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Making Light Of
The Written Word An interview with John Lynch
If there is a sense of good for- tune to John Lynch’s blossom- ing career as a cinematographer, don’t be fooled: luck only gets you so far. It’s talent and deter- mination that can take you all the way. And if the 32 year old Dubliner’s career to date is any indica- tion, that’s exactly where he’s going.
His first feature, Pandaemonium, directed by Julien Temple, has played at various film festivals
- including London - to great
acclaim. Shot on a combina- tion of Fuji F-500, 64 daylight and 250 daylight stocks, the film is a kaleidoscopic journey through the friendship between two of the 19th centu- ry’s great Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Played, respectively, by
John Hannah and Linus Roache,
the film charts their mutually supportive work as well as the destructive forces that eventually tore them apart. Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy (Emily Woof) and Coleridge’s wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) are key players in the drama that unfolds, as the full spectrum of emotion is played out - and is vividly reflected in Lynch’s photography.
“It’s all the colours of the rain- bow basically,” he explains, “and it’s turned out even better than I had hoped. It’s not reality, it’s not sup- posed to be a documentary, I just wanted it to be quite dark in places and colourful in others. That comes partly from Coleridge and his descent into drug addiction.
“If I did it from Wordsworth’s viewpoint he was more like a journal-
ist, he documented what was going on around him. But Coleridge saw it through different eyes, he created his own reality. That’s the way I was approaching it.
‘I know that technically it may look wrong. It’s wrong if you’re mak- ing Eastenders, or a typical American film, but audiences have loved it. They’ve come out at the end with
So I had to live with it. I couldn’t even take painkillers because that makes you drowsy.”
The determination that has seen Lynch - who blends Irish charm with a steely confidence - make his name in the competitive worlds of pop pro- mos and commercials was amply demonstrated there.
But then he is nothing if not his own man. Born in Dublin, in the Ballymun area so mem- orably portrayed in The Commitments, he had a childhood fascination with photography - “I couldn’t afford to get them devel- oped, but I took rolls and rolls of film!” - that helped sustain Lynch through the tragic death of his father when he was just eleven.
During his teenage years Lynch’s love of taking pictures continued, but the idea that he could ever turn
this into a career always seemed an unlikely one, the folk of Ballymun being well used to accepting they are on as wrong a side of the tracks as it’s possible to get. Leaving Ireland at 18, Lynch and five friends set off to explore Europe, and the next step on his career path was unwittingly taken.
“Three of us ended up in Munich,” he recalls, “and while I was there I got a job in Arriflex during the holidays. There was nobody in the place, but my job was to empty the waste paper bins, and that was the first time I ever saw an Arri 3 – and at that moment the idea that I could make films occurred to me.”
Coming to London for the first time Lynch toiled his way through
continued over
smiling eyes because they’ve seen some lovely images they might not have seen quite like this before.”
The beautiful imagery is, as ever, in contrast to the more mundane pressures that prey upon film-makers to produce the goods in limited time and with limited resources. For Lynch this was complicated by the fact that he sustained a hernia on the first day of shooting.
“Talk about blood, sweat and tears on a job,” he laughs. “I got a her- nia on the first day and had to work through it for the rest of the film. I couldn’t tell anybody because I’d have been replaced, and I couldn’t have an operation because that would have meant taking six weeks off work.
Photos main: John Lynch and above a still from County Kilburn
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