Page 6 - Fujifilm Exposure_15 Melinda Messenger_ok

“It’s more important to get the script across. You just zip up and do it straight, but other times you need a visual, creative twist and that’s when you have time to play.”
script across. You just zip up and do it straight, but other times you need a visual, creative twist and that’s when you have time to play.
“But you obviously have to adapt depending on the job because some- times it is your job to illuminate the scene and record it, which can be a tough task in itself. On Pandaemonium we had more flexibility, and Julien backed me up all the way. Thank God people like it.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Pandaemonium was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
JOHN LYNCH
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various odd jobs, turning his child- hood karate lessons to his advantage when he found a lucrative job as bouncer in a West End pub. But still the desire to work in film persisted, so much that he could think of little else.
“I thought I had to focus on what I wantedtodowithmylifesoIgota job with a company called GP Films, was there for about a year and learned a lot. After that I went for a job in Panavision as a lens technician, and spent five years there learning all about lenses and cameras. I was test- ing equipment with people like Philippe Rousselot, Alex Thomson and Peter Biziou.
“I always asked if they minded me taking notes and they never did. They’d test light bulbs, stocks, everything and I’d ask questions and they’d explain it to me. That was brilliant, for five years all I was doing was checking lenses, checking cameras, checking all the bits and pieces with them and then sitting there for two week periods while they viewed tests of different stocks.”
It’s the kind of intensive educa- tion that film school theory lacks. But the real life changing moment for Lynch came during a visit to the Gaza Strip in the mid 90s. The sights, sounds and experiences of a place in such turmoil convinced him to seize the day, in fact to seize the camera and have the courage to follow his impossible dream.
A changed man on his return, Lynch handed in his notice to
Panavision and found himself back in Ireland, shooting promo footage for the Irish lottery.
“It was a ten day job and I won cine- matographer of the year for it,” he smiles. “I was thinking I was 26 years old, every- body told me I could- n’t make it but I was determined to try.” Lynch’s next break came when he was hired to shoot the pop promo for Breathe, the Prodigy song that followed up their huge hit Firestarter.
“That really set me up,” he adds. From that spring-
board, Lynch worked with artists such as Bjork and Robbie Williams - songs including Angels, Millennium and his contro-
versial Kids duet with Kylie Minogue.
As well as the pop promos,
various short
films and a job
shooting the sec-
ond unit dream
sequence on the
sci-fi thriller
Event Horizon,
commercials
have taken Lynch
around the world
in the past few
years. He has
worked on campaigns for clients such as BMW, Audi, VW and Vodafone, the latter budgeted at £118 million.
It’s all a far cry from Pandaemonium, working in the trench- es of a location shoot on a period movie that required ingenuity and patience in equal parts. “It’s quite intense but that’s what I’m good at,
I think, coming up with stuff out of nowhere. It’s unfortunate in a way, I’d like to spend more time on something, but I keep getting hired to do these impossible jobs.”
“Darius Khondji is a hero of mine,” Lynch continues, “and I’ve got to know him a little bit. I was talking to
him before I did Pandaemonium, and he said that there are no rules at all on a story like ours.
Whatever he’s doing – and his next feature County Kilburn, an irrev- erent contemporary comedy, is already completed and ready for release next year – Lynch seems to be
doing it right. And if his working style is more fluid Coleridge than rigid Wordsworth, then that is quite con- scious. Rules were made to be broken, after all.
“It’s more important to get the
Photos from top left: Samantha Morton, Emily Woof, John Hannah and Linus Roache in Pandaemonium; Lynch with Geri Halliwell on the set of Bag It Up which was shot on Fuji; John Lynch behind the camera; underwater sequence from Speedo commercial
EXPOSURE • 4
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