DOP Zac Nicholson explains how to shoot period comedy on a location-heavy new movie from director Armando Iannucci FILMING THE FARCE S urely, Armando Iannucci’s brand of comedy couldn’t live anywhere other than television. His shtick is to revel in nonsense and absurdity but couch and which are contained in a 90-minute block of content called a movie. For WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL / PICTURES LIONSGATE / ZAC N ICHOLSON
THE PERSONAL H I STORY OF DAV I D COPPERF I ELD | COMEDY
KEEPING FAITH WITH IANNUCCI “Armando is watching very, very closely and he’s logging in his mind all the things that he needs from the scene,” says Nicholson. “While you’re operating you’re concentrating on the framing and trying to catch the dialogue so you have to put your faith in him when he says that he’s got what he wants. He’s not interested in being rigorously methodical about shooting every single line on the correct eyeline for instance. He wants to ‘feel it’, wants the camera to have lots of energy and he’s logging what he’s got and what he hasn’t got.” Where Avenue 5 was shot on the largest stages at Warner Bros Studios Leavesden,
instance, Iannucci’s Avenue 5 is an eight- episode HBO show and his current movie, The Personal History of David Copperfield, is one two-hour film. Both are shot by BSC member rated cinematographers and filmed as cinematically as possible. In fact, Avenue 5 ’s DOP Eben Bolter wouldn’t have done the show if it didn’t have that aesthetic attached to it. Where Avenue 5 was Bolter’s first experience of working with Iannucci, BSC member Zac Nicholson had already shot The Death of Stalin, so was used to multicamera shoots and not getting in the way of the ensemble.
it in scenarios so serious and vanilla that they supercharge the dialogue’s babble. Apart from maybe his Alan Partridge shows, all his work is based on ensemble pieces; The Death of Stalin , In the Loop , Veep and more recently Avenue 5 . You could compare the Iannucci banter with, say, Quentin Tarantino (especially in Reservoir Dogs ) but where he uses babble as a precursor to violence, Armando insists on improvisation to glory in the farce. It works brilliantly. But what is a film and what is a TV series in 2020? Those who watched Netflix’s The Irishman over three and a half hours were even advised where to press pause by film fan sites taking on the managing role of the broadcaster. This avoidance of a serial was probably an edict from Scorsese who famously railed against the idea of anyone watching his films on a phone, but ironically could only find Netflix as a financial backer for the movie. It would be interesting to know who decides which screenplays become series
IMAGES Dev Patel as David Copperfield and Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber with Armando Iannucci
Armando really likes the handheld camera. He doesn’t like it when cameras get too fixed
MARCH 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 21
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