Gary Oldman Interview
We’re gearing up for the third season of The High Bar (the show I’m Director and Technical Director for) and we managed to get a few minutes alone with Gary Oldman while he was promoting “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” to discuss his career and process.
And by a few minutes, I do mean a few minutes. He was on a crazy schedule and we got into the room 30 minutes before he showed up and then had exactly 15 minutes of his time. Obviously in this type of schedule you can’t go over on setup time, yet we still had to get three cameras set up as well as audio and lighting. Oh, and we only had three crew members.
So what we ended up doing was keeping it simple. Content is king on a shoot like this and we needed to make sure we got it all. We devoted two crew members to setting up camera and audio (and double checking that it worked) and then one other crew member set up the lights. We had a minor gear issues with the lights (of course), and had to roll with just two kino divas. Fortunately we could boom them out on c-stands and use them both as hair lights/keys. The look isn’t quite as polished as I would have liked, but at least there’s some shape.
Another issue, Gary came in and decided to favor his left shoulder early in the interview, which unfortunately killed our OTS shots. We couldn’t stop mid-shoot and ask him to shift sides, so we rolled with it.
At the end of the day we got our interview with an A-list actor, and we managed to keep him on schedule, which in turn made the publicist happy. For an up and coming show like ours it’s incredibly important to keep these relationships working and to show we can follow the rules. But we also got a really great interview out of it!
Enjoy!
1 year ago