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LESS IS MORE An interview with Henry Braham BSC
behind the camera
O n a patch of artificial lawn in a leafy corner of ‘B’
Stage at Shepperton, the world’s favourite extrater- restrial is stretched out in a hammock. Another day, another British Telecom
commercial as a motion control cam- era delicately swoops through some branches to pick out E.T. gently rock- ing from side to side.
Director Paul Weiland calls his final “Cut!” of the morning and after brief discussion about the post-lunch session his cinematographer Henry Braham slumps gratefully into a chair at the side of a now darkened and temporarily abandoned set.
Braham, 35, is one of the new ris- ing British DPs after a recent run of high-profile features like Shooting Fish, The Land Girls and Waking Ned. He recently returned from Portugal and various other points around Europe and America’s West Coast where he has been shooting American writer-director Adam Brooks’ The Invisible Circus, a 70s-set drama with British actor Christopher Ecclestone and Hollywood stars, Cameron Diaz and Jordana Brewster.
This latest BT ad re-unites him with Weiland for whom he shot the very first commercial of the E.T.-styled campaign, as well as a Comic Relief TV special Oliver II - Let’s Twist Again and his third feature, the shamefully underrated romantic comedy Roseanna’s Grave, filmed glowingly south of Rome in wide-screen anamor- phic to capture “layers of texture.”
And it was working earlier for one of Weiland’s regular sidekicks, director Frank Budgen that Braham
first made his breakthrough in the commercials world to which he regu- larly returns between features.
Braham explains: “Directors in advertising are by definition looking for things that are new and original. Frank was looking for someone young and inexperienced whom he could manipulate so I was exactly at the
Before all that, and starting out with no clear idea at all about what he wanted to do with life after school, he was encouraged first in photography and then film-making more generally as he moved tenta- tively into documentaries and televi- sion. His first big break was making promos for the rock band KLF, those
After it was cut they wrote an ambient soundtrack to it. They started out as the archetypal pop band and we had a fantastic time together. Mind you, I didn’t really know what I was doing - learning on the job, I suppose.”
Perhaps most important to him from that period was Alfie In The Underworld, a two minute short he made about “a mad bloke under some arches in North London. “It was an original piece of work, perhaps my first truly original piece of work. Anyway, I thought ‘that’s me.’ I thought it up and executed it. It was, I suppose, just something to show peo- ple. And it was noticed.” By, among others, Frank Budgen.
Says Braham, “Films were really what I was interested in. But not just any films. During my training period I had worked with Peter Allwork doing aerial photography. He was great to me and sent me off on jobs he could- n’t do. But I did begin to see that working on something you didn’t nec- essarily connect with could make it very difficult.”
His first feature was for The Gruber Brothers - director Stefan Schwartz and producer Richard Holmes - with whom he’d collaborate again on the box-office hit Shooting Fish. Soft Top, Hard Shoulder, written by its Scots star Peter Capaldi, was a tiny-budgeted road comedy, “a fairy- tale story which we set about telling in a simple way, maybe too simply because we didn’t have much time and really no money at all. A good discipline? Of course, it can be absolutely brilliant. When I did docu- mentaries, I’d take a little kit of lights with me and I could do anything.
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right stage for someone like Frank. I was willing to listen carefully and he wanted to participate in photograph- ing his own ads which he does bril- liantly. So this is the route I went, picking up with some very intelligent directors who were right at the top of their tree. The great thing about being inexperienced is that anything and everything is possible.”
twisted techno terrorists who became most notorious for incinerat- ing a million pounds on camera.
“We did all sorts of bizarre things,” he recalls, “like shooting video and film even before they’d writ- ten the music which they’d then write to fit. On one occasion we went to Spain for a month and did this road movie which had no story at all.
Photos main: Henry Braham BSC; above: Highland location on Soft Top, Hard Shoulder.