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THE KING’S SPEECH
“WHAT I WAS ESPECIALLY BLOWN AWAY BY WAS HOW THE VIVID 500T DEALT WITH GRAIN.”
➤ ItwasbacktothepastforDP Danny Cohen BSC who had not that long ago dabbled in some of the same period of The King’s Speech on Stephen Poliakoff’s Hitchcockian, eve-of-war thriller Glorious 39.
Resuming his collaboration here with Tom Hooper, for whom he had shot the 18th Century US Presidential miniseries John Adams and a more contemporary biopic, Longford, Cohen said the director’s brief was “to make it as natural and believable as possible.
He and Hooper used two principal sources as reference for their eventual “look”. First, they pored over the stills of German émigré photographer Bill Brandt who, after moving to England in 1933 began documenting UK society in famous collections like The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938).
“What we took mostly from his stuff,” says Cohen, “was framing. I’m a big fan of wide lenses and Tom especially likes wide lenses very close to people’s faces. We also looked at the BBC documentary, The Thirties In Colour {a four-part series, which drew from official archive and also private collection footage]. You tend always to have lots of ideas and references, which are then thrown into the magimix; in the end it can be quite random what makes you do certain things.”
The film, co-starring Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth (the future Queen Mother), Derek Jacobi, Guy Pearce, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon and Jennifer Ehle, was shot over seven weeks in and around London.
For Hooper, it was an added pleasure to be filming on most occasions so close to home. “It’s seven years since the last time. I have recreated London in Lithuania, in Richmond, Virginia and even in Budapest; it’s quite nice sometimes to recreate London in London.”
For Geoffrey Rush, London was another character in the film. “Most of the film happens inside rooms, behind closed doors. The storyline happens mostly through the winter. Tom really wanted authenticity and he got really intrigued when he read about ‘peasouper’ fogs.
“TheoneanecdoteTomheard from his 90-year-old neighbour was that sometimes the fog would be so thick in the Thirties that if you were in a taxi, you’d have to get out and walk in front to show the driver the way because he’d only have two metres of visibility.
“Tom has really gone for that kind of atmosphere at times. He wanted some exteriors shrouded in a kind of gloom that is a metaphor for what is hanging over Bertie’s life.”
Apart from the interior of Logue’s apartment which was a set at Elstree Studios, the rest of the film was shot on a wide variety of locations, including a couple some distance from London.
For instance, shooting the opening sequence at Wembley Stadium, the filmmakers cunningly combined a big, old stand at Elland Road, the home of Leeds United, with the pitch at Bradford Bulls rugby league ground, Odsal Stadium.
“Challenges? Every single one of them,” said Cohen, who since The King’s Speech shot Shane Meadows’ This Is England ’86, Dominic Savage’s Dive and is currently working on Johnny English Reborn.
“The main problem was we were shooting in winter and would always be struggling for light at the end of the day.
“One of our biggest locations was in Portland Place, in a big Georgian house diagonally opposite the BBC. We used it for Logue’s consulting rooms and also for Bertie and Elizabeth’s house in Piccadilly before they became King and Queen.
“It had a skylight so we put a scaffold rig above the ceiling so we could play day or night. We put up a big blackout tent and then inside that we had white sheets, putting light on to the sheets to create
day and then on top of that had hard light coming in through
the skylight.”
Lancaster House, once part of the St James’ Palace complex, doubled for Buckingham Palace. “We had only a day there. It was a huge building with windows that matched the Palace but there was also scaffolding down the side for some renovations taking place.
“ So we had to come up with a little ruse which worked in the sense that we didn’t have to use big cherrypickers. Instead, we bought about 300 metres of Egyptian cotton to hang in front of the windows so wecouldlightthroughtheminorder to blow the windows out so you couldn’t see the scaffolding.”
Ely Cathedral, an experienced royal stand-in, used previously in, among others, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and The Other Boleyn Girl,
was used for some key Westminster Abbey scenes, while another currently popular location, Battersea Power Station, provided a
suitably authentic looking BBC Control Room carefully fashioned from an existing period interior.
“It’s always,” notes Cohen, “about trying to maintain a balance between making it look good and makingitlookreal.” QUENTINFALK
The King’s Speech, opening in the UK on January 7, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 500T 8547 and ETERNA Vivid 160T 8543
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