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OF A ROCK LEGEND
Inside the mind of an assassin. A report on the making of The Killing Of John Lennon
Of the many logistical headaches posed by mak- ing The Killing Of John Lennon, none was perhaps greater than the duration of the shoot. Made over the course of four years,
the resulting film - a Special Jury Prize winner at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival - is testimony to the dogged determination of British writer-direc- tor Andrew Piddington, and to the technical skills of his cinematographer Roger Eaton.
Such was the sporadic length of the shoot that Eaton admits some scenes were shot on the 16mm Fujicolor ETER- NA 500T, while others were shot on the older stock that it replaced.
“In my tests,” explains Eaton, “I was really pushing it because we were doing a lot of available light stuff at night, on exterior streets. I extensively tested the 16mm stock in New York, and the Fujifilm came out outstanding- ly better than anything else.”
The efforts of Eaton, Piddington and the rest add up to a compelling view of the man who achieved lasting infamy for the cold-blooded murder of British rock legend John Lennon.
Mark David Chapman, played here by newcomer Jonas Ball, is followed from his adopted home in Hawaii, where his behaviour has become increasingly eccentric, to the chilly streets of New York where he dreams of meeting Lennon, his idol. But along the way his warped mind comes to view the man he admires as a charla- tan and a fraud, and so he develops a plan to kill him.
In making a low budget movie about such a controversial subject, and in depicting the brutal murder that occurred in 1980 at the actual location where it happened in New York, Piddington, Eaton and the crew attempted to be as discreet as possible.
“We tried to keep the unit very small,” Eaton explains, “and many of the reverses were not shot outside the Dakota Building; they were shot fur- ther down the street.”
The murder scene itself was more complex still. “That scene was shot over the entire four years. So we had to do all the reverses and different angles
over that time, and to keep it consis- tent. It was also shot in several different locations, on two different continents. That was very tough to get right.”
Far from filming the dying moments of the fallen star in New York, where questions of taste might have impinged upon them, the unit found a location that substituted the interior of the Dakota Building a little closer to home.
“It’s the Henry Cole Wing of the V&A,” Eaton smiles. “You can’t shoot in the arch of the Dakota, that’s absolutely forbidden. In
the end we went all over New York, and then extended our search up the East Coast, Pennsylvania and Boston. But the Henry Cole Wing was the closest to what we needed; it was totally extraordinary.”
More extraordinary still is the cohesion of a movie made over such a protracted length of time. But, apart from the leading man’s ever changing hair length, continuity seems not to have been too much of a problem.
“We tried to shoot one block of the script at a time,” says Eaton, “and complete it from beginning to end. That approach helped us a lot in deal- ing with those sort of issues; we wouldn’t be cutting into the middle of scenes unless we could help it, which we couldn’t in the actual shooting of the scene itself.”
The strength of the film comes from its unblinking view of a mentally disturbed man, and is carefully script- ed using his own, damning words. So, it does not end with the event for which he has become notorious, but follows him into the penal system that has held him these last 27 years.
Much of his mental turmoil, his evi- dent psychosis, is expressed on screen through camera movements and effects, but Eaton contends that these are the product of collaboration on the floor rather than extensive pre-planning.
“For me, the process is more about absorbing the script and the energy of the picture on a subcon- scious level. You can have these thoughts in the first place, but some-
thing happens along the way and you’re left with this kind of serendipi- ty. The way to deal with that is by working off the energy, because when you’re actually on the set itself things are different, things change.
“Something happens, and then it’s a question of thinking on one’s feet and really using what’s available, and expressing that. It’s a bit like painting; you sketch the ideas down at script stage enough to formulate a feeling,
and then at the shooting stage it’s a question of maybe adjusting things to fit what’s actually going on.
“It’s about dealing with the sub- text. I think that’s really what cine- matography is: dealing with subtext on a multi layered basis. That’s a culmina- tion of everything I do between the lighting, the framing, the camera moves, and the energy particularly.
“I was very conscious of the way the camera would be hand-held or not, to give certain scenes the life or nerv- ousness, so all those little subtleties build up; they’re all very thought through in terms of how we decide to do these things.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
The Killing Of John Lennon, on release in the UK, was partly originated on 16mm Fujicolor ETERNA 500T 8673 and Super F-500T 8672
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