SMOOTH OPERATORS•CHRIS PLEVIN ACO ASSOCIATE BSC GBCT
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Opposite: (descending) shooting on Game Of Thrones, Band Of Brothers and Mr Bean’s Holiday (2nd unit). This page: (descending) pictured on Men In Black 3, Aladdin, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (photo © Giles Keyte), Auf Wiedersehn Pet in The Dominican Republic, and The Edge Of Love.
By Natasha Block Hicks
T
o visit beautifully-bleak landscapes in the course of one’s work is a privilege peppered with discomfort, relates Chris Plevin ACO Associate BSC GBCT, enjoying the momentary snugness of his home outside London. “I love those incredible vistas and the fact that you can see so far,” he says reverentially. Plevin’s career has taken him to the mountains of Norway and the iconic African Sahara. His latest role, as A-camera operator on The Northman (2022, dir. Robert Eggers, DP Jarin Blaschke), introduced a new sort of ‘desolate’. “The landscapes of Ireland and Iceland are both pretty moody,” he relates, “I love them, but you’ve got to have stoicism to film there. You may have to stand in the rain and wind for a long time, to be rewarded with a cold meal in a soggy bit of cardboard.” The plight of the cast – in authentic Viking peasant rags, standing semi-barefoot in the same mud and wind as the bundled-up crew – kept things in perspective. “We had snow, wind and rain, but there were only two days when the weather was so bad that we couldn’t shoot,” Plevin recalls, “and, of course, it looks fantastic with beautiful sets in wonderful scenery. “The job of operator is essentially the same whatever the genre,” he continues, “but there can be such variation within it, in terms of your input. Robert and Jarin were very tight and extremely specific; many scenes were covered with a single shot. The blocking would be such that it would manipulate the actors into the right space
I never get bored going to work for the camera to capture a close-up, in a way that was meticulously choreographed. They were very precise about what they wanted to do, so my role became one of technical precision.” Plevin studied Materials Engineering at Queen Mary College in London in the late sixties, so precision should be second nature to him. However, he confesses to finding the course distractingly dull. He then attended the West Surrey College Of Art in Farnham to study film. “West Surrey introduced the idea that you could combine technology and artistry and get paid for it, which was brilliant,” recalls Plevin, “I’d found what I wanted to do.” After graduating, Plevin was hired as a camera trainee at United Motion Pictures (London) Ltd, a small 62 MAY 2022 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD
producer of corporate and motor sport documentaries. Around this time, he became involved with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and was called-up, alongside director Maxim Ford, to shoot a TUC film on their ‘Jobs For Youth’ campaign. Discovering a shared interest in left wing politics, Plevin and Ford expanded their slate to include the ‘Jobs For Youth’ concerts in Brixton, which became the documentary feature Live A Life (1982) and, with some funding from Channel 4, they founded the co-operative production company Parallax Pictures. “We wanted to make some commercials for worthy causes like Greenpeace and the TUC campaigns,” relates Plevin, “but with glossy filming values. We thought if Ridley Scott could persuade people to buy Hovis, why couldn’t we use the same techniques for anti-nuclear?” By the early nineties Plevin had drifted away from Parallax and was busy working as a freelance focus puller for DPs like Michael Coulter BSC on productions such as Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994, dir. Mike Newell). On his last project as an assistant, Mary Reilly (1996, dir. Stephen Frears), the DP, Philippe Rousselot ASC AFC, suggested to Plevin that it was time for him to take on a new challenge. He moved up to operating, working on commercials for a year until the first film work came in – a low-budget British comedy, Brassed Off (1996, dir. Mark Herman, DP Andy Collins). “Brassed Off was a real film from the heart,” recalls Plevin enthusiastically, “everyone was behind it. Mark was focussed on the story and performance, so I was able to work intuitively with Andy, which was a great experience.” Plevin clocked-up a few of these archetypal Britflicks during his first years of operating, such as Little Voice (1998) and Purely Belter (2000), both with Herman and Collins, and additional operating on
CHRIS PLEVIN ACO ASSOCIATE BSC GBCT•SMOOTH OPERATORS
Camera operator is a very privileged position, plus at the end of the day, you get to go home examples like Notting Hill (1999, dir. Roger Mitchell, DP Michael Coulter BSC). “It is a shame that British, low-budget, narrative-driven films are much less common now,” Plevin laments, “as I really liked doing them.” A number of second unit DP credits crop-up for Plevin during his early operating years, such as on Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes, DP Maryse Alberti AFC) and Mansfield Park (1999, dir. Patricia Rozema, DP Michael Coulter BSC). “I probably should have pursued that road,” muses Plevin, “but I got married and had children, so there was an imperative to keep a roof over our head and not step into the unknown. “Camera operator is still a very privileged position,” he continues, “plus at the end of the day, you get to go home. The DP is on call 24/7.” Plevin’s first significant TV operating on Band Of Brothers (2001, DP Joel Ransom CSC) was, in his words, a “revelatory experience”. He was the second operator on his unit alongside Martin Hume ACO Associate BSC GBCT. “It was 90% handheld, with the lovely Moviecam SL film cameras,” recalls Plevin. “We did one shot that ran across the D-Day airfield in a Jeep. Martin sat handheld in the back, then he handed the camera over to me physically at the encampment and I continued the shot into the officers’ tent. That was before gimbals.” Shooting episodes simultaneously, several units would team-up when more cameras were required for big sequences. “It was so well organised,” remembers Plevin. Christopher Newman, the 1st AD responsible for the scheduling on Band Of Brothers, went on to produce Game Of Thrones (2011-2019) on which Plevin operated from 2015 to 2017. “The DPs, directors and actors on Game Of Thrones would fly in and out of where the ‘machine’, the core crew, was parked in each location,” reveals Plevin, “it was incredibly efficient. The producers recognised that, with the DPs changing, the operators were the guardians of the house style; we knew the rules. It gave the whole thing a seamless coherent look from start to finish.” Cinematographer John Mathieson BSC, who Plevin first met on the music video scene when they were both assistants, has been instrumental in several significant moments of Plevin’s career. By chance, Mathieson’s camera crew on Kingdom Of Heaven (2005, dir. Ridley Scott) were staying in the same Moroccan hotel as the crew of The Grid (2004, dir. Mikael Salomon, DP
Seamus Deasy), on which Plevin was operating, and he managed to hop on to C-camera on the epic blockbuster – his first – when The Grid wrapped. It was on another Scott/Mathieson picture, Robin Hood (2010), that Plevin, on D-camera, and the other operators, Peter Taylor, Martin Hume, Paul Edwards, plus Peter Cavaciuti, first conceived the idea for the Association Of Camera Operators (ACO), for which Plevin served as president from 2012 to 2014. Mathieson also gave Plevin his first experience of shooting a 3D movie, on 47 Ronin (2013, dir. Carl Rinsch). “That was a very difficult shoot, technically, because of the delay in the operators’ monitor and the inertia of
the enormously heavy Alexa 3D rig,” remarks Plevin. “You had to predict when the actors were going to move to achieve the correct framing.” The first time Mathieson invited Plevin to take A-camera was on Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015), although it was Philippe Rousselot who had first bought Plevin to the British director’s attention some years earlier on Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (2011). Ritchie and Plevin’s working relationship has continued outside the umbrella of any one DP, with Plevin operating A-camera for Mathieson again on King Arthur: Legend
Of The Sword (2017) followed by Aladdin (2019) and Wrath Of Man (2021), both lit by DP Alan Stewart BSC. “Guy’s got a particular way of shooting,” reveals Plevin. “I was pretty proud of The Man From U.N.C.L.E because I felt we’d managed to create a really nice style. We tried to steer it in the direction of those classic 1960’s spy movies in the way we used the zoom, and with John shooting some 16mm handheld it introduced different textures. There’s a sort of voyeuristic, surveillance-type look to some scenes.” Project epic, or project small, the camaraderie of the crew remains one of Plevin’s favourite aspects of his job. “You feel part of a group of people who are working as one,” he explains, “and you’re only as good as your crew will allow you to be. I never get bored going to work, so I’m very lucky in that respect.”
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