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SEASIDESPECIAL
CREATING A COASTAL SUMMER LOOK FOR
THE SCOUTING BOOK FOR BOYS
fter “brewing” in his head for almost 17 years, the story of that complex transition from childhood to manhood finally coalesced in writer Jack
Thorne’s head after he read Robbie Williams’ book Somebody Someday in 2002 with its caravan seaside park-set tales.
Eight years on, with a London Film Festival award-winning script by Thorne, The Scouting Book For Boys, directed by Tom Harper, finally opens in the UK.
Set on and around the coast of East Anglia- specifically, Broadland Sands holiday park on the Suffolk/Norfolk border as well as beaches at Holkham and Hunstanton - the film co-stars Thomas Turgoose, Holly Grainger, Rafe Spall, Susan Lynch and Steven Mackintosh.
For his feature debut, Harper re-united with DP Robbie Ryan BSC with whom he’d made his BAFTA nominated short Cubs.
“Robbie was really important for us”, says producer Ivana MacKinnon. “We were lucky because we were going to shoot at least two weeks earlier to try and catch the end of summer.
“But Robbie was still working on Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, so we shifted our shoot back two weeks and prayed that autumn would come late. The two weeks before we shot had torrential downpours every day. And the day we started shooting, the sun came out and it stayed out for our two weeks of exteriors.”
Harper and Ryan worked closely on the look of the film, specifically the way the narrative is told from Turgoose’s point of view. As Harper says: “a lot of that came down to asking: How do we get inside his head and show things from his perspective
without drawing attention to the filmmaking process?”
Although the production was working on a tough budget, it was Harper’s intention that the film looked beautiful. Ryan’s expertise at finding beauty in light refraction and close-up meant Harper could pursue the idea of a magical air to the story without incurring painful costs in production design.
“If you played it as naturalism, it would be a pretty bleak affair, in a grizzly rainy caravan site. It was very important to both Robbie and I that the cinematography lifted the film and took it to a place of beauty,” says Harper.
Being essentially a summer film, Harper wanted to make sure that, although they were shooting into the autumn months, the colours remained vibrant and “hot”. Julian Day, the costume designer referred to the film’s colour palette as “a pack of Refreshers”. Harper loved the notion and filtered it down through the production and art departments and across the cinematography to create a rich landscape on which the story could properly unfold.
Building the cave location was a challenge for the production. It was impossible for the location scouts to find cave environments large enough and effective enough to serve the purpose, but at the same time be accessible and practical enough to accommodate a full crew.
Having recently completed filming on Neil Marshall’s The Descent: Part 2, (which was also shot on Fujifilm) set in a large array of interconnecting caves, constructed at Ealing
Studios, MacKinnon struck upon the idea of using some of the cave walls as backdrop. The production
shipped the large wooden constructions to Great Yarmouth and the cave scenes were shot in a warehouse on a nearby local industrial estate.
Although principal photography was crammed into five short weeks, Harper refused to allow the restrictions of a short shoot curb his ambition, especially in the more difficult sequences such as the caravan-jumping.
“It was technically challenging working out how we were going to do it on the resources we had. It’s quite complicated just in terms of the logistics of getting people on top of caravans, supporting the caravans to make them safe to jump on, the camera equipment needed, the stunt men and women and all of the rest of it.
“But then Robbie and I felt very strongly that the jumping should have the feeling of early morning and be silhouetted against the sun, flaring out the lens. Achieving all of that in the small amount of time where the light is right for those shots – well, it was impossible actually, so we had to come up with a whole range of different plans and different shots we could cheat.
“It was a very difficult process and we had to keep changing our plans, but fortunately it’s all come together – that sequence is really beautiful and just what I wanted to openthefilmwith.” QUENTINFALK
The Scouting Book For Boys, which opens on March 19 was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T 8543, ETERNA 400T 8583, Super F-125T 8532 and Super-F 250D 8562.
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