In It For The Dough...!

The Lewis brothers - actor/producer Damian and writer/director Gareth - team up for The Baker, a Welsh-set black comedy

by Anwar Brett, Exposure, Summer 2006

Surely everyone dreams of packing up the stressful city life and starting anew in the country. When hitman-for-hire Milo (Damian Lewis) succumbs to these thoughts he finds himself reinvented through mishap and circumstance as the new baker in an idyllic Welsh village.

Forced to come to terms with the challenges of this new career, he must also elude former colleagues and rivals who do not take kindly to his abrupt retirement.

This is the fertile comic ground for The Baker, a new British film that marks the feature debut of writer-director Gareth Lewis. The younger brother of his leading man, he developed the script for seven years before cameras finally rolled in the spring of this year.

"There was always this romantic notion that we would make a film together," explained Damian, who is also a producer on the film, "so I was always attached to it emotionally. Gareth would run drafts by me and I would give him notes. Then really it was in the last two or three years when we became a bit more cohesively a partnership, when our production company Picture Farm came into being, that we really focused on trying to get it made. The script changed for the better and then it was ready."

In the lovely Monmouthshire village of Grosmont in late April the production was two-thirds complete. The village had been transformed, houses were repainted in bright hues and the village pub was transformed from "The Angel" to "The Daffodil".

There can barely have been a crew member that did not notice that it was adjacent to Poorscript Lane. But this was not taken as a dark omen, as producer Dan Shepherd -- whose company Grandville Pictures has helped self-finance the movie -- also enthused over Gareth's script.

"I worked for Working Title many years ago," he explained, "and it was a project that was developed there under their low-budget division. So I had been aware of it. I hadn't seen it for three or four years, but it came back to us, we read it and it was funnier and far better than anything we could have hoped for. We were really excited about it."

Another fan is DP Sean Bobbitt, who is painstaking in picking projects that he really believes in on a story level. It was his decision to shoot the film on the Eterna 500T, the Eterna 250D and the 64D stocks.

"I specifically chose the Fuji stocks in relation to the digital intermediate route we would go in later," he explains. "I wanted to contrast the early days of Milo with the transformation he undergoes as he falls in love and discovers his love of baking, as he tries to find a new life away from international murder."

With the opening scenes detailing Milo's murderous former life, Bobbitt and his director took the unexpected choice of shooting this conventionally, with his subsequent conversion captured by a hand-held camera.

"All of the early stuff with the assassin is done with track and dolly," Bobbitt added. "Only when we get into the village itself does the camera get to be free. That's the key word: It's freed from its restrictions in the same way that Milo is freed from his."

Operating as well as lighting, Bobbitt admitted that the extra responsibility freed him to from constantly thinking about the lights, while also giving himself an ideal view of the frame. Director Gareth Lewis also saw an advantage in having his DP double up his duties.

"The great thing with Sean is that you get two shots for the price of one," he added. You don't have to cut and reset the camera. It's on his shoulder, so if he just moves with the action you don't necessarily move with the action; you're just in a new place."

Taking visual inspiration from various sources such as the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona, Bobbitt noted that the styling of Terry Gilliam's Brazil was also a key influence. "There are elements of that in terms of composition and wide angle lenses that we found very interesting. Also Amélie which -- because that was one of the early digital intermediate processes -- has elements that we have also referenced and incorporated into our colour palette."

Having worked with both Lewis brothers before, Bobbitt was a straightforward choice to light Gareth's first feature, and he was in an ideal place to judge how well the brothers work together.

"I think they're really cute together actually. They are brothers in a really sweet sort of way. There's a lot of unspoken vocabulary between them. They collaborate absolutely with each other. Damian is a producer as well so there is a potential for conflict, but we've seen none of that."

"I think we were both looking forward to working together," Gareth added, "but also a little apprehensive. We get on very well though like any other siblings we have bust-ups."

"But having said that, having lived together for as long as we did we can have those and move on. You just get on with it -- it's not terminal. We're quite close in age; there's only two years between us, so we're mates. I respect his work and, I think, he's coming to respect mine."

The Baker was originated on 35mm Eterna 500T 8573, Eterma 250D 8563, and Super F-64D 8522.

Caption: Writer-director Gareth Lewis and leading man Damian Lewis of The Baker.

Caption: DP Sean Bobbitt working with the Lewis brothers.

The DP View

by Sean Bobbitt, Exposure, Summer 2006

I'm very pleased that we've gone the digital intermediate route because given our schedule and the time of year we're working in, there are immense fluctuations in terms of light levels and intensity.

To a certain extent the DI is going to help me to balance those out. It has been very frustrating on the exteriors when we started with a completely clear blue sky and suddenly the clouds roll in. It's a question of waiting for the sun to come back. In that respect the DI gives us a certain amount to play around with.

I've been very pleased with the latitude of the Eterna stocks; they're fantastically well suited for the DI process. The range that you have within them is fantastic and yet they're not too soft. You can still hold your blacks and get good constant images.

That's really why we chose them. I wanted to have a stock that gives me as much information as I can possibly get onto it so that I can take the whole film visually into other places in the post-production.