Page 9 - Fujifilm Exposure_11 Blackadder_ok

ALL CASTLES
ALL CASTLES
four-hour BBC epic
tv production
books exactly. We have been extremely faithful in the detail of what’s described - for example what the cos- tumes look like, what’s on tables, what’s on the walls. The overall look, though, is not English Gothic; it’s something else, a more modernist fantasy, if you like.
“The whole process was extremely collabora- tive. What we - that’s me, Estelle and our visual designer Christopher Hobbs - decided to do was use Peake’s autobiography as a cue. He was brought up in Northern India and China where his father was a med- ical missionary, so we thought that must have pro- vided loads of visual influences. We looked at castles of the Orient as well as Byzantine and British to come up with what we hoped would be the mother of all castles. The orientalism gives it a beautiful, other-
worldly feel and there’s a strong thread of that run- ning through all the design.”
Alongside cinematographer Gavin Finney BSC, with whom he had worked on the telefilm Bad Boy Blues and several commercials, he hatched the com- plementary idea of “a light quality which should be a sort of high plains Eastern rather than deep British gothic which would, I think, have become boring over the course of four hours. So we looked at films like Kundun and The Last Emperor and settled on some- thing beautiful, clear, yellowy and watery-like that goes to a deep yellow at the end of the day. It’s a warmer lighting colour than you might expect for this kind of thing but it then gave us the opportunity in episode four to turn deep dark gothic, blue heavy and ominous.
“We’re both great fans of Fuji stock and on this we used the whole range from slow to fast. We find it has this kind of very deep dense black because it has got great colour range on the green. It has a texture other stocks don’t seem to have. We’ve lit it with immense contrast; there’s an enormous amount of black in the picture and we wanted something that would record that as well as providing some very crisp colours alongside.”
With a cast including Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as Steerpike), Ian Richardson, Christopher Lee, Stephen Fry, John Sessions, Fiona Shaw, Martin Clunes, Never Macintosh, Zoe Wanamaker and Eastenders’ June Brown, Gormenghast was, apart from a week of gar- den location nearby, shot on 35mm over 17 weeks entirely at Shepperton Studios on seven stages encompassing no less than 120 sets.
“Add to that 180 effects shots and you can see there was no expense spared. The only thing we weren’t doing was paying a Hollywood star $20mil- lion,” says Wilson, whose next project is Concrete Island - “Robinson Crusoe Meets Crash ,” he laughs - for C4 based on a 70s novella by JG Ballard.
“I’ve made Gormenghast look how I imagined it when I first read the book,” says Wilson, possibly pre- empting inevitable flak from some die-hard cultist quarters. “I imagined it in my own mind’s eye and recreated that. If that’s not other people’s vision of it, there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can say is that my older brother, who also happens to be my harsh- est critic, is a super-fan of the book. And he loves my film.” If it’s good enough for him... ■ QUENTIN FALK
Gormenghast was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos top left: Stephen Fry as Dr Bellgrove; top right: getting ready for a watery take; above: cinematographer Gavin Finney (left) with director Andy Wilson (centre).