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MOTION PICTURE & PRO-VIDEO
CROSSING
CONTINENTS
After shooting Three and Victims
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 23
virtually back-to-back, Tony Imi bsc reflects on a globe-trotting twelve months
?What’s the unlikely connec- tion between a three-hand- ed psychological thriller set on a desert island in the Caribbean and a druggy tale of bombed-out California college kids?
If you don’t count Tony Imi, the veteran British cinematographer who lit both stories, then, as he explained, the answer’s Luxembourg. Financially and geographically.
Three co-stars Titanic’s Billy Zane and sometime breakfast TV presen- ter/model Kelly Brook - who together became a huge tabloid ‘item’ after first meeting on the project – as a couple whose weekend cruise with friends turns into a shipwreck nightmare.
It seems that the loss of the boat due to fire came about as a result of a row between Zane, as a pressured business- man, and one of the sailors (played by Argentinian actor Juan Pablo DePace).
And, don’t you know it, only three manage to survive the sinking: just the couple and the hunky sailor, who quickly injects a serious dose of sexual tension into an already frazzled scenario eventu- ally leading to a deadly showdown.
Written and directed by British- born Stewart Raffill – best known for
films set in the Great Outdoors like
The Adventures Of The Wilderness Family and When The North Wind Blows – Three was financed with a mix- ture of Russian, German and Luxembourg money.
Imi, whose appetite had been whetted when he first saw the script – especially the prospect of five weeks in the Bahamas – worked with mostly a British crew along with a few Americans brought in from nearby Miami. He also had one of his regular operators, Roberto Contreras (“a Chilean-Canadian based in Leamington Spa,” laughed Imi).
In fact, Imi thought he’d actually missed out on the film before finally landing it when another cameraman had to bow out and one of his own projects fell through. So it was back to the Caribbean for the first time since 1990 when he’d lit a telemovie version of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man & The Sea (with Anthony Quinn) in the Virgin Islands.
Once he was finally on board, as it were, it turned out that most of the equipment (“I changed some lights”) and film stock had already been put in place.
“Because of the light out there, which is great all day long, I mostly
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