Page 8 - Fujifilm Exposure_20 Bend It Like Beckham_ok

WATER WATER
WATER WATER
It’s all cameras, lights and action
There’s a key moment near the start of the concluding instalment of Channel Four’s two-part period polar epic, Shackleton. The expedition’s Australian cameraman, Frank Hurley, is desperate to retrieve his photographs from a sub- merged room in the stricken ship and
has to be held by his ankles as he plunges beneath four feet of slush ice.
The filmmakers were not likely to let actor Matt Day do the real thing on the pro- duction’s freezing Greenland location – doubling for Antarctica – so the stunt was staged on the last day of shooting in a tank
north of London just off the M25.
This was also the same place where
there was a shipwreck at the climax of Shakespeare In Love, where 15 four- month-old babies floated for BBC’s The Human Body and, quite recently, the setting for a watery dream sequence with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth in the new film version of The Importance of Being Earnest.
We’re talking about Action Underwater Studios on an industrial site at Waltham Cross, an unlikely though endlessly busy stop on the film- making trail catering for everything from cinema and television to commer- cials, pop videos and still shoots.
AUS, which set up officially under that name some six years ago, evolved out of an old BOC works which had a
Photo: Doug Green (left) and Mike Valentine testing a boat in the tank
EXPOSURE • 6 & 7