I Get My Inspiration From All Around

I met with rising Australian cinematographer, photographer, film maker and all round good-guy Adam Howden to talk about life in the business and his work on recent films Osita La Notte Finale and Punch Drunk. Here’s what unraveled…

SBW. Tell us a little about what you do…
AH. I’m a cinematographer and I shoot Television Commercials, Short Films, Music Videos and the like.

SBW. What gets you going each day? Where do you get inspiration from?
AH. Apart from a stiff coffee it’s the urge to create something long lasting and meaningful to express something about the human condition. I get my inspiration from all around. I’m a musician as well. I love it when pictures and music lock together to create something even more beautiful than the some of its parts. Cinematographers like Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson and Christopher Doyle. Photographers like Bill Henson, Gregory Crewdson and Ansel Adams. Also music by everyone from Neil Young to Adam Freeland and Wes Montgomery to The Editors.

SBW. Tell us about your involvement in Osita La Notte Finale…
AH. Craig Boreham (Writer/Director) approached me whilst we were both studying at the Australian Film Television and Radio School this year. I was intrigued by the story of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last night on earth and really connected with the story. Pasolini was a writer, poet, director, an auteur really, and so Craig and I collaborated and the results are very very good! Ostia was the second collaboration between Craig and I. We work really well together; he’s a good friend and a great director.

SBW. Craig, tell us a little bit about your working relationship with Adam and your combined interpretation of your script for Ostia…
CB. It was a real process of exploration for both of us.  We had a pretty tight set of resources to work with and an ambitious script, which was also period, being set in the 70s, so we were well aware that the more planning we did, the closer we would get to pulling it off. We knew when we started thinking about it that we wanted to shoot on film and in black and white to give the movie a strong visual tone and to reference the Italian Neo-realist period.   We watched a lot of movies from the time and also a lot of contemporary work that used black and white.

Looking at Pasolini’s films we decided that to place the film into an entirely neo-realist landscape didn’t really do justice to his full body of work so we explored mixing it up with a fusion of the classic look and more contemporary handheld moments as well as more abstract sequences as transitions. It was a strong collaboration and we both got pretty into thinking about techniques from the time that you usually shun these days, like zooms and dissolves etc, and how we could make them work for us and not be jarring to watch.

As a director it’s really important to work with a director of photography that is totally on the same page as you.  There is a lot of trust going both ways and both Adam and I like to be all over it before we get to set. It makes for a much easier time for everyone when unexpected things do happen, and they always do. Having worked together a few times now, I knew that working with Adam was going to enable me to focus on my actors and get the story beats and have full confidence that he would get the great pictures.

SBW. Adam, tell us about Punch Drunk…
AH. When I first went freelance in 2006 I met Sam Wark (Writer/Director) on a commercial I was shooting. He was the agency Art Director I was the cinematographer. Funnily enough he really looked like this friend of mine and so I sort of felt like I already knew him, it was weird but we’ve been working together ever since.

Punch Drunk is a film that Sam wrote around 7 years ago, he’d told me about it and it got stuck in my head. This year with the economic downturn and all, things were slow in advertising so Sam and I needed something we could sink our teeth into to keep us from going stir crazy – it worked!

SBW. Sam, tell us a little bit about your working relationship with Adam and how you two collaborated on Punch Drunk…
SW. I first met Adam on a commercial I wrote and Art Directed in 2006 when I was working for an Ad Agency. I had seen his work on a reel and thought it was really nice and thought that he should be doing bigger commercials with an eye and style he gave his shots. So we hired him. It was a fun ad and better for having Adam and his camera assistant Cameron Gaze involved. I remember thinking, these are really chilled but professional guys I want to work with them when I Directed one day (the next year I started directing).

It sounds kind of cliché but Adam and I have a very open working relationship and let our boundaries cross to a certain degree. For two reasons I imagine, one, because once we wrap on projects we are mates that will head off and have a beer and a laugh, and two, from the very beginning I like to get Adam involved so he sees it as clearly as I do all the way through. I think by doing this Adam has an emotional connection to some of the shots and instinctively knows how to shoot it without me even explaining. Its good like that as we can sometimes just exchange a look on set and we know exactly what each other is thinking without tip-toeing around each others artistic motivations. This is something that has come with time and knowing how each other works I guess (that and I have only ever used Adam since I started Directing). We have a great working relationship because we are both very passionate about what we do and not afraid of working our arses off to get the result we want.

In Punch Drunk I had a very clear and strong sense of the emotion needed so we literally sat down for days and I acted through the scenes to Adam step by step and explained what I wanted to feel from each scene, Adam in turn made a shot list which we refined and based our shoot on. We actually did nearly everything together, locations, rehearsals to even watching reference movies together. I think you’ll be hard pushed to find a more committed DP. He loved the script, so like myself threw himself completely into it. He worked so hard and the pictures are testament to that. I only hope I can still get to use him once this film is seen by the industry.

SBW. Adam, who would you most like to be compared to?

a) Richard Avedon

b) Michelangelo Antonioni

c) Elle Macpherson

d) David Shrigley

e) George Lucas

AH. I’d say probably Richard Avedon, his photographs are very beautiful and very iconic. I come from a stills photographic background and did a commercial photographic degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the late 1990’s. Digital was around back then but it wasn’t the norm like it is today. I had, and still do, have a passion for film based black & white photography. There’s something about the simplicity of the chemistry, the silver in the film emulsion and the honesty that it seems to evoke in my images and the subjects that just doesn’t feel the same if I shoot digital.

SBW. What are you plans for 2010?
AH. Well I moved to Sydney in January this year and have just finished a Graduate Diploma – Cinematography from the Australian Film Television and Radio School. So next year I plan to stick around in Sydney and keep working on establishing myself as a cinematographer up here. I want to keep shooting more and better commercials, music videos, short films and hopefully, fingers crossed, a TV series or feature film would be great!

SBW. Finish the sentence: Master Mouse Patrol…
AH. Makes me think of Modest Mouse (the band) and Danger Mouse (the cartoon) all rolled up into one swampy drunk and angry little super hero!