Another stunning shot moves in the opposite direction, slowly creeping downward through the center of a spiral staircase. Explicates Mathieson, "There are two columns in London. One is Trafalgar Square, which everyone knows. The other, which isn’t so well known, is called the Monument. It was built after the Great Fire [which engulfed London in 1666], and it has this spiral staircase in the middle of it with an aperture that’s only about 21/2 feet across. To get the shot, we dragged an Arri 435 up to the top and put it on this atrocious video head that somebody stole from somewhere it was the only thing that would fit in there. Employing the types of cables and pulleys that are used for flying or stage shows, we managed to drop the camera down the middle of the Monument without hitting the sides. There was one problem, though: the Monument leans to one side, so we had to give the camera a little push in the opposite direction. Of course, all of the counterweights had to hang outside down the Monument, so the only time we could do the shot was in the middle of the night. We had to drag all of this stuff up there a huge array of pulleys and weights and get the camera in. We were exhausted."
Given the filmmakers’ penchant for old-fashioned effects, all of the picture’s driving shots were attained on a set via rearscreen projection and video. "There’s a shot of Dyer driving downtown, for example," says Mathieson. "He’s covered with soft pools of light, and it just wouldn’t have been possible to do that on the streets. Instead, we went out and shot backgrounds of out-of-focus lights on 16mm, and then transferred them to tape. That way, we could muck around with them really quickly and cheaply, and then play with them on the video projector on the stage."
The results of this method are not necessarily realistic, but instead capture the energy and mood of the characters in each of the driving scenes. One particular scene exhibits Mathieson pulling off a lovely shift from night to day when Bacon recollects the bright images of a car crash. "They’re traveling at night," he recounts, "and then the scene switches to daylight and the car accident. We did the accident by filming a fence at nighttime, turning it to negative, dissolving it with a real piece of film on location, and panning the camera at the same speed onto the victims lying in the road. It was seamless, but again, really simple. You turn something into negative on video with just the touch of the button, so we have the driving scene, the look out the window, the fence and then the pan around the daylight scene, and you don’t even see the cut even though it’s a hard cut."
The film itself has minimal camera motion, but the images still possess a certain verve. "I’m not that interested in clever camera moves," admits Mathieson. "Quite often the camera is static, because that immediately creates a kind of tableau which subliminally suggests the paintings; most of the movement and energy comes from the characters within that tableau. But while John doesn’t like fancy camera moves, we did manage to bring a vitality to the camerawork, via different angles and a kind of perverse fun that we all were party to."
That sense of "perverse fun" is what gives Love Is the Devil its unique character. The film is a bold dismissal of the tried-and-true cinematographic techniques about striving for attractive imagery. According to Mathieson, at one point actor Derek Jacobi said to Maybury, "This isn’t a very pretty film, is it Johnny?" But while this picture is indifferent to physical allure or sumptuous photography, it’s also obsessed, as Bacon was, with another kind of intensity. As one critic has written in reference to Deakin’s work, one wouldn’t want to borrow the grooming habits of any of these characters, but Love Is the Devil still approaches the sublime.
