American Cinematographer - April 2000 - 18

r
so

few of those moves in the film, that

shot gains power - you're not
expecting it, and your eye isn't used to it.
It's a simple, strong move toward the
window, and you feel you're being drawn
out, or that you're flying with the boy out
one

the window."

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swelter¬
ing, stinking landscape in which the
mounting piles of refuse mirrored his
increasingly disordered mindset. Kuchler
notes ruefully that the film was shot
during the rainiest summer in Glasgow's
recorded history.
The filmmakers chose to render
Ratcatchers

surreal, somnambulistic

Fuji 500 ASA (8571) stock, which

tone on

we

a

silky look. It had softer blacks, and
wanted to have shallower blacks

because

we

felt it

represented the 1970s

better, [based on] the archive material of
the time," Kuchler notes. "We also went
for lower

printing numbers. Fuji 500
good with lower printing
numbers; it looked very painterly, pastel¬
like and soft. For sunny exteriors, we used
Fuji 125 [8531]."
In one comic fantasy sequence,
Kenny (John Miller), an animal-loving
looked very

friend of James's, ties

a

balloon and sends the

hapless rodent

mouse to a

aloft into the wild blue yonder. The mouse
flies away from Earth and lands on the
moon,

which is populated entirely by

mice. This brief, unexpected

flight of
fancy celebrates the unfettered imagina¬
tion of

a

child. The

scene was

black-and-white 16mm and

shot

was

on

post-

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developed by 1 ^ to 2 stops at 400 ASA.

format

with video," Kuchler recalls. "We put

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FI

James had to wander through a

very

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developing a visual style for the
project, the filmmakers examined a lot of
photographs of Glasgow from the 1970s
a period in the city's history that, as
Ramsay puts it, looked almost medieval,
with refuse strewn everywhere. Kuchler

way

a

of life.

"We telecined it and refilmed the telecine

glasses in between to decrease the
quality, then refilmed it a second time
before we actually filmed it back on the
some

set. The mouse

sequence is in two
halves. The first shot [of the mouse flying
American Cinematographer - April 2000

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