Expat Kiwi cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh’s CV includes some of NZ’s finest films and international hits. He tells Grant Smithies about the art of making his latest big-budget projects look just right.

AS WE ease into summer, slowly and gratefully, like a cold man lowering himself into a hot bath, spare a thought for expat New Zealander Stuart Dryburgh. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where autumn has gone awol and a long hot summer is collapsing directly into winter.

“It’s stinking weather here,” he says. “It’s lashing with rain, and I’ve got a bored four-year-old. Hang on a minute while I find something to distract him.” He flicks on the telly and the TiVo, and little Joaquin chooses a cartoon called Backyardigans. “He loves it, especially this episode. He watches it over and over again. The central character, believe it or not, is a superhero photographer.”

Ah, bless. Just like dad. Born in London and raised in New Zealand from the age of nine, Dryburgh has been listed as one of the 10 best cinematographers in the world. Now 58, he hasn’t lived here for 15 years, but his CV includes several of the brightest jewels in our cinematic history, including An Angel At My Table, The Piano, Once Were Warriors, and In My Father’s Den.

Since moving overseas, Dryburgh has shot everything from world-conquering rom-com Bridget Jones’s Diary and mafia satire Analyse This to Texan murder mystery Lone Star. He has pointed his camera at Robert De Niro, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Julia Roberts, Naomi Watts,  Helen Mirren, Nicole Kidman, Marisa Tomei, Charlize Theron, to name a few. He even shot the pilot for Sex and the City, filmed in 1997 on 16mm.

“That pilot was nothing like the rest of the series,” says Dryburgh. “The director and I imagined a very different comedy to what it eventually became. We didn’t see it as all about shoes and fashion; it was more a dry social commentary about what it is to be a single woman in Manhattan.” Given the subsequent success of the show, does he admit he was wrong? “In terms of ratings, yes. Artistically, not necessarily.”

It’s another TV pilot that has me calling Dryburgh today. If you need further proof of the man’s credentials, consider this: when director Martin Scorsese was looking for a cinematographer to shoot the pilot for HBO’s new Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire, currently screening here on Sky, he called Dryburgh.

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire

It was perhaps the most expensive TV pilot ever made, costing nearly $US20 million ($26m)  “It was expensive for a couple of very good reasons,” says Dryburgh. “Firstly, we had Marty, an A-list movie director, and he felt he needed an unusually long shoot to do it justice. Then it cost over $US2 million to build the Boardwalk set here in Brooklyn, and there’s amazing costuming and art direction, too, which is also expensive. It had to look right. We didn’t want to use any cutesy period drama cliches like sepia or black and white, but both Marty and I felt it was important to get the look right then let the characters, the story and the art direction shine through.”

Created by former Sopranos screenwriter/producer Terence Winter, Boardwalk Empire stars Steve Buscemi as crooked Atlantic City treasurer and bootlegger Nucky Thompson, a man who saw the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s as a chance to make some serious money. Like Mad Men, it’s a carefully observed period piece set during a time of great societal change. The banning of the demon drink throws up no end of fascinating characters, from bent politicians and hard-boiled cops to prim Women’s Temperance League campaigners and rising mobsters Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, all chasing their own version of the American Dream.

A big-budget, visually rich drama like this must have felt like a gift to Dryburgh. What fun he must have had, sliding slow tracking shots across the sherbert-blue suits and immaculate early-model Rolls-Royces and little fishing boats loaded with watered-down whisky; swooping his boom down into a sea of men in homburgs and fedoras and flappers in beaded chiffon gowns dancing the Charleston in speakeasies; peering like a voyeur into cheap hotel rooms where politicians and prostitutes lay entwined in rose-pink satin sheets. He makes violence look good, too. Witness the guns blazing like deadly flashbulbs in forest clearings and nightclub cellars, and the blood leaking out slowly across polished floorboards, lit just so, while a crackly Caruso 78 spins on a blood-splattered gramophone nearby.

“It was a dream job in some ways,” he admits. “Because of the period it was set in and all the action, Boardwalk Empire provided the perfect opportunity to show off in a quiet way. It’s tricky, though. You want to show off, but you have to be careful you don’t overpower the story.”

The consensus is that Dryburgh got it just right. Though some critics have quibbled about clunky scripting and so-so supporting actors, the look of Boardwalk Empire has been widely praised; the New York Times called his camera work “lavish and exquisite”. The bad news is the Scorsese/Dryburgh pilot screened here two weeks ago, with surprisingly little fanfare given the huge push it got overseas. Those who missed it will have to wait for the inevitable DVD box set, but the series itself runs here for another two months and gets more compelling with each passing week.

Dryburgh, meanwhile, has another project due to hit cinemas here in December –    a gender-bending adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Frida director Julie Taymor. Much of the principal photography involved chasing Mirren, Russell Brand and Chris Cooper around various volcanic landscapes in Hawaii, but then the fun really started.

“The Tempest is a good example of how this job is an unusual mix of art and technical skill. Beside the location shooting, there’s some computer effects that we shot live elements for, and other stuff where we did multiple layers using a huge sheet of glass with an inch of water on it, reflecting a screen with trees in the foreground and somebody underneath it and ripples across the surface, like a very old-school mechanical trick. We also shot miniature sets and put our characters in there via green screen, but the sets were quite literally cardboard cut-outs, to give it a beautifully executed weirdness, a sense of deliberate unreality.”

THIS LOOK of “beautifully executed weirdness” is perhaps a trademark of Dryburgh’s. Certainly, it was already there in the early New Zealand movies that made his name: a heightened sense of personality to the landscape, a painterly use of colour, a scattering of oddly unsettling incidental shots, an affection for surfaces that look damp and tactile.

“I was fortunate enough to hook up with Jane Campion early in my career, and we had similar ideas about mood and colour. With Angel At My Table, we used cold bleak blues for the hospital scenes, and then when she gets to Spain, it’s bursting with bright colour. And Janet Frame’s childhood in the South Island is seen through a warmly tinted lens, not that it was the rosiest childhood, but because we were shooting in the North Island and we needed to mute those lush Waikato greens to look more like the tussock country of the South Island.”

Dryburgh also shot Campion’s next film, 1993′s The Piano, alongside former mentor, Alun Bollinger. The movie saw him nominated for a Best Cinematographer Oscar.

“That film was an extraordinary opportunity, because there’s such minimal dialogue. It’s almost a silent movie, so the story had to be told via colour, tone and visual mood. We made the forest look like it was at the bottom of a fishtank. The bush is a greasy, green murk, and the beach was a stark, almost monotone grey with mauve overtones. The house Sam Neill had carved out of the bush was all reds and oranges from the dead trees and the surrounding mud. These visuals accentuate the emotional undercurrents of the plot, even if you’re not conscious of that.”

Once Were Warriors

Shot back-to-back with The Piano was Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors, a movie that owes much of its visual impact to the decision to use “glamour lighting in a dirty old state house”, says Dryburgh. “Lee didn’t want us to take a kind of Ken Loach social realism approach; he wanted the characters to look really beautiful, to play against the bleakness and brutality of their lives. And it really works. Temuera Morrison looks amazing in that film, all pumped up from the gym with that gorgeous glowing skin tone. We got him straight from the role of Dr Ropata. He walked off the Shortland Street set on a Monday, and was with us on Friday, getting his head shaved to be Jake The Muss.”

Ten years later, a “spectacular script” tempted Dryburgh back to New Zealand to shoot 2004′s In My Father’s Den, directed by the late Brad McGann. “I’m certainly very proud of that film, and it’s a shame we never got to see what Brad might have done next. It’s one of the best projects I’ve ever been involved with, and Once Were Warriors comes a pretty close second.”

Dryburgh’s immense contribution to New Zealand cinema has meant that we tend to claim him as our own, even though he was born in London and now lives in America. But how does he see himself?

“I’m now an American citizen; I live here, my wife Carla is American, my two younger kids are American, but I was formed by my experience of growing up in New Zealand from age nine to 40-something, and I have adult kids who still live in New Zealand. If someone asks, I say I’m a New Zealander.” A New Zealander who makes movies in America, which must have its downsides.

Once you start to make star-driven feature films for the big American studios, one imagines you have to pander to the vanity of those stars. Rather than focusing on the more artistic elements of the film’s overall look, you’re the guy who must endlessly finesse the lighting so we don’t notice Meg Ryan’s wrinkles, and choose the perfect angles to conceal the fact that Richard Gere has gotten paunchy.

“Actually, I’ve worked with both those actors and they’re very low-maintenance,” says Dryburgh diplomatically. “They certainly care about precisely those things you mention, but once you have the lighting sorted and so on, they’re both consummate professionals who do the work, don’t make a fuss and go home at the end of each day. I’ve been lucky enough to work more with pros than with poncy stars.”

Even after 30 years in the game, Dryburgh still sounds boundlessly excited about his chosen career. “Yes, I do love it, that’s true. In my view, cinematographers have the best job on any film, because you’re deeply involved in the creative process but you don’t have to go to any of the meetings. Nobody calls you until they’re really making a movie. I know directors who spent three years trying to get a film made and it never happens. That’s a heartbreaker I wouldn’t be up for. But I usually get hired once they have the money and the cast and they know when
and where it’s gonna happen.”

ADMITTEDLY, NOT everything Dryburgh points his camera at turns to gold, but that’s not his fault. Most reviewers singled out Dryburgh’s “luscious” cinematography and Hugh Jackman’s performance as the only reasons to watch Meg Ryan’s time-travel romance, Kate and Leopold. His breathtaking cockpit-eye-view panoramas of patchwork fields were one of the few memorable things about Mira Nair’s 2008 Earhart biopic, Amelia. The vivid close-ups and lavender blue tones of Campion’s Portrait of a Lady drew great praise (“1996′s most delicious eye candy”) once critics stopped yawning over the rest of the movie. And most reviewers were in accord with the writer who dismissed dystopian sci-fi flick Aeon Flux, shot by Dryburgh in Berlin, as “dashingly beautiful but distressingly dumb”.

“Yes, but I don’t really want to get those reviews,” Dryburgh sighs. “Sometimes it sours your relationship with a good director if the reviews say it’s a lame film but it looks nice. Those reviews are gratifying on a subliminal level, but then you’re not surprised when that director doesn’t call you for the next one.”

Meh. Who cares when you’re getting calls from Martin Scorsese? Dryburgh may have shot his share of beautiful lemons, but his visual flair is clearly getting noticed by the right people.

“Certainly, the work I’ve done has been well admired, but more for its artistic sensibilities than its commercial success. I’m not above doing the occasional romantic comedy for the money, but I tend to chase films that are more visually interesting, which is probably why I’m not the man who gets hired for the big blockbuster jobs.”

Perhaps it’s just the grim Brooklyn weather outside his window, but Dryburgh sounds a little melancholy as he says this. Does he secretly wish he was the guy on speed dial for the next Bond movie?

“To be honest, I’d be quite happy with that because those big jobs can be huge fun, but that’s not the reputation I’ve built. I’m admired for more creative work, and I think my early years in New Zealand set me up for that. I originally trained in Auckland as an architect, which gave me a very broad visual arts background, and of course, the budgets in New Zealand meant you had to figure out how to do a lot with very little. In the end, though, I think making movies just suits my personality. I love collaborating with directors, designers, writers, actors, that whole huge team that contributes to making a good film. In the end, of course, it’s all about the story. If a great story’s not there on the page, it’s never gonna be there, no matter how pretty I make everything look.”

Boardwalk Empire screens 8.30pm Saturdays on Sky Movies.