Page 24 - Fujifilm Exposure_41 Happy-Go-Lucky_ok

COLLECTING MOMENTS
AN INTERVIEW WITH
FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER
O
n a clear winter evening, out- side a little Soho coffee shop, Florian Hoffmeister is reminiscing.
“Just recently when Ingmar Bergman died I did a little private retrospective of his work at home with
since Hoffmeister arrived in Berlin as a young man looking for work.
“I was interested in films, so my approach was to gain knowledge about the technology of filmmaking. I went to Berlin with a little book of the addresses of all the film companies, called 10 or so and the tenth said, “well come over, we start shooting next week and you can be an intern.”
He was lucky, certainly, but Hoffmeister isn’t the type to leave his future in the hands of fortune alone. Once in Berlin, he made himself very busy. He completed the internship then went straight into a rental com- pany where he spent a year on both the camera and lighting floors. He enrolled in the German Film and Television Academy, studying both cinematography and directing from 1994 to 1998, and continued to work as an electrician throughout.
“The school sometimes centred on developing artistic thought rather than hands-on teaching, so it was good to have one part of me that was gaining experience working on real film sets, sparking and learning about the tech- nique and the craft.
“The school invited high profile directors and cinematographers from the industry to teach and I remember they would say, “enjoy the time while you have it, do all the thinking now, do all the experiments now.” But we all wanted to get out there working as quickly as possible.” And as luck would again have it, shortly after leaving film school, Hoffmeister made a great ally in his quest.
“By chance, I came across Antonia Bird when she was preparing a film called The Hamburg Cell in Germany, which is about the background to the attacks of September 11th,” recalls Hoffmeister.
“It was a German/British co-production and the German production
my DVD player,” he relates. “When I watched Persona, I actually felt, ‘well that’s it, everything has been done!’ It’s so brave.
“It would be interesting to see how he [Bergman] would get on if he were just starting out now. If he’d come from the theatre and said, ‘I’m, going to make a film’, would he get the finance? It is all about actors and dialogue, and some people might regard it as highly intellec- tual filmmaking”
Hoffmeister has good reason to pon- der this question. Last year, HBO took the step of financing an unusual debut screen project, A Number, helmed by theatre director James MacDonald and originally written for the stage by Caryl Churchill. It’s a wordy, intellectual study of modern cause and effect.
The story is of a cloning experiment run amuck and Hoffmeister was behind the lens. Not only did HBO, a pay-per- view profit-driven broadcasting giant think the project was worth backing, but they thought it was worth shooting on 35mm, on a purpose-built stage set, with Tom Wilkinson and Rhys Ifans in the the leading roles.
“It actually gave me a lot of hope,” smiles Hoffmeister. “There’s someone over there saying, “yes, we will pay to produce it and we expect to profit from it”. They certainly wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I suppose maybe people would argue that the BBC has to do certain things, just like public television in Germany, but HBO has to make money, and still they produce something like that!”
This lucid and pragmatic view of the industry’s ways has been firmly in place
Photo: DP Florian Hoffmeister at work
continued on page 24
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