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RINGING
THE CHANGES
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN DALY BSC
F ar from being typecast and music and arts to high quality films as Titanic Town – reuniting with It might be on a larger scale, you
Persuasion director Roger Michell – Fanny & Elvis, Essex Boys, Greenfingers and The Parole Officer. He went on to shoot second unit on Johnny English, and last year lit the French feature, Lila dit ça.
“That was interesting,” he explains. “We shot in Marseilles and the film was directed by Ziad Doueiri, who worked on Quentin Tarantino’s early films as a camera assistant and focus puller. Ziad was a very visual Director and had a specific look in mind which we achieved with a warm tone and the use of some very wide angle lenses.”
While he had toyed with the idea of directing at the start of his career, Daly is content to remain behind the camera creating the image and lighting the scene. “I realised that it was more the photographic side that I was inter- ested in,” he says, simply.
The leap from television to film, when it came, was not so marked for the experienced DP. “There wasn’t any real difference,” he adds with a shrug.
“From a lighting point of view I don’t really do anything that different.
merely as a period drama man, cinematographer John Daly BSC has maintained an eclectic mix of credits in his distinguished 30-year career. A double BAFTA winner for
his work on the TV productions of Persuasion in 1995 and Far From The Madding Crowd three years later, the BBC veteran has too broad a taste to permit such limitations, managing to ring the changes in his career with impressive regularity.
“I suppose I’ve avoided being identified solely with those sort of films,” he agrees. “I’ve done quite a varied lot of stuff, comedies as well as dramas, though it’s not as if you can ever engineer it. It’s a question of what comes along and what appeals to you at the time.”
The significance of that BBC train- ing is in the variety that it has encour- aged him to seek out. Joining the cor- poration from school, he started out as a trainee and worked his way up to cameraman during the 1970s.
“It was great because we got to shoot everything from current affairs
drama. It was a wonderful grounding, and a terrific experience.
“While I was there I shot the last four episodes of Our Friends In The North, and I did Persuasion as well. But despite the documentary side of it my interest always lay in drama, and natu- rally I wanted to shoot features.
“I was very lucky that I shot a lot of single films at the BBC, for Screen One and Screen Two, which were like low budget features in a way. There used to be a lot of those; it’s a shame no-one’s making them any more.”
A succession of high profile, quali- ty productions called upon Daly’s services in this time. The steamy goings on in The Men’s Room, the com- edy of Pat & Margaret, The bittersweet My Night With Reg, the mystery of The Moonstone and the suspense of The Ice House continued a pattern of con- stant change.
Leaving the BBC after nearly 25 years service, Daly, 48, was not slow in fulfilling his ambition to move into fea- tures. In the last six years he has con- tinued to move freely between episod- ic TV and one off dramas and such
might have more money, but the approach is the same. You get less time on TV, so I suppose you do have to compromise a little more. But it’s always the same criteria – if it’s a proj- ect I find interesting, and I think there’s something I can add to it with my photography then I’ll do it.”
Daly’s most recent job offered a return to the period style in which he had enjoyed so much success over the years. His assured hand and depth of experience proved useful to writer- director James Rogan who came up with the idea for the atmospheric short film, The Open Doors, which was shot over two days this summer in Hampshire using 35mm Fujicolor F- 250D stock.
“The trickiest thing was that most of the time we ended up shooting towards these open doors of the title, so it was always a matter of balancing the light in the interior with the exterior light. It wasn’t meant to be bright and sunny – we were hoping for bad weather, really, or at least not to have sunshine.
“Fortunately most of the time it was bright but cloudy. Whenever the
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Photos above l-r: Steve Coogan in The Parole Officer, Sean Bean and Tom Wilkinson in Essex Boys; Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English; Persuasion (photos courtesy Moviestore Collection); Opposite page: John Daly
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