The Baron is back.

That is the nickname affectionately bestowed upon director of photography Derek Vanlint bsc, csc, by his crew on the set of the thriller The Spreading Ground, currently shooting in Toronto with Dennis Hopper, Leslie Hope, and Frederic Forrest. The film, a Polson Street Production presented by Tsunami Entertainment, is generating a buzz, not only because it is Vanlint’s return to movies after 18 years, but also because it marks his feature directorial debut.

Why has it taken so long for the British-born cinematographer, who made a name for himself shooting Alien (1979) and Dragonslayer (1981), and was subsequently pursued by the likes of filmmakers Norman Jewison, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, and James Cameron, to get back on a motion picture?

Back in 1982, on the heels of his two great movie successes, Vanlint relocated to Toronto for personal reasons, and found ample work shooting commercials in the u.s. He was certainly no stranger to doing tv spots – in fact, they had provided him his first opportunity to collaborate with Alien director Ridley Scott, a fellow Englishman he describes as ‘an instant success, because of his graphic sense and total ruthlessness.’

Although Vanlint’s first Canadian winter made him rethink his move, the production house he was a part of blossomed, and, he adds, ‘Canada grew on me.’ Offers to shoot major motion pictures poured in, but helping run a company proved too time-consuming.

Unfortunately, he experienced some negative business associations along the way, all of which now lead him to lament that, ‘in retrospect, I should have done the movies.’

At his peak, Vanlint, who is represented by Toronto’s Sesler & Company, was as busy directing and shooting commercials as anyone based in Canada, compiling 106 shoot days in one year alone, plus 93 days on the road, just traveling from one American coast to the other.

This hectic schedule and the stress of managing a business eventually took their toll on Vanlint, however and he cites them as contributing factors to a bypass operation he had to undergo in 1987. Although he states that shooting spots ‘has been good’ to him, he cannot hide his frustration over years of haggling with clients over creative matters.

‘There are conglomerates advertising all over the world who seem to think they know far better than their [ad] agency,’ he contends. ‘It’s people who have been to business school in charge of a visual medium. The people I’m talking about probably won’t [recognize themselves], but everyone else in the industry will know who I mean.’

While he accepts that commercials have become a young person’s game, Vanlint sees it as a great shame that many in the business ‘[don’t] have very much film knowledge. They’re more up with music and video. Sometimes I wonder whether they know who they’re advertising to.’

While evaluating the aesthetic developments currently in vogue, he concedes, ‘Some of those changes, you know, I helped bring about, but my background’s always been film.’

Vanlint declares that it ‘absolutely’ feels good to be doing drama again, and his cinematic consciousness has inspired his collaborators on The Spreading Ground, who liken the style of the dark film – which tells the story of the murders of four little girls – to Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).

Or, for a more thematically-related ancestor, Production Supervisor Stephen Maynard invites a comparison to Fritz Lang’s seminal German thriller M (1931), where, similarly, both the police and the underworld mount concurrent pursuits of someone they suspect is a serial killer.

The set is alive with excitement, because, after all, Derek shot Alien.

The fourth day of shooting is in a cramped Via Rail office on the seemingly abandoned third floor of Union Station, which in the film is the workplace of the Robbery and Homicide Division in Burman City, a fictitious American town. In this particular scene, Hopper – not playing the psycho this time, but rather Ed DeLongpre, the policeman in charge of the investigation – assembles his detectives to determine the killer’s modus operandi.

The latest abduction, which occurred at a petting zoo, was caught on a security camera, and in viewing the tape the detectives see that not only does the victim leave with the murderer all too willingly, but also that the latter was ripped off by a pickpocket. Thus, if they can track down the thief, they may find some key information about their slippery murder suspect.

Vanlint has his half dozen actors run through the entire six-minute dialogue sequence in one wide-angle long take before switching to a longer lens and moving in for a tight, low-angle two-shot with Hopper seated in the foreground, and Frederic Forrest, as Det. Michael McGivern, leaning against a desk on the opposite side of the frame. It is all part of a visual strategy Vanlint refers to as ‘lens plotting’, meaning, cutting between shots of varying focal length and distance to help lend every scene, no matter how stationary, tension, movement, and ultimately its own visual and dramatic arc.

‘I’ve probably been doing it for years without really realizing it,’ he elaborates, ‘and it’s only when I was reading Sidney Lumet’s book [Making Movies, 1995] that I realized what I’ve been doing and why. We’re all affected by other people’s work, and Lumet’s 12 Angry Men [1957] had a very positive effect on me, because [for] something to take place in one room without driving you to utter boredom was brilliant.’

Vanlint is shooting with an Arriflex 535B, and for mos shots, he will switch to a lighter and more mobile Arri 435. His camera rests on Aerocrane, not for standard crane shots, but rather to steady the camera for his constant, gentle reframing right in the middle of shots. It is a hand-held look audiences are familiar with both on the big (Breaking the Waves) and little screens (Law and Order, NYPD Blue).

‘Very few films now have a totally static camera,’ he explains. ‘For years I’ve believed the camera is another pov, another actor in the plot. Now it’s an accepted practice. I stay on the crane just to `float’ through the whole movie.’

After coming up the ranks as a focus puller and camera operator, and then later serving as director/cameraman on scores of commercials, Vanlint admits he has ‘a big problem ever giving up the camera,’ and on The Spreading Ground he has even done some of his own operating. As it turns out, he will later call in James Griffith, a former assistant of his and now a cameraman in his own right, to take over the hands-on camera chores and alleviate a good deal of the director/dop’s workload.

Although Vanlint may have embraced certain innovations in motion picture gear and technique that have become commonplace since he shot Dragonslayer, he retains somewhat of an old school outlook. For one thing, he believes Steadicam is overused.

‘I think quite often it’s a cheap fix for doing a shot on a stairway or things like that,’ he argues. ‘I like to resolve that as a problem and stay away [from Steadicam]. To me [Steadicam] tends to push you away from this kind of `fictional reality’. You become too aware of the camera, too aware that you’re sitting watching a movie. It’s like those shots from behind the fireplace where you have the fire in the foreground and the people in plain view, and you immediately think, `If that’s somebody’s point of view, they must be getting very warm.’ ‘

As both director and cinematographer on The Spreading Ground, Vanlint is enjoying a sense of freedom long denied him in the world of commercials, where creative decisions are arrived at in the boardroom and artistic expression is limited to 30 seconds. As he discusses setups on his new film, it is evident a flame, long dormant, has been stoked again. Already there have been offers for more film work, but although his artistic chops appear intact, the flesh is not always as willing. The Baron confesses turning down one project, set in the mountains, out of concerns for holding up the production, adding with a laugh, ‘Rock climbing with [Ridley’s brother, director] Tony Scott was something for 20 years ago.’