Page 28 - Fujifilm Exposure_24 Stephen Fry_ok

ROGER BONICCI
“Lighting a scene is only part of the jigsaw.
How you achieve the shots logistically and whether they cut together are other parts and so is your rapport with actors.”
Photos top: Roger Bonnici (red shirt) and crew on location with The Poet; above: Roger Bonnici with Director Paul Hills
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admits he draws his inspiration from the very best in the business.
“As a technician I worked on so many commercials, and worked with so many DPs like Freddie Young, Dougie Slocombe, Norman Warwick, Billy Williams, Freddie Francis that it was great to see how they worked. All those guys are consummate pros, and to watch them at work was an educa- tion in itself. One of the most impor- tant lessons learnt was not over light- ing, that’s the beauty of it.
“What you do is just hope you can do something similarly wondrous yourself. Even watching John de Borman on Death Machine, where I shot second unit, we were shooting pick up shots for scenes they’d shot two days before and it was great to see their rushes and go onto the set and watch John at work. He’s got a great sense of humour and a great rap- port with his crew. I hope I’ve the same with my crews. I always like to have a laugh, you have to enjoy what you do otherwise it can be hellish.”
When Paul Hills hired Bonnici to shoot Boston Kickout he began a long- standing collaboration that has culmi- nated in their latest film together, The Poet. Shot on Fuji 500T and 125T, this is a noirish tale of a Chechnya veteran (Dougray Scott) who makes a living as an assassin-for -hire, but finds his pro- fessionalism compromised when he falls in love.
“The film looks quite glossy even though it has a very European style to it. One film that we referred to quite a lot was Louis Malle’s Les Amants. We studied it carefully, together with lots of other references, but Paul had a dis- tinct look in mind mostly in the way we shoot it rather than the ‘overall look’.
“We shot in Munich, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Vienna, Grunau in the Austrian Alps and Paris. I wanted everything in Vienna, Munich, Paris, Dusseldorf and Cologne to feel nice and warm so I shot everything with an 85B correction filter and Pola where possible, and various diffusion which achieved that.
“The sequences that were meant to be set in London we shot with an 81EF, so they were a lot cooler. The story starts in London and that has a definite cooler feel before it moves on.
“I actually considered that I’d be able to shoot the whole film on the one stock, with the tight schedule really governing how many different stocks I could use. The schedule was so tight that the last thing I wanted was delays when having to change stocks, so I thought if I could keep the majority of stuff in Europe on the 500 – when we went into the Alps we shot everything on the 125 – and then come back out on to the 500 afterwards. That was great, it meant we could keep the pace up and keep on schedule.
“Obviously the decision for the stock used was also based on the results of the conversion to anamor- phic, because we shot it Super 35 for- mat. I certainly wasn’t going to stick my neck out and say the 500 would be great even for the conversion. But Bavaria Film Labs in Munich did a variety of tests for us and they were blown away by it. They thought it was great.”
Shooting the 125 stock in the Alpine scenes, Bonnici reports that they gave the film a cleaner, slightly crisper image with less grain. He cred- its his operator Martin Parry too, with the skilful framing on the film, and given the fact that Parry started out on Boston Kickout also gives The Poet a pleasing symmetry. Bonnici, for one, is not complaining.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envi- ous of every cameraman who is involved in a film,” he shrugs, “just for the sheer love of being able to shoot a movie. But I’ve got plenty of enthusi- asm and I think it comes across. To me it’s not just a job for job’s sake, it’s what I want to be doing for the rest of my working life.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
The Poet, Boston Kickout and Sunset Heights were all originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
26 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video