Page 30 - Fujifilm Exposure_13 Shiner_ok

African
African
Adventurer
Adventurer
An interview with Vincent Cox
There’s the weather-beaten look of a sea- soned swashbuckler about well-travelled cinematographer Vincent Cox whose career shapes as colourfully as some of the fantasy films he has been shooting recently in his native South Africa. Working almost exclusively of late for the prolific production company Peakviewing, he is cur- rently adding another pair of features back-to-back to the other eight
he has completed for them over the past couple of years or so.
America and
other international
markets cannot, it
seems, get enough
of their modestly-
budgeted films like
Africa, The Last
Leprechaun, The
Little Unicorn,
Merlin 2000 – The
Return and Glory
Glory so Cox is
once again back with Peakviewing in the Matthews’ family fold for another fourteen weeks of almost non- stop film-making activity outside Johannesburg.
First there’s Dazzle - with Maxwell Caulfield, Mia Sara and Jeff Fahey – in which the daughter of a fairytale writer gets quite literally caught up in a storybook adventure. Says Cox: “It’s set somewhere on Planet Earth but in fact we use a series of stand- ing sets, in particular a flexible English-cum-Welsh- cum-Irish farmhouse, at a place called Irene about 30 miles from Jo’burg.
“Dazzle shoots for five weeks then there’s two to three weeks pre-production before the next one, Silver Winchester – A Ghost Story, which we film on a massive farm where there are already three standing Western sets.
“Both films will do their post-production in Johannesburg which had a very good, very high tech, little lab.” Cox has shot all his Peakviewing shows on Fuji. “ I think,” he laughs, “I’ve exposed in total about
two million feet of Fuji stock – which must be more than anyone else in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Cox knows the area well because that’s where he was born, and above which he still enjoys flying in his own DH 82A Tiger Moth (also available for hire, naturally). He first trained in Jo’burg
as an architect but, bitten by the movie bug, went to work in the labs at the city’s famous Killarney Film Studios, which also had its own newsreel company called African Mirror.
He’d just turned 20 when in the late fifties he decided to try his luck in Britain. As well as jobs at Humphries Labs, Pinewood’s Camera Department and the National Coal Board Film Unit, he worked on a whole variety of films from A Night To Remember and Sea Of Sand to Summer Holiday and Blood Of The Vampire, as well as two years on the
Photos inset above: Africa; main: Vincent Cox
from left: George Hamilton in Pets, The Little Leprecaun and Rik Mayall in Merlin 2000
EXPOSURE • 28 & 29