DEFINITION February 2020

COMEDY | AVENUE 5

W e’ve followed Eben Bolter’s career with interest and it was great to hear of his BSC membership last year. We have interviewed him for The Woman in White and White Dragon , both serious single-camera dramas for the BBC and ITV in the UK. For HBO’s Avenue 5, however, he completely broke the mould and had a cinematic multicam comedy in space to shoot. Out of all those descriptions, it is probably ‘cinematic’ that is most important to Bolter, as he admits that if Avenue 5 wasn’t shot that way, he probably would have turned the show down – but everything now has that cinematic aesthetic; digital film is the norm. Armando Iannucci likes to keep shooting very loose to catch any improv gold he encourages, so there were other styles to worry about other than the look. Bolter recalls: “A multicam comedy wasn’t something that I was looking to do... but Armando Iannucci, for HBO, in space. How could I resist?” Space was, in fact, the huge Warner Bros film studio in Leavesden, UK. “He wanted me to forget this was a comedy. He wanted to approach it as if we were doing a big sci-fi drama and make it as cinematic as possible,” Bolter explains.

When the sets caught fire in the middle of the production, they went up like a bonfire every single surface on the ship has a curve to it. He was 3D printing and painting over the top of that to produce this almost egg- shaped finish that curved everywhere.” If you lived in the Watford area in the middle of last year, you might remember a news story about a fire at Warner Bros. The fire destroyed part of Avenue 5 ’s sets and “when the sets caught fire in the middle of the production, they went up like a bonfire”, recalls Bolter. The fire lasted 15 hours and was in the middle of the working week. Amazingly, as seven episodes of the nine had already been shot, it was possible to tweak the script and hardly any days of production were lost. LIGHTING FOR INFINITE SPACE As the show is set in space, it requires a lot of VFX, but Bolter’s cinematic credo

It is, however, ultimately a fast-worded comedy, so Bolter needed to approach it by cross shooting nearly all the time. “We have to let the actors to react in real time to allow improv and different things. Armando also likes lots of cameras, so it was going to be a three- or four-camera shoot from the start.” WHAT IS AVENUE 5? Written by Armando Iannucci, Avenue 5 is an HBO/Sky co-production about a doomed space tourism cruise 40 years in the future. If you know Iannucci’s shows, like The Thick of It , The Death of Stalin and Veep , for instance, you’ll know or guess that improv plays a huge part in them. The show used four big sound stages at Leavesden, where the space cruiser Avenue 5 was laid out for a huge amount of sets – 58 in total. Bolter says: “Designs for the sets were wonderful and filled the stages at Leavesden. Huge, complicated, but well thought out sets. Production designer Simon Bowles did an amazing job coming up with these crazy ideas. There were no straight lines in the design of the spaceship; every wall was curved. He had this incredible technique of using the steel structuring and then, on top of that, he was 3D printing the set out of polystyrene, so

ABOVE Actor Hugh Laurie as Ryan Clark in Avenue 5. Four cameras were used to cross shoot to try and catch improvisation from the actors

34 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 2020

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