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For the next few years, it was the usual relentless round of, first, news- gathering then documentaries, often for months on end, in exotic locations like Madagascar and the Venezuela rain forest. He says: “For three years I did nothing but docs which eventual- ly become a bit boring because as an assistant all you’re doing really is loading mags and maybe pulling a bit of focus. So I moved on to music videos, small ones at first then bigger ones and eventually commercials.”
With operating work at a premi- um, “I had,” says Maurice-Jones,” no choice but to go to lighting so I went out and bought myself the cheapest, dodgiest 16mm camera I could find and began to put myself about as a cameraman doing very, very low bud- get music videos. I even directed some of them myself but I was truly
Chivers (for whom he pulled focus on Hardware), who were also fine teach- ers.” One of his most fruitful collabo- rations to date has been with director Michel Gondry but “the first time was a disaster – each of us thinking, ‘Who’s this idiot?’
“Luckily we were reunited and from that time on it’s been fantastic.” Major music videos (Bjork etc), trail- blazing ads for products like Levis and Smirnoff and now, in Los Angeles, a feature together – Gondry’s debut, Human Nature, written by Charlie (Being John Malkovich) Kaufman, co- starring Patricia Arquette, Tim Robbins and Rhys Ifans.
Maurice-Jones’s own feature bow as a lighting cameraman was in 1995 on a charming though very modest little British film called A Feast At Midnight: “I played safe with the light- ing, it looked pretty but it was noth- ing world-shattering. Basically it showed I could make a film without f****** it up.” Mind you, if he ever finds the critic who wrote, “in this generally flatly-lit film...” there could be some serious payback.
His pay was as modest as the bud- get and so he decided to sink it all straight back into the film “because if I was going to give three months of my time and then be handicapped by not having enough lights, that would be crazy. I wanted to get as much out of it as I possibly could – even if I had to pay for it myself, and that included getting a decent gaffer. I remember Ossie Morris visiting the set once. He looked at my pile of lights and said
he’d never seen so many in his life. I told him that I wanted to cover myself for any eventuality.”
By the time Maurice-Jones arrived on Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, the film had dra- matically retreated in scale from a megadollar budgeted project to its final sub-million status, shot on 16mm and later blown to 35mm. The joke going round was, “we better do it before it ends up as Super-8.” The rest, of course, is history and con- siderable fortunes for some of those involved - though not Maurice-Jones, who cheerfully confesses he didn’t have points in the picture.
For Snatch, he decided to use Fuji: “It started out as a budget thing. We first tested it thoroughly, putting it through a bleach bypass bath. I was really pleased because of the colour saturation. With Lock, Stock we had to try and pull out a special look - a sepia tint, with light coming from odd angles and heavy contrasts.
“With Snatch, I loved the idea of muted colours because I felt it would give the film a kind of timeless feel. We made sure there were no primary colours in the movie, just old-fash- ioned colours going through the whole thing. For instance, each room had a colour of its own. It was a great palette to have. We’ve made prints off a bleach bypass interpos and then a print of that.”
If you watch Maurice-Jones’s work, you’ll notice a very strong emphasis on the human face. He explains: “When I was 19, I went to Sri Lanka and came back after three months with thousands of photos of temples, palm trees, beaches – all the usual stuff. Friends would flick through them quickly until they came to someone’s face and then they’d often ask, ‘Who’s that?’
“ I suddenly realised that people are generally interested in just look- ing at people, and you can learn so much from the human face. Take someone like Vinnie Jones, for instance. If you put a hard light on him from the top, or from really low, it can bring out so much character.” Who’s going to argue with that? ■
Snatch and Human Nature were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
the most terrible director. What I think I’m good at is that if someone else had a good idea I can help move it along another stage.”
He describes his career as a “series of very lucky breaks, latching on to great directors and great cam- eramen, like Alan Almond and Steve
TIM MAURICE JONES
Photos from top: Vinnie Jones in Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels; on set Polaroid of Brad Pitt; Robert Hardy in A Feast At Midnight (courtesy Moviestore Collection); Snatch story boards by Tim Maurice- Jones
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