Over the last year or two I’ve become quite good friends with Axelle Carolyn through some short films we’ve worked on together, and a couple of modelling sessions she did for me. Axelle is married to Neil Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and Doomsday, and this month his latest, Centurion, was released. I was lucky enough to be invited onto the set for a day last year where I witnessed numerous unpleasant sword-based deaths being administered by Mr Sam Worthington, and the film is definitely on my ‘Must See In The Cinema’ list.
Anyway, it’s a good excuse to re-post this cracking portrait of Neil that I took last year in the Coronet Cinema in Notting Hill, London. I was actually there to photograph Axelle but Neil fancied a couple of shots too. It’s lit with one SB-800 flash to camera right, with a Lumiquest Softbox III on it. Ideally I’d have liked another flash camera left to give a bit of rim-light kick but we had so very little time in the location.
A few weeks back I mentioned that the website for 1 Day had gone live, a movie I did some stills for in 2008. It opens next week and today I arrived at work to discover a bunch of my photos from it on page 3 of The Independent. It turns out the film, which is set in Birmingham and centres on street gang warfare punctuated by rap musical numbers, is being turned down by certain chain cinemas in the city after a West Midlands police officer informally suggested to the manager of the Birmingham Odeon that he shouldn’t show it. The manager then spoke to other cinemas who also agreed not to show it, although there are several others that will.
It’s that time of year again, when the horror fans gleefully attempt to out-gore each other with impunity and all the theme bars stock up on fake cobwebs and witches hats, and homes across the world welcome back the smell of slowly-rotting, slightly scorched ghoulishly carved pumpkins : it’s (nearly) Hallowe’en!