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MillimeterDavid Leland
Jun 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
"People are afraid to portray contradictions. If a woman is outspoken about men or sexuality, they're usually portrayed as a hard-edged character; you don't find upper middle class, cultured young ladies being politically incorrect, whereas I warm to those contradictions."
David Leland's latest film, The Land Girls, is rife with such contradictions: genteel, upstanding young women looking for casual sex, enduring and overcoming life's hardships on their own, and having the time of their lives while the bombs of World War II crack the night open mere miles away.
The Land Girls refers to The Women's Land Army. During the war, over 80,000 English women left their homes to work on farms in place of men who had joined the military. By keeping England's farms strong and productive, the "land girls" became legitimate, behind-the-scenes heroines of their country's war effort.
"Those land girls defied a lot of conventions," says Leland (Wish You Were Here, Checking Out). "Whole notions of class were turned upside down. People from different backgrounds thrown into the same pot created a lot of emotional anarachy-certainly a lot of sexual anarchy."
Leland confides he wasn't only combatting traditional gender roles with the film but also some sturdy mythology. "We've made an enormous number of films about the war, but they tend to be in a similar mold, certainly if I talk about British films. By and large, they've perpetuated myth rather than human fraility. The war stories I heard as a child were very different from what I saw on the screen. There was a lot of mythmaking: The idea of individuals winning battles-it's nonsense."
War is hell, they say, but making a film about war isn't heaven, Leland found. Shooting in winter left the production with less-than-agreeable weather. Bitter cold and a large surplus of mud from constant rains slowed things down somewhat, but Leland felt the adverse time of year was essential. "If we had set it in summer, and it was all haymaking, it would have been a jolly romp. I wanted a landscape that was sparse and tough. It was a race to make sure we could shoot it all in winter. We wanted to start in November, but we didn't get to start until February."
Moreover, the conditions forced Leland and his cast to examine scenes more closely. "I've never understood people who say I don't want to rehearse too much, I want to leave things up to chance. I think that's all bullshit. When you've got a unit of 75-100 people, plus so many added elements, I don't think it ever goes stale."
With his cast often set against wide vistas of the English countryside, Leland was careful to do justice to his exteriors, as well. "One of the first major choices was whether to shoot it anamorphic. I kept thinking I wanted it to be a Cinemascope film. Then I met [DP] Henry Braham, who carries a Bible of anamorphic lenses in his back pocket-he's like the Jehovah's Witness of anamorphic. There's a lot of argument against it, in terms of financing. They always say it takes longer to shoot because of the light you need and the narrower depth of field on an anamorphic lens. So I had to go and present my case of how I could shoot in anamorphic in 12 weeks.
"People encourage you to shoot on Super 35, which I think is the poor man's anamorphic. For starters, you're only exposing 60 percent of the negative. Some people put a 2.35 gate in the camera, but when you cut 2.35 out of a 35mm frame, you're cutting off the top and bottom. When you blow up that 60 percent, and change it to anamorphic, you're stretching it, so you don't get the same texture."
Still, Leland is most satisified with having told a story, with all its contradictions and historical ugliness. "Now is the time to tell those stories," he declare. "We don't have to bullshit ourselves about what we did and how we did it. Ordinary people tell great truths."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
