PRODUCTION THE GENTLEMEN
credits including music videos for major artists as well as early-career work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When his agent pitched The Gentlemen , Green was more than hooked: “I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds absolutely awesome’.” After securing the gig, he did five weeks of prep, shooting at various locations across the UK – including Greenwich Peninsula’s Magazine London. “This location has a massive window that overlooks Canary Wharf and has the sun setting in the background, but there’s nothing in there whatsoever,” Green describes. To capture the boxing sequence in episode 6, he and his crew built a set from the ground up. “We had to put all the rigging in and all the lighting, just to get it up to the scale of what a large boxing performance would look like,” Green explains. “It took a while to get all the lights and kit; the guys were rigging for a couple of days, then we prelit for a day and then shot for two or three.” For Green, it was essential to get the lighting right. “It works well if you can side- light or backlight as much as possible, so you can feel the punches, the sweat, the blood coming off the boxing gloves and people’s faces,” he details. “To do that, I spoke to my gaffer Jack Powell and desk operator Charlie Stallard about how to keep it backlit or side-lit as much as possible, even when the boxers and
WORDS Katie Kasperson IMAGES Christopher Rafael/Netflix
DOP Callan Green describes his four-episode stint on The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s latest blood-soaked action-comedy F rom the mind of Guy Ritchie comes The Gentlemen , an eight-episode series that’s spun off Ritchie’s 2019
Creevy and David Caffrey. DOP Callan Green, who joined the project halfway through, watched an early cut of those initial episodes for inspiration. “The bar was set so high, we freaked out a bit,” he admits. “We obviously had a lot to do to bring ours up to scratch.” PACKING A PUNCH Green brought with him an accomplished background, with a motley collection of
film of the same name. In a highly stylised fashion, the show follows the aristocratic Horniman family as they navigate the ins and outs of running an underground drug empire – and the troubles they face along the way. Ritchie sets the stage, directing the first two episodes, with the following six split evenly between Nima Nourizadeh, Eran
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