Cinematographer Denson Baker’s recent projects have included the award-winning New Zealand drama The Dark Horse, the Oliver Stone-produced documentary Ukraine on Fire and the 2009 India-set romance The Waiting City. That last film was directed by Claire McCarthy, Baker’s wife and the director of Ophelia. Ophelia, which screens at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, casts Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen to reframe Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of the ill-fated Ophelia. Baker speaks with Filmmaker below about the key paintings that influenced the film, collaborating with his wife and capturing the film’s tricky opening shot. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 27, 2018Luke Dunkley began his career 20-some years ago as an editor on the short-lived BBC show This Life. He has since gone on to work for dozens of TV series and miniseries, including Netflix’s The Crown, Channel 4’s National Treasure and Canal Plus’s The Last Panther. Dunkley served as the editor on Ophelia, the fourth feature from Australian director Claire McCarthy. Ophelia is a retelling of Hamlet as told from the perspective of the young noblewoman of Denmark. Below, Dunkley discusses how he and McCarthy sought to “not compromise the young female perspective” in their spin on Shakespeare. Filmmaker: How and why did […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2018Ophélia Claude Chabrol was the first member of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd to direct a feature film with Le Beau Serge in 1958, and he scored the first box-office hit of the French New Wave with his second movie, Les Cousins (1959). Yet it took almost another 10 years for him to hit his commercial and critical stride with a series of thrillers (most notably La Femme Infidele, La Rupture and Le Boucher) that would firmly establish Chabrol as the most reliable genre stylist of his generation. In between were a series of flops and for-hire assignments, all of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2017