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TURNING DARK
TURNING DARK
An interview with Mary Farbrother
W eather conditions in North Yorkshire last summer when they were filming The Darkest Light were such that there was a joke on the set that it really ought to have been called The Darkest Dark. Which perhaps gives some indication of the for- midable task that faced cinematographer Mary
Farbrother on her first feature.
The film, co-directed by Simon Beaufoy and
Bille Eltringham, is the story of an 11-year-old moorland farmer’s daughter who believes she has witnessed a vision which has appeared to cure her brother dying of leukaemia. It was intended to have a bleak and unglossy look, but no one bar- gained for the inhospitable weather.
“It got to the point where we were really pleased when you could see rain on camera because we wanted people to know what suffering was going on,” says Farbrother. She was part of a close-knit team on The Darkest Light, the first fea- ture for Footprint Films, the company formed by Beaufoy, writer of The Full Monty and Among Giants, Eltringham and producer Mark Blaney after meeting up at film school in Bournemouth.
Farbrother first worked with them on a BFI/C4-sponsored short, Yellow. It seems to have been good preparation in demonstrating the perils of the English climate, though in a quite different way. “The film was basically about a hot day in a rape seed field,” explains Farbrother. “We shot it in three days and had to make it look sunny. There was a heat haze bar. It was a nightmare but in some ways the look of the film was shaped by it. That’s the beauty of short films; you come up against a problem that forces you to work some- thing out, often because of lack of resources .”
Before Yellow, the National Film and TV School graduate had been working on music videos and commercial work (and still does), but was keen to get into narrative cinema. “I sent my film school reel round to many companies. People
were surprisingly nice and somebody then recom- mended me to Footprint Films.
“We all have a film school background and share a film school ethic.” Which is what precise- ly? “Well I define it as positive compromise. It’s finding the essence and making something worth- while. It’s looking at the strength of the story rather than striving for a glossy look.”
Farbrother clearly knows what she wants, though has taken a somewhat roundabout route to reach this position. It started at Goldsmith’s College in London with a course which combined film studies and sociology with the emphasis on the theoretical side. She completed four experi-
mental animation films, more visual arts than cin- ema. Deconstructing the narrative was the pre- vailing mood at Goldsmith’s in those days.
She emerged with a First Class degree, but more importantly: “I had discovered the camera,” she says, although not necessarily of the movie variety. She had some success as a photographer that included a commission to do the cover for The Prodigy single, Breathe.
“There’s something really nice about looking at the vinyl and your image on the sleeve or seeing your pictures on billboards as you drive along the A40.” Farbrother’s journey to moving pictures con-
tinued. “After college we started a production company making tape slide projections,” she recalls. “We did one for a travel agency which was quite successful. I persuaded them it needed to be in 35mm, even though it was only a 30-second commercial. It ran in cinemas for about a year and it was really exciting to work and edit in 35mm and see it projected on the big screen.
“That’s when I decided I wanted to be a cine- matographer and not a jack of all trades. I knew I needed some deeper skill. I did manage to get a job as a runner on Hear My Song and the DP on that was Sue Gibson. To me she had the best job
Photo: Keri Arnold as Catherine in The Darkest Light
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