Page 24 - Fujifilm Exposure_9 Love's Labour's Lost_ok

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more a matter of logistics than art. Of the key people on the film, I was probably the youngest and it was a big leap of faith for them to invest in me.”
Then, more unemployment dotted with the odd job for old friends, including a couple of shorts. Grandpa, at four min- utes, “had to have a very specif- ic look. There was no dialogue so it had to be carried by what you saw. Having come off shoot- ing consecutively for thirty days, you’ve suddenly got this huge amount of information. We knew what we wanted and there was no-one looking over your shoulder.” Then there was the
15-minute Wonderful World, with some decidedly bizarre subject matter and using music by a band called Tin Star. “With these two films,” says Polonsky, “I at last felt there was a sort of step for- ward. I think this work is more interesting and better than just ‘fine.’”
Having operated on all his films to that date, it was not so much the actual role as the scale and location of the job itself that must have seemed awesome when he was signed up by director Ismail Merchant for Cotton Mary. The story of two Anglo-Indian sisters and their tangled relation- ships with a British family, it’s set in post-colonial India of the 1950s and co-stars James Wilby, Madhur Jaffrey, Sakina Jaffrey and Greta Scacchi.
He would, he learned, be working with veter- an French cinematographer Pierre Lhomme who, as well as being one of Merchant-Ivory’s most reg- ular collaborators (Maurice, Jefferson In Paris etc), has also lit many other key European films down the years such as Sweet Movie, Camille Claudel and Cyrano De Bergerac.
Already aware of Polonsky’s work (MIP has helped finance Radio), Merchant took him on as camera operator “because the company tends to
be very supportive of new peo- ple and probably just wanted to see what I could do. I sup- pose I’m also still quite good value for money.
“At this stage of my career I certainly would have been very scared of doing something like this as a DP because India’s a very hard place to shoot. But it gave me an invaluable opportu- nity to gain experience, to see someone else’s lighting and get that kind of interaction. It seemed that Pierre wasn’t going to be able to take out his own crew and said he wouldn’t do the film without an operator. He’s not what you call a hands-
off person and is very specific about what he wants. At the very least I was going to do what he said.
“His ability to figure out a scene quickly and perceptively was amazing. In fact it was quite sobering to watch. His instinct is unerring. For me it certainly wasn’t plain sailing. Was he test- ing me? Well, he wasn’t interested in making it easy for me. Why should he? I did my best to ful- fil what he wanted.”
“It was”, Polonsky admits, “a tough experi- ence. I’d been very lucky since leaving college because generally things seem to have gone my way. So in some ways it was also very humbling - which was good, too. I’m still young and naturally can’t know as much as someone who’s done it for 40 years. But then again, I come from a different generation, with its own knowledge and its own background, which also has much to offer includ- ing enormous enthusiasm.
“At the moment, it’s very unclear what the future holds in terms of feature films. Yet I would defy anyone to shoot a really unbelievable film under some of the scheduling conditions that are now becoming almost commonplace - whether you’re 26 or 76.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Cotton Mary, An Ideal Husband, Grandpa and The Strowger Switch along with Maurice, Jefferson In Paris and Cyrano de Bergerac were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
JAKE POLONSKY
Photos top: music video Raincheck; centre: Jake Polonsky (second left) with his regular crew, left to right: grip Gary Smith, gaffer Reuben Garrett, clapper loader Iain Young and focus puller Philip Eason. Above left: Jake Polonsky shooting The Architect at the RCA and above, on location with Cotton Mary in India
EXPOSURE • 24