Page 21 - Fujifilm Exposure_3 Michael Winner_ok

Photos: Daniel Benzali and John Hurt in All The Little Animals - Scene from Scandal - A young Mike Molloy with Philippe Mora making MadDogMorgan-JohnHurtinTheHit - DennisHopperonhishorseasMadDogMorgan-AlanBatesandSusannahYorkin TheShout- apensiveMikeMolloysettingupthenextshotand(insetintext),JohnHurtandChristianBaleinAllTheLittleAnimals.
MOLLOY
MOLLOY
continued from previous page
this was a time when there were just two good photographers in the city and they both had an assistant. The break, if you can call sweeping floors that, came with a job at Cinesound, one of the country’s two rival newsreel companies (the other was Movietone). Molloy soon handed in his broom in exchange for the special effects depart- ment, then the editing room and finally the field as a fully-fledged cameraman.
A wonderful grounding, Molloy admits, which persuaded him at 27 to take an early plunge into the freelance life with commercials but always a strong desire to work eventually in feature films. Moving to London,
he had the great good
fortune while making
commercials to work
with Nicolas Roeg
who told him that he
was going to make a
film, “all about this
young rock ‘n’ roll
musician who’s
locked up in a house.
Would you like to be
the camera opera-
tor?”
Performance, of course, Nic Roeg’s infamous co-directing debut with James Fox, Mick Jagger and a lot of sex and violence.
That was fol-
lowed by Walkabout,
again with Roeg but
directing solo this
time, back in Molloy’s
native Oz, deep in the
landscape and life of
the outback for the eerily memorable tale of two children abandoned to their fate. Memories of that assignment came flooding back when, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, when he returned last year to light the splendidly named black comedy thriller, Welcome To Woop-Woop, for director Stephan (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert) Elliott.
In usual fashion, now with Woop-Woop and before that in Vancouver with Bliss (which starred Terence Stamp, Craig Sheffer and Sheryl Lee) - not to mention the late 80s box-office hit Scandal, directed in England by Michael Caton-Jones as well as all his recent commercials - Molloy is
shooting once again on Fujifilm.
Co-starring Christian Bale, John Hurt and
Daniel Benzali, All The Little Animals, scripted from Walker Hamilton’s novel by Thomas’s wife Eski, is a contemporary thriller with a distinctly New Age edge about a deeply troubled young man’s redemption and revenge in the depth of some stunningly beautiful English countryside.
Despite a surfeit of rain, Molloy is clearly rel- ishing the remote rural setting and its lighting pos- sibilities which he believes are perfectly comple- mented by Fuji’s flexibility: “It’s got very good lati- tude and great saturation. On this film we’re deal-
ing with a lot of greens and blue and interiors. The stock has wonderful blacks andsoitgivesmea richer look that I really want here.”
Such control and authority - plus an obvious pleasure that his old producer seems to be “taking to directing like a duck to water” - it must seem a long time from one of Molloy’s more frustrat- ing earlier assign- ments, as John Alcott’s operator on Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
“By the time we were about halfway into the film, Kubrick was doing almost all the operating him- self. Most of the time
I’d be more like Alcott’s batman, just booking restaurants for the crew and ringing the lab for daily reports.
“We had, however, this specially modified Mitchell camera to do the candlelight scenes - it was all literally lit by candles - and it had this very old-fashioned viewfinder and sidefinder which Kubrick simply couldn’t operate. “So,” he smiles in fond memory, “from time to time, I’d find myself being dragged out of the van with the ever familiar cry, ‘We’re doing some candlelight stuff in five min- utes. Molloy, you’re on!’” ■ QUENTIN FALK
All The Little Animals, Welcome To