Dermot McDermot

Late I know but… I had about 4 Cameflexes and most were silent gate, not academy aperture. All were converted to either Nikon or Leica lens mounts except one which had the turret pivot axle and turret machined down and locked to allow mounting a 5.9(?) Nikkor fisheye lens. The 16-35 version had a tool which allowed conversion from 4 perf to 3 perf pulldown. Regrettably, of the millions of feet I put through these cameras, none was either 16mm or 3 perf. 3 perf in theory at least, is the sweet spot since you can use good quality lenses (most anamorphic are not particularly good lenses) and you save on the film stock. The problem is/was finding a telecine which has the setup to take these non-standard gate and perf formats. Though the mechanism requires almost no servicing and will run for centuries with a light oil. the rotating mirrors are acrylic with a vacuum deposited silver coating. The silver wears off and the plastic shutter body can warp. They can be recoated or skimmed and recoated but I doubt you'd find too many people who know how to do that. The long film path at the gate, the lateral guides and the two pressure plates made for very steady footage. I don't think I lost a foot of film in 25 years or more which is better than I could say for Arris. The claw mechanism, just two sprung cams, is ridiculously simple and reliable. Who needs register pins? CM3s did shoot sound. If you can find a copy of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, you can see a couple of blimped Cames - I think at the end where a camera pans around to reveal another camera, also panning, until the two are pointing directly at each other. Blimped silent CM3s. D

Yes of course. It was a slightly bizarre situation where I had been working as a director/cameraman on commercials for some years and wanted to get some experience on features so took a job as clapper-loader using an early and quite awful Arri 35Bl. It was a troubled shoot and I tried to resign on a few occasions but Brian talked me out of it. Those of us who worked closely with Brian were really impressed with his abilities but also his sensibilities. At that stage, feature productions were just taking off over here. I'd written a script which we asked Brian to direct. Unfortunately, it didn't get up. Following that, Brian worked for me as a DOP with me directing. Complicated eh? Later, I worked with a few DOPs and I don't think one of them had the artistic and organisational abilities of Brian and it formed a lot of my attitude to the organisation of the crew on a feature. All too often, you hear about shoots going wrong and someone taking over etc. and I think a lot of it is due to the lack of a leader within each department - with an everyone for themselves culture taking over. As I mentioned earlier, Brian ran the camera department as a tight, disciplined unit where if we had our own internal problems, we kept them within the unit and tried to behave professionally - at least until the whole unit went on strike! Wasn't Brian a tank captain or something like that at Alamein or Tobruk?

I had nothing to do with Badlands other than as an admirer! I agree that it's by a long way, Malik's best film. I was fortunate to work both under and above Brian Probyn some long time ago in several roles.

It's difficult to mount a short flange to focal plane lens like a Lecia M lens to a camera like the Cameflex. It might be possible if you replaced the turret entirely and had a mount machined up which allowed the M mount to fit inside where the Camé mount had been. Heaps of people used Nikkor and Canon lenses on Cameflexes from Haskell Wexler to me. It's an easy conversion because, with the CM3 mount removed, only about 0.5mm of metal needs to be removed from the turret to fit a Nikon mount. 5 minute job as they say. To fit a really wide lens, you might have to machine off the turret pivot but it's no big loss. Probably the same applies to an NPR. You can still swing the turret but you need an Allen key first. However, (forgive the name drop here) Beauviala from Aaton was a big fan of Leica lenses and thought that the R series lenses were just as good as the Ms but easier to fit since the flange to focal plane distance is almost exactly the same as the Camé turret with the CM3 mount removed. Since the Leica R camera was a bit underwhelming, the R series lenses are a lot cheaper these days than M series. Without writing an essay on it, the R series lenses are full stop the best ciné lenses I have used. The only things which came close were Panavision lenses and certainly with an Aaton 35, the Leica/Aaton combination was noticeably better.

In the tree shot, I would guess an ND grad was used. Brian was not averse to popping those things on when he thought about it. Brian's rushes often looked crap - as you'd expect when things were over exposed two stops. The producers would often have to see graded sections before they calmed down. I have no doubt that this was Brian's idea for achieving the look that Malik wanted and I doubt Malik had the experience to know that this would wash out the blue sky but also reduce the need for fill lighting or reflectors. Brian came to prominence in a period in the UK when films were looking more and more realistic and unlit - whatever the actual technique used. Ken Loach's Days of Hope was (and still is)one of the most naturally lit things I had seen and was incredibly influential for lighting cameramen at the time. It was a decade or more before this look appeared in the US and there are still many many Hollywood films made which are lit like tennis courts. There were a lot of other subtle things which Brian used to do which may have gone over Terry Malik's head due to youth and inexperience. One was Brian's very consistent use of different colour key and fill lights. He always tried to get a small blue/orange difference to shape the light in a room. Another was his use of what he called "control words". At one point, when a director was asking for things Brian didn't agree with, Brian just made a small quiet comment. This was followed by 5 minutes of bluster from the director following which the director changed the scene and shot something different. I asked Brian about this later and he said "everyone has their control words. When it's getting over the top, you just need to drop a gentle hint using a control word and things should get back on track. You can't use them too often though." There's mention on the different way of working between Brian and Steve Larner. Brian was the best DOP I have worked with in terms of running his part of the film. He was the "head of department" and made sure that his department worked well and did the best they could, even though everything else was falling apart. I've worked with DOPs where it was everyone for themselves and in-fighting all over the place. Brian was not like that. He was a father figure, both with discipline and advice. The only odd thing, which perhaps started after the ulcers, was his overall level of calm on set. It was not uncommon for Brian to fall asleep, leaning on a light stand or ladder, while waiting for the rest of the crew to get ready for a shot and one of his trusties would gently wake him up before anyone noticed.