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ARIATIONS
ARIATIONS World War Two thriller
feature in focus
optically combine the two in a super- imposition with a percentage of colour and a percentage of black-and-white – we are going for 50-50 on Enigma.
“The two are fused together so you produce a new negative which is greatly diminished in saturation and colour. It gives lovely wash-like old hand-tinted photographs a really beau- tiful look,” he said.
Meanwhile Apted tackles other problems, like creating a historically accurate story without sacrificing the degree of spills and thrills that today’s
audiences expect.
“That is the tightrope of the film,”
said Apted. “This film is about mental gymnastics. It has to have a certain density to it; you can’t trivialise what these people are doing and yet you don’t want to uncomplicate the story so that it is too easy.
“On the other hand, it can’t be so complex so that you don’t under- stand it and lose interest with it. So that is the high wire act that I have to perform.”
Like Apted and McGarvey, the
stars of Enigma, produced by Mick Jagger’s Jagged Films, have gone all out to create the look and atmos- phere for the screen. Dougray Scott, for instance, has made dietary
sacrifices - embarking on the less than appetising cabbage soup diet - so that he is now even slimmer than usual; he’s lost over a stone to por- tray a character on the edge of a ner- vous breakdown.
“He teeters on edge for most of the film,” said Scott. “So to get that fragile look I lost about 22 pounds to bring my weight down to under 11 stones.”
Inevitably, the actor researched his role thoroughly, immersing himself in information about the particular
aspect of World War II, wading through piles of books and reading through archive material from the period around which the Enigma story revolves.
“I did about five months work on this before we started filming,” he said, matter of factly. “I went to Bletchley Park and met with experts, going through the mechanics of the Enigma machine and code breaking.
“It took a huge amount of research and one day it all just seemed to click into place and I found that I had a basic understanding of code-breaking. Now I can do cross- words easier than before because I think cryptically.” ■
Enigma, to be released later this year, was partly originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture negative
Photos (l-r): Kate Winslet; Dougay Scott and Kate Winslet; Dougray Scott; from left: Michael Apted, First AD Nick Heckstall-Smith and DP Seamus McGarvey; Apted (centre), designer John Beard and Seamus McGarvey (right)