Page 4 - Fujifilm Exposure_22 Le Divorce_ok

behind the camera
BLACK & WHITE
BLACK & WHITE
IN COLOUR
IN COLOUR
An interview with Haris Zambarloukos
You do what you want,” director Paul Sarossy briefed his young cine- matographer before start of shooting, “but make it dark – and make my wife look beautiful.”
With that, Cyprus-born Haris Zambarloukos, 32, embarked on just his second feature, Mr In-Between, a very gritty and often extremely grisly gangster thriller set on and sometimes below the streets of London.
Making pretty Irish actress Geraldine O’Rawe – who was co-star- ring in the film with Andrew Howard, Andrew Tiernan, Saeed Jaffrey and David Calder, as a deeply unpleasant villain known as The Tattooed Man – look good was, Zambarloukos recalled, the “easy” part.
The real challenge was matching the mostly unspoken expectations of his debutant director better known as one of the world’s leading cameramen in his own right. Genie award-winning Sarossy has lit most of Atom Egoyan’s major credits like The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica and Felicia’s Journey as well as Hollywood films such as Affliction and Duets.
Zambarloukos, a graduate of
St Martin’s School Of Art and The American Film Institute, was, on his own admission, astonished even to get the assignment.
He’d first met Sarossy at the prestigious CameraImage event in Lodz, Poland where the Canadian was on the jury and Zambarloukos’ own first film as DP – the noirish- thriller Camera Obscura, shot fresh out of the AFI where he’d earned a Master of Fine Arts – was showing out of competition.
“About a month after we’d both got back to England, Paul called me and said he’d got a movie as a direc- tor and ‘why didn’t I come in and have a chat about it?’ We talked, I read the script and thought there’s no way I was going to get such a great gig. I also knew various other people who were up for it.
“So Paul rings again and says, ‘We start in three weeks time, you better start doing prep. I have to admit I was quite wary of going into a thing with a cinematographer whose work I loved. In fact, he made it so easy for me and was a true col- laborator with everyone on the film. Although it was his first feature as a director he’d had so much experi- ence on some 50 films working with other directors like Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich, Norman Jewison and, of course, Atom Egoyan.
“I think we laughed and joked all the way through the production. For such a dark film, you’d have thought we were actually doing a Disney comedy.”
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EXPOSURE • 2 & 3