Page 36 - Fujifilm Exposure_38 As You Like It_ok

FOUR WHEEL DRIVE
Catching up with laid-back cinematographer
John Lynch who currently "surfing the wave" with
car and phone commercials
S
"Everyone always comments that it looks like it’s not lit at all."
ince his well regarded debut feature Pandaemonium in 2000, DP John Lynch seems to have lived the life of a free spirit. In part this may be because the boldly con- ceived Julien Temple- direct-
ed tale of feuding romantic poets burned brightly briefly before fading from everyone’s view.
“At the time I thought it was bril- liant,” says Lynch, “a great piece of work for everybody concerned. It opened at the Toronto Film Festival and I got an award there for Best Cinematography. I thought it was des- tined for fantastic things, but I think it just came along at the wrong time.
“Maybe people were a little bit bored with dead poets. After that I got offered a lot of films, none of which I did. I sort of avoided everything. Pandaemonium [shot on Fujifilm, cen- tring on Coleridge, Byron and Wordsworth] did me a lot of good in many ways, but I thought it was going to be a lot bigger and more successful than it was.”
The only other feature to his name is Incubus, a routine slasher pic, but there are a slew of top of the range commercials and the odd pop promo including a couple reuniting him with his old pal Robbie Williams.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done one with him,” Lynch adds. “I did nearly all of his first album actual- ly, Angels, Let Me Entertain You, Millennium. He’s changed over the years, he’s obviously turned into a superstar now.”
Some of the credit for that might be directed at the Dublin-born DP who brought visual form to Williams’ major early hits. He has experienced some changes of his own too, marrying pro- ducer Mohini Sarda, having a son Dhani (“it was a compromise between an Irish name and an Indian one,” he chuckles) and relocating to Spain.
In that time he seems to have been much in demand for car and mobile phone commercials, a willing victim to the notion that you tend to get asked to do what you’ve just done.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “especially in America. They’re very like that ‘you’re the car guy!’ I’ve got an agency in Los Angeles now, Skouras, and they’re very, very big. I’m absolutely sure I’ll never get a job from them because they’re just huge. They’ve got Harris Savides, Dion Beebe, Robert Richardson - so many people. And they live there, so why would they hire me? But you never know because my reel is quite different, it’s very European. I’m not sure what that means – dark and out of focus, maybe. Everyone always comments that it looks like it’s not lit at all.”
If Lynch gives the impression he is not burning with ambition, some of that could be down to a change in pri- orities, with his son being only three years old. High-end commercials bring the rewards, have the budgets, but require less of his time than another movie might.
“I’m just surfing the wave,” he adds, “going where the tide takes me. It seems to be mainly cars and mobile phones at the moment, that’s the main stuff. I shot the new Vodafone ad, with Fernando Alonso, on the Eterna 250T 8553. In fact, a lot of them have been on Fujifilm: there was one for Vauxhall Opel last year. And there’s the Opel Corsa campaign, with puppets, which was titled C’mon, and the Audi 5 com- mercial, on Eterna 250D 8563, we shot in Namibia recently.”
In his 12 years as a DP, Lynch recognises the development in his own lighting style, but more than that he believes the change within him has
Photo above left: Cinematographer John Lynch; left: a scene from Pandaemonium
come in being able to adapt to the demands of each individual job.
“I was looking back at my reel recently thinking ‘that’s a bit dark’, or ‘that’s a bit bright’, but then I remem- ber the director giving me references of roughly what he was after. So it depends on what the directors say. If they are very visual, then they give you a very definite brief of what they want it to look like. If they haven’t got a view, you read the script and trans- late it in your head to what you think it’s going to be.”
Currently the major project on Lynch’s horizon is a move back from Spain – “we were climate refugees real- ly,” he adds wryly. With that may come a further development in a cine- matographic career that continues to develop nicely. Maybe next it will be John Lynch, director?
“I have directed,” he says, “with a group called Work. Probably the most famous person out of that is Ringan Ledwidge. Four of us used to direct together, but I didn’t really enjoy it at all. There was too much talking, too much going around in circles asking if someone should have brown shoelaces or black shoelaces. So that’s not an ambition of mine anymore. I do write stories and stuff, which might extend into screenplays at some stage. I also want to paint and play the piano. I’ve started playing the accor- dion which is a wonderful thing.”
This musical talent, such as it is, is inherited from his father who used to perform at ceilidhs with his broth- er, styling themselves The Lynch Mob. The artistic talent that runs through Lynch suggest a bit of a renaissance man too, but he is no dilettante: he takes what he does seriously and is glad of the opportunities that are coming his way. “It’s good,” he adds modestly, “I’m very lucky to be able to do it.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
34 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture
profile