Page 19 - Fujifilm Exposure_25 Jean Francois Robin_ok

Torn from the Headlines
DPs Sue Gibson and Adam Suschitzky shed more light on Spooks 2
O ne of the undisputed hits of own right, so we let the scripts lead “And then I used the 400 tungsten Suschitzky was quick to pay trib-
low contrast for a great deal of the night work, and again it was a very sharp but beautifully toned stock which we actually got some great results from.” He added that he also used the 250T for the MI5 interiors.
“It’s always a challenge on a televi- sion drama schedule and budget to produce night exteriors on time. You rely heavily on stocks being able to pull the detail from shadows, to reproduce the highlights as faithfully as possible.
“Certainly the Fuji 400T handled those situations perfectly. It’s a cliché, but I could really trust the emulsions to reproduce what my eye was seeing.”
For Gibson, who chose the Fuji 250 tungsten and 500 tungsten, an episode that took place in a single location seemed like a good chance to avoid the worst of the January weather. But she soon realised that maintaining any sense of pace and tension were her biggest headache.
“Of course the problem is how do you sustain the interest for an hour on one set,” she added, “but surprisingly enough it was a very gripping episode. There were a lot of lighting changes on that one, and I ended up lighting the whole set with battery lights, the sort they use for road works. That was fun.
“I really wanted this series to look different from most things that you see. There is, for example, a tradition that when a scene is dark that it’s usu- ally a bit cold and blue.
“I wanted to get away from that so in all the episodes I did there was a hint of greenness in the sets which I really quite liked. I wanted to make it slightly different, yet still have that sterile atmosphere.
“On all of these episodes you have to devise a way of making things work, and the fact that we change directors really helps, because they all come to it from a different perspective. You get different challenges by the nature of the locations and the way you want to shoot it, and all those factors can be quite useful.”
the BBC’s 2002 output, Spooks returned to our screens earlier this summer with a by-now familiar vein of portentous espionage tales. So where the first
series tapped into the prevailing mood in a post 9/11 world, picking up a BAFTA for Best Drama Series, this fresh run of ten episodes developed things further still.
Writers Howard Brenton, David Wolstencroft, Matthew Graham, Simon Mirren, Steve Bailie and Ben Richards tackled themes that might have been torn from the day’s news- paper headlines.
“It is quite bizarre how close to the bone things can be,” chuckled return- ing DP Sue Gibson BSC. “We shot some episodes and then a couple of weeks later there’d be some echo of what we’d been doing on the news. That can make you feel a little uneasy, but quite gung ho in other respects.”
A timely drama tapping into the global zeitgeist is one thing, but keep- ing audiences hooked on a series at that same cutting edge is quite anoth- er. Gibson and her fellow DP on the series Adam Suschitzky worked on – respectively – six and four episodes shooting two at a time back to back.
“There was a real pressure to pro- duce something as good or better than last year,” explained Suschitzky, who shot some second unit on the original series.
“Of course that was always in the back of our minds. But Spooks is a ter- rific opportunity from a DP’s point of view, you’ve got fantastic scripts, won- derful espionage settings and produc- ers who give you the backing to go off and create the strongest look that you can for each episode.
“The director and I were never sat down and told the in-house style that we had to work with; they gave us this free hand and trusted us which was great.
“The approach here was really to treat each episode like a film in its
us. One week we were in a school environment with a young teenager hacking into the MI5 computer sys- tem, and the next week we were in Russian Mafia territory.
“You couldn’t get more different than that, so we really did treat each episode as a mini film and discovered the appro- priate tone from the script out.”
The challenges are many and var- ied, and are not least linked closely to constraints of time and budget. ‘MI5 not 9 to 5’, as the publicity blurb has it, might equally apply to the extended hours that cast and crew were required to put in. With each episode shot in under two weeks Spooks has been an impressive team effort all round.
“It’s not a long time when you’re doing some very ambitious sequences,” Suschitzky added, “which feature multi- ple points of view and action sequences tucked in there as well.
“There’s a lot of stuff happening, and that’s a real adrenaline boost, it gets everybody’s mind focussed and we were lucky enough to have a really great crew who just ran with the project.” “Unlike Adam, me, the directors and our crew were actually working on this from day one,” explained Sue Gibson, “with only a couple of weeks off for Christmas and another week at the beginning of March. They really worked terribly hard. But we’ve become a bit of a family, so we look after one another.
“On a series like this you spend quite a lot of time on the main set so it was terribly nice to get out. And when we went out on different locations it re-energised everybody.”
Working independently Gibson and Suschitzky tackled their various chal- lenges with enthusiasm, using their film stocks in quite different ways.
“It gave us some very different looks,” affirmed Suschitzky. “I shot with the 125 tungsten for a lot of the exteriors to get a very rich, sharp image, and used the 250 daylight to get a more naturalistic look.
ute to the cast too, actors who have grown into their roles over two series and who are set to return in a third next year.
“It is very helpful when you’re com- ing into a series that’s very established like this,” he said. “Of course it’s very demanding for the actors. They have incredibly quick fire dialogue that they’re probably having to learn the night before, and they really get only one or two chances at a scene. I must say they were really terrific, and that makes my job so much easier.
“Something like Spooks is time-con- suming to shoot, you have to shoot the same scene from umpteen differ- ent points of view in order for the split screen to work, which really puts the pressure on us.
“But at the end of the day it’s a very filmic technique. A lot of that is also down to the post production, the editors on this have done some fantastic stuff, putting together images that some of us didn’t even think would go together but in the end worked really brilliantly.”
“I suppose the thing that runs through the whole series are the char- acters and the relationships between them,” Sue Gibson added.
“It always comes back to that. There are various sub-plots and bits and pieces going on throughout the series, with the spy stuff running par- allel to that. But the thing that holds peoples interest is not only in those thriller aspects but the human rela- tionships too.”
A fact that seems to be echoed behind the camera as well as in front of it. ■ ANWAR BRETT
Spooks 2 was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos opposite page main: The Spooks MI5 not Nine to Five line-up; from top: DPs Sue Gibson & Adam Suschitzky and scenes from Spooks
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 17