Page 87 - FOYER_Cannes 2001

DIARY BERLIN • LOSANGELES • MILAN • FOYER • CANNES • TOKYO • LONDON PAGE85
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“I used the Fuji stock and had a 10 denier Christian Dior stocking over the lens; it is an
old Alfred Hitchcock technique. Stars such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were shot like this many times in
their careers.”
McGarvey – who has
completed Mike Nichols’
Witt since Enigma - also
talked about bi-pack pro-
cessing: “That’s when
you take your colour negative, dupli- cate it on to black and white nega- tive and then optically combine the two in a superimposition with a per- centage of colour and a percentage of black-and-white – we are going for 50-50 on Enigma.
“The two are fused together so you produce a new negative which is greatly diminished in saturation and colour. It gives lovely wash-like old hand-tinted photographs a real- ly beautiful look,” he said.
Meanwhile Apted tackles other problems, like creating a historically accurate story without sacrificing the degree of spills and thrills that today’s audiences expect.
“That is the tightrope of the film,” said Apted. “This film is about mental gymnastics. It has to have a certain density to it; you can’t trivi- alise what these people are doing and yet you don’t want to uncomplicate the story so that it is too easy.
“On the other hand, it can’t be so complex so that you don’t understand it and lose interest with it. So that is the
high wire act that I have to perform.” Like Apted and McGarvey, the stars of Enigma, produced by Mick
Jagger’s Jagged Films, have gone all out to create the look and atmos- phere for the screen. Dougray Scott, for instance, has made dietary sacri- fices - embarking on the less than appetising cabbage soup diet - so that he is now even slimmer than usual; he’s lost over a stone to por- tray a character on the
edge of a nervous breakdown.
“He teeters on edge for most of
the film,” said Scott. “So to get that frag- ile look I lost about 22 pounds to bring my weight down to under 11 stones.”
Inevitably, the actor researched his role thoroughly, immersing himself in information about the particular aspect of
World War II, wading through piles of books and reading through archive material from the period around which the Enigma story revolves.
“I did about five months work on this before we started film- ing,” he said, matter of factly. “I went to Bletchley Park and met with experts, going through the
mechanics of the Enigma machine and code breaking.
“It took a huge amount of research and one day it all just seemed to click into place and I found that I had a basic understanding of code-breaking. Now I can do cross- words easier than before because I think cryptically.” ■
ENIGMA VARIATIONS
Photo: Kate Winslet and Dougay Scott
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