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more by doing cinematography than I would have done by sticking to photography.
“Perhaps I always wanted to be a cine- matographer. It was just the way I’d always seen photography, and it was a natural pro- gression really. I might have been more suc- cessful if I’d started earlier, but it’s nice to be successful and earn lots of money in your job. To cut it right back to zero was incredibly hard to do, but it
was about adventure and being true to myself. I’ve no regrets at all.”
A similar kind of single minded determination has informed Eaton’s film work to date. Features include second unit work on Out of Depth, as well as fully fledged DP cred- its on Cold Fish, Lava, Malevolence and Talisman - each struggling to find distrib- ution in an increasingly stifled marketplace. But the work is good, and with a bit of luck the films should get seen.
Of the most recent, Cold
Fish is a contemporary sus-
pense which pitches a young production runner into a
thriller about manipulation
and power. He gets himself
lined up for a video job with
a pair of conceptual video
artists, and thinks he’s manipulating the situation but finds out instead they are manipulating him.
Charged with photographing a film of this sort, Eaton relished the chance to manipulate his audience. “One aspect of making a thriller is pushing an audience around which is something I think Steven Spielberg does in many of his films. But he doesn’t give an audience any choice except where to look. He says ‘this is the experi- ence you’re going to have and you will do that because I know how to do that to you’, and he’s a master at that.
“On the other hand, you’ve got a few
films where it’s left a little bit more open
to the audience to make up their minds as to which bit they want to pick up on, so therefore there’s a little bit more mystery in it, so it’s a bit more demanding on the viewer. Cold Fish fits into that category.”
Another, slightly more familiar, tale is Lava - a film very reminiscent of The Last Yellow, which
showed in cinemas earlier this year. Inspired by the same seminal event, Lava is written, directed by and co-stars the prodigiously talented Joe Tucker, broth- er of Last Yellow writer Paul Tucker.
“My whole thing really is to get into the direc- tor’s head and then to make that into pictures,” laughs Eaton, “With Joe it was just a bit dangerous
to get inside his head in the first place. He was a first time director, but one who had really done his homework incredibly well. That made it really easy to visualise what he wanted, it was just a question much more of what we could actually achieve with the time we had.”
A dark farce set against the colourful backdrop of the Notting Hill carnival,
Lava had a tortuous history that saw Eaton being hired to film second unit footage on the famous carnival, only to be drafted into help out with the main unit during a period of crisis.
“We got some fantastic footage doing all sorts of cross processing and some experimental stuff, some of which we did on Fuji, some of which we didn’t,” he explains. “I don’t know what happened next, only that they lost their DP and I was asked if I could help them out.
“It seemed obvious, I knew the script and I was keen to work with Joe. But in the meantime they’d also contacted somebody else, Ian Liggett, and he came on board. I don’t know how all
that happened.”
Shooting different portions of the film,
Eaton and Liggett have pulled off a remark- able feat, photographing a coherent and enjoyable movie very well. For his part, Eaton doubtless feels that this is another invaluable piece of his cinematographic education, a move - as far as he is con- cerned - in the right direction.
“I love kind of inventing things,” he adds. “It’s lovely to come up with some- thing, to put all the elements together and see something pop out. Sometimes you use an in-camera effect, plus a film effect plus a lighting effect, there are so many things one has at one’s disposal.
“It’s often a combination of them all. I think in a way one just has to be open minded about it. When you do that, it becomes really exciting.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
ROGER EATON
“My whole thing really is to get into
the director’s head and then to make that into pictures”
Photos top: atmospheric scene from Cold Fish; carnival image from Lava and on location in Notting Hill
Lava and Cold Fish were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
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