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BEN DAVIS
“I must admit I’m really into chemistry, always interested in pushing, pulling and manipulating stocks.”
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never there. To be a cameraman, espe- cially these days, you have to be a bit of a gypsy. In America, he and I worked together on a couple of jobs and it was realty enjoyable. He’d always been an absent presence in my life, a bit of an enigma, and it’s only when I began to follow his career path – when I realised what he did and why he was away - that we became friends.”
Another sort-of father figure – actually, more grandfatherly - has recently emerged in Davis’s life in the unlikely form of the legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, now 86 and veteran of more than 180 productions in a career spanning 60 years. They first met on a new raunchy teenage period comedy – inspired by Boccaccio - called Decameron: Angels & Virgins, starring Star Wars’ Hayden Christiansen, Mischa Barton and Tim Roth.
Said Davis: “I had a call two weeks before production was due to start asking if I wanted ‘to shoot a film in Rome and Siena for the summer?’ It’s written and directed by David Leland and was my first foreign picture. It’s a 15th Century story for a 21st Century audience and should look very beauti- ful. It was all shot on location in beau- tiful places and in some wonderful buildings, like churches and museums, which made the lighting interesting.
“ Dino was the producer and it was a great thing working for someone like that. He was on the set every day and involved in what you were shooting. As a result of that film, he and his wife Martha then asked me to do Young Hannibal, which is certainly the biggest thing I’ve done so far.
“All the films I’d done before had restricted budgets and I’d had had to do without stuff on occasion. Here, for first the first time in my filmmaking experience, everything I asked for and needed was given to me. As a camera- man, you don’t ask for something just for your own benefit but because you feel that’s what’s properly required for the piece.
“No, it’s not just a matter of more ‘toys’. In this case we had a lot of night shooting involving huge areas. Now, you can do it in a cheap way, which doesn’t look nearly as good as if you do it in a right way. To have the resources to do it the right way was great. When our director Peter Webber (Girl With The Pearl Earring) walked on to the set, I was able to tell him he could look in whatever direction he wanted.”
Entirely filmed in Prague, Young Hannibal, with a script and soon-to-be- published book by Lecter’s creator, Thomas Harris, traces the origins of the human flesh-loving, chianti- quaffing evil genius beginning in 1940s, war-torn, Lithuania before switching to Paris in the mid-1950s.
“Gaspar Ulliel (A Very Long Engagement) plays our lead and I remember shooting the first scene when he becomes the monster we know. I looked through the lens and thought, ‘Oh my God!’ This is a serious- ly good actor probably helped by the fact he seems to be, like our director, slightly unhinged. Better change that to ‘slightly off-the-wall’”, laughed Davis.
“Until Young Hannibal, I had never shot on Fuji. Before starting the film, I did a lot of testing. I was bleach- bypassing for the Lithuanian
sequences, pull-processing and pre- flashing. Because I was having to bleach bypass on the negative and not the interpositive, it was basically all or nothing. It can get very dark and I was trying to pull it back a little.
“So the idea was to pull the stock to lessen that contrast and pre-flash as well with different percentages. Doing some exterior tests, I tried the Reala 500 Daylight and it proved the best stock for the job. Then I started to shoot it also on some of the mixed light scenes on the interiors and on some of the daylight scenes. I really grew to love it. It has a certain amount of de-saturation and it is also slightly low-con. I like both those things.
“As a cameraman, I like to do as much as possible ‘in camera’. I don’t think you can recreate a bleach bypass working in a DI suite. In the digital realm, you can’t really recreate the chemical process and I must admit I’m really into chemistry, always interested in pushing, pulling and manipulating stocks, cross-pro- cessing as well. With Hannibal, we have so many different looks.
“When Peter first talked to me about the film he showed me some Jean-Pierre Melville references like Le Samourai. We were going for a film noir look. I wasn’t too sure at first but at the first pre-shoot we did, the guys turned up in 40s cars and hats so it was obvious to go that way. Call it a cross between LA Confidential and Le Samourai.”
Davis was quick to give due credit to his operator Mike Proudfoot. “I learned a lot from watching him. I’d come into a scene with a certain view- point about how it should work which
I’d then discuss with Peter. Mike’s opinion was sometimes a bit left-field but I’d often think, ‘Wow, that’s good.’ It was all worth listening to.”
Davis’s deep respect for his fellow technicians goes way back to those humble beginnings when the height of his ambition was to be a clapper- loader. After his first break at the NFS, he then went on to work on a number of graduation films, painting and deco- rating on the side to pay his way.
Photo main: Daniel Craig in Layer Cake; above l-r: DP Ben Davis with Dino De Laurentiis and crew on the set of Decameron: Angels & Virgins; Director David Leland and Ben Davis; Piper Perabo and Lena Headey in Imagine Me & You
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