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THE DP VIEW
PETER THORNTON
W orking with Phil was an exhilarating experience.
He had so much enthusi- asm and creativity. I liked the way he was able to
accept and then build on last minute changes on location when the images in his head weren’t instantly achiev- able, for whatever reason.
It was a new challenge for me to be the lead “actor” in the film, having to react through the lens to real actors’ dialogue, reactions and eyelines, not to mention having some actual physical contact from time to time.
Getting the camera to be the “eyes” with an actor’s arms either side of the lens was another challenge. We used a Periscope system which enabled a 10mm lens to be mounted at various angles to the film plane. My Aaton camera was then strapped to the back of Alex, the lead character.
An early request from Phil was for me to create an unusual torch for Alex but not an X-Files blue beam or Luke Skywalker’s light sabre. So after hours of research (!), I stumbled across a Micro Flo fluorescent tube kit at Arri Lighting.
By coincidence the kit had a green tube in the box. I managed to persuade the Art Department to make a short, clear Perspex tube with a han- dle on one end and we slid six ‘Super Green’ Micro Flo tubes with half a white Chinagraph pencil in the middle to keep the tubes apart.
Unfortunately, the heat from the tubes caused the wax in the pencil to melt. A bit of a mess! However, the Mark II model with a lead pencil worked very well. It gave a glow that Phil liked and had quite a powerful light output. ■
in production
“It was,’ Claydon recalls, “a good place to learn something of the craft and about story-telling. The first film I did there was a 20-minute short called Legion. Set in the future, it was about how urban drug gangs were beginning to infiltrate the rural environment.”
After being rejected twice by the Newport Film School, he finally, at 19,
managed to talk him- self into the place third time of asking. Three years later he graduated with First Class Honours in film and video and was promptly asked to return as part of the first intake on an MA course in its first, flagship, year as The International Film School Of Wales.
Among other things, it gave
Claydon a chance to turn more film, including an acclaimed fea- turette, Skipping Wit hout Rope, about the young and their tangled relationships, which was later showcased at the British Short Film Festival.
Now out in the wide world and
working part-time at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, he decided to take his showreel round to CFI (Up N Under, The Testimony Of Taliesen Jones,
House), a busy Cardiff-based film pro- duction company, because “I heard they were interested in young people and their ideas.”
He gave them “a couple of ideas” but didn’t think much more about it until he got a phone call out of the blue asking him to meet CFI’s David Ball.
“David started telling me about Alone, a psychological horror film. Now, I’m a big scary movie fan and David said to me that he wanted the film for a younger audience and that ashewasabitofawrinkly,wouldIbe prepared to take the treatment away and see if I could improve it? There was £200 in it for me if I worked on it and brought it back again the follow-
ing the night.
“I asked for a night off from the
theatre, and as I read it my mind began to fry with loads of ideas. I ended up writing them all down in a 30-page treatment which included a visual style, how the characters needed to form – things generally to make it better and slicker for a younger audience.”
The next night, Ball was there with a couple of the other producers and, as he handed over his treatment, Claydon was getting nervous that he had been perhaps too critical.
Finally, the suits all nodded their heads in agreement and said some- thing like, “Nice one, just what we’re looking for.” As Claydon went to grate-
looking at you, the audience; two eyes looking direct at 600 people saying, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Now, that’s what I call intense.”
Alone gathered together a terrific cast, mixing the generations. Along with John Shrapnel and Miriam Margolyes are Caroline Carver, Claudia Harrison, Claire Goose and, from the States, Boogie Nights’ Laurel Hollomon, “who’s a bit like the Sigourney Weaver character in Alien in that we see her at various times throughout the film but she comes into her own at the end.”
So what did the cast make of this debutant director? According to Claydon, “it was a bit ‘Oh, my God, he talks too fast, don’t understand what he’s saying’ because I was always so excited. In fact, I think the actors responded to my enthusiasm.”
As for the crew, perhaps his most crucial and ever sup- portive sidekick was
DP Peter Thornton. “After a couple of days Peter, or Pedro as I called him, understood what I wanted to do. By the end we didn’t even have to speak any more, communicating instead with just the odd noise or gesture.”
Shot on Super-16 then blown to 35mm, Claydon says that
visually Alone is a real mix: “There are extreme close-ups, slow-mo, time laps- es, funky cuts... the cutting style is very fast. I don’t think anything’s been wasted. We’ve even got some great camera faults all of which are used in the film.”
Claydon admits that it has been a dream of a debut. “First, there’s David Ball and CFI allowing a 24-year-old to run around with £1.25m to create a horror movie without much restraint. Second, and this I thought would never happen as it was my first fea- ture, being able, with the help of some great editors, to cut my film together.”
What next? “There’s something called Sandman which I wrote when I was a student. Ironically, it’s about a young film-maker who directed a horror film when he was 24 and it became an instant hit. Since then life’s not been good, he hasn’t made another film and has terrible nightmares which are begin- ning to come true...” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Alone was originated on Fuji
fully grab the £200 cheque, Ball held it back, saying, “...Or you can have this one if you want to direct the film.” At which point, says Claydon, “my face went really white and I felt a bit sick.” The following day he was on a plane forNewYorktodoaspotof TransAtlantic casting.
That was the end of last September and the film was due to start rolling with a £1.25m budget at the beginning of November. Which, with a revised script hammered out by the director and the producers, it did.
Alone is the story of a very dis- turbed person called Alex who’s “dri- ven” to murder by voices from the past. The twist is we never see Alex. The killer is the camera and all those scenes are shot subjectively. That con- ceit was in the original treatment first handed to Claydon and, from the first, he reckoned it “a rollercoaster idea.
“As a medium, it is quite literally ‘in your face.’ Most horror movies are viewed from the third person POV. Here, the person Alex is bad to, is
Photos top: Miriam Margolyes and John Shrapnel; above: Grip Andy Moorhead, Focus Puller Steve Lawless, DP Peter Thornton, “Alex” double Tom Shrapnel, Gaffer David Mason and Clapper Loader John Evans (seated)