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FILLINGTHE VACUUM
ANINTERVIEWWITH
SEAMUSMCGARVEYASCBSC
lfred Hitchcock used famously to say it’s Awhat you don’t show that’s often the
most effective way of conveying horror and dread.
It seems the point was well taken by Scots director Lynne Ramsay and her cinematographer Seamus McGarvey as they prepared the new film version of Lionel Shriver’s remarkable, Orange Award-winning novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, the UK entry in competition at Cannes this year.
In a series of letters to her estranged husband, Eva, an American housewife, unfolds the strange and terrible story of their teenage son who appears to have committed a Columbus high school-type massacre. A startling, sometimes bleak, often oddly witty, treatise on parenthood as well as a singular take on an horrific crime, Shriver’s 2003 book is rightly regarded as a contemporary classic.
McGarvey, best known recently for his fruitful collaboration with Joe Wright on Atone- ment, for which he was BAFTA and Oscar nomi- nated, and The Soloist, was then touted by the director for his latest, Hanna. However be- cause he was going through a divorce at the time, McGarvey felt he must pass. So Wright took on DP Alwin Küchler BSC instead.
Meanwhile, Küchler’s long-time collaborator, Glasgow-born director Lynne Ramsay, with whom he’d made Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, was now beginning to crank up Kevin and, because Küchler was now no longer avail- able turned instead to McGarvey an old friend from the days when he used to live in Scotland.
This serendipitous alliance became even more practical when Ramsay and her hus- band, Rory Kinnear, who was co-writing the screenplay with her, moved into McGarvey’s Tribeca apartment in New York to develop the
script and the storyboards ahead of eventual filming in Connecticut, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly and newcomer Ezra Miller.
McGarvey explains: “Our months of unpaid prep together stood us in good stead because it gave us a really amazing and sustained period of thinking about the film in very cinematographic terms.
“I had been an admirer of Lynne’s from day one- going right back to her shorts. Here was a director who is clearly at home with the camera, both adept and adroit with lenses and light. Unlike much of British film, which often has an overtly literary approach, where the script is the steering wheel of the movie, Lynne has a unique approach. It’s what the French call ‘Camera Stylo’ [a phrase coined first in 1948 that describes the camera as if
it were the director’s pen]. She tends to use ac- tors in a different kind of way, evoking atmosphere through the camera.”
“We had great ambitions for the film in terms of how we wanted to go about it. For a start we wanted to shoot 35mm anamorphic as we felt that the film and the themes lent themselves to widescreen; it’d be a chance to play with the peripheral elements, to explore the vacuums between people, as it were. Lynne had never shot that aspect ratio before and got very interested and excited about its compositional possibilities.”
Although Ramsay had shot her two earlier features on Fujifilm, it turns out that the decision to go the same route this time round was purely coincidental because although McGarvey has used Fujifilm a great deal for his commercials he has only really dabbled when it comes to features, notably on the code- breaking thriller Enigma a decade ago when ➤
Photo: DP Seamus McGarvey ASC BSC on the set of We Need To Talk About Kevin with Tilda Swinton FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 15