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given a video camera and filmmaking became my passion.
“I was a bigtime cinemagoer as a child but never aware of the actual craft of the cameraman as such even when I was making my own early films. The films of Bergman are very strong for me and my family and every Christmas when they showed Fanny & Alexander on TV we’d all watch it together. I haven’t ever met him but I have met his cameraman Sven Nyvist. As I get older I understand and appre- ciate Bergman’s films even more.”
Eschewing the chance to study psy- chology at university, Ihre decided to move instead to the big city and try to turn his passion into a paid profession.
In Stockholm, he managed to get a job almost straightaway with a pro- duction company which specialised in making short drama documentaries about real-life crimes. These 10-minute films were shown every Thursday night at primetime on Sweden’s Channel Three under the title Wanted!
“For the first six months I was the in-house assistant cameraman then, by accident, I became the actual camera- man. The production budget dropped one season and they suddenly decided they couldn’t afford to use an experi- enced freelance. Then they realised they could use me instead who, in their minds, was ‘keen and cheap’.
“It was an amazing kind of film school for me. We were making 30 minutes’ worth of films every week. Every second day I was doing an episode; that’s three a week, all shot on digibeta. It was really hard work. Every now and then we’d do a 50 minute crime ‘special’ which would take perhaps a fortnight. And the shows were always very popular.”
From crime, he moved into music videos but always at the back of his mind was the desire to work in drama. “I knew I had to get contacts on the film side because TV and film are two very different worlds. I had the oppor- tunity to move on by moving back, as it were, into focus pulling or loading
but I felt that as I’d been shooting so much in my own right, I didn’t want now to lose that momentum.”
The answer, he finally decided, was to try and get a place at film school which he confidently believed, at the grand old age of 24, might open up new worlds and new cultures for him. After toying with the idea of school in his native Sweden not to mention Denmark and the States, he finally settled for our own NFTS in leafy Bucks.
“Of course it wasn’t like a school as such rather more a production compa- ny where you could swap ideas and get good feedback from great tutors. It was a fantastic forum, a place where there was time to talk to fellow cam- eramen, editors, set designers – every- one as passionate as oneself. Back in Sweden I’d been mostly working with journalists. Now here I was with film- makers from all over the world who knew so much more than me.”
One of his most fruitful collabora- tions proved to be with fellow student, director Joachim Trier on the fiction short Procter which went on to win both the Kodak and Short Film Bureau Award for Best British Short Film and
Prix UIP for Best European Short Film at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. “I shot it on S16 Fuji 400T and did
a bleach-bypass on it. It’s kind of a existentialist thriller and we filmed in Canary Wharf and Kensington. Joachim loves textures; we wanted a soft look but still dark and gritty.
“At first I was trying out different soft filters but they didn’t really work. I then heard about the 400T which is quite a soft stock and it also gave me enough of exposure. The stock com- bined with the bleach by-pass and a blow-up from S16 to 35mm achieved the look we wanted and worked per- fectly for the film.”
It now seemed only a short step away from his first feature and so it proved after he linked up once again with director Lee Donaldson after having made five commercials (from Nintendo to News International) together.
The Virgin Of Liverpool, which also marks Donaldson’s feature debut, is described as “a dark comic tale of family, religion, youthful integrity and pissed-up bingo callers”. Along with Tomlinson and Vegas it also co-stars Imelda Staunton, Paul Barber and Tom Georgeson. Ihre, who’d never before been to Liverpool,
described his “brief”: “We wanted to tell the story as efficiently as possible, to be realistic in terms of style and performances but with some kind of special touch; a punch to it, if you like.
“We didn’t want anything to look too bleak. The idea was to have a satu- rated look with good contrast – not darkness as such but, then again, not flooded with light. In other words, to have an image which felt familiar yet quirky and unpolished at times. I shot 70 per cent of the film on the 250 Daylight and then for the night interi- ors and some other scenes we used the 500 Tungsten,” he added.
Ihre described the film – “it always felt to me like a very long short film” – as a “massive learning experience.” He’d never before worked with an operator but on this occasion he had the services of Mike Fox, an experi- enced documentary cameraman in his own right.
“That was amazing because I can say that he was originally one of the reasons I wanted to come to England. I had seen his work and thought at the time, ‘I want to do that.’
Ihre reflected on the considerable difference between shorts work and a feature: “What you realise is that when you’re doing a short film or a commer- cial, you and the director are so into the story or project. It’s your world, you’re the masters and (hopefully) totally in control.
“On a feature film you quickly begin to realise there’s a much bigger family involved. Now you are all in the service of the actors.
“You have to do everything to accommodate them throughout the long shooting schedule by not letting your lighting, camera plans and speed get in the way of their perform- ances.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
The Virgin Of Liverpool and Procter were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
JAKOB IHRE BSC
“On a feature film you quickly begin to realise that there’s a much bigger family involved. Now you are all in the service of the actors.”
Photos from top: Jakob Ihre on location, 5,000 metres up in the Himalayas, shooting a commercial; A scene from the award winning short Procter
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