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MAKING WAVES IN L
MAKING WAVES IN L
Imagine if you can a precocious seven- year-old boy racing around the woods near his Dumfriesshire home, super-8 camera in hand as he persuades family and friends to act their socks off in overly ambitious home-made movies with titles like The Spaceman and, with due apologies to 007, the aptly named Woodraker.
Now cut to more than 20 years later as Simon Hunter, 29, supervises action across three studio stages and 17 sets on his first feature, a £1.5 mil- lion suspense thriller called Lighthouse. In front of the camera there are experienced actors like Rachel Shelley, Don Warrington and James Purefoy while hovering at his side are veteran technicians such as DP Tony Imi and Oscar-winning visual effects wiz Roy Field (Superman).
The film follows the fortunes of the survivors of the prison ship Hyperion after crashing into rocks which surround the menacing island of Gehenna, named after the mythical location for eternal torment. In the fog, swirling rain and storm-lashed beaches, the doctor (Shelley) and a convicted prisoner (Purefoy) must join forces against the darkest of enemies.
If this seems like a spectacular transition for the boy who regularly played truant from the school where his father was headmaster in order to shoot his youthful epics - “he was half mad at me, half encouraging”, Hunter recalls - then the debutant director doesn’t seem to be showing any obvious signs of first-night nerves.
Confidence oozes from Hunter who claims he learned how not to waste film from a very early age in between regular visits to the local cinema. “ The first film I saw was Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang but the first to make a real impact was Star Wars. I was fantastically influenced by it and by the Bond films too. All my reports would say ‘if only he put as much effort into his work as he puts into Super 8 films then he might pass his exams.’
“As a kid I was imitating everything I saw on screen. You can see that so clearly in my early work when I was trying, but mostly failing, to recreate technique. During my teenage I moved on to documentaries and when I was 18, I went to
Zaire and made a film about a boat that plies its trade up and down the river. I did it entirely off my own bat after working at a pub in the evenings to earn enough for the trip. It was just me and a Super-8 camera. Looking at the film now, you can see that although it was a documentary, I was try- ing to be David Lean rather than Robert Flaherty.”
Eventually Hunter won a place at West Surrey College of Art and Design’s film school where, over the duration of a three year degree course, he got back to more obviously dramatic subject matter like a short called Click about someone who gets their hand stuck down a waste disposal unit.
Lighthouse started life as an even lower-bud- geted, one location concept after Hunter spotted a piece about a lighthouse in a Sunday supplement. “I though it would be such a great place to set a film because, in a way, it deals with everything
EXPOSURE • 22 & 23
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