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LONDON CALLING
LONDON CALLING
Director Gillies MacKinnon along with DP John de Borman BSC go fourth together on the East End-set drama Pure
At first glance Pure may appear a rather dour drama about heroin abuse in East London. But first glances can be deceptive as the true heart of Gillies MacKinnon’s new film beats within the relationship between drug addict Mel (Molly Parker) and her 10 year old son Paul.
A sensitively told, carefully crafted tale scripted by former journalist Alison Hume, the story was inspired by a newspaper article about a charity that helps the children of addict parents.
MacKinnon has been this way before, of course, with the TV drama Needle in 1990 – written by Jimmy McGovern – and The Grass Arena. But where the emphasis was on the theme of drug use in those films, here it’s on the mother-son relationship. This, above all, informed the visual approach to the film.
“For me this was always an emotion- al film about a mother and a child,” says MacKinnnon, “not a film about heroin. Of course there’s heroin in it, but that element could have been substituted with anything else. If it wasn’t an emo- tional film in its central relationship then there really wasn’t a film as far as I was concerned. That really occupied the complete focus of my mind.”
Collaborating for the fourth time with cinematographer John de Borman BSC, the discussion between the two friends was – by the admis- sion of both – robust, and combined a starkly realistic approach with a style that would not alienate the viewer from characters who might initially seem rather unsympathetic.
“I tried very hard to give Pure a texture and a quality that was very filmic as opposed to being simply downbeat,” de Borman explains. “And in any case I don’t think the film is entirely downbeat, it has humour and pathos. We wanted it to have a very visual quality, so that the audience felt involved. That was important.”
Initially choosing the Fuji 500D Reala stock, de Borman found that the contrast in the grey, flat weather con- ditions he was faced with actually proved to be less effective than with the 500 tungsten stock that he eventu- ally selected.
“We were shooting on very grey days,” he adds, “the sort of condi- tions that you really couldn’t light very much apart from putting reflector boards here or there. Under those conditions the 500D is as contrasty as the tungsten stock. Maybe it just doesn’t suit those weather conditions.
“Gillies emphasised to me that this was a film about people, their faces and, to an extent, their culture and where they come from. He talked about this all the time, and I really took that on board. I also wanted to give it a very urban feel, making sure that we didn’t gloss over the subject matter, to give it a realism without it being too depressing.”
Despite the subject, neither MacKinnon nor de Borman wanted Pure to be as visually bleak as the story would sometimes suggest. “We didn’t want to get into the grim documentary kind of look,” MacKinnon recalls.
“We didn’t want to show all the world as bad and suggest that it’s only going to get worse. We went to the film’s setting in West Ham, and had a really close look at it. And we actually found that if you turned one way you might see one thing but if you turned another it’s actually a feast of colour.
“It’s a very Asian area, there’s a market down there and we kind of fed off of that. When I was recce-ing the market I was reminded of doing a recce in Marrakech for Hideous Kinky actually. It had the same kind of feeling to it. So we decided not only to use that market, with that
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