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Veljkovic got his last-minute entrée to Howitt thanks to an enthusi- astic recommendation from the film’s creative consultant, director Malcolm Needs, for whom the cinematographer had previously shot two features, Shoreditch and Charlie.
Creatively, it seems to have been compatibility at first sight. “When Peter explained to me what an unusu- al and different kind of project he had in mind, I told him that even if we had to shoot without a camera I’d still be excited about it and that we’d somehow find a way to do the film,” laughs Veljkovic.
“A rebel yell from deep within the soul of a man, told in extreme Technicolor, and at a breakneck, breath-taking speed, just like his high- ly cinematic life,” was how Howitt has characterised the project.
Not that, at 49 - albeit absurdly youthful-looking - Veljkovic was exact- ly a novice before being firmly pitched into the production whose tight sched- ule and even tighter budget was to include locations around London, stu- dio work at Ealing and a week’s loca- tion in Morocco.
He originally studied mechanical engineering at home in the old Yugoslavia before becoming infatuated with film after joining local cine clubs where he made 8mm and 16mm movies. Winning various prizes at local and international festivals, he began to think, “I might just be good at this.”
This led to a place at Belgrade’s most prestigious film school, which took on only five new students a year for its four-year course, that covered a lot of the bases as he specialised in cinematography. Ten years of work in all areas of film and TV followed before Veljkovic was invited to England to shoot a one-hour drama at Pinewood for director, fellow Serb and London International Film School grad- uate, Dusan Lazarevic.
“It was called How To Kill, based on the life of a Scottish poet and sol- dier, Keith Douglas, at the Battle of Alamein in the Second World War. It had originally been written for the Edinburgh Festival by a Scots actor Angus Reid, who also played Douglas. We had to create the desert in the stu- dio and it was all a bit surreal. The
real challenge was how to make a one- hour drama with just one person visu- ally interesting.”
That was 15 years ago, and, not entirely unconnected with the gradual disintegration of his homeland, Veljkovic has stayed on here ever since. “When I first arrived, French was my foreign language. I had no English so I had to learn it as I went along. It was my choice to stay. As far as I was concerned everything impor- tant came through London. It was tough at first and I started looking for any kind of work after sorting my per- mit. My first camera job was Match Of The Day. I used to travel with the boys around the various stadiums, doing my camera for 90 minutes, then pack up and go home.”
Since then he has worked on everything from documentaries, com- mercials and music videos, to shorts, TV drama and features, including Shoreditch, with Shane Richie, Natasha Wightman and Joely Richardson, and Charlie, about the East End gangster Charlie Richardson, co-starring Luke Goss, Steven Berkoff and Anita Dobson.
“As far as I am concerned,” says Veljkovic, “it’s been step-by-step, hopefully moving forward all the time. When I’m doing, say, commercials, people ask me, ‘do you miss features?’ I think you can get exhaustively creat- ed just doing one type of project. I really prefer doing different things. You employ similar skills but have dif- ferent disciplines.
“For me, the camera is just the tool; the picture is in your head. The way I work is to talk to the director, read the script, discuss things and get the images in my head. You then go out and make them happen using the tools you have. I don’t, for example, believe in putting down the camera and looking for the shot. I already have the image in my head and then look for the shot to match that.”
When Vejkovic met Howitt he was already committed to a four-week job and a couple if commercials. Such was his instant belief in the man and the project, that he dropped everything for Dangerous Parking.
“Peter’s an unusual personality and also enormously creative which I deeply respect. When we first met, he
said, ‘technically, I don’t know any- thing about your job,” but as we start- ed he encouraged me to push the boundaries all the time – which I loved doing. In fact, sometimes I almost had to stop myself from going too far out of the ordinary but there was Peter always saying, ‘keep going, keep going!’ There was also huge pressure on Peter as an actor because he was probably in all but three shots of the film.
“I hadn’t seen half the locations before we got there, so when we would arrive, I’d say to Peter, ‘if you tell me the emotion you want people to feel when they watch this, that’s good enough visual guidance for me’.”
As far as the ‘look’ of the film was concerned, Veljkovic says, “Peter told me very early on that he’d like the visual style to be eclectic. OK, I replied, you’ll have to explain. He gave
Zoran Veljkovic
“The bigger the challenge, the more excited I get.”
Photo previous page: DP Zoran Veljkovic; main above: Peter Howitt, writer, director and star of Dangerous Parking; above l-r: The poster image of Charlie; a scene from Shoreditch; on the set of Dangerous Parking
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