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behind the camera
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An interview with Mike Valentine BSC
It’s funny who you happen to meet underwater. It might be Ewan McGregor after he’s plunged down a lavatory bowl in Trainspotting. Or else Pierce Brosnan, neither shaken nor stirred despite some outra- geously watery stunts in his latest 007 adventure, Die Another Day.
Then there was, for the unflap- pable Mike Valentine BSC, doyen of underwater cameramen, another mem- orably close subterranean encounter this time with Nicole Kidman on The Hours, director Stephen Daldry’s fol- low-up to his hit Billy Elliot.
It began at a Savoy Hotel meeting with Daldry and larger-than-life Hollywood producer Scott Rudin telling Valentine: “Look, we’ve story- boarded this sequence. We don’t know how to shoot it, and we don’t think it’s going to work.”
Welsh-born Valentine, 48, veteran of more than fifty features not to mention commercials, music videos (including one for, you’ve guessed it, Wet Wet Wet) and a number of his own acclaimed independently-produced documen- taries, wasn’t even remotely fazed.
Cut to Action Underwater Studios on an industrial estate off the M25 near Enfield. Valentine explained: “Because I’d worked with Nicole (here playing drowned novelist Virginia Woolf) before on The Peacemaker and
Birthday Girl she knew me. She was a bit nervous working in the water but I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’
“She had to hold her breath with her head stuck inside a tree root and her hair all tangled in it too. We also added Fuller’s Earth to the water so you literally couldn’t see more than three feet. As she held her breath, trapped in this very confined space, I slowly tracked the camera into her face in a 15-second move.
“At first, you see nothing, but then it’s like a painting revealing the layers and finally, there’s Nicole dead under- water. I stayed underwater readjusting the camera when she got out. They told her, ‘That’s it, you don’t have to do it again.’ I said, ‘Let’s do one more,’ and she told them, ‘Mike’s really got me going. I’m doing another one...’ And so we got another take out of her.
“That in a way personified every- thing we’re trying to do: to present an actor in an incredibly difficult and dangerous situation and yet get them to look as natural as possible so the audience really will believe that char- acter is there without questioning all the possible problems actually associ- ated with getting a great shot.” And, as Valentine, hardly needed to add, always safety first.
As if his glittering career since the mid-80s as a specialist cinematograph- er wasn’t already fascinating enough,
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Photo: Jackie Chan and Mike Valentine