Page 23 - Fujifilm Exposure_9 Love's Labour's Lost_ok

ally helped get Polonsky an agent. “Then I spent five months being unemployed. That’s the bit you don’t get prepared for. You tramp about trying to see production companies, targeting things like music videos and commercials. But then the response tends to be, “really love your tape and lighting ... but we need to see some real jobs on it.”
Nine months after completing college, that first “real job” arrived in the shape of An Ideal Husband, marking the rather belated directing
debut of experienced producer Bill Cartlidge. The film, to be shot on Super16 with James Wilby, Jonathan Firth and Sadie Frost not to mention cameos by that pair of social gadflies, Tara Palmer Tomkinson and Tamara Beckwith, had been pri- vately funded by public subscription.
“It was a great experience,” Polonsky recalls. “Whenever you start out, every job tends to be quite stressful. It always seems as if everything’s on the line. At the RCA, Paul Wheeler had said to
me that the difference between things turning out really well once and turning out well all the time was the essential difference between being an amateur and a professional. As a pro, you have to be able to do it every time; it doesn’t matter what the conditions are, you have to deliver. That’s your responsibility.
“In some ways, An Ideal Husband was less challenging photographically than, say, The Architect which stood or fell by the images. Here we were a very dialogue based film in which you had to see the characters. Bill was concerned that it wasn’t just going to be a bit of television. He wanted the camera to move so that it wouldn’t be boring to watch. It was difficult, we had a short schedule and I suppose that it sometimes became
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Photos main: Jake Polonsky with Cotton Mary cinematographer Pierre Lhomme; top right: still from Grandpa; above right: James Wilby and Sadie Frost in An Ideal Husband