scale of one-to-ten, it’s easier to see a change from one to two than it is to see a change from nine to ten. Now we’re so high in that upper range that we lose the subtlety. So now to be subtle, you have to take large groups of lights out, or be much bolder. I think that’s sad.
Have you changed your approach to, let’s say, choosing colors for a production? Is it intuitive now?
Fisher: I had a standard education about color. Part of Carnegie Tech’s (now Carnegie Mellon) value as a school was that we had to take art classes in the art department. I studied Josef Albers and the colorists. Do I use it? I think all of your education goes somewhere, and none of it is lost. It causes you to think differently, and you grow. But now it’s just: I like this color red. I don’t think I could tell you why I am choosing a color. Yes, I might be able to technically say that this is a complementary color that will cause vibration in the retina. But I don’t think I pick a color that way. I think it’s more subjective, personal, emotional and maybe psychological.
Eisenhauer: One of the things that people ask us frequently is, “How do you use color, pick color. How does it work?”
I guess there is a period in one’s career where one studies one’s own choices. You might try something and then think it wasn’t saturated enough, so you change color and so forth. And sometimes we do have to go through a special process for finding the right color, but after a certain period of being a lighting designer, we start to feel out what kind of colors we want to use by what we see in the mind’s eye, what images come to us, and how those images are tinted. We can infuse so much emotion into what we are doing with color that the goal, the dream, the nirvana part of it, is allowing that feeling to arise—whether it be visual, in the mind’s eye, or emotional. All of the work that we have done as lighting designers through our entire careers informs the choice in that moment. It’s a cumulative experiential choice. Not experiential in terms of having successful lighting designs and successful shows, but rather causing or allowing experience of emotions in an audience. We don’t always analyze the choice, and that’s one of the things about it being instinctive. You go with a gut feeling, and we trust that because we are channeled into an emotional energy. It’s an emotional and abstract function. It is a function of the spirit, and comes through to us in spirit form. We also do the work in addressing the needs of the costumes, what kind of cast and range of skin tones. We don’t ignore that work, but when we are talking about tinting a world, or composing color into shadow, that’s more on the emotional side and I think one of the mysterious design processes that we have.
So there are certain parameters you need to address in this world — the theatre — and once the parameters are defined, it becomes instinctive.
Eisenhauer: Exactly. That’s exactly right. It’s the thing that I visualize for myself as the path and the nirvana.
There is so much pressure being a lighting designer and being in that seat because it’s an on-demand art form. You can’t stay up all night in your studio and do it; you have to do it while everybody is waiting for you, while everybody is on the clock, and the clock is ticking down. It’s on-demand.
What one needs is to create an environment for oneself in which you, as an artist, can sit there and weather the disparaging comment, the time pressure, the nervousness, the running commentary of what you are doing before actually completing anything and the variety of difficulties. It can be scary. And it can be uncomfortable.
In the environment one must create for oneself, and I’ll use a running term, leap over the wall. When you hit the wall which stops you from going forward, you have to leap over it. When you lose your pace, you can get back on track by putting one foot in front of the other, or by putting one light up, and the next light up, and the next light up. You have to trust that, as a lighting designer, your entire past career will inform that next choice you make and you will be right back on track, moving forward.
I’ve created this path, these stepping stones, so when questioning yourself—“Oh my God! What do I have to do next?”—you know that you have to record the cue. And then, “Ugh! What do I do next?” You know you have to talk to the followspots. Chaos can ensue in seconds! It’s hard to function. I just imagine the path, and put one foot in front of the other, and know that this is the next thing I’m supposed to do, and this is the next thing, and so on.
But when things are going well, artistically, and you’re not in a crisis feel, you can actually leave the path below you and float above it. It’s spirit driven; you can just light. You don’t know where your choices are coming from, but you can just enjoy being the channel for them.
So imagine being up there flying, in clear skies, and everything looks great and—bam!—something happens. I remember all I have to do is drop back down to the path, and put one foot in front of the other until I am ready to lift off again. It’s a contrast: first, the built-in nature of the chaos that may be difficult to manage; and then, the pure nirvana of being the lighting designer, floating along and lighting. We each go up and down, every show. My goal is to know, inside, that I have those two places and both will be creative.
When one’s not working, you rely on the other…
Eisenhauer: Right. The path is there when it’s not working. It’s terra firma. That’s where one touches down.
That plays into the name of your lighting design firm, Third Eye Studios.
Eisenhauer: In Eastern philosophy it is considered the eye of the mind. It is where we see images in our head.
And you’d be there all the time if you could.
Eisenhauer: A lot of time I’m just on the phone [Laughs]. You can guess how many weeks and months we spend on the phone and on the computer managing these jobs so we can get three months lighting something big, or three months shooting on a picture.
You dedicate that time to the business-side as a means to an end.
Eisenhauer: Yes. So we can turn the work lights off and bring up some dark blue PARs.
