Page 32 - Fujifilm Exposure_20 Bend It Like Beckham_ok

DAVID HIGGS
“I’m not a very analytical cameraman in terms of sitting down and working out f-stops. I work it, judge it and if it then makes a connection with my heart, I know it’s right.”
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work in a studio behind King’s Cross – enough at least to persuade him to “abandon ship” from his nine-to-five job and turn freelance full-time.
After that it was the usual mix of grabbing work where it was going – from doing stringer stints on Newsnight (covering the Miner’s Strike) to docu- mentaries and shorts – including a year in-house at Samuelsons.
Was he pushy? “Probably not pushy enough but I still managed to keep pretty busy,” Higgs reflects.
Later, falling in with Alan Horrox, a former department head at Thames TV who’d set up Tetra Films in 1992 to work independently, Higgs enjoyed a very fruitful run in drama. The Tomorrow People, a co-production with Nickelodeon, was followed by the pair of Shakespeares, ten episodes of Delta Wave and a couple of single dra- mas, The Treasure Seekers and The Canterville Ghost, a 1997 version (admitted by some to be the most faithful yet) of Wilde’s much-filmed satiric comedy, with Ian Richardson, Celia Imrie and Rik Mayall.
Somewhere in the midst of all that he found time to work, “on and off over three years”, on the second unit of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
“You’d suddenly find yourself with 12 legionnaires in the desert of Morocco. Images would come to mind of David Lean shooting Lawrence Of Arabia, then you’d remember that he had two months to film... and we had 12 hours. Once, we got stoned by nuns in Greece. Technically, it was fascinating.”
More recently, he has been involved in what you clearly sense has been his most fulfiling work to date. “Nature Boy was a huge boost for me. It was such a good script, with four very strong chapters, and I really enjoyed working with Joe Wright (the director) and Catherine Wearing (the producer).”
Innocents was award-winning direc- tor Peter Kosminsky’s typically gritty and confrontational drama-documen- tary about the Bristol Royal Infirmary scandal concerning baby heart surgery. Says Higgs: “I have great respect for him and we got on well. He sees the mechanics of filmmaking in a very particular way. All you have to do is understand and embrace that. Much is talked about the nature of drama- doc, but for the cameraman, as well as everyone else involved, it still comes down to the script and actors.”
Both The Russian Bride and Night Flight have been in collaboration with
director Nick Renton. A rather claus- trophobic though often darkly comic urban drama, Bride, with Sheila Hancock, Lia Williams and Douglas Hodge, had much of its filming done on a two-storey house set built at Twickenham Studios.
According to Higgs: “The lighting challenge was to create an environment that was believable; you had to believe that these people existed in this build- ing. I would sit in on rehearsals and I found I didn’t have to talk about things too much with Nick. It was almost what I’d call a spiritual experience.
“What I think I managed to achieve was a kind of very stylised naturalism. It’s often a question of balance: some- times it’s your job to make it all look beautiful then sometimes you can slide off into darkness. I like, for exam- ple, to get light reflecting off people. If that fits in with the dialogue and the way the actor plays the scene, it can work wonderfully.
“Look, I’m not a very analytical cameraman in terms of sitting down and working out f-stops. I work it, judge it and if it then makes a connec- tion with my heart, I know it’s right.” As far as Higgs is concerned, his heart “won” in the case of The Russian Bride.
From Twickenham to Bray where for two and a half weeks, he was shooting, from often 20 feet up, inside a specially reconstructed, 70-foot long, reconstruction of a Lancaster bomber mounted on a gimbel. This was for Night Flight, a flashback drama to World War Two about the turbulent, interweaving lives of three of its crew. It stars Christopher Plummer, Edward Woodward and Kenneth Cranham.
“I shot a lot of the stuff with an A- Minima, which I was literally able to hold in the palm of my hand. We were going to go the blue screen back- ground route, which meant shooting against black so you’d get no refer- ence to the plane’s movement. We went our route instead which meant you got proper vibration – rather than just shaking the camera about - with some front projection and in- camera effects.”
In the great debate about digital and film, Higgs (who admits he is still holding out for a feature “on my own terms – with a script I can bring some- thing to”) is adamant that, for him, film is still the best capture medium.
“Without wishing to be considered a Luddite, I happen to think,” says Higgs firmly, ”that film still has an unsurpassable magic of translation.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Photo top: A scene from The Russian Bride starring Sheila Hancock, Lia Williams and Douglas Hodge; above left: a scene from C4 Schools’ Romeo And Juliet centre and right: David Higgs and crew on location
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