![]() “But Tom is such a lovely person to spend time with, and a really inspiring director. “Film sets are often high-octane places where tempers can flare and relations can sour,” he says. McGarvey, now working on 20th Century Fox’s PT Barnum musical-biopic The Greatest Showman, is keen to one day reunite with Ford. Interestingly, for the Los Angeles scenes, McGarvey drew inspiration from horror films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Robert Wise’s The Haunting, using “partially seen images, one of my favourite tropes of horror”.įor the abduction thriller strand, “we wanted to make a very crisp and jagged, almost lithographic screen-printed colour noir” and for the flashbacks, he employed glass softening filters to give them “a sort of frothiness, a levity and optimistic perspective”. It was not until they got into the nitty-gritty of delineating the film’s three distinct levels of narrative (Susan’s Los Angeles Edward’s west Texas fiction Susan’s nostalgic flashbacks) that Ford produced “a disparate array of inspirational images pulled from magazines, photo-books, even swatches of material a whole, wonderful smorgasbord of colour and light and graphic influences that showed the progression of the film”. “But at the outset he was purely verbal about the film, in a very articulate, precise way.” Mood board “Sometimes you go into projects and there’s a barrage of imagery that’s been pre-ordained, and it leaves very little wiggle room for your own thoughts to feed into it,” he says. Given Ford is a photographer as well as a fashion designer, McGarvey was surprised that, during their early conversations, the director avoided prescribing any visual references. ![]() It was, says McGarvey, an instant “creative rapport” between the two, with Ford “open to collaboration” and encouraging “a democracy of ideas” from the outset. No wonder he keyed into mind’s-eye view of Susan so effortlessly and no wonder Ford was so keen to work with him, given the film’s tight focus on Adams’ luminous visage. Looking at McGarvey’s previous work - especially his four big-screen collaborations with Joe Wright ( Atonement, The Soloist, Anna Karenina, Pan) and the UK-born director’s signature long tracking shots - it is unsurprising to learn the Armagh-born DoP usually starts conceiving his shots before he has even finished his first script-read.īut though a consummate technician, his style - from his early photography, through his numerous documentaries to even his blockbuster pictures - has always exhibited a warmth and intimacy, especially when capturing and exploring the complex contours of the human face. “And all the other characters are kind of shards of the kaleidoscope of her imagination.” “There’s a sense that, narratively, the audience feels there’s only one person in the film, Susan,” he explains. In many ways, he feels, her character is the cinematographer of the movie. It is not the only way McGarvey connects himself to Adams’ on-screen persona. “I felt like Susan reading the manuscript from start to finish,” he says. ![]() McGarvey compares his experience reading the script to the way its main character, Los Angeles art gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams), is herself absorbed by the story’s horrific narrative-within-a-narrative, a west Texas abduction thriller written by her ex-husband Edward. It’s rare I read a script in one sitting. But this was one where I just sat down and was gripped. “I normally find it very difficult to read scripts in one sitting,” says McGarvey, “because you cogitate over every element, wondering how you might shoot it. Yet none gripped the two-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer so quickly and forcefully as Tom Ford’s psychodrama Nocturnal Animals. Over the past 21 years, Seamus McGarvey has shot 29 feature films, from intimate, intense dramas such as We Need To Talk About Kevin to colossal blockbusters such as Marvel Studios’ The Avengers.
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