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THE DP VIEW
DAMIAN BROMLEY
The biggest thing about Reinventing Eddie is taking a film that’s essentially a kitchen sink script and try and make it more filmic and interesting without making it look too deliberate.
In terms of visuals, England is pretty good. The problem is the weather. You shoot half a scene in sunlight and then the wind gets up and you’ve got to do the second half in the rain.
Again, it boils down to the money. If you have the luxury of weather cover and unit moves, so that you can say, ‘Lets shoot inside today,’ you’re OK, but we didn’t have it on either Reinventing Eddie or Going Off Big Time.
It makes it difficult. Some days we were so stuffed by the rain that at the end of the day I was shooting close- ups at night to match day-time shots.
There was a scene in the interior of a car and another outside a house where I had to do this. I’d prefer not to, but it’s not a major problem. To, some extent, I only had myself to blame because on Going Off Big Time we mocked up a daytime scene at night and it went well. So this time they said, ‘Oh, Damian can light it for day.’
There was a scene where guys were unloading a jukebox from a van into a pub and we had to re-shoot part of it at night. We backed the van up against the door and had one of the guys stand there. We fitted polythene and big trace film all round and blast- ed light at it, and it looked like day.
With things like this you have to go by other people’s reactions. But it wasn’t a surprise to me, I trust my eyes to a large extent. If it looks good when you are standing there, the chances are it will look good on film. I have always tended to do stuff judged by eye and trust that a lot in terms of lighting. ■
in production
THWEST
THWEST
esting comparison.”
This you are prepared to believe
after watching Doyle in gumboots and duffle coat filming blue-overalled John
Lynch and John Thomson in the cabin of a truck being towed by the camera trailer around a bleak industrial estate at West Bank Dock, Widnes.
Bromley takes up the original point: “We do have a pre-knowledge of this area which helps. You could spend a year scouting around England for what you want.”
The DP was aware that one of the things that Jim Doyle was keen to do was to make the story more expansive.
“That is more of a story thing, but it also means the locations are really important,” he says. “You can never be sure about them. It’s a bit like house-
buying: it’s only when you move in you find the prob- lems. You’re not going to have a great looking film if you end up somewhere crap, no matter how you light it.
“We did a fair amount of location scouting, but we felt we should have done more but in the end it’s down to money and time.
There’s only so much you can do.” Also shaping the look of the film
is the fact they chose to shoot in January and February which fits the
mood of the story (“though that’s not to say it’s dark and sinister,” assures Bromley), but obviously pre- sented practical difficulties.
“I think one thing the weather does is force you
to be a little bit clever,” opines Doyle. “Quite often we came up with something better
than we would have done in clear weather. The main thing you want with the weather is consistency. It’s when it changes its mind hour by hour that you get frustrated.”
The weather also influenced their choice of film stock. “I’d not worked with Fuji on a feature before,” says Bromley, “but on this we thought we would take a chance with the F500. Given the kind of weather and other things, it’s nice to have fast and flexible stock that can cover us for all situations.
“All in all, it was a surprisingly unproblematic shoot. Jim and I are quite a tight team now and know how each other is thinking so we don’t have to explain everything.”
Doyle agrees: “You really need that relationship on a feature film. You have got to trust your DP because there are so many other things you have to concentrate on.”
The pair now plan to team up again on another film Doyle is develop- ing with BBG. ■ IAN SOUTAR