Irish budget like this that's going to mean that I have to lose something somewhere else. Shooting on digital was ok. I know that camera. I own that camera. So I know it very well. But there's still a process that I had to go through with Pat. Then what that allowed me was to get some nicer quality lenses and I thought that that was more important. I used these vintage Cooke S2 lenses. They're like an 1940s or 1950s glass that have their imperfections, but I knew that for all the older photos that they had a lovely quality of them. And when you mix that with a digital camera it works, that mix of older lenses with a digital camera. It is something that we had done on Silence. We did something similar. We shot with old Russian lenses on that. It gives you all of the advantages of digital like that ability to shoot at nighttime. That scene that we did at night on the beach that was literally lit by lanterns from the boats. And that was something that just would not be achievable with film. It gave me the flexibility of digital with nice quality glass and that allowed me to rent those from Vast Valley. They have an old set that I am familiar with and luckily enough they were free at the time.
You captured some stunning images of Connemara with them.
There's always an element of chance with these things. You go out to the Inagh Valley and you recce these things and you think "Oh this is going to be great". And you can get caught out with the weather. And in Ireland that's one of the beauties and most frustrating things about it. We were lucky in the Inagh Valley that it wasn't a real crisp bright day. We wanted some clouds, but if you have too much of that then it becomes terribly flat. We were just lucky. We spent a day out in that valley and it was a typical Irish day in that we got a mixture of stuff. But the sun did come out. In that big wide shot of the valley where the two characters meet across the river the sun was going down over the mountain at that stage. It's interesting in black-and-white, it's not as obvious as in colour, because if that was in colour there would have been a lovely golden sunset there. . It still gives that type of quality to it. We were just lucky that it was nice. It's interesting when you look at things through a black and white ye or a black and white lens. You see things differently than you do in colour. Things are more structurally basic are more
CinÉireann / December 2017 47