DEFINITION July 2018

34 SHOOT STORY THE WOMAN IN WHITE

The period paradigm Period dramas are a genre that the UK does very well and there is a never ending thirst for them, but is there anything new to bring to them visually WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL IMAGES BBC

me ‘period’ is a location. It’s set in Victorian England so yes, you’ve got gas lights and candles, moonlight and daylight, so you have all these things from the period. But the story itself it actually a thriller so why do we have to fall in to the trappings of the genre? Why can’t we just make a modern thriller the way maybe Fincher would approach it with, say, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; but just set it in Victorian England?” That’s what Eben told the director he was interested in and he agreed that he wanted to do something new and different. Something that would push against the tried and tested genre. “Let’s use wide lenses and people’s faces. Let’s use punchy moves, snappy pans, snappy tilts. If we’re on a track let’s be moving with a person, let’s be urgent and distinctive. Really get psychological with lenses and camera moves.”

ave we reached peak period drama? The popularity of Poldark would suggest otherwise but DOP Eben Bolter wasn’t interested in pursuing the BBC’s The Woman in White as he felt he couldn’t bring anything new to the genre. “When my agent told me that the BBC were making The Woman in White as a five-part miniseries, I said that I wasn’t interested at all. The idea of a BBC serial drama to me was so done that I could see it already and have seen it a million times before. But my agent then went on to say that there was a young director, Carl Tibbetts, and he was also a Black Mirror director. The feeling was that they might be looking for something a bit different so to read it with that in mind.” Eben took the interview and it was his reluctance that the director liked. “I told him that period drama was a genre with visual tropes like candlelight and soft lenses but for

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