Page 14 - Fujifilm Exposure_24 Stephen Fry_ok

FRAME
ACADEMY TAKING STOCK OF
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he pasta salad is doled out on to endless plates, while the crew and the actors tuck in hungrily. Every one of them glances furtively at the lingering packs of Ginger Nuts. Dessert. Inside
the kitchen set, various men and women – some looking more like girls and boys – wander around wearing tool belts, headphones wrapped around their necks and a pensive look on their face. This is filmmaking, after all.
And in this tall, thin building, tucked away amongst the cobbled streets of Covent Garden and behind the clothes stores and fish restau- rants, is where people make films.
The London Film School is an unassuming place. There’s no glass panelling, no airy sound studios like in West Coast film schools. Here, the sound department is housed deep within the bowels of this renovated brewery. Stone steps climb endlessly through the narrow structure.
“It can be interesting when you’re shooting and you have to carry scenery up and down,” sighs a pupil, on his way to get ready for some post-lunch shoot- ing. It all appears rather old-fashioned – and much the better for it.
Indeed, its appearance is the ideal metaphor for the difference between slick Hollywood commercialism and the English grit of Ken Loach and Mike
Leigh, the latter a former pupil and vocal advocate.
Movies are all well and good, but what we’re interested in here is film- making. Which is probably why the school has such a luminous array of international alumni, including Michael Mann, Tak Fujimoto, Howard Atherton, Roger Pratt – and the afore- mentioned Leigh.
“My job is to re-organise in a very fundamental way,” explains Ben Gibson, executive producer of movies like Beautiful People, Love Is The Devil, and Young Soul Rebels, and the Director of the School for just over two years.
“I’ve changed a lot of the structure – and I built a fire exit.” He grins, “It used to be a very dangerous building.”
As an experienced filmmaker, Gibson was charged with bringing the place up to date.
“The school used to be called the London International Film School, which sounded like a finishing school for diplomatic kids. So we dropped the International, although 85% of the students are still non-UK residents. I’m trying to preserve what’s good about the old-fashioned Eastern European constitution of this place, in terms of how you make films – and add flexibility to it.”
As someone ten, fifteen years younger than a lot of film school chiefs,
the LFS has benefited from having some- one at the reins who’s still involved.
“A lot of what I bring to it is a filo- fax of working for twenty years in the UK film industry,” admits Gibson. During the course of the interview, he takes a call from the legendary Hungarian director Bela Tarr, about an upcoming (unrevealed) film.
“I have spent a long time drawing in people from the independent sector to do part-time teaching. I’m finding it very easy – we had a Lynne Ramsay masterclass, Mike Leigh comes in reg- ularly, Stephen Frears has visited. Foreign filmmakers drop in whenever they are passing.”
Impressive for a school that, despite a firm tradition since being founded in 1956 by the Principal of the Heatherley School of Fine Art, was in need of a makeover. Initially settling in Brixton, the school moved to Charlotte Street in the early Sixties, before switching to its cur-
rent location in the middle of the same decade.
In 1974, the school was renamed the London International Film School, before changing back in 2001.
Having got the Masters degree val- idated by London Metropolitan University and aware that in compari- son to a lot of places, his is a finan- cially-poor school, Gibson is especial- ly interested in consolidating the view of the school to would-be pupils and the rest of the filmmaking world. This is even more important now in the era of get-camera-ready-quick film courses that you find at the back of movie magazines.
Says Gibson: “Many film schools are trying to do this super-luxe deliv- ery of talent, which is not really where the independent film world is going. In my opinion, all these opportunist learners are being somewhat misled by these film courses with huge claims and very little content.
THE LONDON FILM SCHOOL AND ITS WELL-EARNED INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION
12 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video