By Both cinematographer John Mathieson and a podcast host who interviewed him earlier this year have offered responses to comments the former gave in an interview with the latter which seemed to disparage Mathieson’s long-time collaborator Ridley Scott.
Mathieson’s first collaboration with Scott was on the original “Gladiator” and he subsequently worked with Scott on five more films including “Gladiator II” now in cinemas.
The comments in the interview suggested he wasn’t a fan of Scott’s recent approach to filming which involves multiple cameras to shoot scenes, allowing Scott to film them much more quickly. He seemed to go so far as calling it “really lazy” and suggested Scott was impatient.
Today, both he and the host of the DocFix Documentary Storytelling Podcast got in touch with Deadline to respond to the kerfuffle that broke out in the wake of that story.
Mathieson says he did a two-hour interview which got condensed to 30 minutes and was edited in way that made it appear Mathieson leveled disparaging comments about Scott when he was referring to the overall industry in general.
The podcast host said the negative implication of the edits were not done deliberately, and explained what happened. He says the interview was a wide spanning one briefly covering “Gladiator” before covering various wider topics and filming techniques:
“All this happened over almost two hours. Then I had to cut it down to around 30 [minutes]. I mainly focused on discussing film techniques as this was the most interesting to my listeners and me. What I want to give people is practical support and advice. During that editing process, of course, things were condensed and this is where the problems arose.
One thing I was sure about was that John never intended to criticize Ridley. It does seem that bringing separate comments closer together might have made things ambiguous if people chose to take things out of context – which they did. I’m sorry John and I didn’t have a chance to go through it after my cutdown.”
Mathieson meanwhile says around a good twenty minutes of the interview was cut out between his comments about the laziness of the industry in general regarding digital age filming and talking about Scott and his multi-camera setup:
“Because the digital stuff doesn’t cost anything, but so you shoot a lot. And I saying that is that, and I said, this was the quote. I said, the industry, it’s really lazy. Lazy and sloppy are not two words I would ever put with this gentleman of a certain age and genius. But if you slide out – and you can hear it – you slide out a paragraph and put it right next to, oh, let’s talk about Rid and multi cameras. And he edits the piece down to 30 minutes… I could hear the blip of the sound. I said, well, that wasn’t said against that. That was probably said maybe 20 minutes later. However, this is what has risen to the surface. And I’m deeply regretful of that.”
The whole interview was forgotten about until a British tabloid picked up the edited interview quotes yesterday and is steamrolled from there. Mathieson then called the filmmaker:
“I said, ‘well this has happened,’ and he said, ‘Oh, God, what the f—k? He said you’ve got to be careful.’ I said, I Know. I’m really sorry you got dropped into this, it’s very embarrassing and very hurtful.”
Scott’s celebrates his 87th birthday tomorrow and has “The Bee Gees” lined up as his next project. “Gladiator II” meanwhile is in cinemas now.
The post “Gladiator II” Lenser Talks Misquoted Remarks appeared first on Dark Horizons.
