Page 36 - Fujifilm Exposure_44 Damned United_ok

TONY COLDWELL
“I SPENT A LOT OF TIME STUDYING ITALIAN CINEMA, BRITISH CINEMA AND THE WHOLE CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM...”
was on Channel 4’s 1998 produc- tion of Macbeth, with Sean Pertwee and Greta Scacchi. To this day, he continues to combine occasional documentaries like The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off with dramas such as Ghostboat and Cold Blood.
Trained in the practicalities of the business under the wing of fel- low Granada alumni David Odd and George Turner, Coldwell cites Nestor Almendros as a particular favourite.
“I think Almendros was responsi- ble for a kind of breakthrough, break- ing up the old classical Hollywood lighting set up and taking on the in- fluence of the French New Wave. He was definitely one of the pioneers who allowed people like Roger Deakins to really move forward.”
Most recently he’s been as usual behind the camera shooting Casualty 1909 (he’d also made Casualty 1907) for the BBC, Coldwell came to that job having shot the ITV single drama Albert’s Memorial, starring David Jason and David Warner.
This tells the story of two old friends, war veterans, who fulfil the dying wish of a comrade to be buried in Europe, at the site of a crime they
witnessed which bound them to- gether in a bond of collective guilt.
‘Liberating’ his body they set off on their adventure, driven by Jason’s character in a black London taxi cab. This posed several chal- lenges for Coldwell, not least be- cause Jason himself was driving without the use of a low loader.
Albert’s Memorial was entirely shot on Fujifilm Motion Picture Stock, but to create the plate shots a more unconventional method was needed. Ever resourceful, the cam- eraman turned to an unlikely pro- duction for help. “I rang up Rodney Charters, the guy who shoots 24. I knew that all their car interiors were shot on a stage, so I emailed him one Sunday afternoon and he called me from Los Angeles the very same day. I picked his brains for an hour and a half, and after that I felt a great deal more comfortable about it.
“One thing he said was that they shot all the plate stuff with video cameras. I asked if he’d thought of going down the film route and he ex- plained that if you’re inside a car shooting from outside it would be five stops overexposed on film. But
to get the same look you only need to overexpose it by a stop and a half on video. That gives you a really good comparison between what film and video can handle.” The required plate shots were provided by second unit DP Andrew Speller and his crew, with the aid of a Lexus kitted out with eight video cameras covering several angles for playback in the studio. Coldwell then had to match his lighting to the real locations.
“We had to do a huge amount of plate shots to cut into it. We’d be cutting from a shot that was live in- side the cab to another that recre- ated a French motorway in a studio in Leeds, with the plates we’d shot when we were out there.
“I didn’t quite believe that we’d be able to pull it off shooting on video cameras, but in fact it works very well for what we needed.”
ANWAR BRETT
Albert’s Memorial, to be aired on ITV, was originated on 16mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T 8643, ETERNA 250D 8663, ETERNA 400T 8683
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Photo top: DP Tony Coldwell shooting Cold Blood: below (left to right) In the country mood on Albert’s Memorial; Casualty 1909; Albert’s Memorial taxi cab; David Jason in Ghostboat
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