ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE. CVP
FAMILY AFFAIR
DOP Luke Menges has worked in many roles on both sides of the Atlantic. He shares some experiences along the way Cinematographer Luke Menges comes from a family of filmmakers. His father is a director of photography who started in documentaries before moving over to direction and feature films. Meanwhile, his mother was a model and actor who transitioned to producing documentary films. A childhood immersed in cinema had a profound impact. “When I was a kid, my dad gave me his stills camera,” he recalls. “I used to go off into the hills around our house in Wales and experiment with directions of light, compositions, film speeds and black & white versus colour. Me, my brothers and sisters would occasionally visit the sets my dad worked on, or filmmakers would visit my dad at home. My mum was close to some fantastic Magnum photographers, so the industry was all around me in various forms as I grew up. It had an impact on me and my brothers and sisters.” CAREER PATH When he left school, Menges moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years, working as a runner on music videos and commercials as well as low-budget feature films. These included a Michael Jackson music video and a Nike commercial directed by David Fincher for Propaganda Films. After cutting his teeth in the industry, Menges progressed into edit assisting, before moving back to the UK to edit small documentaries. “Being in the edit was a great lesson in learning about coverage and what you need to tell the story. “I then got a great opportunity to shoot and direct a low-budget one-hour film about a pirate radio station in Harlesden. We had a handful of days to shoot and three weeks to cut 50 minutes; luckily I worked with a hugely talented editor. Filming with DJs in the community was fun, and not having a huge budget gave us freedom to try out different ideas.
SANDS OF TIME From a childhood in the Welsh valleys, Menges now finds himself filming in exotic locales
76. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook