DP Steve Chivers, who’s repped in the U.S. by bicoastal New York Office, has a bad cold. "I picked it up in Hong Kong," he says from his home in London. "Then I dragged it everywhere. I probably gave it to most of Italy, and now to all of Morocco." Chivers is back home now, after another stint on the road. Indeed, these days he’s harder to find than Waldo-this year alone he’s traveled around the world three times.
Travel, of course, is a part of the journeyman nature of a DP. But when you’re an English DP, Chivers says, you must travel constantly. "It’s very difficult to get anything together in England at the moment," says the 20-year industry vet. "The pound isn’t so strong really, so everyone has been shooting abroad-especially in South Africa. Go down there to Capetown and every hundred yards, there’s a shoot going on. It’s unbelievable. It’s bigger than Hollywood really. It’s mad, absolutely mad."
Chivers is currently making forays into the U.S. market, most recently working with director Daniel Barber of Striper Films, New York (Barber is repped in Europe by his own company, Rose Hackney Barber, London), on a series of spots for L.L. Bean via Mullen, Wenham, Mass. The ads, "Beach," "Marsh," and "Hike" all feature strikingly beautiful images of outdoor life, full of light and soft color. For instance, in "Beach," a montage of scenes from a day at the beach flash across the screen-little boys running down a sand dune, then exploring a tidal pool, while a father swings his son through the waves, then gives him a piggyback ride. The images of play are contrasted with shots of the ocean breaking over black rocks and kites fluttering in the distance.
"We shot in New Zealand," Chivers says. "We were on an inaccessible beach in a forest. The director wanted to be completely naturalistic, to the extent that he didn’t want a camera or any equipment to intrude. [No] reflectors or lights or anything like that."
Chivers, who has also worked with directors such as Jo Roman of Rose Hackney Barber, Stein Leikanger of London-based Outsider Films, and Vaughan Arnell of bicoastal/international Propaganda Films (who’s repped in the U.K. by his company, Lewis & Watson), says he isn’t beholden to anyone. "Sometimes you work with the same director on three or four jobs in a row and you get to a point where you want to work with someone else, just for a change, just because it’s becoming the same. It starts to feel like a job, and then I’m not really interested, and I’m off and I get something else, something new. Working in England is a bit like that, like a job, so that’s why I want to move on."
Why all the disgruntled feelings about the U.K.?
"[DPs] here are perceived as technicians, and we’re penalized in all sorts of directions because of that attitude," he says. "We show up, stand behind the camera, we go home, and that’s it. Our involvement is no bigger than that. It didn’t ever bother me before, but I’m getting on a bit now and I’ve really had enough of it and I want my involvement to be bigger than that."
The role of the DP, Chivers says, is currently being redefined. "The whole nature of my job changes. I don’t know quite where it’s going to go. But I want to be part of that. And in England, I’m not going to have so much of an opportunity."
Chivers has had a relationship with cameras since he was a boy. "I’ve got Super-8 films from when I was nine or 10 years old," he says. "I’ve always buggered about with still cameras and dark rooms and the processing stuff."
Chivers attended various London art schools-including St. Martins and Goldsmiths-through his late teens and early 20s, where he continued "making lots of strange, little films."
After his stint in various art schools, Chivers found a market for his work in music videos. "It all started there, really," he says. He shot videos for, among others, U2, Phil Collins, Annie Lennox and Lenny Kravitz.
Chivers also has feature work on his resume, including the ’94 film Highlander III: The Sorcerer, which was directed by Andy Morehan, but says he didn’t entirely enjoy the experience. "It’s 90% politics, 10% doing your job. I’m still looking at scripts, but I haven’t seen anything that appeals to me in this country. The scripts I get are all these Four Weddings And A Funeral- type films which is another reason to come to the States."
Whatever "DP" might come to mean in the next decade, Chivers says, one thing will remain the same: "It’s still fundamentally storytelling," he says. "Technology is giving us tools we’ve never had before, but it’s not an excuse for producing images. We still have to tell great stories. Otherwise, there’s really no point."s
