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MARCEL ZYSKIND
“I don’t want to use the same stocks
all the time and I really loved Fujifilm’s stocks. The Reala 500D is beautiful.”
continued from page 28
Pakistan [where Pearl was murdered] but it wasn’t possible mostly for secu- rity reasons,” he adds. In addition, there are two days of filming in the US.
Although it’s clear that a very special relationship exists between Zyskind and Winterbottom, one which the cameraman hopes will continue to be ongoing, that hasn’t precluded some other intriguing collaborations in between: on commercials, music videos (notably on Massive Attack’s Live With Me with Jonathan Glazer) and, of course, feature films. For Saul Dibb, he shot the South London thriller, Bullet Boy, and lately, has all- but-completed Mister Lonely, the first film for almost a decade (since Gummo) by controversial American writer-director Harmony Korine.
Filmed on an island in Panama, Scotland and Paris, Mister Lonely is described by Zyskind as “an existen- tial tragi-comedy- about finding your- self or finding somewhere else.” In the story, he laughs, “Marilyn Monroe meets Michael Jackson in Paris and brings him to Scotland where she’s married to Charlie Chaplin and they have Shirley Temple together.”
Confused? It’s all about imperson- ators. Denis Lavant plays a wannabe Chaplin, Samantha Morton is Monroe and Diego Luna does Jackson. The cast also includes a James Dean, Abraham Lincoln, The Three Stooges, The Pope (James Fox) and even The Queen of England (played by Anita Pallenberg). The real David Blaine is in the film “for about 10 seconds” and there’s also an appearance by maverick filmmaker Werner Herzog. “It’s very interesting, also very bizarre,” notes Zyskind. “and I’m very proud of the film.”
After first using Fujifilm on the Glazer music video, Mister Lonely marks the first time (not counting his
and Winterbottom’s abortive work on the first Goal! film) that he’s used it on a feature film. “I don’t want to use the same stocks all the time and I really loved Fujifilm stocks. Harmony was going for a very clean look and tried to be as grainless as possible. The Reala 500D is a beautiful stock but I couldn’t use it for all the night-time scenes; for those, the Eterna 500T was perfect.
“I think the film’s going to be a visual feast. It was certainly a great film to be part of. We used dolly tracks, zoom, 35mm, not things that I am doing everyday, say, with Michael. It was shot in a much more traditional way and for references we looked at films like Hud and The Misfits.”
Although cinematography appealed to film buff Zyskind from an early age, it proved a tortuous route for a while. Leaving school at 16, he got on to a local authority-run media course in Copenhagen which led to a work place- ment with a post-production facility where he then stayed for six months.
Still unable to get on a proper filmmaking course, he wrote applica- tions to various companies and, at 17, was hired by one of the country’s biggest film and TV combines, Nordisk, as a camera assistant. He must have been a quick learner for after a year he was confident enough to be able to quit and join a specialist outfit, Gubbi Film, of cameramen work- ing in Steadicam, commercials and music videos.
One of his Gubbi colleagues got him an interview with director Lars von Trier who together with DP Robby Muller had embarked on his ambitious Bjork musical-drama, Dancer In The Dark. “I met von Trier who said to the effect that I was young enough to be manipulated and so was hired. ‘Fine, fair enough,’ I thought,” says Zyskind.
He became an assistant, working in particular on the film’s legendary 100- camera sequences.
Not only had he now broken through into features but he also man- aged to get some belated training after signing up for the Polish Film School’s accelerated nine-month, two-semester exchange programme, a kind of per- sonal mix-and-match of the normal four-year course in Lódz´. At the end of that, Robby Muller called him to say that he was going to Manchester to do a film (24 Hour Party People) for Michael Winterbottom and he’d like Zyskind to go along too.
This was to be his introduction to the filmmaker and also the first time Zyskind had been to England. He cot- toned on quickly to Winterbottom’s favoured shooting style – “very hand- held, a lot of practical lighting” – and given the opportunities by Muller, “I wanted to show Michael what I could do as I knew he had next a ‘road movie’ set between Pakistan and England.”
In This World, recreating the sometime harrowing East-West trail of a pair of young Afghan refugees marked Zyskind’s feature graduation to DP and was, as far as he’s con- cerned, “my breakthrough movie. It was a fantastic experience and changed my life really.” It also firmly established the kind of freewheeling, often DV-driven, style of much of Winterbottom’s more recent work.
After films like, say, Code 46 and A Cock And Bull Story, it was very much back to the kind of In This World basics with The Road To Guantanamo, this time recreating the extraordinary story of the Tipton Three, a trio of British Muslims of Pakistani descent who after returning to their native country for a wedding ended up in Guantanamo Bay.
Photo main: a scene from The Road To Guantanamo (photo Stuart Wilson); above l-r: Tim Robbins in Code 46 (photo Peter Mountain) and Marcel Zyskind on location during In This World and Mister Lonely (photos Parisa Taghizadeh, Stuart Wilson, Brent Stewart)
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