Page 11 - Fujifilm Exposure_19 Spider_ok

THE DP VIEW
PETER SUSCHITSKY BSC
Although the story takes place in various states of reality, as seen through Spider’s eyes, we’re not trying to point each of them in a very obvi- ous way with the look of the film.
“I think it will be clear to the audiences which is which but we’re not trying to change anything photo- graphically or underline anything.
“I’m using the Fuji F-400 on the film, and I chose it because it corre- sponds to the feel I want to give the film. The stock has a low contrast response, the skin tones are very good on it but above all it’s different from any other stock available.
“Most other stocks resemble each other quite closely, they just have dif- ferent sensitivities and different speeds. But this one is quite different.
“On this film we just have to find the best way of bringing out the spirit of the script, I had very little pre-pro- duction time on this film, but I did have a little time to explore various stocks and I chose the one that corresponds to the feel I want to give the film.” ■
THREAD
THREAD
in the hands of someone like David Cronenberg is pretty satisfying, which is probably why he is one of the most relaxed and cheerful looking people to be found on the small, quietly effi- cient set near Eton.
“I am very cheerful,” says McGrath, “I like what I’ve seen and I’ve been an admirer of David’s for many years. I trust him implicitly to handle my brainchild, and have him make what he will of it.”
McGrath’s brand of psychological horror is distinctive, but not all that surprising when you learn that his father was medical supervisor at Broadmoor and for a while the family lived in the grounds of the institution.
This gave the tyro writer the inspiration for this story and others, and a determination to make the detail as accu- rate as possible.
“It’s very dark, and it’s very much focused on a mind in disorder,” he says.
“The book was very much the interior experience of a man suffering from schizophrenia and I worked very hard to get the illness right when I was working on it.
“I don’t think there’s any gratu- itous horror here, I did a lot of research and spoke to my father who was still alive at that time. I was able to keep road testing it on him, he would steer me right, and the weirder it got the better he liked it. You can’t get weird, the most hellish thing you can imagine is like nothing compared to what these poor people suffer.”
Painstaking attention to detail is the keynote of Cronenberg’s approach
too, conveying a great deal with some- thing seemingly small and insignifi- cant. “I saw that in the script,” he explains, “because of course we are in the head of this character. Those little things are the ones that are signifi- cant, the things that in most movies are completely not significant.
“When you think of the mundane details of most peoples’ lives, as those lives become more and more closed down and more and more claustropho- bic it becomes all about the little things. About the tobacco tin and how you arrange your things.
“That becomes your whole world and it can still be an incredibly com- plex, difficult world to manage. That’s really the world of this movie.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Spider was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos top: Ralph Fiennes as Spider; above: David Cronenberg directs Gabriel Byrne on the set of Spider
cover story