Page 14 - Fujifilm Exposure_41 Happy-Go-Lucky_ok

A MATTER OF PHYSICS
AN INTERVIEW WITH
CHRISTOPHER ROSS
C ameramen often talk disarm- ingly about how luck – right
place, right time etc - has reg- ularly played a major part in their careers. Then, of course, there’s often the small matter of patience
which, to coin a phrase, can also bring its own reward.
Elements of both – allied surely to sizeable amounts of skill and sheer enthusiasm - are perhaps inextricably present in the rise and rise
of Chris Ross who, at just 32, has shot no fewer than three new British features in the past 12 months. Not to men- tion Simon Ellis’s Soft, one of this year’s BAFTA-nominated live action shorts.
He could also point to his, albeit modest, involve- ment in another pair of award-winning films – Atonement (Visual Effects elements) and Control (oper- ating on some concert and
TV footage) – to suggest that this is a current streak of quite enviable heat.
Ross’s extraordinary past year or so began with his resumption of a fer- tile collaboration with writer-director Paul Andrew Williams initiated in 2005 with the acclaimed and extremely gritty low-budget thriller London To Brighton.
That film had been written very speedily in the white heat of frustra- tion following the financial collapse of what was intended to be his first fea-
ture, The Cottage. With the subsequent success of London To Brighton, The Cottage was retrieved from the prover- bial bottom drawer and, with solid Isle of Man, UK Film Council and Screen Yorkshire backing, ‘greenlit’ as Williams’ much-anticipated follow-up.
Ross recalls he’d been offered a couple of features before the chance to make his own cinematographic debut on London To Brighton but he had no hesitation because, “I thought
moved with the characters on dollies and cranes.
From a lighting perspective – bearing in mind the entire film takes place at night between 9pm and 4am, the following morning – a deep blue moonlight was chosen to reflect both the fantasy and horror genres that Williams wished to bridge with the project. It’s this moonlight, which runs through every scene linking its contin- uous timeline.
Elements of glamour, grittiness, fantasy, horror and violence periodically permeate the subject matter of Ross’s two most recent features, which also intro- duced him for the first time to Fujifilm.
Eden Lake (formerly known as Little Terrors) intro- duced him to writer-director James Watkins making his feature-directing debut with what Ross describes as “a horror thriller with a social realist edge”. Starring Keilly
Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Jack O’Connell and Thomas Turgoose, it tells the story of a holidaying couple whose weekend idyll in the epony- mous beauty spot becomes a nightmare after encountering what these days is modishly described as “feral youth”.
Says Ross: “The one thing they [the finance guarantee people] wanted before we embarked on the main shooting was for us to do a little
it could be very interesting; something I hadn’t seen come out of the UK for some time.” The original budget was £70,000. “We shot 90 per cent of the film in a three week block on 16mm, mostly hand-held,” he adds.
For The Cottage, a sort of horror comedy cross between Shaun Of The Dead and Straw Dogs, the idea was to be much more conventionally cine- matic and controlled than on London To Brighton with a camera that
Photo main: DP Christopher Ross; inset above: a scene from Cass, starring Nonso Anozie (centre) as Cass with Leo Gregory (left) and Gavin Brocker
12 • Exposure • The Magazine• Fujifilm Motion Picture
continued on page 14