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CRIGHTON BONE
“To give it a softer look we went with the Eterna 400T...
It’s really beautiful, not really low contrast, just a little bit softer in the colours with a tiny bit of de-saturation.”
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lesser man might have felt a little miffed to have left New Zealand for England just as Peter Jackson was establishing the Kiwi movie boom. But Crighton Bone takes
such things in his stride, a mature approach that reflects the unconven- tional progression of his career to date.
Born in Wellington, Bone, 37, took a commerce degree at Canterbury University, and it was there that the movie bug bit. “I belonged to the film society and was mad keen,” he explains. “We’d watch 1960s’ French cinema every Tuesday night, also art house films from around the world. I was eager to work in the business, and I knew I wanted to work with the cam- era because I very much enjoyed tak- ing still photographs as well.
“But it took me a few years to start off in that direction. I applied for the film school at that university, but they wouldn’t let me in because I’d done the commerce degree. At the same time I applied to television school and managed to get in there. So I got sidetracked into that, and went straight into shooting tape for the news on TV3 in New Zealand.”
Shooting and then editing his own work, this five-year posting in Christchurch laid the foundation for Bone’s subsequent career. It was in 1997 that he left his home for good and came to the UK.
“I sort of landed on my feet,” he adds. “For the first two years I was here I was just shooting television, including a snowboarding programme called Board Stupid, which was a mix- ture of film and tape.”
There is something of the autodi- dact about Bone, a desire to learn all aspects of the business, whether tak- ing a course on shooting 16mm at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield, or assisting fashion stills photographers to form a greater understanding of lighting. Graduating from freelance documentary work, pop promos, shorts and some second unit work, Bone made it into lighting fea- tures last year.
“I shot a film called Heroes & Villains,” he continues, “for a first time director called Selwyn Roberts. He’s a double BAFTA-winning producer (Shackleton, Longitude), and we got on fantastically well. That was the best thing that happened to me since com- ing here, meeting Selwyn and being chosen to shoot that. It was my first feature, and a really good experience. Selwyn’s pretty well known in the
industry, he’s been bandying my good name around and that’s how I got my next film, I Want Candy.
“Selwyn had recently worked with production manager Emily Stillman on some pick ups for X-Men 3 and he was telling everybody he met about me. He spoke to her, she got my reel and I met the director Steve Surjik and we had a chat. He wanted to shoot all hand- held, and he was concerned that he could get someone who could meet the schedule of shooting a 90 minute film in 30 days. It was tough, a TV schedule really. Sometimes we did five pages a day, but we only missed out on two shots in the whole five weeks.”
Shot on 35mm Eterna 400T 8583, I Want Candy tells the comical tale of two film students (Tom Riley, Tom Burke) who invite porn legend Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) to star in their graduation film.
“I’ve been doing a lot recently on low contrast stocks and really liked them,” Bone adds, “so I was looking for something that was going to do something similar. To give it a softer look we went with the Eterna 400T in case we do go through the traditional post process. And it’s really beautiful, not really low contrast, just a little bit softer in the colours with a tiny bit of de-saturation. I always wanted to choose one stock as well for the whole film to minimise wastage and keep things straightforward.”
Bone worked on another feature earlier in the year, the Iranian film Half Moon – shot under the title Last Symphony Of The Kurds – which was directed by Bahman Ghobadi, best known for Turtles Can Fly. Taking over from his friend, DP Nigel Black, Bone worked on the last third of a chaotic production.
“That was a quite amazing experi- ence. Because the director doesn’t trust producers, he doesn’t have one. We would travel everywhere in convoy and there would be no call sheets; he was working with non-professional actors and a skeleton crew. It’s an amazing country to shoot in, where everywhere you look it’s already been set dressed.
“We adopted a documentary style, all hand-held 35mm anamorphic, all shot at magic hour. So we’d get three or four shots done and that was it; there’d be too much light or not enough. Then it was time to go home, sleep in the middle of the day or wait for the clouds to come over and make the light soft enough.”
The Antipodean wanderlust that runs deep in Crighton Bone finds
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