Page 7 - Fujifilm Exposure_26 Jack Cardiff BSC_ok

RECREATING
RECREATING
THE PAST
THE PAST
AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GREATREX BSC
The only clues to the presence of Hollywood ‘royalty’ in the vicinity of an as-yet unlit stage at Ealing Studios were a couple of those familiar cloth- back chairs standing side-by- side bearing the names ‘Kevin Costner’ and ‘Joan Allen’.
If London W5 seemed rather an unlikely place to find such a glitzy pair of international stars then it was perhaps no odder than to discover that the stu- dio sets as well as locations in Walton- on-Thames, Surrey and Hampstead NW3 were actually doubling for the United States. Detroit, Michigan, to be exact.
Thanks to helpful tax breaks, The Upside Of Anger, written and directed by Mike Binder, probably best known here for his roles in films like The Contender and Minority Report, had ‘runaway’ from Hollywood to a UK base.
Binder’s comedy is about a housewife (Allen), her four-strong-willed daughters (Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt) and a long-time
family friend (Costner) trying to cope with the unexplained disappearance of their husband/father/best chum.
Binder’s Director of Photography, Swansea-born Richard Greatrex BSC is, of course, no stranger to the business of visual dissembling having memorably recreated the historical past in films like Shakespeare In Love, Mrs Brown, War Requiem and A Knight’s Tale.
His skills have extended equally to the small screen with the atmospheric Victoriana of The Woman In White – which earned him BAFTA and RTS cine- matography awards – and, from the more recent past, graphically painful scenes of Bosnian conflict in Peter Kosminsky’s justly acclaimed Warriors.
Set in 1992 – and filmed about six years after the events actually depicted – Warriors quite literally followed the very mixed fortunes of some British troops (played by the likes of Ioan Gruffudd, Damian Lewis and Matthew McFadyen) attached to the local peacekeeping UN force whose business is to offer humani-
tarian aid with the safety catch on in the eye of severe provocation.
Greatrex recalled the assignment with undisguised relish: “We never saw it as an ‘action film’ as such, but we did set out to have a very strong stylistic ele- ment. That was, we abided by one rule – we only saw things from the troops POV; we only went places where they went, we never went ahead and we never stayed behind.
“I’d never before done so much intu- itive kind of work. With lots of the scenes, we didn’t really know what was going to happen next. Of course, we knew with the explosions, for example, the areas we shouldn’t go for our own safety but we often didn’t know when they’d go up. Effectively, I was just one of the soldiers, running with them.”
They filmed in a benighted northern part of the Czech Republic where the Russian military had once been based in time of occupation and influence. “There were these big empty tower blocks left from the past and,” said
continued over
Photos main: Richard Greatrex BSC; above l-r: Scenes from the BAFTA Award winner The Woman In White (photo courtesy BBC), A Knight’s Tale (photo courtesy Moviestore Collection) and Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Warriors (photo courtesy BBC);
Billy Connolly and Judi Dench in Mrs Brown (photo courtesy Moviestore Collection)
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 5