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Photos above and far left: Scenes from Love + Hate; Left (center) and inset right: Director Dominic Savage on the set of Love + Hate
he muses, “it’s just dif-
ferent in terms of financ-
ing. The difference ulti-
mately is getting the
mixture right in appeal-
ing to an audience and
making your film about
something. With televi-
sion you obviously want
as many people to see it as possible, but it’s a bit more free. With cinema you’ve always got to think about your audience.”
Audiences who do go to see his new film will see a bitter-sweet love story unfold in an unnamed northern English town, threatened by intoler- ance on both extremes of the cross cultural community. After a couple of false starts with locations that balked at the edgy nature of the material the final choice of Blackburn meant a homecoming of sorts for Ackroyd.
“Blackburn was great,” he recalls. “They were nice people, we had no bother whatsoever and it gave us very strong visuals. The town is set in a deep valley, the older part tends to be where the newer immigrant popula- tion settles while the other side has been developed into housing estates where predominantly white families live. That’s not to say that Blackburn has a big racist element in any way; to us it felt like a well-integrated town.
“The contradictory side of it is these Victorian terraced houses which are actually bigger and more substan- tial on one side of the city, as opposed to the newer more sprawling modern ones. And the terraced houses are often on these very steep hills, and that gave it a character which I thought was nice; that Lancashire
to judge how similar the two men are than Barry Ackroyd, who has lit Loach’s last 11 films, including the similarly- themed – but visually quite different – Ae Fond Kiss.
“I think Dominic’s style has a lot of simi-
larities to Ken’s,” Ackroyd agrees, “but it also has a lot of its own strange, unique qualities. Writing a scenario without dialogue for exam- ple, is quite a different way of work- ing. Ken probably wouldn’t go that way, but Dominic’s open to all sorts of different things. That’s the differences in working with them, for me. There’s a practical similarity in having light equipment, you keep everything as small as possible.
“We had the budget for bigger lights if we’d wanted them, but that can get in the way. It’s a very personal story, and we stay there with it. There’s a little bit of hand-holding, some fights and very passionate scenes. It’s interesting, but actors put a lot into those scenes. Usually if they’ve got the trust of the crew and the director, films have this incredible momentum; it’s almost unstoppable.”
And the story does indeed flow nicely. But if Dominic Savage ever thought this production might be out of control these fears were not enter- tained for long as the ending – behind the camera at least – has proved to be a happy one. ■ ANWAR BRETT
Love + Hate, on general release from May 5, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor Super F-500 8572 and Super
F-250D 8562 Motion Picture Negative
Bitter-sweet in Blackburn. Award-winning Dominic Savage on his cross-cultural feature debut, Love + Hate
range of lights for which LED could ful- fil the brief better than anything else.
“What we ended up with on this is not a fluorescent tube; it’s not a large source of light, it’s very soft. We called it the Eyelite, and the reason I took the eye shape is because the frame that we film in is always landscape.
“So while the lens is circular there’s no good reason why the light should be – we’re shooting a rectan- gle, after all. The one obvious thing that LEDs can do, because they’re very small and even, is populate any shape you want. So I got away from the circle and gave it the full width of the frame rather than having wasted sections at the top and the bottom.”
Added Savage: “I was very keen for the film to have a very strong roman-
feature in focus
s a multiple BAFTA award director on television, much is expected of Dominic Savage’s feature debut. And with Love + Hate the man who made his name with uncompro-
mising single dramas such as Nice Girl, When I Was 12 and most notably the acclaimed 2002 production, Out Of Control, does not disappoint.
Savage has a track record of telling stories that view challenging situa- tions with compassion and under- standing. And the story he tells here of star cross’d lovers from communi- ties divided by racism and cultural insularity fits into the pattern of his career very nicely.
Reuniting with DP Barry Ackroyd BSC, with whom he worked on Out Of Control, Savage confesses that taking the plunge from a single drama to a feature film did not require so many changes on his part.
“I think I’ve approached all my films in the same way,”
landscape is always there in the film. We have some beautiful countryside.” Selecting the Fuji Super F-500T and
the 250 daylight, Ackroyd shot in a variety of locations. These range from the drab shop interior where the char- acters of Naseema (Samina Awan) and Adam (Tom Hudson) first meet, to the concrete car parks and back alleys that are the backdrop to inter-community rivalries and the green fields beyond which offer contrast, and even hope.
He also enlarged on one of his technical innovations for the film.
“On the last film I did with Dominic, I used Osram fluorescent tubes, but I got the idea that LED lights would now be the thing to use because of their energy efficiency.
“A couple of years ago, I searched the web and found a company that made light boxes for advertising hoardings. I’m not very technical, but I called and spoke to them about my ideas. We hit it off and set up a small company to manufacture this whole
tic quality about it. I may be a bit soft in that respect, but I do believe that love should win in the end. I hoped it would work as a tale of romance between young people.
“There are enough difficulties with young people committing to each other and expressing love to each other anyway, but these were two quite difficult things to bring together, and the racism angle just upped the stakes really.”
Shot over five weeks, with the cast carefully chosen to reflect significant elements of their characters’ experi- ence, and then carefully work-shopped through performances that carry a certain authenticity to them, the result is a familiar story told in a refreshing, new and sometimes shocking way.
But the vibrant and vivid telling of this tale owes much to the way Savage works, and invites comparisons with the methods of another auteur of the British working class experience, Ken Loach. There is no-one better placed
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 29