Page 28 - Fujifilm Exposure_36 Living The Dream_ok

Between Good And
ark Mahon’s own story ing duties himself, along with those of huge warehouse set with a lot of sounds so unlikely that writer-producer. extras, and I lit that very simply. We
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if he were to turn it into a screenplay it would probably be dismissed for being too far- fetched. A LAMDA
trained actor, he suffered a serious accident 12 years ago that curtailed these ambitions, and temporarily con- fined him to a wheelchair.
It was then that he turned his attention instead to screenwriting. His first produced screenplay, Strength
And Honour, has been a fair while coming but it was the success of another, as-yet-unmade script, that provided the impetus to get this proj- ect off the ground.
“I had written quite a bit,” Mahon explains, “but I was getting very disil- lusioned with the whole business. Then, about a year ago, I found out that I was actually nominated for an award in Hollywood. After having a bad year, I thought ‘feck it, I’m going to go over and have a good holiday anyway!’. I went over and actually picked up the award, which was for one of my other projects, Freedom Within The Heart.
“I was in Hollywood being wined and dined by everybody. The great thing about the award was that I was invited to everything - the WGAs, the DGAs, the SAG Awards. I even attend- ed the Oscars and met a lot of people. And it went on from there, really.”
Suddenly he found himself an award winning screenwriter, thanks to the Long Beach International Action on Film Award, and had the confi- dence and cachet to get Strength And Honour started. Yet when it came to meeting with a potential director, Mahon found few who shared his vision. So he decided to take on direct-
“People have asked me if I was a typical producer who was directing to save money,” he adds, “but I’m quite the opposite. I would consider myself first and foremost a writer-director and I became a producer so I could get the project made. I raised the money independently. That’s how it kind of rolled out.”
Recruiting Alan Almond BSC to light the movie for him, Mahon pre- pared the ground in his native County
Cork. The story is a tale of redemption for a former semi-professional boxer (Michael Madsen) who must break the promise he made to his dying wife and return to the ring to save his ailing six- year-old son.
Combining the father-son ele- ments with the visually powerful scenes of bare-knuckle boxing was one of the many challenges Almond faced, and he decided to shoot on a combi- nation of the 35mm Eterna 500T and 250D stocks to bring it all to life.
“One of the key features of the lighting plan was to keep Michael’s character in the dark for much of the film,” Almond explains. “That was the intention anyway. We would light an area and then have him come near the light rather than right in it. The stock dealt with that really well.”
The fight scenes themselves had to stand as independent vignettes that were as much about character as narra- tive. This inevitably meant that Almond – who operated as well as lighting the film – got into the thick of the action, with focus puller Ray Moore.
“I did a lot of that hand held,” he continues, “and we had an Arri LT which is a great camera to do that sort of work with. There’s a series of four fights in the first third of the film. It’s a
had four fights going on simultaneous- ly; it had a quite gritty, hard look.
“We had a Dublin-based fight
arranger, Roger Yuan, who’s a martial artist, and he was really good at the choreography of the fights. The box- ers always had something to do; a lot of the fighters in the film weren’t stuntmen but local boxers or even local bare knuckle fighters, and we couldn’t just have them throwing dumb punches at each other; they had
to have a specific routine. Roger was great at that.”
The story builds to a climax that sees Madsen’s character Sean Kelleher face the very Devil incarnate, Smasher O’Driscoll, played with gusto by Vinnie Jones. The constant battle between good and evil, doubt and fear, winning and losing, were evoked in subtle, classical ways through the use of the camera and the choice of lighting.
“The film opens with the camera tracking along the ropes of the boxing ring,” Almond adds. “Mark was always talking to me about it being black out- side of the ring and white inside it. That’s the fine line between good and evil, that’s how he viewed the ring.
“He always tried to get Michael on the right of screen, which is an old Hollywood tradition about the goodie always being on the right and the bad- die always being on the left. So that was an added complication in terms of choreography and camera position, and camera position in relation to where the sun was.”
With a cast that includes such international stars as Richard Chamberlain and Patrick Bergin, with local talent like Pat Shortt and new- comer Luke Whelton playing Sean’s son Michael, there was an eclectic
mix of actors, all drawn to Mahon’s debut screenplay.
In delineating a distinct and quite different atmosphere between the more grisly fight scenes and the evi- dent bond between father and son, Almond went down the less obvious route than might have been expected.
“One of the things we talked about before we shot the film was to make the sentimental, softer areas of it as real as possible, so as not to kill them with sugar. That’s what we’ve tried to do. In terms of lighting those scenes, we didn’t try to romanticise it
in production
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