DoP Kate McCullough über „The Quiet Girl“
by Jens Prausnitz, July 16, 2023
In over 20 years as a guest at Camerimage International Film Festival, I have never seen a film launch preceded by the Irish Ambassador’s greeting to the audience. A big gesture for a small film that almost won the foreign Oscar. But “The Quiet Girl” doesn’t need any noise to worm its way into the hearts of viewers, but can rely entirely on the images, which speak for themselves.
Photo: Ernst Kaczynski
For “The Quiet Girl” Kate McCullough finds images with a powerful pull that you cannot cope with without handkerchiefs. There are shots you didn’t see coming, and Kate McCullough always finds the perfect frame at the right time, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Despite the air conditioning, the humidity in the cinema increased noticeably and caused the spectators’ dams to break before the credits rolled.
Directed in Gaelic, Colm Bairéad’s debut film took just five weeks to shoot, which sounds like more than it is when you’re only allowed to work five hours a day with the nine-year-old leading lady, who appears in almost every scene. It was also shot on location for cost reasons. The Irish DoP relied on the Sony VENICE and ZEISS CP.3/XD lenses.
Thank you for this perfect film. I actually wanted to stay for the Q&A, but then I had to be alone with him for a bit. Can you explain to us how you conjure up such impressions?
I assume you know you’re only as good as the team around you? So if you feel supported and there is a lot of trust between each other, then we can all do the best possible job. I’ve never worked with Colm before, but it “clicked” straight away. We simply understood each other because of our empathy. It felt like we’d worked together for years, or our ancestors with each other – something in our heritage that just helps us understand each other. We were always kind of in sync. Of course there’s a healthy tension between director and camera, pushing each other as far as you can go, but we pretty much agreed on everything.
Once you have such a strong bond, it gives you support even under stress when you follow the rehearsals and ask yourself how you are supposed to manage it. You find a way through it and the best camera position for it. I often believe that there is only one or two places that are right for the camera.
ISo you set the settings on the fly, with no storyboards?
No storyboards. We had a shot list, but it was more for dividing up the day of shooting. On set we put it away and tried to be open to everything that was going on around us. Just ticking a list quickly becomes an administrative act. That’s why it’s very important for me to keep my eyes open and to be vigilant. You plan things and then that day an actor does something that is so much more meaningful than what you expected. You have to recognize these moments as such and then implement them accordingly, and not in the way you planned weeks ago.
DoP Kate McCullough and director shot The Quiet Girl without a storyboard. (Photo: Curzon Film)
I think that’s probably coming from my documentary background of just forsaking his instincts
trust and cut it in your head the way you perceive it. To understand in what relationship to each other
the settings will stand.
That sums it up very well, and you can literally see it in such settings.
That’s cinema, isn’t it? As it accumulates its own attitudes. A single, isolated shot should not stand on its own and should die. I think it’s the relationship between what comes before and what comes after that first peels something out of the space. I did a little editing myself in college, and I must have learned something good from it!
It’s great how calmly you let the viewer look around at your pictures.
It was definitely a decision we made early on in our approach. The film is an adaptation of a short story that is told very economically without making any unnecessary noise around it. It’s just information and it’s up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. That’s why it was very important to us to be economical with our film language and to enable the characters to move freely in space. The rooms within the rooms were also important, things that weren’t said, or things that were said but were supposed to mean something else. [15329]
Here is the continuation of the interview with DoP Kate McCullough!
2023-07-16 08:03:07
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