The Cinematography

This film as an intimate, passionate love story," says director of photography Dick Pope, "but it is set against some of England's most stunning, rugged scenery." Indeed, Pope feels that the sea and the landscape are important characters in the piece. "The moors, cliffs and coastline of North Cornwall, with its big open skies and the Atlantic Ocean, were constantly undergoing changes in mood and color," he states.

"We shot the picture in the super 35mm widescreen format to capture this epic quality on film," he continues. "Beeban has a very strong visual sense and a clear vision of how she wanted the film to look, which I sought to translate photographically onto the screen."

Pope's lighting and camera decisions were based primarily on the characters. "Different characters are expressed with different colors in a collaboration between costume and lighting," he says. "Amy wears the colors of the sea and sky, blues and greens, while Dr. Kennedy wears browns and reds, burnished and warm. Yanko's life back home in the Ukraine is very colorful, but in Cornwall it is confused. All of these factors contributed to my thought processes."

The Cornish locations on which the film was shot presented a wide variety of challenges for Pope. The speed at which the weather and the light can change in this part of the world made his job particularly difficult. He concedes that it was often hard to make the beginning and the end of a scene match. "It can be pouring rain one minute and sunny the next as the winds sweep in from the sea," he states.

"The film spans all the seasons," he adds, "so we required rain and storm scenes as well as idyllic summer days. When the local weather did not oblige, we had to create our own. On the whole, though, we were remarkably lucky."