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FACE TO FACE
FACE TO FACE
An interview with Tim Maurice-Jones
A s a teenager, Tim Maurice-Jones was, on his own admission, not
exactly the world’s most original comic strip artist. Keen, yes, but with, frankly, a “drawing
style that was just a copy of everyone else’s. I knew it wasn’t really worth pur- suing professionally.”
Nothing’s ever wasted, of course, and years later that adolescent activity in graphic design would come home to roost as Maurice-Jones was becoming fast estab- lished as an up-and- coming cinematogra- pher of cutting edge music videos, com- mercials and features.
The 39-year-old
now recalls: “A month
before we started
Lock, Stock And Two
Smoking Barrels, I sat
down with my operator Peter Wignall and the director Guy Ritchie and we drew the entire film from beginning to end; probably about 1500 pictures in all.
“Doing a film you get absolutely exhausted and your creativity drops to the floor. Sometimes you’re so tired you can hardly stand up, but in this case all the main creative deci- sions had been made some weeks earlier sitting in an office together at Ealing, starting at 10 in the morning and finishing at five. Like me, Pete comes from a cartoon background. Guy’s great gift is working with actors. In the preparation we’d all come up with loads of crazy ideas to which Guy would eventually say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, so the story boards are a complete collaboration.”
The process was repeated again when the trio were re-united more recently on Snatch, co-starring Brad
Pitt, Benicio del Toro and Vinnie Jones. At £7 million it’s a rather more lavish heist comedy-thriller than Lock Stock - still trademark quirky, of course - which came in at under a million pounds. This time round they had an even cosier six weeks to storyboard.
Says Maurice-Jones: “Although we storyboard the whole thing we
now laughs, “I must have got that job through complete naivety. If they wanted a line drawn across map they’d get us to animate it.
“This was before a time when things were done on computer at the press of a button, it was painstaking work. Take something like the BBC logo spinning round and flying up to camera – that would take probably
two days. I caught the tail-end of proper ani- mation, with special effects like slit-scan, multi-image and multi- plane techniques. At this stage I don’t think I knew that something called cinematography even existed.
“Slowly I began to get a feeling for the camera, a sense, for instance, of what the emulsion could take – basically, not to be scared of it. Then one day I saw a film crew
working around the place – it was The Chinese Detective, I well remember – and I watched them shooting, think- ing, ‘That looks fun.” From that moment, I decided that was exactly what I wanted to do and immediately lost all interest in animation.
“The great thing about the BBC is that you’re allowed to move around departments so I’d phone up at week- ends, ask what crews were going out and then just tag along as an extra pair of hands. I did that for about a year, going out for nothing, just watching and learning. One day I was watching the clapper/loader – that was the job I was really chasing – and thought, ‘You don’t do that, you do this...’ That’s when I think I was ready. I resigned that day, had a month’s holiday and then the very next day was back at the BBC as a freelance camera assistant.”
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don’t, of course, slavishly stick to it. If something else better comes along you do it. For instance when we get on to the set and see the actors block through, we might instead think the scene works better as one big Steadicam shot, or per- haps play great as a series of cuts. The point is, you always have some- thing to fall back on.
“Now,” he adds, “ I would never enter a film without storyboarding; you’re just killing yourself otherwise.” His other standby is the Polaroid camera. Maurice-Jones takes a Polaroid of every set-up and to date his collection numbers around 10,000.
So maybe it isn’t quite such a leap between that meticulous preparation and imagining the same youngster who 20 years earlier wrote a letter to the BBC asking if he could join their animation department. “I think,” he
Photos main: Tim Maurice-Jones; inset above: Brad Pitt in Snatch
EXPOSURE • 10 & 11