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Greatrex, “we were told we could blow them up if we wanted to.
“Everything with Peter is based on a very strong sense of documented reality and this particular script was the result of some 80 interviews with squaddies and officers. So everything we shot actu- ally happened, which made it doubly horrific, and we worked very hard to make it feel real.
“I was operating as well, running about all over the place with a 16mm camera. Fortunately I had a grip who was a very tall guy and he often just used to pick me up and carry me across holes. I guess about 90 per cent was hand-held, with me not quite knowing what was going to happen next.
“We tried to create that 360 degree reality as much as we could. For example, we never had the usual circus of filmmaking anywhere in sight so you could always turn any- where. And you never lit anything because it would be inappropriate, Yes, it was very exciting and enthralling to do.”
Warriors, which garnered Greatrex one of his, to date, four BAFTA nomina- tions, actually ended up with just two British Film Academy masks – for Drama Serial and Sound (Fiction). The produc- tion, he clearly felt with some feeling, was not properly “represented in the awards department.”
Shot a couple of years earlier, Mrs Brown, an altogether different and much gentler slice of ‘reality’, also started life as a TV film on 16mm before becoming, overnight it seemed and to Greatrex’s horror, a 35mm hit theatrical release.
“Not only was it shot on 16mm but we’d also filmed it in 29 days. It was completely finished when Harvey Weinstein at Miramax saw it and said he wanted to make it into, a movie and so paid for a blow-up. It had never been designed for the movies, it was framed wrongly and lit wrongly as well.
“For example, I remember one night during shooting when we were doing this big crane into one of the dances and
then the director John Madden wanted to track in. I told him we couldn’t move the crane anymore so we would put a zoom lens on. I knew we’d be a stop or so underexposed with a zoom because it was a slower lens.
“Now, with telecine you can just bring that back a bit, get the contrast up and hold the blacks back. But you can’t do that if you’re doing a straight transfer to film. Well, you can now with modern technology, but you couldn’t then.
“Anyway, the result was a lot of the blacks looked terribly low key and a lot of the heads were cut off because it wasn’t framed for 1:85. But happily, it didn’t seem to matter because people loved the film.”
RICHARD GREATREX BSC
“I try to make my lighting invisible and to do that
you have to light simply with a minimum number of lamps”
6 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video