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behind the camera
THE RIGHT CHEMISTRY
AN INTERVIEW WITH
BEN DAVIS
T he advertisement in Time Out was seeking actors for a “forthcoming production” at
the National Film School (before the days it added “Television” to its title). Barely out of his teens, Ben
Davis called them up and cheekily asked if he could be their clapper-loader.
Davis, now 44, recalled: “They said ‘okay, starting tomorrow’. I was told they were going to use a 16mm SR camera, which I’d never seen before. I used my father’s contacts and went to a company called AKA and learned to load an SR then turned up on set the next day. The camera actually turned out to be an Aaton [and the student DP was Denis Crossan]. However, I managed to bluff my way through it,” he laughed.
This school work was to be his first halting step in the British indus- try after returning from the States where he’d got an initial taste for film- making as a lowly assistant to his
father, BAFTA-nominated cameraman Michael Davis (Inspector Morse, Minder, The Sweeney), who’d re-locat- ed to America.
Now, 25 years later, Davis junior is one of the most highly regarded DPs around after films like Miranda, Layer Cake, Imagine Me & You and Young Hannibal: Behind The Mask, the huge- ly-anticipated prequel to the block- busting Dr Lecter saga.
Davis’s current success must be a source of particular pleasure to his father who was always keen for one of his sons to follow him into the indus- try. “London born-and-bred” (and a lifelong QPR fan) Ben was, on his own admission, “a bit of a scallywag, get- ting into trouble” when his father sug- gested “that I come over and see him. I got off the plane and the next day he putmeonafilmsetasatrainee.I think from that first day I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
“Did I grow up in a film household? Well, not really because by father was
continued on page 4
Photo main: DP Ben Davis and above, with Producer Dino De Laurentiis on the set of Decameron: Angels & Virgins
2 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture