American Cinematographer - April 2009 - 66

Sundance 2009: 5 That Thrived Right: English schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) succumbs to the charms of an older man (Peter Saarsgard) in An Education. Below: Cinematographer John de Borman, BSC prepares to shoot one of the film’s handheld scenes. His work earned the Excellence in Cinematography Award in the World CinemaDramatic competition. An Education Cinematographer: John de Borman, BSC Director: Lone Scherfig The heroine of An Education, 16-year-old English schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan), learns some painful life lessons when she becomes romantically involved with David (Peter Sarsgaard), a charming man in his 30s who is not as honorable as he initially seems. Viewers enjoy a lesson in classic cinematography courtesy of John de Borman, BSC, whose elegant work earned the cinematography award in the World Cinema-Dramatic category. “I never knew there was a cinematographer’s award at Sundance,” he confesses. 66 April 2009 An Education photos by Kerry Brown, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. “Since it happened, I can’t tell you how many people have been phoning and texting me. When you get an award at Sundance, lots of people know about it!” De Borman’s previous work hardly went unnoticed. In 2000, he earned an Evening Standard British Film Award for his body of work and for Best Technical/Artistic Achievement (for Hideous Kinky), as well as an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Hamlet; in 2007, he added a BAFTA nomination for the television project Tsunami: The Aftermath. His résumé also includes Last Chance Harvey, Ella Enchanted and The Full Monty. Still, he was especially chuffed about the Sundance kudos. “I’m interested in shooting proper stories, grown-up stories, and I actually haven’t done half as many as I’d like to do. To receive an award for that is sensational.” Set in London in the early 1960s, An Education blends two worlds. The safe but slightly drab suburb of Twickenham is represented by the home Jenny shares with her doting parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and the halls of her all-girl high school, where the star pupil’s progress is closely monitored by her English teacher (Olivia Williams) and headmistress (Emma Thompson). At the other extreme are the swank urban nightspots Jenny experiences with David and his fashionable friends, Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). De Borman, who grew up in London, brought a personal perspective to the period settings. “My father had a restaurant in the King’s Road, so I knew the glamorous Sixties from my childhood, and I tried to bring some of those memories to the film,” he says. “Shooting scenes at the Walthamstow greyhound racing club was my suggestion. It has been closed down for quite some time, so I suppose we immortalized it onscreen.” De Borman says he and director Lone Scherfig built their narrative foundation on the straightforward virtues of England’s “kitchen sink” films, which brought social realism to dramas focused on the lives of working Britons. The cinematographer cites The LShaped Room (1962), shot by Douglas Slocombe, BSC, as a particular inspiration. “That picture is beautifully shot and composed, and it really made an impression on me,” he says. “It’s about portraiture, it’s about faces, and it concerns people who are lonely and out of sorts, so it has some thematic similarities with our film. Those films were about the human condition, and

American Cinematographer - April 2009

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