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PARTING THE CLOUDS
Figures in an Irish landscape. On bringing Garage to the screen
Garage, a Cannes award- winner as well as recipient of no fewer than 11 Irish Film & Television
Academy nominations, tells the tragi-comic tale of a sweet but simple man (Pat Shortt) who finds himself the victim of an avaricious property developer and malign local gossip.
Co-starring Anne-Marie Duff, it’s directed from Mark O’Halloran’s script by Lenny Abrahamson who previously made the well-regarded Adam & Paul.
The film re-united Abrahamson with one of Ireland’s top cinematogra- phers Peter Robertson (True North, Inside I’m Dancing, Song For A Raggy Boy) with whom he’d worked on many commercials.
Noted the director: “I think he [Peter] is an excellent cameraman. I like the fact that Peter lights incredi- bly simply. He’s got the confidence not to over-light and not to over-egg the shot. So, as a result, not only do you get very beautiful images but ones where the scaffolding is hidden. You don’t see the tricks. It just seems right and at the same time is beauti- fully judged.”
THE DP VIEW
Garage was shot on location in Counties Offaly, Galway and Tipperary as well as some interior scenes in Dublin.
The shoot reminded Robertson of the days when he started out in film with a successful TV series called Waterways. “A lot of that was shot in the same area as Garage so I had an affinity with it. I knew that flat, open big sky landscape.”
According to Abrahamson: “I like to work in a really spare visual style, so there is a kind of bareness and sim- plicity in the way that we shoot. If you can keep the style still enough, then the smallest ripples become visible.
“That’s not to say that every sequence or scene is shot in the same way. I like the idea of incorporating dif- ferent styles within the same film. Not in a very self-consciously modernistic
way so that the audience will notice it, but just in a way that allows the audi- ence to feel each scene appropriately.”
Robertson, an award-winner in his own right, has over the years come to terms with the vagaries of filming in his native Ireland.
“On Garage we’d shoot part of a scene in blinding sunlight and then the sun would go in,” he sighed. “So what do you do. Re-shoot it? You just learn to deal with it. It’s all part of being a cameraman in this part of the world. I’m sure in California they’ve got other things to deal with.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Garage, currently on release in the UK, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 250T 8553, ETERNA 500T 8573 and Super F-64D 8522
I
PETER ROBERTSON
ended up using mostly the ETERNA 250T, but for a lot of the day exteriors, I switched to Super F-64D. Had the weather been good, that probably wouldn’t
have been the case.
It was funny, because we’d had
some of the best weather I’ve experi- enced in the country for maybe a decade. Then the actual week we started to shoot, it began to rain and a sort of leaden sky came in.
The Super F-64D was, I thought, fantastic for those big landscape shots.
When we were doing the telecine on Garage, I looked at the stock with the operator, and there was something different about it. He nailed it when he said that it had a really earthy quality.
For this particular project, which was done in that landscape in rural Ireland, it is so applicable, that we were lucky, because we had some very good sky too, although it wasn’t blue, ‘happy-happy’ sky because there was layered cloud. That’s very interesting to the eye but hard to photograph. ■
Photo top: Pat Shortt, Anne-Marie Duff, Una Kavanagh and Adam O’Toole in Garage; above l-r: DP Peter Robertson and Director Lenny Abrahamson and a scene from Garage
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