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BEN SMITHARD
“I USED A LOT OF AVAILABLE LIGHT WHEREVER I COULD AND IN FACT SOME QUITE BIG SCENES HAVE BEEN SHOT COMPLETELY NATURALLY.”
➤ ThatwasTomHooper,whobe- fore starting on The Damned United – starring Michael Sheen, as Clough, along with Jim Broadbent, Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall – had just completed HBO’s John Adams in the States which has since gone on to win 13 Emmy Awards.
“I knew,” says Smithard, who had just come off lighting BBC1’s BAFTA- laden Cranford, “that a lot of people were up for it. When I finally went into the meeting, I was so wanting to do it. No-one, I think, expected me to get it; I was a bit like the horse with the lame leg coming through from the back.
“I’d never met Tom before and, in fact, I was nearly physically sick be- fore the meeting. I had, of course, read Peter Morgan’s script, which was great, so there were two won- derful pieces of source material to work from and I also brought in loads of books and references.
“It was all quite weird, really. The meeting ended up lasting about two and a half hours. Later my agent got in touch and asked how it’d gone.
I said, ‘ok’ and he then asked’ how long’ the meeting had been. I told him and he said that no-one has two and a half hour first meetings with directors. I then went away on a commercial and a week later heard that I’d got the film.”
When he and Hooper eventually started ‘prepping’, their main points of reference were stills, in particular social realistic photography from the 60s and 70s, rather than films.
Mind you, and this connects back to his time at film school in Bournemouth, where he first devel- oped his love for the great ‘kitchen sink’ movies of the British New Wave, he probably had, even in the very back of his mind, the likes of Saturday Night & Sunday Morning,
A Kind Of Loving, Billy Liar and This Sporting Life.
In the book and the film two stories run concurrently contrasting the debacle of Leeds with the earlier glory days of Derby County. The idea of using both black-and-white and colour had been briefly contem- plated then as swiftly discarded.
“In the event, I used a lot of avail- able light wherever I could and in fact some quite big scenes have been shot completely naturally. One of the things I’d done on Cranford was that all the nigh interiors in the houses were lit with just candles.
“Luckily there was a scene in The Damned United which was also meant to be candlelit because there’s a power cut going on. I asked Tom if I could use candles and it was music to his ears. Trouble was it got incred-
iblyhotintheroom.Before,we’d done it on a set at Shepperton where all the heat went out. This time everyone was making sure it didn’t all catch fire. We pushed it as far as we could.”
For what was his first feature, Smithard used Fujifilm. “I’d used it in a lot of commercials, including some of my favourite work. The new stocks are amazing and I used three of them. It looked really good. Re- sults are what counts. I’m not what you’d call the most technical of DPs; for me, it’s purely what I see in front of the camera.”
After film school, Smithard worked his way into the industry first as an electrician and gaffer, moving up to DP when he was 27. “For the first seven years, all I shot were commercials and music videos –bothofwhichIstilldoalot–be- fore getting my drama break thanks to director Terry McDonough on Wire In The Blood.
“Terry had been a camera opera- tor, which perhaps helped, and I also had a connection with one of the producers, but I was still quite sur- prised they let me do it at all. In the event I enjoyed it very much – well, as much as you can enjoy two months of Newcastle in winter!”
On Cranford, he survived the replacement of first director with Simon Curtis, and the two have since re-united for BBC’s A Short Stay In Switzerland, the timely true-life story of Dr Ann Turner (Julie Walters) who sought assisted suicide in 2006.
“Cranford was an opportunity to shoot something quite classically without being too flashy for the sake of it. It was not about the cam- era, of course; it was there to record some amazing faces, particu- larly some of the older women. I just shot them as they were with all their lines. I thought I might get a lot of trouble about that from Eileen Atkins, so I was really glad when she won a BAFTA.”
Warts and all, one might say, as was the case with Sheen as Clough, no stranger to real life-roles (Frost/Nixon, The Queen, Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!). “It’s the best performance I’ve seen from a human being in my life. It’ll be his Raging Bull. There’s the mixture of the research he’s put in together with his innate talent. It’s almost as if he was born to play him.” QUENTIN FALK
The Damned United, which will be released March 27th 2009, was originated on 35mm ETERNA 500T 8573, ETERNA 250D 8563 and ETERNA Vivid 160T 8543
Photo main previous page: DP Ben Smithard in pensive mood on location; this page main: Michael Sheen as Brian Clough in The Damned United; scene from Cranford; crew shot with DP Ben Smithard and director Tom Hooper on the set of Damned United; a commercials shoot
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