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Put me in the middle of a cathedral and I could photograph it. You know that’s all you got and you make it work. Yes, it can be wonderful having restrictions. You must never think, ‘No, I can’t do that because I haven’t got the money.’
“Perhaps it’s to do with age” but nowadays Braham, married to pro- ducer Glynis Murray, says he finds that his photography is “definitely influenced by life experience. As I get more experienced I begin to want to do less, less and less again. So I’m often stripping things away using less light, making it as simple as possible. And no, I’m certainly not frightened of using natural light.”
When he thinks back to The Land Girls, which was made especial- ly poignant by dint of his own coun- try and farming background, he now says, “there are things I would have done on that even ‘less’. It was very specifically set in the winter and we tried not to romanticise things. You want to like the three girls [Anna Friel, Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz] so you light them to like them. The light one steals from are paint- ings of Rembrandt with the result you try for that juxtaposition of winter outside and that warmth
inside. Mind you, the film was a nightmare to shoot. By the time we broke for lunch on the first day after shooting in a ploughed field, it was like the Battle of the Somme.”
Waking Ned, like Shooting Fish co-produced by his wife, was, as one might suspect, “a lovely family affair. There were really two options as far as how the film should look. What we did was the romantic Ealing comedy
bit, theatrical even quite heavy-hand- ed photographically. The other way we could have played it was gritty and realistic. Both would have worked but, looking back now, I think I’d liked to have gone the gritty route instead.”
The less light requirement came home to roost again when he was preparing for The Invisible Circus. “ I was looking for a very manipulative and adaptable way of working, an abil-
ity to work in both low light and nat- ural light. I was amazed by the Fuji stock. When I was doing the first BT ad with E.T. I first tested it then used it. The commercial was all set at night and I found myself switching off lights - which I love. I suppose my ideal would be to have no lights at all. So for Circus I ended up testing the stock again this time at home with my chil- dren, sitting them in the window, try- ing various things. The next thing they were being projected in Hollywood. My worry about previous Fuji stocks was that the colours were too colour- ful but this didn’t seem to do that.”
Braham has recently turned down a number of new features sim- ply because he wants to be around and available “to finish The Invisible Circus properly. The negative is unbe- lievable but it is very difficult to print. Because it has so much latitude, the print is the limiting factor and the grader really has to be in tune with what was intended in order to get the print right. It needs close supervision because I think it will eventually look quite special.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
The Invisible Circus and
Soft Top, Hard Shoulder
were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
HENRY BRAHAM BSC
“As I get more experienced I begin to want less and less again... my ideal would be to have no lights at all.”
Photos top: a scene from The Land Girls; above left: Shooting Fish; centre: Henry Braham BSC on location in France filming The Invisible Circus; right: Oldtimers Ian Bannen and David Kelly in Waking Ned.
EXPOSURE • 24