Interview: Cinematographer Ben Cole

How one man used his pre-existing career experience to propel him forward.

Ben Cole never aspired to be a cinematographer. As a child, he grew up wanting to be an actor, since drama was all he was good at in school. Despite being around future acting icons like Gary Oldman and Ralph Fiennes, Ben never got that one lucky break that his peers did. After 20 years of trying to be an actor, with his most famous work being a $25 million Italian film called Jackpot that he calls 'rubbish', and seeing that the kind of stories he wanted to tell weren’t there, what led him down the path of becoming a cinematographer and why cinematography in particular?

Ben said: “I got to the stage where I had to make a choice: either I spend the rest of my life playing small roles, because if at the age of 20, you get a leading role in the movie, you become a leading actor, and if you never get a leading role and at the age of 35, you’re always going to play small roles. I decided that if I wasn’t going to be a leading actor, I wanted to still make films.  When I was on movie sets, the person on set that really intrigued me was the cinematographer. Directors were running around, pulling their hair out, and the cinematographer was standing calmly on set with his beautiful piece of equipment.” How would Ben’s experience as an actor help with this career path? According to him: “Photography had always been my hobby, and I decided I would step the other side of the camera, every time I’d done a film, I’d sat every day watching the cinematographer, how he did it and how he solved problems, and if I wanted to work on films, the best role I’d see was as a cinematographer.”

Ben’s work as a cinematographer has seen him shoot on projects varying from music videos to his brother Nigel Cole’s films such as Made In Dagenham, but his project that he is most proud of is the one that got him his reputation as a cinematographer. As he recalls: “I got offered a job running a film school in Ethiopia for street children. We taught these kids about these new cameras and these new editing systems, and I loved it. These children were traumatised, they were orphans on the streets, they were exceptionally talented, and they needed to do something, so they wrote stories about their lives, and we filmed and edited them, after that, I was hooked. When I came back to England, I decided that I would give up acting and that I would start to make films.”

What helped Ben stand out as a cinematographer was his first big film, One Giant Leap, which got nominated for two Grammy Awards. Ben mentions how: “There were a couple of musicians that had never shot a film before and asked me to mentor them because they were trying to do something completely different. They were travelling around the world with 13 different backing tracks and asked different musicians to play on the same track, and then they interviewed people from beggars to prostitutes to taxi drivers about what it is like to be human. I travelled to 152 locations around the world, and I filmed 1400 hours of video.” Would all that effort be worth it in Ben’s eyes? For him, it was. “As we were travelling around the world, I could go out on the streets with my camera and film people’s behaviour. I love travelling and filming on a camera, filming that couple outside the police station having a row, filming that romantic couple walking by the seaside, filming anything you’d like on a long lens so no one can tell what you’re doing.”

“It established what I loved doing, and I learnt a lot about life. We interviewed a concrete salesman who had a shack at the bottom of a hotel, and he was the wisest man I’d ever met, and he sold concrete! In India, you’d get lots of people who had boring jobs but had devoted their lives to something else that made them wise and kind. There’s an artist called Michael Franti, and one of his lyrics is ‘Every single soul is a poem written on the back of God’s hand’. We were out to get something deeply spiritual, and the most spiritual things we heard were from normal people, not from gurus. Just average everyday people who have suffered and have spent their lives studying something because that was attached to their suffering, and they’d realise something healed their suffering and trauma, and discovered a real purpose: to share with other people who suffer.”

Now 63, Ben feels accomplished with his career so far, with a few remaining projects on his horizon, including a documentary on trauma received at boarding schools. His main takeaway from life, however, was a meeting with a Tibetan monk in his Milan flat. As Ben recalls: “He was in his apartment and he grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into his room, and he said ‘I have a mission for you, I want you to make posi-TV. Positivity, posi-TV, now go make.’ It was like he’d recognised something in me and given me a mission. Every film I make, I try to show how positive life can be.”