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LEARNING FROM THE VERY BEST
F or such a comparative new- comer to the ranks of cine-
matographer, Nigel Willoughby has been mak- ing up for lost time with a vengeance. Graduating to DP in 2001 after more than
17 years as one of the industry’s busiest camera operators, Willoughby’s career has only recently gone into overdrive, culmi-
nating in the past 12 months with films directed by two of Britain’s tower- ing veteran talents.
“I’m blessed,” admit- ted Willoughby, referring to his latest work with Ken Loach and, after more than a decade away from the big screen, Nicolas Roeg, on, respectively, These Times and Puffball.
“It was incredible to
work in the same year with
Ken and Nic. Both steeped
in film, they are two of the finest film- makers we have ever produced and yet the way they work is utterly differ- ent. However, in some respects, they were quite similar in what they gave me. I was a like a sponge around those guys,” he enthused.
It’s odd then to think that things might have been rather different if it hadn’t been for a very persistent pro- ducer around the turn of the new mil- lennium. Willoughby was at the time tucked away in a Dartmoor eyrie thor- oughly browned off with all matters filmic after various frustrations had finally come to a head on Sleepy Hollow.
AN INTERVIEW WITH
NIGEL WILLOUGHBY
“I had thought, ‘that’s it, I’m leav- ing the business; I’ve had enough’. I’d been down in Devon for about five months wondering what an earth I’d do next when I got a call from Peter McAleese, the line producer for Bridget Jones’s Diary. He told me that the cam- eraman Stuart Dryburgh [for whom Willoughby had operated on The Portrait Of A Lady five years earlier]
going into a file on your computer that had always been there but you’d never opened it.
“All this information came flooding out about what I knew, that I really had no idea I did know because I’d never been asked those questions before. It just took off from there. I thought, ‘I’m never going back – I’m a cameraman’. The only wonder was why it had taken
me so long. That I did is down to Stuart entirely.”
As if the past year wasn’t special enough for Willoughby, perhaps the icing on the cake was resuming a fruitful collabo- ration with director Gillies MacKinnon for whom he had made his full feature DP debut on The Escapist, a thriller with Jonny Lee Miller and Andy Serkis. Three years later, they re- united for the BBC’s
award-winning period miniseries, Gunpowder, Treason & Plot,
and have now just worked together again on Adrian Hodges’s adaptation of HG Wells’ classic, The History Of Mr Polly for ITV1, co-starring Lee Evans, Anne-Marie Duff and Julie Graham.
Although Willoughby might have taken some time to discover what he now describes as his “natural habitat” as a cameraman, there might have been something in the genes because his Surrey estate agent father was a madly keen – and very successful – amateur filmmaker who had even con- verted one of the bedrooms in the family house into an editing suite.
wanted me to come and shoot 2nd Unit for him.
“I told Peter to tell Stuart, ‘thanks – but not for me’. Five calls later,
Peter, by now exasperated, says that Stuart is turning down cameramen and ‘insists’ I shoot it and that I should ‘get up off my lazy arse.’”
That persistence finally paid off and Willoughby swapped Dartmoor for the Working Title production. “I remember walking on to the set of Bridget Jones’s Diary – it was her flat – and we were doing pick-ups. I got out the meter for the first time... almost the first time ever... and it was like
Photo main: DP Nigel Willoughby; above: Kierston Wareing in Ken Loach’s These Times (photo Joss Barratt)
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