Special Guest Post coming from ad. Kudos!
„If you sit in this room, a window is sort of depth, sort of like a graphic slide. In other words, if I shoot a young lady sitting against the wall, all there is, really, is her face. If, however, I shoot through the window over there, there’s a window across the street, so immediately there’s a depth to the shot. (…)
After a time, you start to play with the perspectives. You put the window there and the camera there because you can see there and there, so you can get endless perspectives, or a much longer perspective. (…) It’s always interesting seeing what’s going on through the window, on the other side of the window. I’ve spent my life walking down streets looking through other people’s windows. It’s always interesting. It’s sort of natural. It’s there to be used.It’s part of the perspective. It puts everyone in relation to one another.
In My Beautiful Launderette, I was always intrigued with the window shots. In one shot, for example, you see Johnny, while Omar is sitting in the car thirty to forty feet away. Then he gets out of the car and walks over to Johnny. I realized I had done similar shots through windows in the rest of the film. Here I realized someone was crossing over from alienation to being white, in a scene written by someone with a white English mother and a Pakistani father. It’s about the journey from one side to another. So I realized the shot that arrived quite intuitively perfectly expressed what the film was doing, what the film was about: crossing over and integration through separation.” (extras dintr-un interviu cu Stephen Frears via)