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➤ which scooped no fewer than six AFI awards – and, more recently, The Waiting City, a romantic drama (and another award-winner) co-starring Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton in the magnificently exotic settings of Kolkata, West Bengal.
“My background,” he explains, “is in music videos and commercials as well as feature documentary, and I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot shooting all around the world - from Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands and India to the US, Italy – including the Vatican - Germany, South Korea and China.
“I think it is a great thing to have cinematographers travel to new places to photograph them: when we stay in the same place for a long time we start to take that place for granted and begin to look at them in the same way each time so it’s not fresh any more.
“I love landing in a new city or landscape and exploring it, hopefully finding a fresh way of looking at it, one that is different to how everyone else has seen it before.
“I take a lot of what I learn from shooting documentary and apply it to my drama work, from making the most of available light or recreating the available light look, to the coverage and operating style to create a sense of realism and immediacy.”
Adapted by Rona Munro – who’d written Ladybird, Ladybird for Loach Sr - from Humphreys’ 1994 book, Empty Cradles, Oranges And Sunshine stars Emily Watson as Humphreys who al- most single-handedly, against over- whelming odds and with little regard for her own well-being, eventually reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.
Children as young as four had been told that their parents were dead, and been sent to children’s homes on the other side of the world. Many were subjected to appalling abuse. They were, as the publicity blurb graphically puts it, “promised oranges and sunshine: they got hard labour and life in institutions.”
Co-starring in the film, which was shot on location in Nottingham and
South Australia, are Hugo Weaving, David Wenham, Greg Stone, Federay Holmes, Richard Dillane,Tara Morice and Lorraine Ashbourne.
Says Baker: “When Jim and I first started talking about the film and the approach to it, the look of it, we knew that we wanted it to be something which was based in realism.
“We wanted it to start as an intimate story about this woman who’s living her life and then gets launched on this whole involuntary hero’s journey, so the film starts to get bigger and more epic as she starts to get embroiled in what we saw as a detective story.
“So at times we have a bit more of a documentary feel: there’s a lot of shooting off the shoulder, a lot of handheld in there. But at other times it’s more epic, with the occasional crane shot or a little dolly shot. That really takes the audience into the scene and lets them know they’re going on a big screen journey.
“Jim and I had a lot of discussions about what format we should shoot the film on and both he and I were really adamant about wanting to shoot on 35mm film as opposed to going digital like a lot of films these days.
“There are a couple of reasons: one of them was that it’s a film set in the 80s so we wanted to shoot on a format that was shot on in the 80s. But we also wanted it to be cinematic film and felt that 35mm really does do that.
“Plus, we just found our style of working was much more suited to the film conventions which leave the camera free to roam. I’ve found on digital productions that you end up with this big mother ship that follows you everywhere, this big base of cables and recording decks and lap- tops. That wasn’t suitable for what we wanted to do.”
Baker clearly relished shooting in the UK as well as his adopted Oz. How did he distinguish between the two countries in the look of the film?
“We shot in Nottingham in winter. There we wanted to have a colder feel, wanted it to feel a little bit more atmospheric. Then Margaret arrives in Australia and it’s hot, scorching sun.
“It’s brighter. It’s kind of vibrant, but then you start to realise that it’s not all oranges and sunshine: there’s something sinister going on in a way, so we wanted the look to be bright, but not all saturated - it’s not all happy. Generally, we chose to back- light our characters and shoot into the shadows, so as to have it look a little bit more scorching than comfortable.
He also thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration with Loach, whose back- ground is in TV dramas like Bad Girls, Holby City, Shameless, Waterloo Road and Casualty.
“He’s a great director. He really knows what he wants and he’s also someone who’s very quick to make a
suggestion that can change the scene and turn it into something that little bit better.
“We liked the idea of doing a lot of it off the shoulder: let the actors play the whole scene through, shoot it in one shot, just a few takes. We wanted often to have that sense of ‘here it is happening before our eyes’, without having to resort to cutting up a scene. A lot of the film is one shot scenes.”
The director also seems to have been a chip off the old block when it came to film stocks as Loach Sr has also been a prolific user of Fujifilm for years. Baker, too, is certainly no stranger: “I have worked with Fujifilm stocks a lot in the past, particularly on
DENSON BAKER ACS
“I USED STOCK CHOICE TO ESTABLISH DIFFERENT LOOKS THAT EVOLVE WITH THE MOOD, THE LOCATION ATMOSPHERE AND EMOTIONAL ARC OF THE FILM.”
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