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CHRISTOPHER ROSS
“The Vivid 160T is quite a beautiful stock, with wonderful colour and contrast to it, and beautiful flesh tones.”
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screen test, as it were – to show them the kind of film we wanted to make. So, in February, we shot a six-page section of the script – an all-day exteri- or torture scene - for five days in Black Park with a professional cast.
“Why Fujifilm? Well, I used the ETERNA 250D for the test and just loved the way it looked. It made the greens stand out and in the grade we boosted the contrast quite a bit and lowered the colour saturation. Often greens can go quite grey and murky but in this case they stayed reason- ably vibrant whereas the rest of the image had pulled down quite nicely.
“When we eventually went on to shoot the main film at the end of July, I was very interested in using that stock for the same sequence. Rachel Baker told me I was also welcome to test any other stocks I might want.
“As I also operate, I wanted to convey visually the changing mood of the film, to have it all worked out semi-analytically in terms of stocks and lenses. As the mood of the film changes so the visual feel changes to punctuate that for the audience in terms of what’s happening.
“Fujifilm had just brought out the ETERNA Vivid 160T. It’s quite a beauti- ful stock, with wonderful colour and contrast to it, and beautiful flesh tones, especially for Kelly. I used that stock for the start of the film to con- vey happy times; then there was the ETERNA 250D when things were get- ting quite bad; ETERNA 500D when things were really bad; and, finally, the ETERNA 500T when things were really, really bad – and at night,” he laughs.
“We were shooting Super 35mm and, hopefully, the very smooth, long focal length, glamour look for the start of the film progresses slowly into quite a mean, moody, dark and gritty final 20 minutes.”
Eden Lake, shot on location across six weeks in Black Park, Burnham Beeches and at Frensham Little Pond near Farnham (doubling for the titular site), wrapped at 3.30am one morning last September and less than five hours later, Ross was on a technical recce for his next assign- ment, Cass.
Cass Pennant, one-time terrace legend and leader of West Ham United’s infamous Intercity Firm, is now a reformed football hooligan, self- styled ‘hooliologist’ and book publish-
er. Cass, adapted by director Jon Baird from Pennant’s colourful autobiogra- phy, spans the 50s to the 90s, covering his youth as a black adopted kid grow- ing up in a predominantly white racist part of London, through the street vio- lence to prison then finally marriage and redemption.
Starring Nonso Anozie (as Cass), Natalie Press, Leo Gregory, Gavin Brocker, Linda Bassett and Peter Wight, the film is, Ross avers, not about football hooliganism. “Jon and I see it much more in the style of a Ray
or Ali; it’s more about a man, what he became and then beyond.
“We decided to shoot it 1:66, which I think is very rarely used nowadays; the last one I remember in that format was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We felt the much squarer format would be a good way to go with this. Jon wanted a lot of the framing to be symmetrical and remi- niscent of Stanley Kubrick. The two main references were A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. To that you could also add the first half of Full
Metal Jacket and, non-Kubrick, Trainspotting, which I also admire a great deal.
“We shot 16mm entirely on loca- tion with two cameras for stylistic and logistical reasons because we needed to get into some very small locations and felt that as the story was quite gritty, a little bit of grain would help us along. Dividing the film up into sec- tions, the idea was to try and follow the arcs of the story and characters, mimicking them, as it were, with the visual style of the film.”
14 • Exposure • The Magazine• Fujifilm Motion Picture