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KEEPING IT SIMPLE
AN INTERVIEW WITH
ANDREW SPELLER
A lthough it might never be seen as widely as his
other work, Andrew Speller’s most recent proj- ect may be the most important he has ever trained his camera upon.
Commissioned by the BBC World Service Trust, he and other industry professionals from the UK have been mentoring film students in Nigeria, guiding them through a series of one hour films that fulfil a public service remit as well as offering hands on training for a new generation of Nigerian filmmakers.
“While I was shooting the first two episodes, we had a Nigerian crew shadowing us,” Speller explains. “They’re straight out of college, so we were trying to train them up as much as possible, and gradually towards the end of the shoot giving them half a day in the schedule to film. The whole idea is to get them trained up to take over and do it themselves.”
This educational aspect has a dis- tinct echo in Speller’s early career, for after art college and film school, he
got his break at the Central Office of Information, making public informa- tion films in the 1970s. It was there that he finally earned his union ticket, and when he went freelance in the 1980s found work as a focus puller at companies such as Solus, run by Dick Pope and Roger Deakins.
“Roger was crucial in taking me forward with him,” Speller recalls. “We were doing pop promos every day, as well as concerts and documentaries. When Channel 4 started producing films, he started getting offered dra- mas and I became a drama focus puller. We did independent films like Another Time, Another Place with Mike Radford, and then eventually we went on to do bigger things like 1984 and White Mischief. In the meantime, he’d also offered me my first chance to operate, on Defence Of The Realm.”
By his own admission Speller’s career follows no linear path, rather it is a zig-zag between genres and light- ing duties.
“Once I decided I was going to move up to operating, I found myself doing a wide mixture of work, lighting
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Photo main: DP Andrew Speller; inset l-r: Speller with Joseph Friend; Robson Green, Joseph Friend and Maggie O’Neill on the set of Little Devil; the wedding party in Perfect Day
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