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HE WHO DARES,WINS
HE WHO DARES,WINS
A ccording to Chris Seager, it’s all a question of “brav-
ery”, for until a couple of years ago, he doesn’t reck- on he was brave enough as a cinematographer. That all changed, he
claims, with Madame Bovary, a stylish BBC2 two-parter when, says Seager, “I went about 300 per cent different and really began to push the limits.”
How ironic that what he describes enthusiastically as his filmic “coming-of-age” should have been for the old alma mater where he spent 20 years before quitting to go freelance in 1994 when in his mid-forties.
For it was quite soon after leaving the BBC that he found himself in New York working with the late Nigel Finch on the gay rights docu-drama Stonewall (on which Finch died while the film was being edited).
He and Finch, who had been co-editor of the influential arts show Arena, were having break- fast one day when the conversa- tion inevitably got round to the Corporation. “Nigel said he thought that DPs at the BBC were restrained from being expressive because of the man- agement system.
“The system was such that your rushes were watched every day, and management might make comments to the producer even about things like use of smoke or, say, fog filters. They might say they didn’t like your work and this sort of ‘creative’ input could make you feel very restrained.
“It wasn’t until I left the BBC that I began to feel properly free. As a DP you’re bound to make mistakes every
day but surely that’s how you begin to learn – and then to push the limits,” suggests Seager.
The catalyst for, first. his resigna- tion from the BBC and, second, his entry into a wider working world was John Schlesinger’s award-winning Cold Comfort Farm - shown on TV and in cinemas - which was followed in fairly quick order by other feature
Yet better late than never, for Seager’s non-stop career since the Beeb suggests, from even a cursory overview of his small screen credits, that his output has been increasingly varied and often bold: the mini-series A Dance To The Music Of Time, Frenchman’s Creek (a RTS Photography Award nomination), Madame Bovary, of course, The Sins,
exploded one Saturday night just after ‘Jerusalem’ on the Last Night Of The Proms. He was 11 at the time and, he confesses, “mesmerised by this box. I was fascinated by how it worked and so my parents gave me a book on the subject which detailed everything from the TV studio to the transmitter.”
But first there was photography and with the help of a folio of pictures
he’d shot in his native Bristol showing a city in the process of architectur- al change during the Sixties, he won a place at Guildford Art School. It wasn’t long, though, before he became even more fas- cinated with film thanks at first to “the amazing clat- ter of a Steenbeck which I’d hear every day down the end of a long corridor at the college.”
So he switched courses, ending up light- ing five or six of his fel- low students’ films. Naturally this cut no ice at all when it came to the cold, harsh, still heavily unionised, world of film industry employment. Instead he found work in
educational television, working for 18 months – “and enjoying it immensely” – with video cameras out of Winchester.
When he did get finally to join the BBC he was told, starkly: “It’s all video now, multi-camera shoots...” There were no jobs going in an apparently belea- guered film department so he became a trainee at Evesham in “tech-ops – Ohm’s Law, electronics... typical BBC thing. I really struggled through all that.”
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An interview with Chris Seager BSC
films like Beautiful Thing, Fever Pitch and Alive & Kicking.
But harking back to that bravery theme, Seager re-asserts with almost brutal self-honesty, “one of the mis- takes I’ve made on the features I’ve done so far is that I probably wasn’t brave enough. A lot of DPs coming from a television background do tend to do their first films as if they were TV. Yes, I’d have to put up my hand to that too.”
and Lorna Doone (which earned him a BAFTA nomination last year).
Then, there’s the current BBC1 four-parter, The Way We Live Now, based on Trollope’s novel, and the Philip Saville-directed The Biographer, about Andrew Morton and the ‘Squidgy Tapes’ scandal.
There was a sort of inevitability that Seager would perhaps one day tangle with the telly ever since his family’s 12 inch black-and-white set
Photos main: Chris Seager; above: Faye Dunaway in The Biographer