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A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL SHOOT STORY
here are certain threads running through the professional life of DOP Danny Cohen. These are feature films, Oscars and Director Stephen Frears. There is also his relationship with RED cameras. Danny’s last few features include The King’s Speech , Les Misérables , The Danish Girl , Florence Foster Jenkins and Room . Four out of those five movies involved actor Oscars. His last few films also featured his partnership with Stephen Frears, who he teamed up with again for the BBC’s A Very English Scandal . The fact that Danny can breeze in and out of serial television from such a fruitful features career says all you need to know about the lessening creative skills gap between films and TV but probably mostly about his relationship with Frears. The big difference is the time it takes to shoot something interesting for television against the time you have to achieve that in film. The conclusion is that modern day television drama is far more complicated than it’s ever been and the audience is also expecting a similar visual experience to that they get in the cinema. “I don’t think you can discriminate between TV and films anymore,” comments Danny. “Potentially TV is more complicated because you don’t want people to change channels; films are easier in that respect as you have a captive audience to some degree in a cinema. Television has to be a little bit cannier as it has to captivate its audience and hang on to their eyeballs for longer and encourage them to come back for the next episode. “Having said that I don’t think I would have done anything differently if this was a feature. The choices I’m
making are about the story being told; hopefully you’re telling the story in the best way with the best images irrespective of where it’s being viewed.” PERIOD PIECE Although the story of the politician Jeremy Thorpe covered a couple of decades it was decided from early in the production that the look would be period. “Because I’ve done quite a few things with Stephen he lets me get on with it. His approach is he knows exactly what he doesn’t like and if he’s getting what he likes he just gets on with it. That’s what is quite fun, you get a lot of freedom to do it as you want to. He will definitely shout if it’s not what he’s after. If he’s getting the images in front of him and the performances from the actors he kind of rolls along with it which is brilliant.” Stephen’s real skill as a director is to laser focus on the narrative and how this particularly convoluted story is played out. The story is told over three one hour episodes so for Danny it’s like shooting two feature films with quite a few different locations spread over nearly 20 years. “It was a very
ABOVE Stephen Frears on the set of A Very English Scandal. LEFT Ben Whishaw as Norman Scott.
THE CHOICES I’M MAKING ARE ABOUT THE STORY BEING TOLD
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JULY 2018 DEFINITION
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