I love cinema verite, and Blindsight called for combining verite with interview, a rich mix. For verite scenes it's a sine qua non that the cinematographer needs to have as much patience as I do to let things unfurl in front of the camera.

[Right: Sabriye Tenberken in Blindsight]

Some DPs think it's a set-it-up- and-shoot-it-quick-and- go-for-a-beer deal, and how much do I wish it were that easy, but alas anything I've ever directed that was worth watching has required a more painstaking approach. Real life is like wildlife, and you have to stake it out accordingly. The interesting things happen when people aren't on best behavior for a quick posing shot, when you've rendered yourself such a natural, boring even, part of the scenery that everyone's censor switches off and something closer to reality ensues. So in many ways my visual style follows from this need to be unobtrusive, quiet, restrained, observant.

The trick is to be low-key and competent and quick while being as tuned-in as possible to what's going on -- then sometimes, like the Zen archer who only has to let go of the arrow to hit the target, you automatically get those magic moments when it's completely effortless that you and the camera person are all set up and rolling just when the most amazing thing happens "unexpectedly". As our DP Petr Cikhart says "I'm always proud when I realize the subjects are completely oblivious to the presence of the camera" - and that takes time, and that's why he got the job, and that's why he did a great job. Initially I wondered whether filming blind people would be easier in the sense that they wouldn't be so aware of the camera, but I quickly learned that they were just as aware as sighted people of exactly where we were and what we were doing, even if they couldn't see us - but Erik and Sabriye, our two main protagonists, are wonderfully unself-conscious, which always makes my job easier.

It's hard work shooting, and for all the challenges I faced trying to direct while slogging up a mountain at extreme altitude, I didn't have to worry about competently operating a camera while up there (I operated a tiny bit on this, but no way could I have done that up the mountain, only when I was comfortably down at 12,000' in Lhasa). My hat (and balaclava and bandana) is off to Petr and Keith Partridge who operated up on Everest, often hand-held. It's hard to convey to you lucky people at sea level how much effort is involved in lifting a heavy object when there is less than half as much oxygen as you are used to - let alone having intelligent thoughts while you are doing so - let alone synchronizing what's available of mind and body to capture beautiful, lyrical, correctly-focussed- and-exposed shots. It was also hard to use a viewfinder when you are at extreme altitude and extreme brightness - I was sometimes amazed that the guys could even see through that viewfinder, and that we didn't have exposure problems. Keith was a pro in the mountains (previously he's shot the mountain sequences in TOUCHING THE VOID and ALIEN VS PREDATOR) and was the only person who I can say was truly a joy to be with at altitude (which famously makes people irritable). Petr, our main DP, has done a lot of wildlife and high-adventure work but was new to the mountains - fortunately he took to it like a true yak. We were also lucky to have terrific contributions from other talented cinematographers including on the first trip Mahyad Tousi and Michael Brown, who has summited Everest three times and is a regular member of Erik's team. It was quite a camera dream team.

We chose the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam because it was full-on sumptuous High Def, while still being relatively portable and light - but that's only when you're comparing it to a cumbersome and labor-intensive 35mm film rig. It was about four times bigger than your average mini-DV-pro type camera, for example. It was brand-new at that time and so something of a shot in the dark - but all our research suggested this was the technology we needed, even if it had only just come along in time for us.  And the image quality is stunning - as Petr says "I was particularly impressed with the colors, depth of film possibilities and the film-like look" - and I agree whole-heartedly. It gives me goose-bumps, actually. And I challenge all but the geekiest of techheads to spot that it wasn't shot on 35mm after our beautiful blow-up (courtesy of St. Anne's Post in London).

Tibet is so photographically stunning that to get too jiggy with the look of the film would have detracted more than it could add - we looked at some heavier filter options but I wanted to keep it pretty clean, so we used just a Haze 2A and polarizer where necessary. Occasional ND grads but only when inconspicuous. Mostly just one wide lens for the verite scenes, although we had alternatives on hand for specific shots, and we used mostly available light - we only brought one light with us as well as an invaluable box of tricks including bright bulbs, hand-held lights, booster practicals, chinese lantern shades, gel scraps and flex-fills. Trying to light the interiors of dark Tibetan homes with tiny filthy windows was often about persuading everyone to sit as close as possible to the window and face in the right direction, while all their friends and relatives hold the flex-fills, and I dangled from the ceiling holding a blue-gelled flashlight. Not so inconspicuous.

So for all that I've said above about wanting to be inconspicuous, there's a balance - there's no use being low-key when it's too dark or if you missed the moment. Sometimes my job involved persuading Tibetan people to do things they found pretty surprising. Learning a few key Tibetan phrases was the key to directing, especially in the villages, where Westerners had never visited before - let alone tried to shoot a Hi-Def movie about the blind kid they've previously written off as useless. So one thing I prepared that really paid off bigtime was that I memorized some handy-dandy Tibetan phrases for various common in-the-field situations, such as: "very good, but now we do it again, one more time, right now", and "please wait one minute", and "yes I know you have to go feed the cow, but five minutes more please I am very happy". I once shocked the life out of a marvelously-coral-bedecked nomad who was staring at the lens and ruining our shot, when I ran up to him and said in my atrocious accent "hello, please could you look at that mountain, not at the camera, just for a minute, thanks". He did too, and that shot made the cut. Hey, whatever it takes, is my motto.

On a personal notes, I am (legally) blind in my right eye - I can see enough to flinch if something's coming towards it, but I could never read or recognize anyone because the vision in it was so bad when I was born that my brain didn't bother wiring up to it. My good eye is not that good either, minus 15 and astigmatic - which is worse than anybody I've ever met who isn't blind - but it corrects well. I'm wary to even use "blind in one eye" because my experiences don't compare with someone who has to cope with being blind in two eyes. But perhaps partly as a result of my unusual vision, and the discrepancy between what each of my eyes sees, I have always been obsessed with optical effects, and photography, and visual arts in general. My vision is monocular ? like a camera - and I see things flatly  - more like a movie screen - not in the three dimensions of stereo vision. In my first cinematography class, the professor talked about painting with light to create the illusion of 3-D on a flat surface, and it was only then that I realized that this may be the reason why all my paintings and photography had always been very heavy on sculpting with light, modeling objects and their relationships in 3-D on the page/canvas using the wrap of shade and light, and the blueing of the distance. Maybe that's why I'm particularly fond of strongly directional and source-y lighting (think Rembrandt, Vermeer, early Van Gogh), and I love scenes where this is in full effect, such as when Sonam Bongso is trying to watch the movie with the rest of the village kids and we get the play of the intense sources of the naked projector bulb and light beam and screen - and that was also Petr's favorite scene to shoot. My poor vision may be another reason why I don't like to put too much extra stuff in between the lens and the subject - I just want to see what's out there as fully as possible, with as little scratched-up junk in-between me and it as possible.

We took two of the VariCams up on the mountain - because we didn't know if one would break, or the team would split, or if it would be too much work for one team at that altitude. Each cinematographer had two specially-appointed camera-Sherpas, one of whom would carry the camera, and the other the tripod, and they got fantastically nifty with all the high-tech gear. It was a luxury for me for there to be two teams, and also to have a large crew including sound recordists as well as researchers and producers and editors and translators and Chinese officials and mountain-safety experts and Sherpas and cooks - previously I've often worked with just one other person in the field, and either operated or recorded sound myself. And sometimes I found myself wishing that we didn't have all the rigamarole and bunfight of a whole flotilla of people and vehicles, sometimes you can be more creative when you are lighter on your feet - and the lonely moody majesty of the mountains is not quite the same in such a large group - however, when I first saw the finished print up on a big screen, WOW. I drooled. All that palaver had been worthwhile.