Sean Bobbitt BSC Shares His Experiences of Shooting Steve McQueen's Modern Epic 12 Years a Slave
We sat down with Sean Bobbitt BSC at the Camerimage festival to talk about 12 Years a Slave — his third feature with director Steve McQueen after Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), and the one that has put their working method in front of the largest audience yet. A long collaboration Bobbitt and McQueen have been working together since Hunger, and the conversational shorthand between a director and a cinematographer who have made three features together is a recurring theme of his interview. Where a first collaboration is mostly about establishing a shared language for what light, lens and frame should do, by a third feature that vocabulary is in place — which is what makes McQueen’s signature long, locked-off takes possible. The famous unbroken bench shot in Hunger and the single-take dinner conversation in 12 Years a Slave are not stunts; they are the natural extension of the way the two of them think about screen time. ...