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GAVIN FINNEY
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need to go backwards.
“If I wasn’t going to be earning money
for a while then this was the time to do it. As it turned out, my break happened bit by bit especially when I got to do a couple of the drama shorts that Channel Four were sponsoring at the time. They earned me a proper broadcast screen credit as DP but, even more importantly, led to what I really wantedtodowhichwastoworkwithactors.”
After lighting more than half a dozen commercials and the odd promo for Vadim Jean, it was perhaps no great surprise when the director asked Finney to collaborate on his psycho-thriller Beyond Bedlam, with Craig Fairbrass, Elizabeth Hurley and Keith Allen.
“Okay,” says Finney, “so it wasn’t the great- est movie in the world. But it was a chance to make my first feature and it proved to be a very good experience. We had amazing sponsorship from lighting and other companies which meant that despite a miniscule budget we had all the gear to make it work and look quite flashy. I par- ticularly remember filming in those great long cor- ridors at the old hospital in Friern
Barnet with perhaps 20 HMIs, Wendy
lights and generators.” And he even
got to photograph Liz Hurley in the
nude. On a closed set, of course.
It was yet another earlier collab- oration, on one of those C4 shorts as well as a Screen One drama, Witness Against Hitler, which then led to Finney’s most recently released fea- ture work for director Betsan Morris Evans. Dad Savage, a Fenland thriller starring Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart as a vengeful tulip farmer, was, despite its East Anglian setting, clearly intended to convey a strong American feel.
“Betsan knows the sort of style I light and we had long discussions especially about how the exteriors should look. It was a very flat landscape, a sort of Mid-America prairie look and that was accentuated by our using Super 35. The script was in fact originally set in the Peak District but, according to Finney, “Betsan changed the location to Lincolnshire early on. It was a brilliant, inspired decision because those huge, flat landscapes, dead straight roads and big skies were perfect for the Cinemascope format.”
That big country contrasted craftily with the deliberate claustrophobia of a dusty cellar in which all the players in an often violent drama are unwittingly and quite literally thrust early on in the flashback tale. “There was a very defined look for that too, “says Finney, “with careful slats of light and so on. It was all mechanically constructed at Twickenham Studios. A great deal of pre-produc-
tion went into those shots because we could do them only once. We had to be very careful so that a massive gaping hole in the set didn’t reveal any of the lights. If you eventually get the video and sin- gle frame it, you might actually notice one light.”
The violence and harsh contemporary feel of Dad Savage couldn’t be further removed from Finney’s latest assignment, a film adaptation of Tom’s Midnight Garden, author Philippa Pearce’s much-loved 40-year-old children’s time-travelling classic of fantasy and adventure, with Anthony Way, Greta Scacchi, James Wilby and Joan Plowright.
“Our American director Willard Carroll got the rights, I think, by telling Philippa that he wasn’t going to mess with her story. It stays in the 1950s and the 1880s although there had apparently been some pressure from others for it to be updated to Los Angeles today. His only concession was to have a grown-up bookending the story in the 90s;
otherwise it’s very faithful to the original book. “I loved the script and its mixture of fanta- sy and reality. Willard’s main concern was that we make the transition between this century and the last in a way that was unambiguous. The idea was to find a photographic style that would clearly differentiate the periods and give each period its own signature, as it were. What he didn’t want was for the 1880s to be all syrupy and soft-focus. He wanted the periodwhenTomgoesbacktothegardento be very clean, crisp and realistic, with the
1950s much more stylised.
“So we shot that with different stock
and using old Cooke lenses. The Cookes have a natural softness, the colour bal- ance isn’t quite as cold and those lens- es using Fuji stock and combined with design gave it a more pastel look and a
softer feel.”
Finney, who’s hoping to make another
filmsoonwithBetsanMorrisEvansaswell as a big BBC production of Mervyn Peake’s surreal epic Gormenghast, has firm and refreshing views on his role as
DP.
“I like to be very close to the
director on set and to be involved with the mise-en-scene - the scenes and how they’ll be cut together. Our English way of working whereby the director talks directly to the operator can tend to exclude the DP, especially when time is at a pre- mium and the DP is off in another place lighting the next scene. I need to know everything and even if I have an operator, I’ll still line the shot up.
“Also, as a DP, I believe I should be con- cerned with the film’s complete image which means I think my work is only properly finished when the film actually goes to release. On Tom’s Midnight Garden, I was personally quite involved with the effects too and went along during post- production to see how they were progressing and to advise where I could. In fact there were times when I had to go back and re-scan and re-grade what the facility had done.
“This work, along with grading, often isn’t paid for so there is now, correctly, a big movement by DPs and their agents to see this work is properly recognised. I can be working for up to three weeks of solid post-production without pay because there’s no allocation in the budget for it. The only answer you get for this from producers when asked about it is ‘because we never do.’ The argu- ment seems to go, ‘well, if you don’t supervise it, we’ll cock it up. So how bad do you want to make it look?’ It’s a sort of blackmail. This state of affairs must change and will, ultimately.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Parts of Tom’s Midnight Garden and Witness Against Hitler were originated on
Photos: top; Patrick Stewart in Dad Savage and below; Finney with director Willard Carroll on the set of Tom’s Midnight Garden.
EXPOSURE • 22 & 23