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behind the camera
YOUR FLEXIBLE FRIEND
YOUR FLEXIBLE FRIEND
F unny business shooting movies. One moment you’re on the Isle Of Man filming scenes for a sci-fi shocker (Deadly Instincts) that’s meant to be set on an American college campus, the next you’re in South Africa trying to create some magic for a fantasy (The Fairy King Of Ar)
actually located on the Isle Of Man.
Just to complete a deliciously illogical hat-trick
of illusion, there you suddenly are with Hollywood actors like Martin Sheen, Corbin Bernsen
and Christopher Atkins making a shoot-
’em-up horse opera (Guns Of Honor) in a
specially constructed frontier town north of Johannesburg that’s doubling for the Old American West.
Well-travelled veteran cinematogra- pher Peter Thornton - from Yorkshire stock but based these past 18 years in deepest South Wales - has been there, done that lot and probably has the tee- shirts too to prove it.
Thornton, 52, who describes himself disarmingly (though evidence quite clear- ly proves to be to the contrary) as “a jack of all trades, master of none,” is also rather a dab hand at odd statistics. Like the time he was filming a lifestyles of the rich-and-famous-style TV series around Europe called Nothing But The Best. He drove 8000 miles in five weeks and loaded 364 rolls of film.
Years later, as DP on the HTV Wales/Channel 5 television cop series Mind To Kill, and using his own 16mm Aaton, he reckons he was shooting around four hours of screen time every seven weeks which totalled something like 48 hours of footage going through his trusty camera. Thornton has, even as you read this, just begun to work on a new series, once again starring Philip Madoc as dogged Detective Noel Bain.
An interview with Peter Thornton
And finally, as they say, to conclude this logisti- cal introduction, Thornton pointed to a particular month last year which perhaps perfectly demon- strated just how flexible your camera craftsman must be these multi-format days. During that comparative- ly short period, he shot on everything from a DV miniature digital camera to 16mm and 35mm film, via widescreen DigiBeta and Beta SP.
Starting out in the mid-60s on a three year course at the Bournemouth Film School, Thornton
tor, but I was very happy and quite at ease, still am in fact, participating in someone else’s vision. At Bournemouth I always tended to do the camerawork for other people’s projects. It was only when I left there I realised how close to reality the course had actually been.”
From there, Thornton got a job at the rather grandly-titled West Of England Film Studios in Bristol, in reality, a small independent production company making 35mm cinema commercials, TV ads and
16mm industrial documentaries. Equipped with everything from decent projection facilities and a little theatre to cutting rooms and an old rostrum cam- era, it proved an invaluable training ground where employees mucked in on every aspect of film-making, including set-building.
When the work eventually dried up, Thornton quit to become a freelance camera assistant until HTV in Bristol offered him what would turn out to be a six-month stint as a clapper-loader on a sprawling historical TV series, Arthur Of The Britons. A staff position in the cam- era department followed at a time when the company were expanding ambitious- ly in the field of international network drama.
A typical example, which also sig- nalled Thornton’s own big break as an operator, was The Curse Of King
Tutankhamun’s Tomb, a project almost as jinxed as the original expedition in the 20s. First off, the pro- duction had its equipment confiscated in Cairo so the whole unit had to sit for four days in Luxor twiddling its thumbs. Then the star of the show, Ian McShane, went and broke his leg and had to be flown home to the UK. Another delay while the unit awaited his replacement, Robin Ellis. The interiors for the TV movie were being shot in an RAF hangar near Bath
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knew even then that his principal interest lay in cine- matography. The practical side of the course was supervised by a man called Reg Johnson who had apparently worked with Hitchcock.
“He was steeped in the industry and because he was then knocking on a bit decided to go into teach- ing. The equipment was quite sparse and we had to improvise a lot with what little we had. I have never been very good at ideas, I would never make a direc-
Photo: Peter Thornton shooting, Channel 4’s political documentary series Divided Kingdom, in Scotland