DEFINITION April 2019

DRAMA | DUMBO/CAPTA I N MARVEL

RIGHT CGI Dumbo is a baby elephant growing up over a six-month period

WORK-LIFE BALANCE Despite working so much, Davis is keen to balance his professional life with his home life. “I go from picture to picture and it’s difficult with kids, but I’ve been lucky recently. I always try to work in the UK, I don’t like being away in hotel rooms. My father was a cinematographer and, later on, a director. He made documentaries and was always away for long periods of time when we were growing up in Laos, South America, Africa and in Vietnam during the war. I remember his absence quite clearly. It was very hard. I remember him not being around, and always asking, ‘When’s dad coming back?’ His marriage ended – that must have put a strain on that – and he moved to America. That’s where the heart of the industry was and where he wanted to go with his career. Now I find myself working back-to-back, but I remember that.” Davis admits: “It’s very difficult to have a home life with the hours we work. I leave my house at 5.50am and return at night at 9.30–10.00pm. You don’t see the kids, so weekends and days off I dedicate to them.” Why the long hours? Because no matter how big the budget, the ambition of a film always outweighs it. “It’s always a struggle to make those two fit together. One way to do that is to have a very compressed schedule. Every day is very expensive, whether it’s a 25- or an 85-day schedule. Invariably, there always comes a point when they take a week out of the schedule, so you end up working long hours. These days, we don’t pause or have any downtime, we don’t sit down for lunch. You end up eating from a box most of the time. “A lot of the time I do a continuous day, meaning I watch rushes in morning, work 14 or more hours and get home late in the evening. My continuous day is longer than the crew’s. There is no such thing as a lunch break if you are a DOP. There are meetings, checking other sets, pre-lighting... “For me, it’s all about my crew. I’m in charge of three huge departments: camera, grip and lighting. At the end of a long week, everything slows down and mistakes happen because the crew is tired. If you do six-day shooting weeks, when you get to week four or five, the one-day turnaround is not enough. The speed slows down and you get half as many shots as you would normally. I understand the assistant director and producers are pushed into a

corner. If the hours get long, I am under a lot of pressure to get a certain amount of things done, because I am orchestrating, but the process slows down and I have to step back, because people are tired.” When receiving scripts, Davis’ first consideration when choosing which films to work on is: how does it work for his family and kids? “Roman [his son] has his own career now. If it’s abroad, can I take the family with me? If it’s home, that’s a benefit, but how long will it be and does it interfere with school holidays? I want to know who the director is. Sometimes, there isn’t a script, they call up and say, ‘This is the film, this is the director, are you interested?’ Then again, sometimes it’s the script that comes first – it’s fluid really,” he explains Davis’ family is involved in the movie world, too, with his son playing the main character in Jojo Rabbit . The mother is played by Scarlett Johanssen and Taika Waititi, director of Thor: Ragnarok , both directs and stars as Hitler. “Roman has been keen on drama since he was really young. We were all living in the Pacific Palisades while I was shooting Captain Marvel , and he went for this casting. The whole family went to Prague for ten weeks and left me alone. Now, Roman’s career will dictate things.” MICHAEL DAVIS Davis reflects on his father, Michael Davis, who spent many years with his great friend, Marcel Ophüls, ‘chasing Nazis’. In 1973, Michael Davis photographed The Memory of Justice and, later, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie with Ophüls. “The sad thing about Dad, he never discussed his work, or maybe we were too young to watch it,” he says. “I remember his metal briefcase was complete chaos

with coins, a light meter, a passport, a jar of Marmite, old security papers. I love that Dad was strong politically and had a voice. That was the golden era of documentaries: Panorama , Man Alive , World in Action , Disappearing World . Sometimes I went to the AKA office on Broadwick Street and there were all these legendary cameramen, directors, editors, sound recordists, journalists gathered there. When I was a clapper loader on Air America , they used the documentary he made for Disappearing World as a reference for the feature film. It was an anthropological film about the Meo tribesman. One day, he spotted donkeys loaded with these great sacks on their backs, so they followed them down the mountain and fell upon an airstrip with the CIA planes loading the poppy/ heroin.” HIS BACKGROUND “I was very young when I started in the industry and had a great time as a young

I wanted it to look like 16mm cross process Ektachrome. We did a lot of testing and film grain emulation

30 DEF I N I T ION | APR I L 20 1 9

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