Page 29 - Fujifilm Exposure_25 Jean Francois Robin_ok

Cantor had learned the nuts and bolts of filmmaking in a five year stretch, from 1997, working for the BBC: “As far as I was concerned it was the best film school you could go to, and much more practical.”
He was an award-winning member of its innovative promos department. “It’s pretty much like doing commer- cials. It’s a short form slot that has to hit 30 seconds in which you have to get the message across to sell the product – the ‘product’ in this case being a TV show, a channel or the brand of channel.”
Cantor admits he was tempted to set Suzie Gold “in a smaller communi- ty like Manchester, Leeds or even
Glasgow. That, I suppose, would have more reflected my own upbringing.
“Then again we didn’t want to make just another ‘gritty’ British drama. A lot of British films don’t look very good. That’s why people like me don’t tend to respond to them too well and that’s probably why they don’t often do well at the box office.
“I believe that the experience of going to the cinema should be an enchanting one. It just seemed that having it set in London was absolutely the right thing for the film.”
To help him achieve his look, Cantor picked Daf Hobson BSC as his cinematographer. Hobson, a double BAFTA winner whose prolific TV work
includes the Andrew Davies-revised Othello, The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, The Lakes, Sword Of Honour and The Family, has made just one previous feature, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome To Sarajevo.
Says Cantor: “This is a contempo- rary story, but things date so quickly we’ve gone for a kind of timeless feel especially in terms of its production and costume design. It could have happened 50 years ago... and it could still happen in fifty years time!”
Also in the film, which shot for seven weeks in London and the Isle of Man, are Miriam Karlin, Stanley Townsend, Leo Gregory, Rebecca Front and, in a cameo, Rachel Stevens
from the pop group S Club. Cantor and Green’s enthusiasm about the project paid off handsomely when Pathé Pictures came on board as distribu- tors for the UK and France.
According to Pathé’s managing director, Francois Ivernel, Suzie Gold was “one of those rare scripts that came from nowhere and which enthused the whole team. The pres- ence of Summer Phoenix is another great asset for this richly textured comedy.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Suzie Gold, to be released in November, was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 27
in production