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THE LANGUAGE OF HEAVEN
In Wales they can use local crews, and equally importantly crews willing to negotiate deals to avoid the crippling costs of overtime.
Whether making their own films or providing professional expertise for others, the film industry in Wales is growing very quickly. This cannot be denied and, in any language, if ever there was a time, it’s time now for everyone to be optimistic. ■
ones, when he or any other non- Welsh speaker works on a Welsh lan- guage film.
“I’m touching wood here, but I’vecomeacrossveryfewWelsh speaking die-hards who flatly refuse to discuss anything in English on set,” he smiles.
“It’s time consuming because actors are directed a lot of the time in the Welsh language so there’s always that period of time when you’re sitting around waiting for them to finish. And then the director has to go through the whole thing again in English. It lengthens the production day”, he admits.
“For an operator it can create difficulties because in English he can take line cues for telling the grips to start tracking or for the focus puller. On Welsh language films he almost has to learn instant Welsh for the scene and start cam- era moves or whatever on a particu- lar Welsh word. It’s not a big prob- lem though. I’ve worked in France with French crews and it’s no worse than that. You just get used to it.”
Peter Thornton, another Welsh- based director of photography who also worked on episodes of A Mind To Kill, is equally philosophical: “I’m a photographer really and it’s the pictures I like. It doesn’t really mat- ter what the language is.” ■
W ales is unique in difficulties, or sometimes larger
Britain in that it’s a country that makes films in more than one language. The Welsh Channel 4,
S4C, is committed to only commis- sioning programmes (and now fea- ture films) made in the Welsh lan- guage. Now this creates a number of interesting problems.
First, how do you sell them ‘abroad’ in the rest of Britain and the world at large? The world at large bit is easy. As Clive Waldron of production company Lluniau Lliw points out “In Europe where you get subtitling and dubbing as a matter of course, a good film should trav- el”. But what about in England, Scotland, Ireland and most impor- tantly America, where audiences are resistant to subtitled movies and dubbing is only a partial solution? What do you do then?
Simple. Because all Welsh speaking actors can also speak English, you have to make the film in Welsh and in English. The indus- try jargon for this is back-to-back filming. For example, Lluniau Lliw worked with S4C to produce the recent thriller series A Mind To Kill, of which both English and Welsh versions were filmed.
First, do you only hire Welsh speaking crews to make them? Director of Photography Tony Impey has been working in Wales for over 35 years and while he’s got a smat- tering of the language, he’s by no means fluent which can cause minor
Darklands photographed by Zoran Djordjic
Cameleon photographed by Peter Thornton
Up ’n Under photographed by Alan M. Trow BSC
A Mind To Kill photographed by Peter Thornton/Alan M. Trow BSC all were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative.
Photos from top:
Darklands • House Of America
Twin Town • and above, Hedd Wyn (BFI
FESTIVALS & EVENTS
FESTIVALS & EVENTS