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EXPOSURE • 4 & 5
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Mr In-Between, which has since gone on to trawl in festival awards from Tokyo to Cognac via San José and Karlovy Vary, was shot mostly in East London, including a hall borrowed from the Territorial Army, as well as points further north east in the capital including Harlesden and Willesden. There was also a key climactic scene filmed on the infamous Beachy Head clifftop.
“We managed to get into each other’s head,” explained Zambarloukos, “about what to do and how to do it, and the shoot was the execution of those ideas. Not that it was an easy shoot. Schedule and ambition are often two conflicting forces. We had a lot of ambition, very tight schedule and even less of a budget than I’d had on my first film.
“But as also happened with Camera Obscura, we got fantastic industry support for the film. Originally we were going to do it on 16mm but everyone rallied round – people like Fuji, Panavision, Deluxe and Lee Lighting – to make it work for us on 35mm. I’m sometimes quite shocked about how much the ven- dors help filmmakers... much more so than any studio.”
The Fuji connection began many years earlier after Zambarloukos had enrolled at the
St Martin’s School Of Art. With aspirations to become a painter, he’d signed up for the Foundation course during which “I got to try film. I saw two movies – The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Bunuel’s L’Age D’Or – which, for me, changed everything. Then we made a Super8 film and I was sold on it lock, stock and barrel.
During his subsequent three year film course, during which he finally determined on a cinemato- graphic path, “I basically lit most of the directors’ films there. Probably the best production I did was The Docket Box, directed by Debbie Emmins, which featured strongly in the 1993 Fuji Scholarship Awards.
“We shot it at Shepperton on a sound stage, I had to order lights and equipment, work with a set, and to a proper schedule and budget – not so experimental as I was used to. I’m still quite proud of that film today.”
After graduating, he worked on shorts and the odd documentary as well as spending some time back at Shepperton with Panavision under the expert tute- lage of Andy Cooper and Adrian Waterlow learning more about cameras and lenses.
Then it was off to the States, for having applied to various film schools he was finally accepted by
the AFI on its three-year cine- matography course.
“It was probably the best three years I’ve ever had,” Zambarloukos reflected. “It works like a mini-stu- dio system and had a very collabo- rative environment. The first year was as intense as it gets: you’d shoot four days a week and study for three with just the odd week- end off every few months.
“You’d do three short films in that year then a Master thesis film in the last. For that there was a tough selection process and I man- aged to team up with a director, Anne Madden, whose script got through. We made a film called First Daughter which then went on to win lots of prizes.”
At the AFI he made another firm friend in fellow filmmaker, writer-director Hamlet Sarkissian who just happened to be writing teacher, and industry veteran, Leslie Stevens’s favourite pupil.
With the invaluable backing, which also included some financial help, of Stevens, and the important moral support of Zambarloukos’ own favourite DP, Oscar-winning Conrad Hall – for whom he worked as an intern - Camera Obscura eventually got into production as part of Panavision’s First Filmmaker programme.
Zambarloukos didn’t use Fujifilm for Camera Obscura but when it
came to shooting Mr In-Between, it was the perfect option as far as he was concerned.
“We tested different brands and stocks but what really got me was the 500 Tungsten – it’s basically your workhorse of a stock. We had exterior daylight as well for which I used the 250D. I usually end up de- saturating and darkening things as much as I can and as I’d done with Camera Obscura, this film would also go though a bleach bypass.
“We had a lot of the darkness in the film and what I got with the 500T, and what I particularly loved about it, was the way it dug into the shadow area which I kind of needed for the bleach bypass process. And yet I never lost contrast. I still got those black blacks but also a very faithful colour reproduction.
“Paul [Sarossy] really pushed me as he’d loved the guts of Camera Obscura. I wasn’t, for example, afraid of just filling a room full of smoke and using a maglight as I’d done before.
I was using as much architectur- al and environmental light as possible then augmenting it with film lighting.
“I usually worked at that point to a very low f-stop. Paul is a deep focus fan and I thought, ‘what an
HARIS ZAMBARLOUKOS
Photos main: Haris Zambarloukos behind the camera (photos, main and previous page, by Larry Gus);
top right and above left: on location at Beachy Head; above: Nicole Russo; right: Andrew Howard in Mr In-Between