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BALAZS BOLYGO
“The Vivid 160T satisfied all the qualities I was looking for and I ended up falling in love with it.”
continued from page 26
“Angela visited the school just after I had graduated,” says Bolygo. “She was editing a short she’d shot and she’d had problems. The DP let her down last minute and she had a couple of others filling in so getting a consistent look through the film was proving to be a real nightmare. I gave her advice on it and six months later she asked me to work on her next short, The Choir”.
Soon after that, Bolygo was again invited to join Murray. This time the collaboration would turn industry heads, for Bolygo’s use of darkly lus- cious photography on this piece marked him out as an emerging mas- ter of the lens.
The short in question, Sredni Vashtar, is a period curiosity based on the classic, and much-filmed, ‘Saki’ short story. It follows the tale of a boy who is joined by a mysterious pole- cat-type creature in bringing about the downfall of his oppressive tight- lipped guardian.
“I love that short, I think it’s one of the best I’ve done.” says Bolygo, reflecting on what was a confirmation of his competence moulding light and science into an assured piece of art.
In the early noughties, he also scored, on Fujifilm, another important short, Daniel Mulloy’s Dance Floor, which won both a BAFTA Cymru and the DM Davies Award,
A series of slightly oddball fea- tures followed Sredni, including the crime-caper Fakers, a dance genera- tion pseudo-documentary It’s All Gone Pete Tong (which Bolygo admits to being “about the maddest thing I’ve ever done”) and the Irish tongue-in- cheek zombie flick Boy Eats Girl.
The last, riding on the happy fancy that you haven’t really made it until you’ve had one of your works banned somewhere, secured Bolygo’s place in Irish history at least by being pulled from its native cinemas after
just one week due to its religiously ‘challenging’ portrayal of the afterlife.
Bolygo has perhaps been most comfortable when found lighting high production value television series, like Hustle and Life on Mars. It was during his interview for Life On Mars that he met another key player in his future success, in the form of director SJ Clarkson. “We just hit it off. She’s one of these people who walks into the room and you instantly click.”
Clarkson then approached Bolygo with the fledgling idea for Mistresses, a BBC television drama about the lives of four quite different women whilst it still had some two years of pre-pro- duction ahead of it.
“We threw ideas around together about what it could be, hypothetically at that stage. I said I’d shoot it, and so I was involved from the beginning. Things were slow to start off with and then, suddenly, it happened, which was a real surprise to both of us.
“There was never a question of it not being on film,” continues Bolygo. “Every time I start a project, I test all the stocks I think would be potentially good for it. Fujifilm came out with this new stock, the ETERNA Vivid 160T, and for Mistresses, I tested it with all the other stocks I normally use to see how it would react to the ideas I was toying with.
“The Vivid 160T really surprised me in terms of its qualities as I was real- ly pushing for mixed lights and playing for quite specific colour arcs and light- ing arcs for different characters.”
Mistresses tracks four female char- acters (played by Sarah Parish, Orla Brady, Sharon Small and Shelley Conn) as they pursue their different lives, interwoven throughout the episodes
“We wanted to mirror this with the lighting and the colour round the girls,” explains Bolygo. “We were quite specific with tonalities and palettes for each character. One idea was that we
wanted to mix light sources - let the daylight go slightly blue, let the fluo- rescents go green and practicals warm - but do it quite subtly and also vary it from a neutral lighting approach.
“The Vivid 160T ended up picking up on it much better than the other stocks; and also being a much more contrasty, sharp stock works to its advantage. So of all the qualities I was looking for, the Vivid 160T satisfied them all and I ended up falling in love with it, really. Within a week, we were shooting everything with that stock.”
Near the end of Mistresses – on which he shared DP duties with Tim Palmer - fate smiled sweetly on Bolygo yet again.
Sredni Vashtar’s producer Robbie Sandison called him up about a new project he was line producing, a typi- cally richly lavish BBC period drama, Lark Rise To Candleford, which, like Mistresses, was shooting in Bristol, This effectively meant Bolygo could jump from one project to the next without going back to his home in London. But how does he cope with having such long stints away from life and love?
“I’m loyal to my crew,” Bolygo muses. “I’ve only got a select few peo- ple that I work with in terms of load- ers and focus pullers, but I work with them on a long term basis. I’ve worked with my current loader for eight years. I really try and build up a family unit and I know them all as friends.
“That’s one of the things that’s great about this job; you can actually create a good environment with a real- ly nice bunch of people that you just love working with. I’m really quite lucky.” ■ NATASHA BLOCK
Mistresses, to be aired on BBC One next year, was originated on 16mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 160T 8643
Photo main: DP Balazs Bolygo having fun in front of the camera;
above scenes from Life On Mars, Sredni Vashtar; and the cast of Mistresses (photo Warren Orchard) (contents photo of Balazs Bolygo courtesy Warren Orchard)
28 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture