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“ETERNA VIVID 160T WAS INCREDIBLY CLEAN, THE SHADOWS WERE BLACK, AND WITH NO SIGNS OF GRAIN AT ALL.”
scar-winning producer David Parfitt knows a thing or two about tweaking the Bard for today’s cinema audience. After all, his glorious 1998
comedy Shakespeare In Love snared a total of no fewer than 10 Academy Awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Parfitt is clearly hoping the
magic will strike again for A Bunch Of Amateurs, in which a rustic contem- porary production of King Lear is the backcloth to a droll-sounding tale of Anglo-American cultural confusion.
Burt Reynolds plays a veteran, somewhat has-been, Hollywood actor who thinks he’s been invited to star as Shakespeare’s tragic monarch at Stratford. What we and, in the film, the world’s press know from the outset - but he doesn’t - is that the invitation has actually come from a humble am-dram company in Stratford St John, Suffolk.
“It’s a classic fish out of water story,” explains Parfitt who presided over the project for seven long years before a healthy dose of finance from the Isle of Man finally propelled the £5m production before the cam- eras earlier this year.
With a script by Nick Newman and Ian Hislop, the film, being shot on the Isle of Man, London (doubling for LA) and South Bucks, co-stars Saman- tha Bond, Sir Derek Jacobi, Imelda Staunton and Charles Durning.
The film also reunites Parfitt with American director Andy Cadiff (TV’s The War At Home) and DP Ashley Rowe BSC four years after they made Chasing Liberty together in 2004.
Explains Rowe: “When we first met, we talked about shooting it digi- tally. Then found out we were shoot- ing on the Isle of Man for three weeks in winter. They’d be split days, each day of a short schedule being incredibly tight; outside for a good part of the day then back into a hot interior. I could see the elec- tronic equipment clogging up.
“So we decided to shoot Super 16mm instead. Before we started, I tested all the Fujifilm stocks. I liter- ally set up just one shot – a close-up of my assistant in a lit situation – and did that shot on all the stocks before grading it digitally and making a 35mm negative which we printed.
“The best of the lot was the ETERNA Vivid 160T. It was incredibly clean, the shadows were black, and with no signs of grain at all. How- ever, I knew I couldn’t shoot it all on the 160T because we had a lot of nighttime interiors to shoot in our barn location.
“When I met up with David and Andy for this, they referred back to Calendar Girls, which I’d also shot. They liked the look of that, and the script here has a similar kind of at- mosphere to Calendar Girls. I’ve also lit this in a natural way, not choco- late-boxy at all.” QUENTIN FALK
A Bunch Of Amateurs was originated on 16mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T 8643 and ETERNA 250D 8663
BARDTOTHEBONE
WHY BURT REYNOLDS GOT TO TACKLE A BUNCH OF AMATEURS
44 • EXPOSURE • THE MAGAZINE • FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE