ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (1985)
Either you've got no work, lots of friends, no money and a hundred parties to go to and an endless supply of drugs or you're inundated with work and so busy that your friends never see you any more and anyway when you do have a weekend off there's the two small children and the commune in the country to attend to. At least that's how it feels to me. This must be success. A friend from my previous life visited the giant Notting Hill set of Absolute Beginners the other day, looked around at the scale of it all and said: "Well I suppose you could say you're a success?" I looked at him across the chasm of the years and said: "I suppose so."
ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS certainly marks a moment in my graduation fromthe
I'm not saying that it's hopeless to go through the grades and learn that way:
most of today's finest cameramen and their technicians learnt precisely that
way so it's a method that works. It doesn't necessarily suit everyone that's
all - and especially those like me who come into the business from an oblique
angle - it my case still photography and a 7 year absence from my home country:
a sixties kid.
I have to thank
Richard Bedford (the editor) Julien and I have
been working together, off and on, for four years prior to doing this film.And John Beard (Production designer) who has built the
most wonderful sets on very limited recourseshas
worked with us on many previous promos. People sometimes comment on
rushes "That's great, that looks great Oliver" and sometimes all youcan say is: "It's the set." The
Way back last year when this film was planned Julien
and I decided on a very 50's technicolour look for
ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS.I rapidly discovered that recreating the look of such
masterpieces as THE RED SHOES or BLACKNARCISSUS (Jack Cardiff) was not going to
be easy. The 3 strip dye transfer process has been long gone and is only
available (for printing only) in
The producers were good enough to employ me for six weeks prior to principal
photography which was to include a three week prelight
for the soho set. Mike Proudfoot,
the operator, was not available at the time so I set about some very extensive
testing with Steve Alcorn, a mate from film school,and Chris Vile the camera trainee. We started
with lenses and established that my own set of Canon superspeeds
and Cooke 5:1 zoom was as good as anything that Samuelson's had and
supplemented them with others from the Canon range. I went for these
lenses because they seemed to render the kind of colour
and contrast that I was looking for. Also in a series of flare tests I found
that the type of halo these lenses gave from naked light sources was the kind
of thing I like - the Zeiss's looked more starry and less even. On the other hand the Zeiss's won on random striation: if you're not careful with
out-of-shot light sources the Canons can streak really badly. Another point in favour of the Canon's was their minimum image shift when
racking through focus. But what the fuss
was really all about was SUPASCOPE or whatever we are going to call it. (It
later was called Super 35) . The current version of
blown-up anamorphic prints for projection (the press likes to call it
CINEMASCOPE) was started by Les Ostenelli, Hugh
Hudson and John Alcott for Greystoke where they shot
'flat' and then made anamorphic prints afterwards. The difference from
TECHNICOPE - the 2 fame pull down system used in the sixties – isthat the gate was enlarged to include the soundtrack area
of the film thus using the full width available. When the lab made the
anamorphic print this re-introduced the area to make the soundtrack.
This system has one major advantage over
the old 2 frame system. Because you use more width you
use more height and thus a greater area of the negative renders a
less grainy blow-up. (Advances in emulsion graininess also contribute towards
this improvement.) Greystoke was not able to
use a zoom however because the filing out of the gate on one side only meant
the lenses were no longer central to the image and this created coverage
problems. This has now been solved by Karl Kelly and his team by re-centering
the mounts on the BL3 and my Arri III so that the lenses are one again in the
centre of the image. However REVOLUTION
(Hugh Hudson) was in production during our pre-production and because some
rushes had a fault a state of extreme angst and paranoia surrounded this system
to the extent that Goldcrest would not agree to our
using the system and repeatedly insisted that we shot anamorphic if we were so
insistent on the 2.33:1 ratio. 4 days before day 1 we still did not have
permission to shoot this system so eventually I told them that I had no further
time to change over to 1.85 as all the cameras (2 BL3's and my ARRI III) were
now prepared for SUPASCOPE and unless they wanted to delay the start date we
had to shoot... I digress. Because the image size is wider at the gate, lenses
must be very carefully checked for cut off as motion picture lenses are
designed for 1:1.85 and not Super35. Fortunately the Canon primes
originate in design from stills photography and hence we found that the edge
definition was a significant improvement over the Zeiss's
and Cooke's although frankly there is not a lot in it. I was planning to
work at about T4.5 with 5294 until our stock tests on the by now neon-lit
Not willing to give up so easily I requested two more batches (different `vintage') and tested them Wednesday. Just for comparison we shot 5247 at T2 and T2.8. Rushes next day were a revelation: both the new batches of fast looked terrible although one was a marginal improvement over the first, but the 5247 result was absolutely wonderful. Suddenly I was seeing on the screen what I wanted to see for this film: deep blacks and superb rich colour and no grain. So I made the decision immediately and sent all the fast stock back and re-ordered for slow for the whole film. "Even for the night exteriors?!" Yes, everything. Stuart the loader, a fine critic, asked me the other day: shouldn't you have gone for T4.5, maybe used the fast occasionally? He was concerned about the depth and depth has been a problem all along. Only about 10%of this film takes place in the day - as in all Julien's work - and consequently there are always neon's or practicals or TV's featuring in shot and I find that with 5247 at 120ASA (my rating) an aperture of less that T3 starts to make these features loose their brilliance. This is why I was so keen on T4 or T5.6 with the fast until realizing that it wasn't going to give us the colour we wanted. But one other unexpected bonus came to my rescue. Many cinematographers stay away from the 18mm lens reckoning it to be distorted and too wide for normal use. But we found ourselves using it more and more: the introduction to Soho, a brilliant Steadicam sequence executed by Malcom Mackintosh was entirely shot on it and we began to realise that the 18mm in scope somehow doesn't appear distorted – probably because we are used to a certain amount of distortion in the wide format anyway from the anamorphic camera lenses that usually shoot these pictures. So T2.8 wasn't such a problem anymore because the 18mm has such depth anyway. And the real boon is that a similar stop on the equivalent wide angle in Panavision or Techniscope lenses is a real horror to my mind with bad edge fall off and terrible barrel distortion. Curiously enough the least satisfactory definition was obtained in long shots on the 24mm - we tried several others but never did find a 24mm that really seemed good at infinity.
The point I was most insistent about in pre-production about this format were the following:
1. The giant soho set would be seen much more fully because we would need to tilt down that much more in a `taller' format to exclude lights, the studio ceiling etc. For this reason we decided on a common headroom for TV and anamorphic.
2. Per given quantity of light, much greater depth of field than anamorphic.
3. Smaller lighter lenses with much greater definition and colour clarity, less prone to flare.
4. Perfect matching of anamorphics – because there's only one in use in a controlled laboratory situation.
5. Greatly improved 70mm blow -up; no de-squeezing necessary.
6. Significantly reduced lens rental costs; better look through on camera hence less lightlihood of mistakes (flagsetc).
A point I was not making and one which I think needs de-emphasing
is that this system is not a `multi-format' system enabling any kind of print
format to be stuck from it. Although physically this is possible- we
shoot the whole negative area - the framing requirements for TV and scope are
quite different and whilst we obviously will be able to make a satisfactory
print for TV by a mixture of scanning and using the lower part of the frame, it
is simply not possible to optimize for two quite different ratios and although
the producers argument is that more people see the film on TV or tape my
argument is that they are probably eating dinner anyway. In other words the
composition should be at it's optimum where the film
is seen at it's optimum: in the cinema on a large screen with great sound and
an audience that looks at the screen. The TV audience will simply see
less of the film but then that's true anyway because Grandma will probably pop
up in the middle anyway. To be serious, there is always going to be a
compromise between the requirements of the scope screen and TV and as I see it
the compromise has to be on TV where all the other losses of picture quality,
sound size etc are apparent anyway. I think it is of great importance to
make cinema films for the cinema; to attract audiences back to the cinema we
have to woo them with all the attractions the cinema can provide - by using the
argument that more people will see it in telly anyway
we accept defeat. On "My Beautiful Laundrette"
(Steven Frears), we decided that the film was for TV so we shot for TV on 16mm
and put the money we saved into the production. Ironically the film is to
open in two
Looking back at Absolute Beginners, I realise all
sorts of things that we could do better next time round, especially in relation
to pre-production and sets. Not having shot an epic like this before (an
epic for me that is!), I didn't know some of the things I now know about studio
sets, particularly in relation to lighting. John Beard would give me a
drawing of a set and I wasn't too good at being constructive about my
requirements at that stage: I was more used to looking at something and then
making suggestions, but on a studio that is often too late - particularly in
the tight situations we always seemed to be in. For instance we quite
often had areas where a band would be playing and I would not spot that there
wasn't anywhere to hide back or side lights: now I know better! We
constantly would ask for floors we could track on but then the
I came across this in a diary of the time - 1985. Thought it might
enlighten a few readers about the beginning of Super 35.