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THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
Creating a parallel world.
Henry Braham BSC on how
he helped bring Philip Pullman’s
The Golden Compass to the big screen.
H enry Braham had previously filmed an award-winning epic recreation of Antarctic exploration (Shackleton)
and a popular children’s fantasy (Nanny McPhee). But neither can surely have quite prepared him for the sheer scope and scale of The Golden Compass, the first part of Philip Pullman’s best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. At a reputed $250 million, it may be,
to date, the most expensive film ever made.
For the American-born writer-director Chris Weitz, whose
antecedents span a Cambridge degree in Milton and the American Pie films (with his brother Paul), the road to The Golden Compass began seven years ago when he was shooting Nick Hornby’s About ABoyintheUK.
Braham’s involvement was much more recent, starting at the moment the project was finally ‘greenlit’. “I think I had about 10 weeks before we started shooting and it was full on for me right from the beginning.
“I actually knew very little about the project and hadn’t read the books. I was meant to be doing something else that fell through. A week later, this came along. I read the script and thought, ‘this is rather good.’
“What grabbed me was it was an adventure, a journey and a good old-fashioned story. Yes, I’d heard of the books because my daughters had read them but, for the most part, I came on to the project without any preconceptions whatsoever and just saw it as a movie than with all the baggage of the books.
“Why was I hired? You’d have to ask Chris Weitz that. I know we saw things in a similar way. Had he seen my work? I’ve no idea. The script arrived one evening, the usual mighty panic – ‘can you come in?’ I think,” Braham laughs, “they needed someone to start straightaway. I was around and we got on. That’s fundamentally what working together is all about.
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18 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture