American Cinematographer - October 2013 - 42

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on Howard spoke to AC about Rush
just steps away from one of the
story’s real-life settings: an old racetrack
at the hilltop Crystal Palace park in
South London. Vintage and mock
Formula 3 cars snarl in the background
of the scene, which takes place early in
the movie, six years before the main
characters engage in their Formula 1
duels of 1976.
The day’s racing shots are intermingled with some droll business
involving the entourage of English
driver James Hunt, whose legend is
growing as the story begins. Howard
knows the terrain well. “Rush takes place
at about the time when Happy Days was
the number-one TV show,” he says. “I
was just a little younger than these guys
were, so I remember the way the media
was intensifying its interest in celebrities.”
Howard was initially drawn to
Rush by the screenplay, written by his
Frost/Nixon collaborator Peter Morgan.
“Peter finds an interesting common
ground for adversaries and, therefore,
for the audience,” he says. “Without
sentimentalizing, he does find humanity.”
Howard observes that Rush cine-

October 2013

A Director Shifts Gears

matographer Anthony Dod Mantle,
ASC, BSC, DFF “likes to operate with
a curious camera. It’s always about finding something in the frame or something in the character that answers a
question or piques one’s curiosity. That
gives each frame a lot of energy and a
lot of life.
“Anthony and I almost instantly
recognized a shared sense of what Rush
ought to look and feel like away from
the track,” he continues. “The challenge
was policing ourselves to carry that
aesthetic onto the track, where logistical
factors like crowds, scheduling,
mechanical failures and dangerous race
conditions threatened to push us into
more conventional choices. The answer
was lots and lots of prep on our own
time, so when circumstances allowed us
to get something right, we could go like
hell.”
Howard says the joy in shooting
Rush was how he and Dod Mantle were
able to surprise themselves. “Despite all
the prep and planning we did, there was
always an excitement about discovering
a new possibility and just grabbing it.
It’s not faux documentary, but it does
have a kind of discovered feel — and, I
hope, much less of a staged feel.”
American Cinematographer

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He recognizes that
this strategy presented
editors Dan Henley and
Mike Hill with “a huge
editorial challenge. It’s
not just cutting the heads
and tails off the scenes
and putting them
together in the right
rhythm. They have to
really roll up their sleeves
and help create the sense
of reality. And given the
way we’re shooting the
movie, there are more
than a handful of ways
to approach [various
sequences]. I always have
a point of view, but I
don’t tell them [right
away] because I always
want to see what they
discover with the footage first.”
Howard reserves special praise
for Rush’s art department, led by supervising art director Patrick Rolfe, for its
deep research on the movie’s era. The
team festooned production-office
corridors with a variety of images, and
“those reinforced all our instincts as to
the look and feel not only photographically, but also atmospherically. [The
photos influenced] wardrobe, props,
our color palette, and even the body
language of characters and the feel of
the background actors. Those images
seeped in to create a unified aesthetic
that informed our choices in every
shot.”
The director concludes that he,
Dod Mantle and their collaborators
sought to “dimensionalize” the drama
so that audiences “feel really rewarded
that they’ve experienced something,
and a little surprised by the journey
they’ve gone through with the characters. It’s not necessarily the journey they
expected.”
— Fred Schruers

American Cinematographer - October 2013

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