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Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 5
“For his 30th birthday, Emma Thompson [his then wife] couldn’t think of anything to buy him so decided instead to have a surprise party in Los Angeles and invited me and my wife over as part of it. While we were there, he talked to me about this script in which a bunch of people get together at a house. Would I like to be involved?
“I was still Oz-based them. Word finally came through that the production was happening so I traced my lineage and discovered that my grandfather was from Kent so I could work in the UK. So off we [Lanser’s wife is a make-up artist] went – and Peter’s Friends was my first feature as a DP.”
Strange it should have taken a trans- global odyssey to get the break, but then Lanser’s career has hardly been a conventional film industry story. With the loss of his father at 14, he had to work and he qualified as an automotive engineer by the end of his teens. With dirt racing as he hobby, he worked in
a motorbike shop during the week and raced at the weekends.
“I got a stills camera, bought a dented 300mm lens and started taking pictures of the other competitors who attended the events. They weren’t pros but people like used car sales- men or panel beaters.
“I also got into Super 8, shooting and editing films as well as getting my friends to act in them. A lot seemed to have surfing in them probably because many of my pals were surfers. You just shot the stuff and learned as you went along.”
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behind the camera