American Cinematographer - December 2000 - 18

mate

story', it is set against the backdrop

of the coal-miners' strike of 1984

-

the

longest national strike in the history of
the British working class. Billy (Jamie
Bell) lives with his widower father (Gary
Lewis) and cranky older brother (Jamie

Billy Elliot:
A Triumphant Grand Jete
by Rachael K. Bosley

Draven), both of whom work in the
mines, and the film toes a difficult line by

tempering Billy's increasing passion for
dance with the growing tension and
violence created by the strike.
Tufano says he was chiefly
concerned with how to present the film's
dance numbers so that they would
appear organic to their settings. "We
wanted a documentary-style realism; the
dancing had to grow out of the environ¬
ment," the cinematographer says. "The
hope was that the dance numbers
wouldn't look out of place. They had to

appear as if they were part of what was
going on in Billy's mind." He adds with a
laugh that the film's tight shooting sched¬
ule helped him accomplish this: "It was
all done very quickly, so the numbers
have a roughness to them that makes
them fit in and flow with the rest of the
material."
The

witnesses

An exuberant

Billy

(Jamie Bell) dances
home after

experiencing his
first ballet class in

Billy Elliot.
Cinematographer
Brian Tufano, BSC

(pictured at right)
says the toughest
aspect of the
production was
making the dance
sequences appear

organic to Billy's
working-class
environment.

16 December 2000

Aboy who aspires to dance ballet
doesn't emerge from a mining town
in northern England every day, and

his feature credits also include Dream-

cinematographer Brian Tufano, BSC

says

The Lords of Discipline and
Quadrophenia. He says Billy Elliot
offered him a chance to do two things

that this

was

that have become almost second nature:

was

one

reason

he

instantly charmed by the story of Billy
Elliot. "It's a very off-the-wall subject,"
Tufano offers, "and I liked the writing
very

much."
No

stranger to off-the-wall
subjects, Tufano brought visual panache
to the low-budget hits Trainspotting (see
AC August '96) and Shallow Grave, and

scape,

collaborate with

(in this

a

first-time film director

case, veteran

theater director

Stephen Daldry), and create first-rate
production value with a very small
budget. "Our biggest challenges were
time and money, which is always true of
smaller films," he notes.

Although Billy Elliot tells

an

inti¬

youth center where Billy first
a

ballet class

-

while he is

failing miserably at boxing - was
intended to stand in sharp contrast to the
cramped areas in which the rest of his
life unfolds. "We framed

scenes

set in

Billy's home and neighborhood very
tightly, because we wanted to suggest
he was trapped in his environment,"
Tufano explains. "Stephen [Daldry]
wanted the scenes set in the youth
center to have a lighter quality, a kind of
heightened realism, because dance is
how Billy escapes his environment and
enters a world of his own." Although the
filmmakers initially planned to build a set
for the youth-center interior, they found a

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byGPhioletss
American Cinematographer - December 2000

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