Page 22 - Fujifilm Exposure_9 Love's Labour's Lost_ok

behind the camera
MAKING LIGHT WORK
MAKING LIGHT WORK
A s a child of about eight, Jake Polonsky remembers begging his father to take him to see Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey which had been cunningly re-released in the immediate wake of that other, rather more accessible, effects-laden inter-
galactic feast, Star Wars.
Predictably, he and his sister were “bored
senseless” and had to sit outside in the foyer of their local cinema for more than two hours because Polonsky senior refused to leave the screening. “About seven years later, I watched the film again,” smiles Jake, “and found it was one of the most incredible things I’d seen in my life. And when I got a chance to see it properly on 70mm during my time at the American Film Institute, it hadn’t appeared to date at all. It was still state-of-the-art.”
You could say it was just a question of “edu- cation.” Which is something London-born Polonsky junior knows all about during his rise and rise to become one of Britain’s most promis- ing young cameramen. As well as a succession of shorts and music videos, he has lit the new mod- ern-dress version of An Ideal Husband and then most recently operated in India on Merchant- Ivory’s latest feature, Cotton Mary.
But those latterday rewards have arrived firm- ly on the back of a long and clearly profitable Anglo-American film education which, punctuated by a traditional History and English degree at Oxford, was garnered either side of the pond.
First there was a foundation course at Central St Martins where he specialised in film, photogra- phy and video then after Oxford - “a bit of a side- ways move but I’m glad I did it” - a place at the AFI in Los Angeles, boosted by a Fulbright scholar- ship, to study cinematography.
“It was really a brilliant school. People some- how assume that if you go to film school in LA that it must have a very commercial and crass approach. But actually all they’re really con- cerned about is making sure you understand how to tell a story - something that’s often over- looked in other film schools.
“At the AFI you concentrate specifically on the area you are there for, which meant we had top people coming in like Conrad Hall and Vilmos
An interview with Jake Polonsky
Zsigmond. But apart from the technical training with your own class, they also had a very good philosophy of trying to get everybody together to talk about the work generally.
“In the first year, they insist you shoot every- thing on video. Now for some people that might seem a big turn-off. But in fact it meant you could shoot and edit a half hour film in about ten days. The point was that you wouldn’t get sidetracked by all the technical complications or get too fes- tishistic about the visual side. There were good lighting stores which supported all the produc- tions to a very high level. The result was they could make in all about 76 films a year. On the other hand, you weren’t going to finish that first year with a showreel; that wasn’t what you were there for. It was all about working and learning.
“At that point they’d select just eight projects for the second year and you would become attached to those. To stay on meant paying $13,000 for the privilege and there’d be no teach- ing either. Right at the begin-
ning of the course we were
warned not to get depressed if
we didn’t end up being select-
ed.” The students were told
about “a Polish guy who’d
come to the school and
became incredibly depressed
after failing to make the sec-
ond year; he thought he’d
probably end up on cable TV
in Minnesota.” That “Polish
guy” was Janusz Kaminski
who recently won his second
Oscar in five years, for Saving
Private Ryan.
At 23 and back home in the
UK, Polonsky now applied to film school at the Royal College Of Art: “There was stuff I still wanted to learn and the RCA sounded an interesting college. though it’s not so high-profile about its graduates. For me, it was really no big disaster not staying over in LA. In fact coming back to the UK was the best thing I could have done. This might be regarded as the long haul but at least if I did it all in one go there was no way in the future I could ever think back and say I should have done this or that course.
“It was also a very different situation from the AFI where we had 28 in the class. In my time at the RCA we had just three and were taught by two people, Ivan Strasburg and Paul Wheeler. It was just brilliant. We were guaranteed to shoot a lot and in fact there were always twice as many pro- jects as there were DPs. We all got to shoot two First Year films and two Second Year films plus any number of other things going on during the course. Also we shot predominantly on film.”
While at the RCA he won an Arriflex Award in the Fuji Scholarships (for The Strowger Switch) and also the Freddie Young Award, on behalf of the British Society Of Cinematographers. That came during his second year along with work on a pair of acclaimed graduation films, The Architect, about Albert Speer, and Radio, set in Thirties’ Portugal, which more importantly marked the first time he’d worked properly with actors.
The BSC scholarship not only provided cash to help him complete the course but also eventu-
Photos top: Greta Schacchi and three ladies in Cotton Mary; above: director of Cotton Mary, Ismail Merchant
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