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THE WEARIN’ OF THE GREEN
AN INTERVIEW WITH
SIMON KOSSOFF BSC
H e may have been born and brought up in London but,
as Simon Kossoff admits, it’s Ireland that has pro- vided the most consistent creative thread through- out his life.
From the moment, as a teenager, he first discov- ered a meaningful form of self-expression using a humble Instamatic on hol- iday, to his latest assign- ment in Dublin as an experienced cinematogra- pher, Kossoff has enjoyed a rich on-off relationship with the Emerald Isle down the years.
It hasn’t all been
sweetness and light.
During the late seventies
he was often in the frontline as a docu- mentary cameraman shooting footage of the unrest in Belfast and Derry for programmes like This Week and The Troubles. “We were,” he recalls, “some- times caught between the stone throwers and either the army or the RUC when stepping back to the long end of the zoom was a good idea”
More tangible reward came many years later, in 2002, with the award of an IFTA – the Irish equiva- lent of a BAFTA – for his Best Cinematography on the searing sin- gle drama, Sinners, set in the Sixties about the horrors of the Magdalene laundries and shot on Digibeta.
That production had continued a very fruitful relationship with Irish director Aisling Walsh, which began with a Trial & Retribution film for ITV. Since Sinners, they collaborated again on the award-nominated BBC drama
“As a boy, I think I may have been more interested in things like the mod- els for Sink The Bismarck in the tank at Pinewood than what Dad was doing on his sets,” he says. He was even tested for the main juvenile role in one
of his father’s more famous films, A Kid For Two Farthings. “I definitely wasn’t an actor. I’d always been shy, still am, so that wasn’t a route ever to go down,” he laughs.
Dyslexic before the expression became com- mon currency, school was clearly a trial and he was, on his own admission, drifting in teenage to the despair of his family. But with that camera, every- thing, you might say,
clicked. He won a place at the Ealing School of Photography where, after starting out in stills, he eventually moved over to cinematography. “I found I enjoyed working to a script, a narrative and, above all, with a crew. Stills were just a bit lonely.”
Within six months of graduating, and after he’d completed his first-ever professional lighting assignment on a corporate film about sex education (“nothing salacious”), Kossoff got a traineeship with BBC Scotland where he spent the next five years, first as an assistant cameraman, later as an act- ing cameraman. “It was superb experi- ence, documentary and drama,
serial, Fingersmith, and most recently, they were back together again – in Ireland, of course – for an RTE film, Flesh And Blood, starring Nathalie Press, Olivia Williams and David O’Hara.
Although he claims the creative spark didn’t first manifest itself until that vacation “across the water” at the age of 18, Kossoff was, he also sug- gests, probably “lost to the industry by the time I was eight.” The sur- name’s perhaps the giveaway, for, as the older son of David Kossoff, one of this country’s best-loved character actors (who died last year at 85), he spent much of his childhood in radio studios and on film sets.
Photo main: Simon Kossoff BSC and above with his father David Kossoff on Young Charlie Chaplin
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