PETER MOUNTAIN
- 5' ELEVEN''
- 32 minutes ago
- 11 min read
If walls could talk, or so the saying goes. And prolific British stills photographer Peter Mountain is the next best thing. A career that has spanned decades - that began shooting some of the most well-known faces of the British pop scene of the Eighties before an unexpected swerve into stills on feature films - means that Peter has observed, composed, shot and edited some of the world's most incredible talent in some of the most incredible locations. And, after a high-profile trajectory as varied and interesting, one can only begin to guess at the plethora of wonderful tales he has to tell.
Interview by Carla McCannon. All images by Peter Mountain.
Peter's career began brilliantly haphazardly. “It came to that point, at school, where you're meant to go off to decide which university to go to, and my parents said to me: “You can do anything you'd like in this life, apart from two things: one, art college, and two, you're not allowed a motorcycle”. So,” he smiles, “I rode to art college on my motorcycle.”
The art college itself – Exeter – he specifically selected because it was one of the thinnest prospectuses in the library, and it came as a shock, not to mention a lovely bonus, to discover that it was on the coast. After leaving three years later, he started out assisting photographers in London and “obviously learned more in two weeks about photography than I probably did in four years at art college.” Following a stint working with someone who created room sets for House & Garden, where he became an expert at assembling flat-pack furniture in record time, he began working for a couple of pop photographers.
“During the Eighties, we were photographing all the pop stars of that era, Alison Moyet and Howard Jones, Paul Young, who I really like, Phil Oakey from The Human League, Tina Turner, all of these people. So, I think that by spending about three or four years with them, assisting, you became so used to famous people coming in that you weren't starstruck in any way, because they were just normal people. Quite often until they went into hair and makeup, you didn't even know who they were. I mean, I remember talking to Phil Oakey for a good hour. He seemed like a nice guy, and I told him, ‘You should leave the studio because the photographer's got The Human League coming in.’ And then he went off behind the curtain and came out... I thought he was a dispatch rider.”
After some time assisting, Peter branched out on his own, still in music. The switch to stills came as unexpectedly as it did unintentionally: on his way to a meeting at EMI, portfolio in hand, and running early for once, he stopped off for a burger nearby – also a one-off. A loud American was sitting at the table next to him, so loud Peter got up to leave. “Hey, what's in the bag?” asked the American. “It's not a bag, it's a portfolio,” responded Peter. “You're a photographer or something?” The American leafed through his portfolio and asked him to do two weeks on his film – he was a director. “It was a very low-key little film. I was just in and out,” explains Peter, adding,“I didn't really know what I was doing.” The producer, however, remembered him for his enthusiasm and a year later phoned him up to offer him twenty weeks on a film. Emir Kusturica directed and the film Underground went on to win a Palme d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. Due to the troubles in Yugoslavia, the shoot itself ultimately lasted a year and a half, generating enough footage for a TV series – which it is, incidentally, in the Baltic. For Peter, this experience was a baptism of fire, not least because they shot the film in Serbo-Croatian - “Not one of my languages” - and he was the only English person on set. Not understanding a word anyone was saying led to some funny situations, like shooting a fight between two actors thinking, “this is a great scene”, before being discreetly told that the cameras were not rolling and this was not in fact a scene at all but a private moment gone wrong.
“It was good because then [without the language] you just learn to look. All you could do was look, because you couldn't understand a word they were saying. I think because I looked so much and I knew what was going on, after six months or something, they'd say, ‘if you want to know what is happening on set, just ask Peter. He knows everything.’ And then people would come over and ask ‘Where's Vilko?’ And I'd say, “He's over there having a cup of coffee.”
Back in London afterwards, busy rebuilding his network in the music industry, a producer from Ciby 2000, the French production company behind Underground, put him up for shooting some specials on Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. “When I got there, Bernardo already had a photographer,” said Peter, “a very nice guy, but unfortunately, he became rather ill. So then I stayed on to do it. I did all the unit work on that film. And so my two weeks there became six or eight weeks.” It was after this experience that he decided being a stills photographer was something he enjoyed and wanted to continue with intentionally; and it was after another shoot, this time in India on Kama Sutra, that things snowballed. “I'd go back to the fact that I really didn't know what the hell I was doing, but they seemed happy with the results, so it was fine. So I still didn't have any formal training in movie stills, in a way that I think probably a lot of people have had. I was running by the skin of my teeth, just enjoying it for what it was. So that's how I got into it. And then, once you're in, you're in, aren't you?” He has never looked back since.
Over the course of the 70 films he's so far worked on as a stills photographer, Peter has weathered the huge shift in the industry, transitioning from shooting on film to digital - which came about for him on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and the multiple changes that has brought about. “I loved film. It was wonderful. And then the producer on Charlie said, ‘No, I'm going to go digital. You've got to do it digitally.’ This [film] was [shot] at Pinewood when Pinewood had a lab, and I went in there and I told them I was going to go digital. And I remember them saying to me, ‘You know everything there is about film, you know all the tricks, you've been doing it for so long. But trust me, you are starting at the bottom of the ladder with digital.’ And boy, were they right. Back then, you'd shoot raw files, and they weren't as good as they are now. I remember the skin tone always looked like a dead shark. You had to grade them and do all sorts of things, and I didn't really have that know-how at the time. And so it was a big transition. Also, when we shot on film, we had to put our cameras in a thing called a blimp, which was a soundproof box. So the camera was big, heavy and cumbersome, and I'm left-eyed, so I'd rest the blimp on this shoulder and then look through it like that. You were kind of hidden by this great big box, so you're a little bit more anonymous, but now with the digital cameras, as I shoot on a Sony A1 system, they're completely silent. You don't need to put them in a blimp. And they have a tiltable screen, so you can just hold it at waist level, like an old Rolleiflex finder. Then sometimes you can shoot through the viewfinder if you feel you're not being too intrusive, or you can hold it out at an angle, so with a digital camera, you can get it in places you never could with a blimp. With the blimp, you had to look through the eyepiece. Also, when we were shooting film, you had 36 exposures on a roll. So quite often, you wouldn't shoot that many rolls - you wouldn't be allowed to shoot that many. So it was a bit like I always say, taking a six-shooter to a gunfight, you had to be careful with your bullets. But digital's like having an Uzi, you can just hose the thing down. I remember I used to watch a rehearsal and think I want that moment, when he or she turns that way, that's lovely. And I'd wait, and I'd just do those bits. But now you can shoot as much as you want, and then that gives you more and more work to do in the evenings and on days off. On my last day off, I edited for 13 hours. So I know if I'm doing a movie now and it's on digital, that's going to be me seven days a week. Another thing is that there's no patience because digital is so immediate. [The producers] might want it that night or that afternoon, but in the old days, you had the luxury of the chemistry, which would take one and a half hours for a clip test, and to get the film back. So there was more time. And there's not much time in the digital era.”
I felt compelled to ask an impossible question, but one I was curious about nevertheless – does he have a favourite shot? “There's one that I really like from Fear and Loathing. It's just the beginning of the race, the Mint 400, which is a desert motorcycle race, and I was playing around with film stocks, so I was shooting on colour infrared film, because with Fear and Loathing, you could do whatever you liked. I mean, the wackier the better. And if you did colour infrared, you'd use a number 12 yellow filter. Then you could get a realistic flesh tone, but strangely enough, all vegetation would go magenta, but the sky would stay about normal. We had a car called The Red Shark, but this film turned it bright yellow, so that was a bit useless. But that photograph I really liked. And then you might have a picture that you've taken and you really like the lighting. It's very subjective because it could be something that I like but other people might not. Other people would probably go for what they'd see as an iconic image, something that has been featured in the press and people are very aware of. Interestingly enough, I was on the set for this movie, and there was a guy who was handling the crowd, and he was one of the A.D.s. He was wearing a T-shirt, and printed on it was one of the photographs that I took of Johnny [Depp]and Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing, sitting in the car. He walked past, and I said, “I took that photograph!” and then we had to take a selfie together. So, I suppose that would be an iconic image. It wouldn't necessarily be my favourite image. I like it, but I think you can always do better. I might love a picture because it was so damn difficult to get, but nobody would know that. And quite often it might be a picture that doesn't have a famous person in it, but there's something about it that I like.”
I had the pleasure of working with Peter myself many years ago on the set of a London-based feature film, and to catch up with him now is to instantly reconnect with the charisma, warmth and kindness I remembered so well. On set all those years ago, I once complimented him on a pair of jeans he was wearing, “Nice fit”, I said, “Where are they from?” “Umm...” he smiled hesitatingly, “Well Captain Jack Sparrow sort of gave them to me.”
Indeed, to discuss Peter's career as a stills photographer, is to talk about his long-standing working relationship with the most famous of pirate captains. Over the course of their respective careers, Peter and Johnny Depp have collaborated on some twenty films. From the professional challenges of hanging off pirate ships in the Caribbean trying to get the best shot, to the more personal challenges of being handed a diverse array of roles as an extra over the years: dressed up in full drag in the desert outside of LA “in a Jackie O. wig, a light cashmere sweater and fake nails that kept snapping off every time I rolled a cigarette” on The Brave; to being cast as “the slutty barmaid” in the same film – a role which came with fake breasts, a blonde wig, a skimpy outfit and a grip walking by muttering “No offense, but I preferred you as a brunette”; to having his throat gleefully slashed by Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street himself at Pinewood Studios, Peter has been around the world and back photographing Depp on film sets for the last three decades. Their close working relationship has become so symbiotic that on the first day of shooting on The Ninth Gate, when the first A.D. politely told Peter he couldn't stand where he was positioning himself on set because he was in Johnny's eyeline, Depp responded with the wonderful line “Peter is my eyeline.”
“So, I felt with Johnny, I can just be anywhere I want. Because he isn’t put off by things... He'll be chatting between takes and say, “Yeah, and another thing...” and they say, ‘Johnny, we're ready for you on set.’ And then he'll go off and do his scene and come back and carry on with the conversation. With acting, he can just turn it on, turn it off. Whereas some actors need to have space. Everyone's got their style. I have mine as a photographer, and actors have theirs. But I think I got a bit spoiled with Johnny because I could do whatever I wanted to. So I expected you could do that with everybody, but you can't.”
None more so perhaps than Jack Nicholson. “I remember I had to go to America to do a film with [him]. I was sent to get some portraits. Somebody said to me, ‘he's not very good before 11 o'clock in the morning, so don't even try,’ but I was only there for three days. And day one, - I think it was probably ten to eleven - he was sitting on a director's chair not doing anything, in Miami, some palm trees behind. I walked up and introduced myself and said, “Oh, hey Jack. Do you mind if I take some photographs?” And he said, ‘If you photograph me now, then I'd seriously question your judgment.’ And I thought, OK, I won't do that then, but I've really got to get something. The next day, he was having hair and makeup done, and I thought, I won't even ask him, I'll just start shooting. So I started shooting him when I was on a medium-format camera, and I said, ‘I hope you don't mind me photographing you’. And he goes, ‘No, that's OK’. And I said, ‘I must admit, Jack, I find you a bit of an intimidating man.’ He said, ‘is that because of yesterday?’ And I said ‘No, just generally you scare the shit out of me.’ And he said, ‘Well, I saw The Shining and I scared the shit out of myself.’ That was a nice moment. I kind of felt like I got something there. Not the best of photographs, but that was an achievement.”
In a career like Peter Mountain's, it is one of many.
This interview is part of The Cinema Issue 15. Purchase your copy here.