MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS | SHOOT STORY
W e interviewed DOP John film and Mary Queen of Scots both come under the banner of ‘period’, they couldn’t be more different. Where The Favourite uses film, unusual angles and lenses and is quite ‘rock’n’roll’ – John’s term – Mary Queen of Scots remains a more traditional piece. John did think it could have ‘rocked’ a bit more. “I wish it was a bigger movie, it needed to be bigger I felt. It’s the trick of British low- budget films that you rely on talent to throw you so far. “I got a sense of Scotland but just never got a sense of England or how wealthy or different it was; why didn’t Elizabeth have more to draw on than Mary? Elizabeth’s future was pretty uncertain, there were all sorts of people trying to do her in, she was surrounded by hostile countries, it was a very uncomfortable time for her. I wish we’d had more resources to get a sense of the countries; it’s very play-like. The queens never actually met, so that scene was fabricated in the movie. Scotland at the time was a real threat to England, you had the Church of Scotland rising at that time.” A BIT OF KEN RUSSELL? “I could have been a lot more radical with the lighting or the sets,” Mathieson continues. “If you’re going to go modern with those Elizabethan faces and costumes, I could have recalled The Devils : Derek Jarman art directed it, he was one of the people who got me going. Even now it looks really good; you take something and turn it on its head. Maybe we should have done that more. “I did come on to the film late, I took over from Seamus McGarvey. So I kind of fell into it a bit and kind of did my thing. I suppose I did traditional things really and of course there’s nothing wrong with that but I didn’t really have time to go through all the options. “Shooting on film was talked about before I joined and it would look better on film, undoubtedly, but we didn’t have the time or the budget to do it. Ironically I’ve just shot a film on film, and the budget for the stock went down because you shoot less and you shoot less hours; and less hours mean less overtime. Film is more expensive per frame but if your shooting ratio goes down to about an hour a day, even with multi-cameras it generally costs less. With digital I find people shot about two hours or two and a half hours so that means that during that extra hour or hour and a half you can’t lay track, dress the set, fluff Mathieson around the time that the movie The Favourite was released and even though that
BELOW DOP John Mathieson with crew members on set.
Shooting on film was talked about but we didn’t have the time or the budget to do it
FEBRUARY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 15
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