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BRIAN TUFANO BSC
“Filmmaking is a creative process and I believe that as a Tutor, you should not be prescriptive; there is no one way of doing things, every DP does the same thing but differently.”
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they used to let me look through the cameras and even operate them a lit- tle, when they were rehearsing.
“Then one day, on one of my jour- neys, I suddenly discovered the film department buried in the depths with its back up against the railway line. The studio was so low that when you opened up the camera blimp, it almost hit the ceiling. Once I discovered the Film Studio and the cutting rooms, you couldn’t keep me away.
“The trouble was National Service was beckoning and I was told that I couldn’t have a technical job until I’d done my time in the forces. In the event, I missed it by four months so quickly started banging on doors again. Finally, I got a job as a trainee projectionist, showing the rushes”.
Continuing to ingratiate himself with the camera crews, his persist- ence paid off. “Because the crews only consisted of a cameraman and an assistant, any spare pair of hands was more than welcome. If there were night shoots going on, the camera crew would wait for me to finish work in the projection room at around 5.30 or 6.00 o’clock. I’d then jump in the car and we’d go out and shoot all night, sometimes if I was lucky, they would allow me to be the loader.
“At weekends, the Sportsview crew would pick me up after work on Friday nights and we’d go off to wherever the big football match was. Invariably we’d seem to spend all Saturday after- noon in the pissing rain, stranded above the halfway line on a scaffold. There’d be two 16mm cameras side by side and as one ran out, I would have to switch the other camera on and the Cameraman would walk over and carry on filming. I’d also have to keep notes of when all the incidents hap- pened, and every 20 minutes, I would lower the film down in a bucket, to a dispatch rider who’d then take it back to London where it would be on processed, edited and on air that night. I think that’s what turned me off football,” he laughed.
The bigger break came when, after getting a job as a fulltime assistant, he was assigned to Panorama. Suddenly the call came through one Monday morning for a crew – one of two on the programme – to head off urgently to Brussels where the then Foreign Minister, Edward Heath would be mak- ing an important announcement in the wake of another Common Market ‘Non’ from General de Gaulle.
Again, serendipity, or to be more accurate on this occasion heavy snow, resulted in Tufano being the only avail- able technician with, perhaps as impor- tantly, a handy passport (he still lived nearby). In Brussels, a slightly bemused director asked who he was as they then embarked on the big story. This, in turn, led on to a follow-up in Paris. “Do you want to do it?” the direc- tor asked him. “I didn’t come home for a week – and I’d only gone out in the first place with one change of clothes. We got some really good footage, that added depth to the story.”
From then on mostly rooted in docu- mentaries, Tufano’s work also spanned everything “from Z Cars to Andy Pandy. I never did manage to climb to the dizzy heights of Bill And Ben!” he smiles.
It was a call “out of the blue” from director Jack Gold, whom Tufano had first known as an assistant editor, which led to his drama ‘break’.
‘Jack was about to direct a film for Music & Arts which comprised three short stories by AE Coppard. Because of the restrictions then of not being allowed to shoot everything on film, it had to be made in a format allowing for a presenter at beginning and end. The trick was to make it so when repeated it’d be able to go out without the presenter.” The result, The World Of Coppard, was, says Tufano, the first all-on-film fiction drama the BBC made.
He’s subsequently worked with most of Britain’s finest including Loach, Leigh, Gold, Frears, Parker and Anthony Page as well as a number of times with Franc Roddam and Danny Boyle, both in television and, of course, features.
It’s particularly Tufano’s work on Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting that often gets quoted by a newer generation of native talent with whom the now vet- eran cameraman also works regularly.
“Danny and I had worked together twice before so had established a rela- tionship, but on this occasion I had initial concerns about the material. I could see it, but it was not quite gelling in my brain visually.
“Then in one of our few conversa- tions, which were always brief and to the point, Danny told me: ‘I’ve just come back from Scotland where I’ve been working with guys in rehab, and I realise that they tend to spend most of their life on the floor. So, for this, we need to find a way of making the cam- era hoover along the ground all the time, whilst visually thinking of the
paintings of Francis Bacon and Munch’s The Scream.’
“I started doing my research by looking at the work of Francis Bacon. How the hell am I going to recreate this? I thought. Then suddenly, no pun intended, the light went on and I thought that what Danny was really saying was: We don’t know what their world is like. In other words, be open- minded and imaginative.”
That kind of flexibility is also what led Tufano to using Fujifilm for the first time on his most recent two proj- ects, Adulthood – a sequel to Kidulthood – written, directed and star- ring, Noel Clarke, who appeared in the
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 5
first film, and, just before that, My Zinc Bed, a three-hander for the BBC/HBO, adapted from his own play by David Hare, which reunited Tufano with Anthony Page for the first time since the award-winning Middlemarch.
“Here at the film school, the stu- dents think we’re teaching them, but in fact we are continuing to learn our- selves. As I said before: I don’t believe in being prescriptive. I show them what I do, what’s possible then they can go out and experiment for them- selves. Likewise, I don’t believe you should just patronise one stock or favour one particular rental house. After all, the whole industry is amaz- ing in what it does for the NFTS.
“Anyway, here I am showing stu- dents how to use the various film stocks and I’m thinking I should really start using them myself aside from just on Masterclasses.”
So he broke his duck with My Zinc Bed, co-starring Uma Thurman,
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