PRODUCTION
BIG PICTURE THE ENGLISH
needed a great deal of thought and a great deal of planning in advance,” says Wratten. But the location was perfect for capturing
the classic Western look. “There’s rarely anything to see with more cinematic beauty than a mid-twentieth century Technicolor Western,” says Blick “We engaged with that. We shot 2.39:1 CinemaScope using a limited selection of Panavision Anamorphic lenses. On location, cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer and I scheduled for the late afternoon when the dust was up and the sun low: Back-lit by sun and front-lit by heavy arc light, I found the results impressive, although it could be blinding to the actors.” Camera positioning was also classic. “I
didn’t want to move the camera, so spent a good deal of the time figuring out where best to place it so we wouldn’t have to,” says Blick. “It’s pretentious to say I picked this up off studying
Kurosawa but so what, I did! And George Stevens. And Eastwood. And Anthony Mann.” The camera chosen was the Sony Venice
with Panavision Primo Anamorphic lenses. “We also use Live Grain, a software package
“LOGISTICALLY, EVERYTHING NEEDED A GREAT DEAL OF
THOUGHT AND A GREAT DEAL OF PLANNING IN ADVANCE”
which interacts with the light coming in through the lens of the camera that gives it a slightly more filmic feel,” says Wratten. Covid obviously reared its head during the
process. The shoot was planned for the latter part of 2020. Prep had begun but, as the British HoDs returned to the UK for Christmas “we
then couldn’t get back into Spain until Easter,” says Wratten, due to further Covid restrictions. In the end “We didn’t get in to start filming
until May 21,” says Brenman. But the production managed to keep the crew together. “Amazon and BBC were fantastic editorial partners, and they needed to be. Short-termist producers would say ‘get rid of everybody and we’ll rehire a month out.’ But we’d got the best team so it would actually be more cost effective just to keep paying everybody, at slightly reduced rates, and let them really prep. And it’s probably because of that, that once we started, it was all very coordinated, because there’d been a lot of thinking.” The delay also meant a spring/summer shoot
and days of uninterrupted sunshine. “In a funny way, that did us a favour because we ended up shooting at the optimum time,” says Wratten. “If we’d have known then what we know now, we’d have planned for that all along.”
22
televisual.com Autumn 2022
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