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SCHOOLED
SCHOOLED
IN HIS ART
IN HIS ART
An interview with Gavin Finney BSC
T he budget was about £200 and there was also a roll of stock at their dis- posal, but thanks to “massive spon- sorship” the team of keen young stu- dents at Manchester Polytechnic Film School had also acquired a steam engine, access to five miles of
track, vintage cars and lights.
“We were making a commercial, based on Brief Encounter, in a competition for Lloyds Bank,” Gavin Finney recalls. The ‘prentice effort won an award that year, 1986, but more impor- tantly for Finney, it marked the turning point “when I absolutely knew I wanted to be on cam-
era.”
The 35-year-old whose work has spanned
award-winning shorts (This Boy’s Life, Strangers), television (The Sculptress, Witness Against Hitler, The English Wife, The Vet) and features (Beyond Bedlam, Dad Savage, Tom’s Midnight Garden) admits he “fell into films almost by default.
“I was a stills photographer after I left school but then had to work in a bookshop to earn enough money for my first camera. It was great but not total- ly satisfying. I enjoyed taking the photos but missing was the drama, the ability to tell a proper story.
“So I applied to Manchester with my portfolio of stills and that straightaway seemed like a good idea because the film school shared the building with a very good theatre school in an old convert- ed cinema. With actors on site, this meant you could have a better shot at making a drama.
“I knew from the moment I started there I was on the right track. During my three years doing a broadly based film production degree we started to do bigger and more rewarding dramas. I suppose we felt that we were just there to make a showreel. The teachers, however, began to feel it wasn’t edu-
cational enough and stopped grading us.”
Back in the real world, Finney found the going tough over the next year or so. “Having tasted being a DP, I found going back to loading and focus pulling very difficult. I did commercials, promos and shorts... nothing great but enough to give me valuable practice. I really wanted to get back to lighting but the union was very strong and it seemed I could be doing nine or ten years as an assistant - and assistants have a way of remaining
assistants in this hierarchical industry.”
So the next stop was three years at the National Film And Television School to which Finney had applied as a lighting cameraman. “The National did quite a good job of echoing what it’s like in the outside world. Each person was given a budget which they could control and put towards films they wanted to work on. You could find yourself hired on the basis of what you had in your folio, not to mention what you had left in your kitty. There was no safety net and School films could fall apart just as easily as
ones in the real world.
“The National needs to be an exciting and
challenging place, and it certainly was when I was there. Apart from anything else it gave me a very good reel with This Boy’s Story, directed by John Roberts, which won a Student Oscar, and Danny Cannon’s Strangers, which we made in Los Angeles. This was all broadcast quality stuff.”
Once again, earning a living beckoned. Finney remained clear in his mind that he wasn’t going to resume climbing any ladder. “There was no way I was going to do that,” he explains, emphatically. “I had done six years of lighting and operating, I’d gaffered and gripped, knew what it was like to move heavy lights or wrap cable at four in the
morning covered in dog dirt. I just didn’t feel the
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