American Cinematographer - May 2014 - 20

Production Slate

Road Work
By Jon D. Witmer

Written and directed by Steven Knight, Locke unfolds nearly
in real time as its title character (played by Tom Hardy) navigates a
veritable minefield of phone calls over the course of an 85-minute
nighttime drive. As Locke strives to keep a key business endeavor on
schedule, he also reveals to his wife that he has been unfaithful - a
confession that threatens to destroy their life together. Although
Hardy is the only actor to appear onscreen, both sides of each conversation are heard.
Locke is the first collaboration between Knight and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, BSC, who elected to shoot with
digital cameras in order to capture the nighttime driving along open
roads in and around London, England. Zambarloukos recalls that he
was sent the script by Locke producer Guy Heeley, a former assistant
director with whom he had worked on the features Sleuth (AC Nov.
'07) and Death Defying Acts. Speaking with AC while enjoying "a bit
of a break" in Cyprus, Zambarloukos enthuses, "I read the script,
which is probably one of the best I'll ever get to read, and I was like,
'Please, sign me up!'"
American Cinematographer: Was it at all daunting to be
limited to one character's car, at night, for almost 90 minutes?
Zambarloukos: Oh, hugely daunting, but also liberating.
When we started talking about it, Steve asked, 'Do you ever drive at
night and get fascinated by color and light and the pulse of what
could possibly be going on behind each car windshield?' We started
talking about [the film] as a kind of visual poem. More than anything
20

May 2014

technical about how to shoot it, for me it was about, 'How can I be
a good servant to this human story?'
How much prep time did you and Knight have
together?
Zambarloukos: Two to three weeks. It was quite intense.
First of all, Steve says, 'I want to do the whole performance every
night while driving from Birmingham to London.' That's the route
Locke takes along the M1, which is a very important highway in the
U.K, and it takes about an hour and a half. But then we were told
you're not allowed to film on a motorway in England anymore, so
we had to find permission from a road that could double for the
M1. We were both quite devastated that we couldn't do the Birmingham-to-London route, but in retrospect, I was very lucky because
half or three-quarters of that route would have had no streetlights
whatsoever!
How many shooting days did you have?
Zambarloukos: We had eight nights to shoot. We had five
nights with Tom, and we needed to spend one shooting him getting
into the car and driving off from the construction site. In the end,
we decided to do three nights on a low-loader [process trailer] and
one night of Tom driving the real car, with us inside with two
cameras, so we could look through the windshield at the road. We
also did a couple of days of drive-bys and POVs, anything we could
do without Tom. We worked out that we could do two performances every night, so I can actually tell producers I did 79 pages in
one day, because that's how long the script was! Tom put his entire
self into it, so he would be exhausted by 2 or 3 a.m., giving us about
four hours of shooting [each night]. Another reason for finishing by

American Cinematographer

Unit photography by Kerry Brown. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of A24.

Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) weighs the consequences of his path as he drives from Birmingham to London in the feature Locke.

American Cinematographer - May 2014

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