MURREN TULLETT•BRIAN AND CHARLES

by thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview

SHOOTING GALLERY•EURO CINE EXPO EXTRAS 2022

THE ODD COUPLE

By Ron Prince

Friends come in all shapes and sizes. Lonely inventor Brian’s buddy turns out to be Charles Petrescu, a sentient AI robot he has cobbled together from junk – including a mannequin’s head, a kitted cardigan and a washing machine – strewn around the remote farm he inhabits in North Wales.

Brought to life during a lightning strike, Charles quickly grows in his learning about the world round him, and the unlikely pair develop an engaging camaraderie playing darts, boiling cabbages, riding bikes, enjoying pillow fights and watching travel shows on the telly together. But, when the village bully and his family abduct Charles, and threaten to destroy him, Brian and his kind-hearted neighbour Hazel decide to fight for Charles’ freedom.

That’s the premise behind director Jim Archer’s charming, disarming and bizarrely-British, fulllength debut feature, Brian And Charles, starring David Earl, backed by Film4 and BFI, and shot by cinematographer Murren Tullett, making just his second longform production.

Harnessing a fly-on-the-wall documentary style, via a predominantly handheld camera, Brian And Charles is an expansion of Archer’s eccentric short of the same name from 2017, which itself was based on a comedy stand-up routine and radio show.

With the screenplay by David Earl and Chris Hayward, who also star in the film, Brian And Charles was an audience favourite at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, and received rave reviews for its depiction of loneliness and the replenishing power of friendship, wrapped in amusing whimsicality.

“During pre-production Jim and I considered films with countryside settings and significant use of observational camera – such as The Levelling (2016, DP Nanu Segal BSC), God’s Own Country (2017, DP Joshua James Richards) and Gwen (2018, DP Adam Etherington BSC),” says Tullett, whose previous credits include the highly-praised Palace Of Fun (2016), his first longform feature, the short Calving (2021), plus four episodes of the TV series Down From London (2019), directed by Archer.

“I am great a fan of Jim’s work, and was really taken by the Brian And Charles short he had made earlier, with its handheld, documentary-style approach, use of long lingering shots and tocamera monologues, and we wanted to carry that over into this film.

“However, we distinctly wanted to avoid going down a ‘mockumentary’ route, using things like zooms and other techniques to punctuate jokes, which have become over-used and feel somewhat passé, especially in TV shows now. This production was more about creating something with a more measured, cinematic approach, a slow pace to unfold the charm of Brian and Charles’ growing friendship, yet with lots of bleak scenic elements to underpin the narrative about Brian’s loneliness and isolation.”

Production was originally due to commence in March 2020, but was postponed until the winter due to UK pandemic lockdown. After a six moth hiatus, the four-week shoot took place during November and December at locations around Snowdonia, including a working farm in Cwm Penmachno, the village of Llyn Gwynant and the local town Betws-y-Coed.

“From a visual perspective, the delay in shooting actually worked brilliantly for me and Jim in shaping the look and tone of the film,” says Tullet. “I think it would have been much more difficult to reflect the sense of Brian’s loneliness in the spring months, with flowers and buds appearing in March, April and May. The weather at the time of year we shot also played very much into my favour, as we had pretty constant cloud, which helped in protecting the consistency of the light.”

Initial tests for the production were conducted at Panavision, in London, where Tullett and Archer looked at different framing and lens options, including Anamorphic, in order to move away from a TV look. This was followed by technical scouts of the locations in Wales, to shoot further tests, including Charles’s head on a pole, to get a feeling for the farmhouse, the landscapes and the winter hues.

“After seeing our locations, we ditched the idea of shooting Anamorphic,” explains Tullett, “partly because having a large and unpredictable robot in such tiny interiors just wouldn’t have worked with the close focal distances we needed to achieve on the cast. So we decided to shoot spherical, crop to 2.35:1 and do further tests with more modern glass options, including Panavision Primos, Zeiss Master Primes and Leitz Summicron-C cine lenses.”

Tullett’s eventual camera package, provided by Panavision, comprised of an ARRI Alexa Mini fitted with the Leitz Summicron-Cs.

“Although they are T2 across the range, the Leitz

This production was about creating something measured and cinematic

Summicron-Cs are amazingly compact and lightweight which, in combination with the Alexa Mini, helped to support the handheld operating style. Also, I really didn’t want to end-up with something heavy on my shoulder for a month of shooting so many scenes with improvised dialogue and lengthy following singles. “Furthermore, the Summicron-Cs come in a broad range of focal lengths, which helped in creating variety of framing choices, and they have minimal flare. We were going to have to put big light sources through small windows to light the interiors of the traditional stone cottage, and the Leitz lenses really helped mitigate the effect of veiling flares in the image.”

During prep, Tullett worked with colourist Matthieu Toullet, then at MPC (now at Company3) in London, to devise a trio of monitoring LUTs that helped set the look and tone of the film through subtly desaturated looks on interior, exterior and night scenes.

Apart from a handful of artfully-crafted landscape aerials, filmed using drones by The Flying Picture Company, and rigs for driving scenes, Tullett duly operated the camera handheld for the vast majority of the production, assisted on focus by 1st AC Barney Coates. Tobin Jones operated B-camera during scenes involving multiple characters. The gaffer was Helio Ribeiro, and the lighting package was provided by Panalux.

“Originally, our lighting budget was very small, as there was an assumption by production that, as we were shooting in a documentary format, we would not need more than a minimal resource,” Tullett remarks, “However, as we all know, if you want bring any sort of style and consistency to your work, you do need a decent lighting package, and I was able to negotiate that.

“Lighting the cottage interiors was probably our biggest challenge, along with some of the bigger night scenes. There was hardly any space for lights inside, especially when Brian and Charles were together in a scene. So we lit through the windows, with the CRLS mirror and reflector system from The Light Bridge using Pars and ARRISUNs, and had a few small point sources, like K5600 Joker Bugs and Dedolights, to provide fill-light and other accents in the room. The CRLS system works really well, although you can encounter stability issues when shooting in 40mph winds!

“The night scenes were also difficult, and there was a lot of discussion about the car chase scene, when Brian and Charles are on the back of a truck careering down a country road. That was originally scripted as a day scene, but seemed more powerful and dramatic at night.

“However, there was no ambient light at all, so we had to fix-up a couple of 18Ks on a cherry picker way down the road. Unfortunately, that was one of the nights where it decided to rain really hard. It was wet and painful for me being strapped with the camera into the back of the truck for 12 hours, and it was really hard to hide our sources as they lit up the rain, but the final result looks effective.”

The final DI grade took just four days, aided in no small part by Toullet’s original LUTs, his skills in tonally balancing shots, diminishing any troublesome bright spots on the interiors, and overall sympathetic eye in further focussing the audience’s emotional attention to the visual storytelling.

As one might imagine, making a comedy proved to be a happy experience for the cast and crew.

“It was a bit of a blessing for me, on my first feature of any size, that we had short shooting days,” says Tullet. “I would typically leave the hotel at eight in the morning and be back by five.

“Because of the pandemic, we were in our own little bubble in a remote place, and we all hung-out together in the evenings at weekends. As for the shoot, Jim is great to work with, as is David Earl, and there was a lot of giggling during and inbetween takes. I absolutely loved the experience, are really do hope the quirky British humour of Brian And Charles travels around the world.”