Page 7 - Fujifilm Exposure_7 Alex Thomson BSC_ok

Thomson’s driver. What was it about? : “I think it was about a young man in Tel Aviv but being in Hebrew I never quite knew what was going on.”
Thanks to Roeg, he also graduat- ed to DP once back in the UK. They were together at Denham with some people who’d started a commercials company. They wanted Roeg to do some ads but since he couldn’t, sug- gested they use Thomson instead. And when Clive Donner asked if Roeg would light Mulberry Bush, he again declined saying supportively, ‘Alex is lighting now.’ The collaboration between the pair of old friends would be renewed 15 years on when Roeg, now a director, asked Thomson to be DP on Eureka followed four years later by Track 29.
Eureka earned Thomson a BSC Best Cinematography nomination as did Excalibur which also made the final shortlist for the Hollywood Oscar in 1981. This fine work for John Boorman on a revisionist version of Arthurian legend had begun when Thomson was first asked merely to shoot some artist tests for the director.
“After we saw them we came out of a preview theatre in Wardour Street and he didn’t say anything to me. I remember kicking a few dust- bins in frustration. Then I heard that someone else had got the film but as he didn’t get on with John I was called in to take over. So I was always second choice. With Tony Pratt’s bril-
liant sets and John’s compositions, you’d have to be pretty stupid to get it wrong. After all, who knows what Camelot’s really like?”
Thomson won his first BSC award in 1984 for Ridley Scott’s Legend but, intriguingly, he rates Michael Cimino’s critically-reviled The Sicilian three years on as “per- haps the best work I’ve ever done. I loved the colours, it was choreo- graphed so well and I truly thought it was going to be a great movie. In the end the press slaughtered it. Apparently Michael took the script to Gore Vidal hoping he might give it a polish. ‘It doesn’t need a polish; it needs a trip to Lourdes,’ Vidal told him. So obviously he knew something we didn’t,” Thomson laughs.
From shooting 11,000 feet up in the Alps on Cliffhanger to a few hun- dred feet below in a Welsh slate quar- ry on The Keep, from a recreated East End of The Krays to, most recently, the true-life ceremonial of The King’s Troop (for a 35mm documentary), it’s been a career full of variety for this most flexible of cameramen. But it was a genuinely welcome challenge, redolent of the past, when Branagh invited him on board his full-folio, four-hour version of Hamlet. Before Lawrence of Arabia, Thomson had first tackled the process as focus puller for Jack Cardiff on Scent Of Mystery, an ill-fated “smelly” thriller shot in Todd-AO 65.
“It was practically decided before I signed up for Hamlet that it would be in 70mm. The fabulous advantage of 70mm is the sharpness of detail it gives, which can look three dimen- sional at times. The film had glorious sets and costumes and the widescreen format really brought them out. In an ideal world, every film should be made on 70mm because of the quality you get with the large negative.”
But shooting here, especially in the great hall set where every wall was a mirror, conjured up all kinds of logistical nightmares: “We had to be constantly vigilant especially on the 360 degree pans which Ken used a lot to keep the longer scenes from becoming visually dull. But even in the less complicated shots, when the camera was either fixed or tracking in a straight line, it would take a long time to set up to make sure none of the mirrors would catch the reflec- tion of the camera crew.”
At his side, as she had been on a dozen films before, was Thomson’s daughter Chyna, an experienced cam- era technician in her own right with plans eventually to turn feature direc- tor after cutting her teeth on video promos and commercials. And the movie motif continues on the home front as Thomson’s wife Diana, a cele- brated sculptress, puts the final touches to a copper-coloured bust of pioneering British cameraman, William Friese-Greene - “The First Cinematographer”.
The commission is from the BSC which celebrates its 50th Anniversary next year when Thomson, one of Magic Box Willie’s most popular “sons” and himself a past President of the Society, will be easing into merely his fifty-third year in the industry. Still as passionate as ever about his craft. ■ QUENTIN FALK
The King’s Troop and The Sicilian were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos: from left: Alex Thomson with Michael Winner and Geoffrey Unsworth on the set of You Must Be Joking; Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger; Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet; The Krays; on the set of Alexander The Great in 1955; and inset bottom: Chyna Thomson on the set of The Sicilian (Stills courtesy of Alex Thomson and BFI Stills & Posters)