Most spy thrillers are based on action scenes with flashy camera moves, but slow horses It featured a different variation that interested cinematographer Danny Cohen. In what Cohen calls an “anti-espionage thriller,” the challenge was to eliminate flashy moves to emphasize dialogue and acting.
slow horses Follow a team of British intelligence agents sent by MI5 to Slow House after making a career-ending mistake. In the third episode of “Bad Tradecraft,” which is an Emmy-hosted episode, Lambs (Gary Oldman) and Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) have a secret meeting on a riverside bench.
Most of the series is shot at night, which Cohen says is easier to manage. With the ability to “sculpt the light” without having to worry about the sun covering the clouds, it was easy to enhance the series’ harsh vibe.
Deadline: Things pushed you to work slow horses?
Danny Cohen: Things really attracted me slow horsesIt’s kind of an anti-espionage thriller. We weren’t trying to make London or the characters beautiful and sexy, so we went for a much more sophisticated look. I don’t think Gary Oldman’s character ever changes his clothes and Slow House isn’t set after the Cold War … The direction the film needed was a heavy, rainy, cold and unhappy London, and I think all of that contributes to the ‘atmosphere. .
Deadline: So the third episode, “Bad Tradecraft”, is the one selected for review. What irritated you about the photograph from that episode?
Cohen: One of the really interesting scenes for me was with Jackson Lamb and Taverner. So Gary Oldman and Christine Scott Thomas were sitting on a bench by the canal at night, and what was quite exciting is that this is a very long dialogue for two people who don’t move. They neither walked nor talked, they both sat down. This was one of the things that is not very normal in this type of drama. I think there’s always a desire for the camera to get too excited and try to create some kind of drama, but I don’t think we’ve had to do anything in the sense that we already have two great actors playing the lines, and the lines are really good. This is not about camera flickering or crane movements and I think we only did one. The scene starts with a camera on the boat swimming down the canal as it approaches the shore, but it was a really good job of shooting and we let them do their thing.
And what’s always fun to photograph things at night is that you can really sculpt the light. It’s actually a lot easier because the light can change quite quickly throughout the day. You can sculpt the light to give them an edge and let some of their faces fall into darkness which gives a very strong atmospheric feeling.
I don’t know the exact time of the scene, but it should be between five and 10 minutes, and it’s crazy for two people to sit on the screen for that long, but it’s an exciting way to tell a story. We can do amazing things with cameras, cranes and drones, but if the material is exciting and the actors are excellent, why should we overdo it?
Source: Deadline
