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TV IN FOCUS
emaking anything that carries Rthe sacred label of ‘cult classic’ can be a perilous path to tread.
However, Florian Hoffmeister,
DP on ITV’s new six-hour miniseries The Prisoner, starring James Caviezel and Sir Ian McKellen, believes that whilst respecting the 1967 original, this new production comfortably stands alone from it.
“I always felt that the 2010 series was meant to be a re-interpretation rather than a reproduction,” he states simply. “It hopefully comes across as something that picks up on the themes, on the settings and on the spirit, but is not a true remake.”
This was Hoffmeister’s first collaboration with director Nick Hurran, and it was perhaps the cinematographer’s work on the BBC drama House Of Saddam, that first alerted producer Trevor Hopkins’ attention to Hoffmeister’s talents capturing desert-driven locations on film.
Whilst Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is incarcerated in a seaside town – Portmeirion in North Wales - backed by impassable mountains, this new The Prisoner, shot in Namibia and South Africa, has endless desert stretching to the horizon acting as the silent guard of the village.
“To sum it up in one line,” muses Hoffmeister, “when Ian McKellen’s Number 2 first turns around to reveal himself to James Caviezel Number 6 he says, ‘see how the sun makes it all glow.’
“I took that as the epitome of my lighting approach. During the day, there’s almost no shadow, and at night it’s always clean and clear. In a sense, that is the terror of the place, because you cannot escape it.”
Hoffmeister references The Shining at this point, unique because it’s “a horror film without darkness”.
He wanted the village to be the same: sinister, acting to repress and manipulate the inhabitants trapped there but without the stereotypical horror-genre references of darkness or fog. “
“In the village I’d work with very hard light, sunlight, and at night I would react to the way the production design was quoting from German Expressionist films, playing with very long shadows.
“You can picture it: Ian McKellen, wearing a hat standing under a streetlight so that the shadow is cast
completely over his face. Those shadows were almost sculpted.”
The production design, with its ‘fearful geometry’ was the brainchild of Michael Pickwoad, whose past credits also includes another cult classic, Withnail & I.
“The design gave it quite a dreamlike setting, so I tried to pick up on that theme in lighting,” explains Hoffmeister. “I played around with a lot of strong colours, reds for instance, to an almost surreal extent.
“The absence of any kind of industrial environment required very clean colours, almost like a 1950s Technicolor-esque look. For the desert we shot everything on the Super-F 64D as I felt it would give it that filmic edge I was looking for, especially because it is such a traditional strong stock with its own attitude, its own texture and relatively high contrast compared to newer stocks.”
Unusually for a television drama, The Prisoner was captured on Super 35mm, using 3-perf Panavision XL cameras and Primo lenses. The Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T was employed by Hoffmeister as a “connecting element” between the traditional look of the F-64D and the modern ETERNA 500T.
“IknewthatIwouldendupona stage in Cape Town,” he explains, “that the last two and a half months I would be sitting in dark rooms all day trying to create sunlight. So I thought the 500T, being the workhorse that it is, would be a good choice.”
Occasionally, hints of an outside world, in the form of Number 6’s memories of New York, ghost into the village’s singularity.
“But all the same it is not clear whether it is fact or imagination. Is the village a real place and New York a dream?” hints Hoffmeister. “I wanted the village to stand out as a clean place, so New York I lit with a cacophony of industrialised sodium vapours, fluorescents, greens, all kinds of dirty mixed colours.”
In terms of framing and composition, all the close-ups on The Prisoner were shot hand-held, with long lenses and wide-angle cranes to capture mood and setting. Hoffmeister’s long-time colleague, camera operator Craig Feather took ‘B’ Camera, whilst Hoffmeister operated ‘A’ Camera himself.
RE-IMAGINING A SIXTIES CULT CLASSIC FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. THE PRISONER RETURNS TO ITV.
“It was quite an eclectic mixture between observation and stylisation,” says Hoffmeister. “With such period design and such expressionistic, colourful lighting, I felt the hand-held would add an edge of authenticity to what might otherwise have felt very conceptual.
“I must also credit Nick Hurran for that,” he admits. “We approached the first scene very openly and shot this mixture of long lenses and hand-held close-ups. At the end he turned around and said, ‘well that’s the style.’ and I was looking at the Panavision camera perched on my shoulder and thinking ‘help, 86 days of handheld 35mm work!’”
Hoisting 8-odd kilos of camera, plus lenses, accessories and Fujifilm
stock around on your shoulder in the Namibian desert however is not without its upsides.
“I absolutely fell in love with Africa,” muses Hoffmeister. “You’re in the desert for three months absolutely overwhelmed by the nature. Plus it was a privilege to work with an actor as legendary as Ian McKellen”. He and James Caviezel have these amazing scenes together; it was a real honour to be there photographing that.”
NATASHA BLOCK
The Prisoner, to air on ITV1, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T 8543, Super-F 64D 8522 and ETERNA 500T 8573
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