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There was a kind of inevitability that he and Richard Kwietnowski would eventually pair up on a feature because they’d known each other ever since the days when the director was co-ordinator of the Bristol Film Workshop and Curtis was still a student shooting Super 8. Later they collaborated on a short, Flames Of Passion, as well as a C4 series, Out On Tuesday. Some six years before eventually mak- ing Love And Death On Long Island, the pair were in New York recce-ing locations with the film in mind.
It was worth the wait because the 1997 result, from Gilbert Adair’s novel about a stuffy English nov- elist (John Hurt) undergoing bitter-sweet Anglo- American culture clash, proved a verbal and visual joy. “The challenge,” says Curtis, “was to keep the flow of the narrative despite all the multilayering within the film, including teen movie footage, a Mastermind take-off and dream sequences. It would have been very easy to go over the top stylistically. If that had happened, I think it would have been very difficult to watch. For all those different elements, I mixed up stocks, including Fuji, pulled, pushed, tried different lenses, stripped coatings off and so on. It was a wonderful opportunity to explore my craft.”
From contemporary London and New York State – mostly, in fact, Halifax, Novia Scotia and its environs – to ye olde England and Europe in the early 19th Century for a lush recreation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Curtis recalls: “I got on with the director Marc Munden immediately having told him, ‘If you want Brideshead Revisited or Middlemarch, you’ve come to the wrong guy; I don’t see the point in re- gurgitating the same style of period drama.’ That got him excited. He wanted to look at a costume drama afresh and re-find the expressive qualities of the original text transplanting them into a con- temporary vision.
“ Marc was anxious that every time we turned on a camera there should be something interesting. On the written page it might, for instance, just read, briefly, ‘Becky steps through a door.’ That would turn into a crash zoom, Steadicam leap across the room starting at 9.5 and going to 165mm. My focus
puller didn’t have a lot of hair at the beginning of the shoot – and he certainly didn’t have any more at the end of it. He also saved everyone’s bacon on it.
“I started on Vanity Fair with an operator because I felt that on a 21-week shoot without a break, I wouldn’t be able to cope with that too. As it happened, things didn’t work out and after two weeks I took over and that’s when it really started to flow. It showed me the advantages of being a DP who can also operate; the director enjoys that immediate feedback, and I know the actors appreci- ate it too. On the other hand, I also like to work with an operator. Sometimes that’s the way to go; you just have to be pragmatic.”
Curtis’s latest feature, Saltwater, a co-produc- tion between BBC Films and The Irish Board, marked the feature directing debut of award-win- ning playwright Conor (The Weir) McPherson. Set in a small fishing village north of Dublin, it stars
Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson and Peter MacDonald in a multi-stranded story of family and community tensions. It was showcased earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival.
Curtis says: “Conor didn’t give me any visual ref- erences; he just wanted it naturalistic. I didn’t want to impose anything on the material, rather try and react to it. The locations are very much part of the family story. The landscape we have have chosen to use is eloquent whether it’s the chipper, the school or the beach. Nothing is too stylistic. We’ve used source lighting so that light is seen to come from practicals or soft daylight through the windows.
“I think Conor probably wanted to get an out- sider’s pair of eyes in the same way there’s a great American tradition of getting European cinematog- raphers to lend alternative perspectives to narra- tive. It’s a nice film and I’m pleased with things I’ve done on it.”
Having arrived comparatively early at the status of lighting cameraman in what has been for so long such a traditionally structured industry, he makes some pertinent comments about that “ladder.”
Curtis, who has started prepping DNA’s The Final Curtain, a black comedy written by John (Trainspotting, The Beach) Hodge and directed by first-timer Pat Harkins, says: “My focus puller does a job I could never do. In fact, my loader does a job I really was very poor at. I play instead to my own strengths: lighting, exposing film, moving a camera and composing images. I have learned the hard way from my own mistakes - mistakes often made in pub- lic.
“That way, though, you tend to learn very fast, are not afraid and develop a fairly thick skin. It’s a question of trust, that you can do as good a job as someone who’s worked their way up in the industry. If you can’t cut the mustard, you’re going to be found out pretty quickly,” adds Curtis. ■ QUENTIN FALK
Saltwater, parts of Love And Death On Long Island, and The Final Curtain were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
OLIVER CURTIS BSC
Photos top: Oliver Curtis on set; and from left: Saltwater; Director Conor McPherson awaiting the next set up on Saltwater; Jude Law in The Wisdom Of Crocodiles
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