62 FEATURE FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL
the actors. Impressive; that must be Urszula Pontikos, the DOP. ON A BUDGET Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is described as an independent art house film with an absurdly low production budget price tag that I can’t mention, but that producer Colin Vaines confirms is absolutely true. “Impossible!” I declared, considering a cast of characters that includes Annette Bening, Jamie Bell (the grown-up Billy Elliot), Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters and the scale and ambitiousness of the film shooting on multiple stages at Pinewood, the jewel in the crown of all British film studios which is considered the largest (and some say the most expensive) in all of Europe. Impossible, except this project happens to be a 20-plus-years labour of love for Barbara Broccoli, one of the UK’s greatest and most prominent and prolific movie producers. She is making this at home, in the very studio she grew up on as a child, that her father (the much admired, venerated and loved Cubby Broccoli of Eon Productions) kept enlarging for his spectacular series of James Bond adventures. Colin Vaines adds, “It’s true that we made it for half our original budget. We shot for six weeks in London, Liverpool, and Pinewood with a series of fortunate coincidences, and with many of us forfeiting our salaries for the greater good of the project. We just had to do things differently. The script has been
fuss, even though it was her first big feature film that she was shooting under the glaring spotlight of one of the most prestigious film studios on the globe, and she had to paint her photographic imagery onto one of the world’s largest back projection canvas ever created. Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool has since been recognised as achieving a World Record for the largest cinematic rear projection ever used in a film, by using multiple projectors on a 119.22m² (1283.37ft²) screen. You can watch the many Vimeos of Lester Dunton explaining the process on YouTube. THE STORY Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is the story of the three diminishing years in the life of Film Noir and Oscar- winning Hollywood legend, Gloria Grahame, star of films including The Big Heat , In A Lonely Place , Oklahoma!, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Bad and The Beautiful . She returns to the family home of her former on-off lover Peter Turner in Liverpool. Told by the very young, struggling thespian, the film weaves the threads of their happy carefree romance that exists in the past, with the more sombre reality of the present, where
in development for so long, it was one of those films that just wouldn’t get made.” Coordinating many large moving components simultaneously, plus shooting back projection could be daunting/stressful/intimidating/ – even to older, experienced, veteran cinematographers, but Pontikos just seemed to get on with it without a
ABOVE The film uses back projection to recreate the skies of California.
BELOW DOP Urszula Pontikos on set with the ALEXA.
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