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HOW ACADEMY AWARD WINNING THE KING’S SPEECH CAME
“IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT TRYING TO MAINTAIN A BALANCE BETWEEN MAKING IT LOOK GOOD AND MAKING IT LOOK REAL.” – DANNY COHEN BSC (LEFT)
TRIUMPHANTLYTO LOSTFORWORDS THE BIG SCREEN
tarting in 1925 when Bertie (Colin Firth), the Sthen Duke of York and second son of George
V, was almost paralysed by his stammer while required to speechify at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, The King’s Speech follows his eventual accession to the throne in 1936 and through to a superbly
triumphant address to the nation on the outbreak of World War Two, just three years later.
But those are just the bare bones of an extraordi- nary saga involving, of course the Abdication crisis, a touching domestic love story and of the unorthodox
contemporary biopic, Longford, Cohen said the director’s brief was “to make it as natural and believable as possible.
He and Hooper used two principal sources as reference for their eventual “look”. First, they pored over the stills of German émigré photographer Bill Brandt who, after moving to England in 1933 began documenting UK society in collections like The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938).
“What we took mostly from his stuff,” says Cohen, “was framing. I’m a big fan of wide lenses and Tom especially likes wide lenses very close to people’s faces. We also looked at the BBC documentary, The Thirties In Colour {a four-part series, which drew from official archive and also private collection footage]. You tend always to have lots of ideas and references, which are then thrown into the magimix; in the end it can be quite random what makes you do certain things.
“Tom’s take on history is that film often tends to make it look chocolate boxy and sanitised. So, if we were going to make film about real people and real events, the more veracity you could put on the screen the more believable it will become.
“I decided to use the two ETERNA Vivid stocks for the film, the 160T and the 500T, which I hadn’t used before and so tested a bit. You want to create a distinctive look so you hunt around for something which you feel works best for the story. What I like about the Fujifilm stocks is that the combination of them, the sets, locations and costumes just kind of gel.
“What I was especially blown away by was how the Vivid 500T dealt with grain. With a period film, you can probably get away with a grainier look but the fact that now it’s pretty grainless is an added bonus. What you don’t want is anything that will distract people’s attention.”
The film, co-starring Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth (the future Queen Mother), Derek Jacobi, Guy Pearce, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon and Jennifer Ehle, was shot over seven weeks in and around London.
Apart from the interior of Logue’s apartment which was a set at Elstree Studios, the rest of the film was shot on a wide variety of locations, including a couple some distance from London.
For instance, shooting the opening sequence at Wembley Stadium, the filmmakers cunningly combined a big, old stand at Elland Road, the home of Leeds United, with the pitch at Bradford Bulls rugby league ground, Odsal Stadium.
“Challenges? Every single one of them,” said Cohen. “The main problem was we were shooting in winter and would always be struggling for light at the end of the day.
“One of our biggest locations was in Portland Place, in a big Georgian house diagonally opposite the BBC. We used it for Logue’s consulting rooms and also for Bertie and Elizabeth’s house in Piccadilly before they became King and Queen.
“It had a skylight so we put a scaffold rig above the ceiling so we could play day or night. We put up a big blackout tent and then inside that we had white sheets, putting light on to the sheets to create day and then on top of that had hard light coming in through the skylight.”
Lancaster House, once part of the St James’ Palace complex, doubled for Buckingham Palace. “We had only a day there. It was a huge building with windows that matched the Palace but there was also scaffolding down the side for some renovations taking place.
“ So we had to come up with a little ruse which worked in the sense that we didn’t have to use big cherrypickers. Instead, we bought about 300 metres of Egyptian cotton to hang in front of the windows so we could light through them in order to blow the windows out so you couldn’t see the scaffolding.”
Ely Cathedral, an experienced royal stand-in, used previously in, among others, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and The Other Boleyn Girl, was used for some key Westminster Abbey scenes, while another popular location, Battersea Power Station, provided a suitably authentic looking BBC Control Room carefully fashioned from an existing period interior.
“It’s always,” notes Cohen, “about trying to maintain a balance between making it look good and making it look real.” QUENTIN FALK
The King’s Speech was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 500T 8547 and ETERNA Vivid 160T 8543
And for those interested in more background behind the The King’s Speech, see Philip Armstrong-Dampier’s superb documentary, The Real King’s Speech, recently aired on Channel 4 which had the largest audience share (12.5%) for its type since 2009 - email him on pdad1212@gmail.com The Real King’s Speech is A 1212 Production
alliance between Bertie, later George VI, and a single-minded Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, pictured above), secretly hired to cure the Royal impediment.
The story of this production begins in the 1940s with the war. As a child, screenwriter David Seidler suffered from a profound stammer. Listening to King George VI’s speeches on BBC radio during and after the war inspired him to think that if the King could cope with a stammer, so could he. As a result, George VI, the stammering King who had to speak, became a boyhood hero and role model for David, and ultimately the inspiration for this film.
It was back to the past for DP Danny Cohen BSC who had not that long ago dabbled in the same period of The King’s Speech on Stephen Poliakoff’s Hitchcockian, eve-of-war thriller Glorious 39.
Resuming his collaboration here with Tom Hooper, for whom he had shot the 18th Century US Presidential miniseries John Adams and a more
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