Damp Course

It's funny who you happen to meet underwater. It might be Ewan McGregor after he's plunged down a lavatory bowl in Trainspotting. Or else Pierce Brosnan, neither shaken nor stirred despite some outrageously watery stunts in his latest 007 adventure, Die Another Day.

Then there was, for the unflappable Mike Valentine BSC, doyen of underwater cameramen, another memorably close subterranean encounter this time with Nicole Kidman on The Hours, director Stephen Daldry's follow-up to his hit Billy Elliot.

It began at a Savoy Hotel meeting with Daldry and larger-than-life Hollywood producer Scott Rudin telling Valentine: "Look, we've storyboarded this sequence. We don't know how to shoot it, and we don't think it's going to work."

Welsh-born Valentine, 48, veteran of more than fifty features not to mention commercials, music videos (including one for, you've guessed it, Wet Wet Wet) and a number of his own acclaimed independently-produced documentaries, wasn't even remotely fazed.

Cut to Action Underwater Studios on an industrial estate off the M25 near Enfield. Valentine explained: "Because I'd worked with Nicole (here playing drowned novelist Virginia Woolf) before on The Peacemaker and Birthday Girl she knew me. She was a bit nervous working in the water but I said, `Let's just do it.'

"She had to hold her breath with her head stuck inside a tree root and her hair all tangled in it too. We also added Fuller's Earth to the water so you literally couldn't see more than three feet. As she held her breath,trapped in this very confined space, I slowly tracked the camera into her face in a 15-second move.

"At first, you see nothing, but then it's like a painting revealing the layers and finally, there's Nicole dead under-water. I stayed underwater readjusting the camera when she got out. They told her, `That's it, you don't have to do it again.' I said, `Let's do one more,' and she told them, `Mike's really got me going. I'm doing another one...' And so we got another take out of her.

"That in a way personified everything we're trying to do: to present an actor in an incredibly difficult and dangerous situation and yet get them to look as natural as possible so the audience really will believe that character is there without questioning all the possible problems actually associated with getting a great shot." And, as Valentine, hardly needed to add, always safety first.

As if his glittering career since the mid-80s as a specialist cinematographer wasn't already fascinating enough, it's perhaps all the more remarkable when you consider that before that, from the age of 18, he spent fourteen years as a sound man at the BBC.

It was while he was at the Beeb - after snaring one of 10 posts from more than 1100 applicants - he first took up diving as a hobby.

"I very quickly discovered I wanted to share this new found world with as many people as possible, so I started to make my own films. Because my ego was quite large I decided to jump over Super8 and go straight to 16mm. I borrowed - well, actually I stole for two weeks - a friend's camera, one which had, in fact, been used by Cousteau on some of his underwater documentaries.

"Specially made to go inside underwater housing, it had a modified Beaulieu mechanism which could take 200 foot daylight loads, but they were one after the other on a long metal plate inside a long tube. There was no reflex viewfinder and no focus because it had a pre-set wide-angle lens. You just adjusted the aperture and off you went."

Armed eventually with his six-and-half minute Red Sea-set mini epic, Silent World, Valentine knocked on the door of BBC Acquisitions: `They bought it and showed it. Although I was still working as a sound guy, I was effectively now also an independent producer."

There was no stopping him as every minute of holiday and leave was taken up with his increasingly profitable sideline. Next up was a 35mm effort called Red Sea Mermaid which, courtesy of a deal struck direct with 20th Century Fox in Soho Square, would accompany the teen hit Porky's on the its UK rounds in 1981.

By the time he'd completed some ten films which had all got screenings big or small, something had to give: in this case, his job at the BBC where by the mid-80s he had risen to the dizzy heights of senior technical operator.

The catalyst for his long overdue move into the freelance feature filmmaking world was an offer he simply couldn't refuse: to lend his underwater expertise to the screen version of Lucy Irvine's get-away-from-it-all bestseller, Castaway, which was about to be filmed by Nicolas Roeg.

"When I told my sound manager at the BBC about this chance, he said, `Film is dead - and who is Nic Roeg?' I told him, `You may not appear to know much about the film industry but I think you should know what this is... it's my resignation,' and I literally walked out."

Snapped up by Roeg, his DP Harvey Harrison and production supervisor Selwyn Roberts - with whom he was most recently reunited on the Emmy Award-winning Shackleton - it was to prove the idyllic `big break' for Valentine.

"They got me to the Seychelles for almost two months to shoot and direct all the underwater sequences from a script that only contained two lines of description and allowed me to turn that into more than six minutes ofscreen time. I still can't believe how lucky I was."

The `lucky' streak continued when Spielberg then hired him to work on Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and he hasn't looked back since working, with his production manager wife Francoise alongside, on an astonishing range of major films over the past 15 years.

These include - okay, try and spot the wet stuff- Shakespeare In Love, The Beach, Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace, Entrapment, Leviathan, a couple of earlier Bonds, Sexy Beast, The Importance Of Being Earnest, Shanghai Knights and the upcoming Tomb Raider 2 and The Sound Of Thunder. Just to mention a few.

But when it comes to naming the assignment which has, to date, made him proudest he cited instead the relatively obscure Europa, a typically idiosyncratic post-World War II mystery, co-written and directed by eccentric Dane, Lars von Trier.

"It was filmed in anamorphic black and white with colour inserts and there were a number of sequences where I had to devise a way of shooting. Like one with Jean-Marc Barre trapped inside a sinking train compartment. I had to find a way of building a back projection system underwater - with only three hours to work out how to do it."

No wonder Valentine uses the `we' when he refers to his work. Not in the regal sense, of course, but in terms of sheer team effort.

"As well as Francoise and me, there's a focus puller and loader. They tend to stay on the surface because these days I use the Arri Lens Control System which means that my focus puller can, from up to 50 metres away, digitally control the focus on a lens, alter the stop, ramp the camera, turn it off and on, check the voltage of the system and check the footage in the magazine. In fact, do everything you'd normally expect on an Arri 435 ES -but now we can also do it digitally underwater.

"In addition to them, the underwater crew will also include a safety diver for me, in case I get tangled up in cables, not to mention a safety diver for each actor involved in a sequence. There might be a gaffer and special effects people too."

The most effective `we' also means having the best and latest equipment at your disposal. This year Valentine has spent a cool half a million pounds on equipment.

"There is no housing you can hire off the shelf anywhere in the world that will do physically what our camera system will do. I actually paid someone to make the housing to my specifications and then heavily modified it.

"Now we can have lens control motors and in the same camera body we can use anamorphic lenses, spherical lenses and Super35. We have an exceptionally high quality on-board digital recording system so that if I'm inside a shipwreck, perhaps 100ft down in the Red Sea, away from our boat and the production people, I can record digitally everything we're doing.

"The communication system we use is one modified from that used by NASA to train their astronauts in the tank at Houston. With things like green screen and lip-sync we can now do underwater anything you can do on land."

When it comes to the selection of stocks for underwater filming, Valentine said: "I tend to use daylight based ones because shooting underwater is like shooting in a smoke-filled room. It's a very low-contrast medium, therefore the more filtration you put between the lens and your subject, the worse you'll be for wear. It'll look different but it doesn't usually make it anymore contrasty.

"I want to put as much bite into the image as possible so I will usually shoot without using any 85s and have HMIs instead which are a daylight-balanced light source. With underwater stuff, most people expect the light source to be from above and therefore for it to punch through the water. HMIs punch through a lot more than the Tungsten.

"If we are shooting in the Red Sea, for instance, I will have a stop on 50 Daylight of between t4 and t5.6, which means we can use the fine low grain film stocks. There's a tremendous light reading underwater, much more so than people would appreciate.

"If I'm working in a studio and want to do slow-mo, I would probably move to the 250 Daylight, but, of course, those are also very fine grain these days so there's always enough stop underwater for us to work with."

You'd think that Valentine would by now have pretty much fulfilled all his ambitions. But there's one left, to direct his first feature film. He's cowritten a project about pioneering Louis Boutan who around the turn of the 20th Century was "more or less the first person to take photographs underwater." My film will reveal the techniques he devised combined with a love story involving himself, his girlfriend and the sea." Sounds just a bit autobiographical.