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THECORRIDORSOFPOWER
COMPLETING THE BLAIR TRILOGY WITH THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
fter recently shooting the Iraq Afrontline, as it were, on
Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed The Hurt Locker and Paul Greengrass’s latest The Green
Zone - both also originated on Fujifilm - Barry Ackroyd BSC has just returned to another piece of real-life history, which preceded that particular conflict.
The Special Relationship, a co- production between HBO Films and BBC Films, examines the unique and sometimes turbulent political relationship between newly-installed British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and US President Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid).
For Sheen, who recently portrayed David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Brian Clough in The Damned United - both written by Peter Morgan - it’s the versatile actor’s third outing as Blair in the final part of a trilogy following The Deal and The Queen, which were also penned by the prolific Morgan.
In fact, it seems Morgan was also going to make his directing debut this time round but eventually he moved aside to carry on with other writing chores.
So Richard Loncraine stepped into the breach having already
directed another, earlier, award winning HBO/BBC production, The Gathering Storm, and “this,” says Ackroyd, linking up for ther first time with the director, “completely changed the dynamic.
“I’m very much freeform and Richard, coming in very much as the last moment, having to lock everything down and still with some casting to do in a very short time, has a much more formal, more tried-and-tested, technique.
“He was great to work with, though. In the end it was a little bit of what I do and a little bit of what Richard likes to see. The result was, we shot a very interesting film.
“I’d just spent the whole of Spring grading The Green Zone, a very different style of filmmaking. Here was a chance to show I could also do a more clean and precise kind of film, not unlike what I did when I made The Lost Prince with Stephen Poliakoff, a period drama - which The Special Relationship also is in a way.”
Before Ackroyd and Loncraine got down to the nitty gritty of actually shooting the drama, which co-stars Helen McCrory and Hope Davis as Cherie Blair and Hilary Clinton respectively, a solution had
to be found for best embracing the ultimate demands of both the big and small screen.
Says Ackroyd: “ Our brief for HBO was to deliver a cinema version for world wide distribution and a 16:9 version for broadcast in the US.
“Richard and I both wanted to shoot a more cinematic film using wide screen format 1: 2.35. For sake of economy we shot 3 perf super 35mm on ARRI LT cameras. To take a regular 16:9 image usually would mean framing top and bottom of the 3 perf. But that leaves the large widescreen image with absolutely masses of headroom.
“So we decided that we would shrink the 16:9 image from the center of the 2.35, knowing that we could ‘pan and scan’ the smaller image to produce a 16:9 TV image. We were able to do this because the scanning rate for rendering out the negative to HD is at 3k, providing masses of information and ensuring a great broadcast image as well as a 2.35 print for the cinemas.
“I have to thank Philip Lee and his team at Arion Communications for their help in ensuring we could work in this way and produce rushes in both formats without incurring extra expense.”
With much of the action confined to the leaders’ HQs in Washington and London, ‘prep’ mainly consisted of recces round The White House – “not just The Oval office but the corridors too” – as well as numbers 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street.
As for their stand-ins, locations included Langley Park, the Emirates Stadium, Brocket Hall and Loseley Park (for Chequers), and Methodist Central Hall as well as an entire Oval Office, gardens and colonnade constructed at Pinewood Studios.
Covering events ranging from Kosovo to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the film, as with previous Morgan scripts, mixed archive footage with recreated scenes. “Very effectively,” notes Ackroyd, adding that he used “my old regular favourites, ETERNA 250D and ETERNA 500T” for the task. QUENTIN FALK
The Special Relationship, for release in 2010, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 250D 8563 and ETERNA 500T 8573
FEATURE IN FOCUS
Photo top (l-r): Director Richard Loncraine; DP Barry Ackroyd BSC with cap, on the set of The Special Relationship; Michael Sheen as Tony Blair in The Queen FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 27