Page 22 - Fujifilm Exposure_48 Tamara Drewe_ok

COVER STORY
THEADVENTURESOF
THEADVENTURESOF
AWESSEXGIRL...
AWESSEXGIRL...
ECHOES OF HARDY AS DIRECTOR STEPHEN FREARS HEADS FOR DORSET ON TAMARA DREWE
ime seems to move a little more slowly Tin Dorset, which offers the setting for
Stephen Frears’ new film Tamara
Drewe, adapted by Moira Buffini from the popular Posy Simmonds comic strip.
Yet the task of capturing this bucolic idyll necessarily required a greater urgency – time being money is cinema, after all – but DP Ben Davis BSC was clearly equal to the challenge.
“He came to see me and talked about the book very acutely,” Frears explains, “and he was very quick. He was lovely to work with, and had a sort of modesty about the whole thing.
“If it had been a film simply about the camerawork that wouldn’t have interested me. So in a sense you needed someone who wasn’t going to be very egotistical. You didn’t want a prima donna; you wanted
somebody who was going to be at the service of the film.”
Frears describes the early stages of a relationship with any new cinematographer as being like the first days in a new marriage – “of course it’s always exciting and always frightening,” – but has enjoyed fruitful collaborations in the past with DPs such as Chris Menges BSC, Andrew Dunn BSC, Affonso Beato and Darius Khondji.
The product of his efforts with Davis is the equal of any of these, though the director is quick to point out that he happily delegates decisions of a technical nature to his cameraman.
“You hire people and you trust them,” he explains. “And you find a way of conducting a conversation but it wouldn’t involve words like Fujicolor.”
20 • EXPOSURE • THE MAGAZINE • FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE
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