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behind the camera
PAINTING PICTURES
ON A GIANT CANVAS An interview with Tony Pierce-Roberts
Photos: Facing page Anthony Hopkins as the old master in Surviving Picasso and above Tony Pierce-Roberts
continued over
It was the smell of a camera rather than its away at the BBC because of all those contacts he’d
made. In fact he had missed the boat and actually had to wait a while before getting, first, a holiday relief job then, thankfully, a permanent slot at the Corporation.
These were still golden days at the Beeb when a Civil Service-like security and an astonishing range of opportunities still ruled for employees. Pierce-Roberts eventually became Brian Tufano’s assistant and, as he recalls, “it was a good system.
If you were considered to be a senior assistant and smallish jobs came along then they’d make you an acting cameraman which meant more money and more experience.”
The big-break came one morning when he was working on location at a London museum in the middle of a Nat ionwide television assignment: “The phone went at 11 o’clock and I was told ‘we want you to go to Euston station to meet Tony Garnett then you’re to go and do Days Of Hope with Ken Loach for 14 weeks. The train leaves at three o’clock. If anyone argues with you, have them ring Alisdair
technical prowess which first really turned him on. All right, to be strictly accurate, it was the heady whiff of German adhesive used to glue the linings of an Arriflex camera box
that gave him such a buzz while growing up as a teenager in Central Africa.
Even from this considerable retrospect, the memory clearly still lingers on pleasurably for Birkenhead-born cinematographer Tony Pierce- Roberts, now 53, twice
Oscar-nominated and win- ner of two BAFTA awards for best film cameraman.
One of Britain’s most versatile craftsmen, Pierce-Roberts has also made a powerful mark of late in Hollywood working on studio blockbusters like The Client, Disclosure and Jungle To Jungle (with comic superstar Tim Allen). But it’s proba- bly his long collaboration with the Merchant-Ivory team on no fewer than six pictures - most recently, Surviving Picasso - which really established his international reputation.
All of which was still a
long way off when as an
11-year-old he emigrated with his parents to Rhodesia where his father worked on the railways and mother was a journalist. After he left school he joined the Central African Film Unit, essentially a Government-organisation which, among various tasks, used to service visiting film crews.
When Pierce-Roberts wasn’t sniffing the equipment containers, he graduated from gofer to trainee film cameraman and finally even got to shoot some material. At 21 he decided to return to Britain confident that he would get a job right
including the director,
Milne,” [the BBC’s head of programmes].
After this auspicious start (Pierce-Roberts shot two of the four films in Loach’s political epic), he went on to win those BAFTAS in successive years for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Caught On A Train. Now, realising that however good he was he would always be at the mercy of the BBC’s strange often arbitrary crewing system, and also realising that it was cinema rather than the small- screen (the BBC had at the time of going to a full
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