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behind the camera
MAKING THE LIGHT CHOICES
AN INTERVIEW WITH TAT RADCLIFFE
“A lot of the time you’re trying to capture an energy and mood of a piece. I think you can destroy the mood by overlighting it.”
A fter learning his craft on music videos, commer-
cials and shorts, Tat Radcliffe seems on the verge of ever bigger challenges. The success of Casanova for the BBC
earlier this year offered ample evi- dence of his talent, the vibrant visuals matching the vivid adaptation of the famous old story. But then that’s Radcliffe’s style - to service the plot with the lighting choices he makes.
“I studied English literature at university because I was interested in storytelling,” he explains, “but I soon realised I couldn’t write and I couldn’t read enough. So turning to images was my way of doing it. You just want to make people’s hearts sing.”
His latest piece, The Girls From Chernobyl, swaps the bawdy bed- rooms of 18th century Casanova for a family home in Manchester. It tells of Bob (Alun Armstrong) and Julie (Lindsay Coulson) who are nervously facing up to the prospect of their teenage daughter moving out.
Bob distracts himself with building a new house, but Julie wants some- thing more. She finds it when she hears of a charity that places children from Belarus with British families for a month to help them recover the linger- ing legacy of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
“It’s a kind of rite-of-passage story,” Radcliffe continues, “with the resurrec- tion of this family as these two girls come over and help save this marriage. Philip Martin, the director, insisted that
we look at it almost like a wildlife film. That things were unfolding before our eyes. We come in and things have already happened, we observe for a few weeks and then leave.
“I used the new Fujifilm Eterna 500, which was very exciting because I want- ed to shoot the whole thing with a tobac- co filter, which is quite strong. It kind of muddies the picture in a lovely way.
“We wanted to get away from the idea that we were shooting a TV drama where everything was consciously lit to make things look beautiful. We were trying to make it look as unlit as possible, so that there wasn’t any sense that we, as a film crew, were imposing our own lighting conditions on this story.
“We just lit this house from the outside. The two floors were built, but all the sets had ceilings, and we just lit it through the windows as we would on location. We didn’t bring any lights inside. And it was the same with the locations where we tried to go with as much available light as possible and the stock helped because we could shoot in virtually every light condition we were faced with.”
From his first commercial – a McCain ad in which a little girl is deciding whether she prefers Daddy or chips – Tat Radcliffe has been drawn to strong narrative. An exten- sive list of pop promos includes work for Supergrass, Primal Scream, Sinead O’Connor, Coldplay and The Thrills, and the best of these have told a story as the song unfolded. He won a Best
Cinematography Award at CADS for The Streets’ Dry Your Eyes, which was shot on 35mm Super F-500 8572.
“We had to shoot in every possible environment, and didn’t really have enough time in each location to put more than one light up. So we needed stock to give latitude that held in the variation of colour temperatures.”
Radcliffe’s approach to his work is, by his own admission, less technical than instinctive. The image is impor- tant, but only in context. “I’m not interested in making things look beau- tiful for the sake of it,” the 40 year old nods. “You have to catch a mood, and
28 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture