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ROB HARDY
“I REMEMBER DOING A TEST FOR THIS WITH VARIOUS STOCKS AND THE ETERNA 500T WAS AMAZING: I WAS BLOWN AWAY BY IT.”
< It wasn’t just about making images but also to do with telling stories and collaboration. It’s rare when you get things to gel so easily.”
He and Crowley certainly knew what they didn’t want Boy A, an often harrowing story with echoes of the Bulger case, to be – “BritGrit”, edgy, mostly handheld, set on coun- cil estates, the old kitchen sink thing taken a step further. I’m not belit- tling that, but we wanted to show our story in a very different way. It had to be non-judgemental, not spray-on emotion dictating to the au- dience what it should feel.
If there were visual references, then they originated somewhat East of “BritGrit” – Andrei Zvagintsev’s The Return and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a pair of award-winning Russian films. Merely starting points, insists Hardy, but clearly influential as they fashioned the drama, shot entirely in Manchester.
To further enhance the ‘look’, Hardy turned again to Fujifilm, which he’d previously used at the behest of writer-director (and regu- lar commercials’ collaborator) Mi- randa Bowen on a Cinema Extreme short, Honeymoon.
“We were doing a scene in the car park of a service station involv- ing Emilia Fox running around in her wedding dress looking for her hus- band who’s gone missing. The shot takes you 360 degrees, it was at night and I had no way of lighting it and just had to trust the parking lot lights; we also had a 10k way off in the distance that we’d occasionally pass and it’d flare into the lens.
“I remember doing a test for this with various stocks and the ETERNA 500T was amazing: I was blown away by it. Consequently I decided to un- derlight everything for the rest of
the film because of the results, and because it gave me closest to what my eye saw. I used it again, and the F-64D for the interiors, for Boy A. I was lighting a lot of the time with tungsten light. I didn’t use any HMI at all because I don’t believe it as a daylight source.
“The combination of that and the Fujifilm stocks worked very well together to give me something closer to how I actually see things. As with Honeymoon, the rushes were terrific.”
If Boy A was a ‘Eureka moment’ in terms of kick-starting his filmmaking passion, then his first one was as a horror film-loving Essex-born young- ster when he first became aware that there was actually a process involved the creation of films. Before that, he remembered his grandfather giving him a Super 8 camera: “I used to wan- der with it round the house. There was no film in it but I’d still stick it to my face and see the world through a square frame.”
Three years of film school at Newport was followed by Sheffield Northern Media School where failing to get on the directors’ course, “I ticked the next box down marked ‘Cinematography’. It sort of landed me in a place where I felt I belonged. I remember our course tutor saying, ‘you can’t teach cinematography – it’s just a matter of opinions,’ and my thinking, ‘yeh, I’ve just forked out three grand for this, and you’re not going to teach me anything?’
On the other hand, he was proba- bly absolutely right. That’s the way I’ve worked ever since then... instinc- tively. I just see cameras, lights and whatever technologies are available simply as tools to use as and when.”
Staying on in Sheffield, Hardy has a short but rather unhappy experi- >
“...THAT’S THE WAY I’VE WORKED EVER SINCE THEN... INSTINCTIVELY. I JUST SEE CAMERAS, LIGHTS AND WHATEVER TECHNOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE SIMPLY
AS TOOLS TO USE AS AND WHEN.”
Photos main: Michael Caine in Is There Anybody There? (photo by Nick Wall); above l-r: shooting Honeymoon: Andrew Garfield and, right, Peter Mullan in Boy A
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