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it’s perhaps all the more remarkable when you consider that before that, from the age of 18, he spent fourteen years as a sound man at the BBC.
It was while he was at the Beeb – after snaring one of 10 posts from more than 1100 applicants – he first took up diving as a hobby.
“I very quickly discovered I want- ed to share this new found world with as many people as possible, so I start- ed to make my own films. Because my ego was quite large I decided to jump over Super8 and go straight to 16mm. I borrowed – well, actually I stole for two weeks – a friend’s camera, one which had, in fact, been used by Cousteau on some of his underwater documentaries.
“Specially made to go inside under- water housing, it had a modified Beaulieu mechanism which could take 200 foot daylight loads, but they were one after the other on a long metal plate inside a long tube. There was no reflex viewfinder and no focus because it had a pre-set wide-angle lens. You just adjusted the aperture and off you went.”
Armed eventually with his six-and- half minute Red Sea-set mini epic, Silent World, Valentine knocked on the door of BBC Acquisitions: ‘They bought it and showed it. Although I was still working as a sound guy, I was effective- ly now also an independent producer.”
There was no stopping him as every minute of holiday and leave was taken up with his increasingly prof- itable sideline. Next up was a 35mm effort called Red Sea Mermaid which, courtesy of a deal struck direct with 20th Century Fox in Soho Square, would accompany the teen hit Porky’s on the its UK rounds in 1981.
By the time he’d completed some ten films which had all got screenings big or small, something had to give: in this case, his job at the BBC where by
the mid-80s he had risen to the dizzy heights of senior technical operator. The catalyst for his long overdue move into the freelance feature film-
making world was an offer he simply couldn’t refuse: to lend his underwa- ter expertise to the screen version of Lucy Irvine’s get-away-from-it-all best- seller, Castaway, which was about to be filmed by Nicolas Roeg.
“When I told my sound manager at the BBC about this chance, he said, ‘Film is dead – and who is Nic Roeg?’ I told him, ‘You may not appear to know much about the film industry but I think you should know what this is... it’s my resignation,’ and I literally walked out.”
Snapped up by Roeg, his DP Harvey Harrison and production supervisor Selwyn Roberts – with whom he was most recently reunited on the Emmy Award-winning Shackleton – it was to prove the idyllic ‘big break’ for Valentine.
“They got me to the Seychelles for almost two months to shoot and direct all the underwater sequences from a script that only contained two lines of description and allowed me to turn that into more than six minutes of screen time. I still can’t believe how lucky I was.”
The ‘lucky’ streak continued when Spielberg then hired him to work on Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and he hasn’t looked back since working,
with his production man- ager wife Francoise along- side, on an astonishing range of major films over the past 15 years.
These include – okay, try and spot the wet stuff – Shakespeare In Love, The Beach, Star Wars – Episode One: The Phantom Menace, Entrapment, Leviathan, a
couple of earlier Bonds, Sexy Beast, The Importance Of Being Earnest, Shanghai Knights and the upcoming Tomb Raider 2 and The Sound Of Thunder. Just to mention a few.
But when it comes to naming the assignment which has, to date, made him proudest he cited instead the rela- tively obscure Europa, a typically idio- syncratic post-World War II mystery, co-written and directed by eccentric Dane, Lars von Trier.
“It was filmed in anamorphic black and white with colour inserts and there were a number of sequences where I had to devise a way of shoot- ing. Like one with Jean-Marc Barre trapped inside a sinking train com- partment. I had to find a way of build- ing a back projection system underwa- ter – with only three hours to work out how to do it.”
No wonder Valentine uses the ‘we’ when he refers to his work. Not in the regal sense, of course, but in terms of sheer team effort.
“As well as Francoise and me, there’s a focus puller and loader. They tend to stay on the surface because these days I use the Arri Lens Control System which means that my focus puller can, from up to 50 metres away, digitally control the focus on a lens, alter the stop, ramp the camera, turn it off and on, check the voltage of the system and check the footage in the magazine. In fact, do everything you’d
normally expect on an Arri 435 ES – but now we can also do it digitally underwater.
“In addition to them, the underwa- ter crew will also include a safety diver for me, in case I get tangled up in cables, not to mention a safety diver for each actor involved in a sequence. There might be a gaffer and special effects people too.”
The most effective ‘we’ also means having the best and latest equipment at your disposal. This year Valentine has spent a cool half a million pounds on equipment.
“There is no housing you can hire off the shelf anywhere in the world that will do physically what our camera sys- tem will do. I actually paid someone to make the housing to my specifications and then heavily modified it.
“Now we can have lens control motors and in the same camera body we can use anamorphic lenses, spheri- cal lenses and Super35. We have an exceptionally high quality on-board dig- ital recording system so that if I’m inside a shipwreck, perhaps 100ft down in the Red Sea, away from our boat and the production people, I can record dig- itally everything we’re doing.
“The communication system we use is one modified from that used by NASA to train their astronauts in the tank at Houston. With things like green screen and lip-sync we can now do underwater anything you can do on land.”
When it comes to the selection of stocks for underwater filming, Valentine said: “I tend to use daylight based ones because shooting under- water is like shooting in a smoke-filled room. It’s a very low-contrast medium, therefore the more filtration you put between the lens and your subject, the worse you’ll be for wear. It’ll look dif- ferent but it doesn’t usually make it anymore contrasty.
Photos (top): Mike Valentine; above: Underwater filming; scenes from various commercials; and shooting 007
EXPOSURE • 4 & 5