Page 29 - Fujifilm Exposure_35 Miss Potter_ok

I
tv production
Through
The Eyes Of
A Child
Exploring the pain of divorce in
Little Devil, a new drama from ITV
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 27
t’s that old devil called love in this latest collaboration between director David Richards and DP Andrew Speller. A year ago they were involved in bringing Perfect Day, a comedy-drama about
the trials and tribulations of marriage to the screen.
This time around it’s divorce, which occupies their thoughts, as two couples who consider themselves best friends, count the cost when friend- ship turns to something more for two in their number.
Starring Robson Green, Maggie O’Neill, James Wilby and Emily Joyce, the story is frequently seen through the eyes of the 10- year-old son of one family. This, it turns out, proved a turning point in the design, planning and narrative of the piece.
“Whenever a marriage breaks down kids involved tend to blame themselves,” says Richards. “So here we have a little boy who thinks it’s his fault initially, then realises it isn’t. And in his 10-year-old way he starts trying to do things to bring his mum and dad
back together. It’s a serious subject but it’s treated, I hope, in a fairly light way. It’s not an ‘angsty’ film.”
“Early on when we were prepping the piece,” Speller continues, “David and I talked about wanting to make it distinctive when we were looking at the world through children’s eyes. We felt it should be visually different and rather than go for some very obvious pictorial slant, like changing colour or changing stocks, we decided that we’d shoot their world and their view of things on wide angle lenses in quite close.
“This is quite a departure for David and certainly for myself, shooting on lenses like a 21 or even an 18, in really close on the child. You’d find that with the camera 18 inches from his face but on a wide lens you were really drawn as if into his thoughts. Otherwise, when we were out in more naturalistic scenes with the adults, they were shot as we would shoot anything.”
Taking his cue from DPs like Conrad Hall and Roger Deakins,
in movies like American Beauty and Intolerable Cruelty, Speller also cites Eduardo Serra’s work on
continued over Photo: Robson Green, Joseph Friend and Maggie O’Neill on the set of Little Devil