Page 6 - Fujifilm Exposure_40 Golden Compass_ok

continued from previous page
I did I just couldn’t get a shadow. I’d end up bringing blacks in to make shadows appear.
“I now feel at home with the two Fuji stocks I’ve been using, the Reala 500D and ETERNA 500T – they’ve done everything I’ve asked of them and more. I can do my ‘magic stop’, light by eye, don’t need the light meter and I still love the image that’s coming back – and I can still go further.”
For ITV’s He Kills Coppers, a sec- ond helping of author Jake Arnott’s period British underworld culture, which had enjoyed an acclaimed debut in the BBC 2 adaptation of The Long Firm, Odd was re-united with director Adrian Shergold with whom he has worked prolifically over the past three years (She’s Gone, Dirty Filthy Love, Ahead of the Class, Persuasion).
“Adrian let’s me dance when I want to dance; we complement each other generally very well. We did Soho in East London and it was brilliant because I remember Soho in the Sixties and it was like walking down those streets when I was 17. I felt lib- erated with Fujifilm in that street because I didn’t use much light. When I saw the dark to light, it felt real. The Reala 500D, in particular, is just the most perfect stock.”
Mention of the Sixties takes us neatly back to Odd’s... well, odd beginnings in the industry. The youngest of six children, with five older sisters, he was from a tightly knit, very religious, Manchester family for whom treats like the cinema weren’t exactly encouraged.
An underachiever at school (“probably dyslexic”), he went to Art School on the strength of a love of drawing before, much to the family’s displeasure, heading off to London as a sort of prototype Sixties’ hippie.
“My mother would say to me: ‘All I want is for you to be happy’, and that tiny bit of advice has always worked for me.” His own mantra has been that every job he’s had seems to have been luckier than the last.
In London, happiness proved, first, to be a job as an animation artist in a company, which made films for Hawker Siddeley. Eventually he per- suaded them to let him join the film unit “and I’d sit at the end of a runway shooting planes flying around.”
In London he was also quite sud- denly, if belatedly, exposed - to coin a phrase - to film and he enthusiastically
lapped up all the new, especially, European, films like Juliet Of The Spirits, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville and Jules Et Jim.
Almost as exciting was also find- ing himself living across the road from one of Antonioni’s Blow-Up locations. “I was gob-smacked, seen nothing like it before, lights all over the place; they actually took the roof off this house to shoot interiors.”
Not too long after, during which time he’d moved to a trainee camera- man job with the Metal Box Film Unit (“a guy there called Brian Rowe gave me a lot of breaks”) he successfully applied for a job as a trainee with Granada TV back in his native Manchester.
“I started in the studios but they soon realised I wasn’t really studio material. It was a great break, but I never made it easy for them. I was always in trouble, always pushing boundaries. I became a news camera- man and the great thing about shoot- ing news on film is you’d go straight into the editing rooms at the end of day and watch them cut it. All the time they’d be saying to me, ‘on News, you can’t do two-frame cuts, Day for Night or slo-mo’. But I’d keep on doing it because I just wanted to experiment all the time.”
Apart from his three aforemen- tioned mentors at Granada, there was the late, great Anthony Wilson, presen- ter and pop impresario who proved to be a supporter and loyal friend. “’And tonight,’ he’d say,” Odd recalls, ‘anoth- er film by David Odd’. After one of my first-ever news jobs, he said to me: ‘That was wonderful - but we couldn’t cut it! Wonderful all the same.’”
News, shooting rock concerts (Wilson’s influential So It Goes strand) then documentaries globally – cover- ing everything from the Brighton Bombings and post-Amin Uganda to Reagan and Mrs Gandhi – until just after the Falklands War, disillusioned about the motives behind info-gather- ing began to set in.
So he went to management and asked about getting a chance to work in “the proper Making Up Stories busi- ness. I was happy to do anything – 2nd units, pick ups, anything involving a camera and an actor.”
The chance came with The Practice, an ITV medical drama devised as a spoiler for BBC’s embryo EastEnders, which would normally shoot a week in the studio then a day
on location. For an exterior, they’d devised a stunt for which a lorry crash- es into a factory then blows up; wives and families arrive to try and collect their injured relatives as an ambulance also attempts to collect the victims.
Thinking, “David Lean, what would he do? Ah yes, Dr Zhivago – everybody would be pushing the wrong way,” Odd decided to recreate something like that. “We set up one long track and shot scenes off the dolly round and round. By the end of the day, we’d shot 20 minutes of cut film. They’d now got the rest of the week to shoot the other five minutes in the studio.”
By the time he got to his biggest drama break which was taking over from the ailing Ken Morgan on Prime Suspect 2 in 1992 (he’d end up doing most of the Prime Suspects) Odd had graduated to fully fledged cinematog- rapher, shooting, among other things, the Rik Mayall Presents series (“with- out Granada really knowing it I was shooting probably the first ever wide- screen TV”) and some of the Return Of Sherlock Holmes series.
Since his days at, and since leav- ing, Granada to go freelance, Odd has earned no fewer than six BAFTA nomi- nations (Prime Suspect 4, Touching Evil, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Dirty Filthy Love, White Teeth) winning an RTS gong for Great Expectations.
Much as he will credit the stock, “in the end it’s like ammo to me. Most of my camera friends are much more tech- nical then me, more interested in things like the focus, depth of field or lenses.
“To me, the camera is simply a tool. By the time the film’s gone through a telecine machine, the subtleties of what- ever lens are generally lost. “In the grade, you get a chance to do things with the shapes and the colours.
“As long as I’ve captured the per- formance – and Fujifilm has helped me do that on the neg – it’s as though we can now French polish this piece of wood with the space to do it.”
Odd’s love for cinematography doesn’t seem to have diminished. “I do feel sort of halfway between a musi- cian and a carpenter – art and craft, yes. It often gives you a tingly feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day, especially when you’ve perhaps laughed and cried behind the camera.”
“Operating the camera, you’re not looking at anything other than the per- son the other end. It can be a phenom-
enal emotion rollercoaster you go on. There’s a very strange affair that goes on between the camera lens and the artist.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
He Kills Coppers, Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, My Boy Jack and The Man Who Lost His Head were partially or wholly originated on 16mm Fujicolor Reala 500D 8692 and ETERNA 500T 8673
DAVID ODD BSC
“When I saw the dark to light, it felt real. The Reala 500D, in particular,
is just the most perfect stock.”
4 • Exposure • The Magazine• Fujifilm Motion Picture