Page 4 - Fujifilm Exposure_5 The Wings Of The Dove_ok

behind the camera
ON WINGS OF FIRE An interview with Eduardo Serra AFC
W inner of this year’s British Film Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Eduardo Serra recalls his ‘brief’ for The Wings Of The Dove like this: “London would be technological while Venice was oriental gypsy.” Given the slight language barrier for this distin- guished Portuguese cameraman, it was still a typi-
cally pithy dissec- tion of the assign- ment at hand.
And consider-
ing the net result
was not just a
BAFTA Award at
the recent 50th cer-
emony in London
but also a coveted
Hollywood Oscar
nomination for his
exceptional work,
it’s clear that this
was another job
very well done and most stylishly dusted.
Iain Softley, director of this acclaimed adapta- tion of Henry James’ romantic novella, explained the background behind Serra’s brief: “I decided to move the time setting of the story from its 1902 publication date to 1910, to the very peak of turn- of-the-century change and chaos. It places the story much more specifically at the beginning of modern times. Visually, 1910 was completely dif- ferent from a decade ago. Electricity was more prevalent, the London Underground had just been built and fashion was changing dramatically.”
As for Venice, Softley wanted to portray the place in 1910 as “akin to Marrakech in the 1960s, a sensual city people visited to find themselves. Venice at the turn of the century was on the extreme of European culture. It was multi-ethnic with a lot of Arab, African and gypsy influence, which Mussolini later tried to erase.” Hence that contrastof “technological”and“orientalgypsy.”
Softley worked closely with Serra, 54, to cap- ture the ineffable nature of Venice at night. Serra in turn drew on the paintings of Venetian artist Ettore Tito for some of his, and the art depart- ment’s, inspiration. The director might have been talking about his cinematographer when he said of Tito: “He worked with bold, bright colours that emphasised the innate romanticism of the city and the atmosphere of a lost era.”
The works of Ettore Tito were, of course, already well known to Serra who years earlier studied for a degree in art his- tory at the Sorbonne. He’d settled on the university art course when he found his way into movies tem- porarily blocked after leaving Vaugirard, the more technical of Paris’s two well known
film schools. His classmates included cameraman Philippe Rousselot and editor Noelle Boisson who’d also both end up later as Oscar nominees.
When Serra’s break eventually came, as sec- ond assistant to Pierre Lhomme, there was no stopping him and he reeled off more than 35 movies, focus-pulling for the likes of Jean Boffety, Jean-Francois Robin, Claude Agostini and Bernard Zitzerman. Finally, after bypassing altogether the position of camera operator, Serra became a fully- fledged DP in 1980 on a 16mm feature, A Vendre.
Since then he has worked all over the world. Map Of The Human Heart, set in the Arctic, Montreal and Dresden, earned him a Best Cinematography award from the Australian Film Critics, The King’s Trail scooped a special jury award, and in his adopted France (where Serra became a citizen in 1971) there was a Cesar nomi- nation for The Hairdresser’s Husband, one of, to date, four films he has lit for Patrice Leconte.
At present he’s in Brittany
working on Trompe L’Oeil, a typically dark-hued drama directed by Claude Chabrol.
Serra also retains rather a soft spot for an early film he made in his native Portugal. Called No Trace Of Sin (1982) and set in Lisbon during the 1940s, it features camera work of which he’s still inordinately proud and which he describes as containing his now familiar trademarks. There’s strong light from windows, shades of grey and black and a sequence near the beginning which features many whirling crane shots travelling spectacularly through 360 degrees.
He’s always been keen to keep a sense of vari- ety about his work. That probably explains a recent series of rather intriguing English-language credits like Peter Chelsom’s Funny Bones and Michael Winterbottom’s Jude, which predated The Wings Of The Dove in its desire to present classic characters in a more contemporary light.
EXPOSURE • 4 & 5