Robert McLachlan | Interviews & Articles | Robert McLachlan: Life On Millennium
Robert McLachlan: Life On Millennium

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Rob McLachlan CSC: Life on Millennium

“After years of lighting high key color stuff, with lots of big, soft lights and soft sources, I found it was a lot more fun to get back to basically the way those guys worked in the 40s and ‘50s, with the slower stocks, with smaller lights but harder sources.”

Rob McLachlan CSC sipped a cup of coffee as he talked, his long legs stretched under the table of a family restaurant just around the corner from Lion’s Gate Studios in North Vancouver. His easy conversation covered with affection the 20 years of his upwardly mobile career as an award-winning cinematographer from peanut butter to champagne, so to speak.

He was trying to relax, to squeeze some well-deserved down time with his family into a short break between shoots. Here, in mid-July, he had recently finished a Disney MOW, and the hit TV series Millennium was about to gear up for its third season. The first two seasons earned McLachlan consecutive CSC Awards for best TV series, plus an ASC nomination. There have been other celebrity accolades, too, like a feature story in the June issue of BC Business magazine.

He was “a little tired right now,” he said, admitting that if Millennium had not been picked up, the prospect of taking his first summer off since 1984 had definite appeal. Work, however, is something McLachlan has come to appreciate, and “that’s the great thing about a series as opposed to one big feature a year. It’s the same as writing or painting or whatever, you don’t get good at it unless you’re doing it all the time.”

“I probably work as many or more days as any other cameraman in the country-if that’s smart or not I don’t know-but if every day you go to work trying to do something a little better than you did the day before, you learn something new. Some kind of new problem gets thrown at you, and you can’t help but get better. Apart from being afraid of never working again, the thing that makes me take the jobs is because I just like shooting.”

McLachlan traces his love of shooting back to his youth. He was born in San Francisco, where his father was getting his start as a commercial artist, but his parents moved back home to Vancouver after a year and a half and young Rob grew up on the North Shore, “on the side of the mountain .” His dad was an avid home moviemaker, with his own rudimentary darkroom in the house, along with editors, splicers and projectors, and a piece of equipment to dub sound on to regular 8mm film. Later he switched to Super 8.

The young McLachlan started doing his own pictures when he was about 12, and when he was in Grade 10 English he was given the option of doing some sort of project instead of writing an essay. He and some classmates decided to make a film.
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 “We went out and had a riot. We used my dad’s camera, spliced it all together and laid a soundtrack on it, and we all got the first A’s that any of us had ever gotten in English. So I realized I was on to something here. I liked doing this. This was really fun.”

After high school, McLachlan enrolled first in the fine arts program at the University of British Columbia for a year, but “around this time, the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, the Simon Fraser University Film Workshop was THE place to learn film, so my wife, a whole bunch of my friends and I all switched over.”

He paid his way through school by working in the Woodward chain’s downtown Vancouver department store and that resulted in his first independent film, and his first film award.

“For years the store had been making peanut butter with a 100-year-old machine,” McLachlan recounted, “In fact, when my grandmother was a kid at the turn of the century, the machine was in the window, and you would bring your own bucket to be filled with steaming-warm, fresh peanut butter.

“In 1977, the machine was up on the eighth floor, where it was run by a guy named Clyde, who had been making peanut butter at the store since before the Second World War. In the 50 years he had been there, he had four years off to go fight in the war, and then he came back and went on making peanut butter. I used to love it up there because it smelled great and nobody bothered me.”

“But the store decided to get rid of this machine, and I thought that was a shame. I wanted to make a film about something, and had saved up my money to buy a little 16mm Beaulieu camera, so I wrote a letter to Chunky Woodward-the guy who owned the store-and said that for a thousand bucks I can make a film about this. I think it actually ended up costing about $1,200.”

“It took me a week to shoot the film in my spare time, and months of editing on equipment at the school. With virtually no help from anybody else, I made it 7 1/2 minutes long, and it won first prize in the B.C. Student Film Festival that year.”

“But the best part was that the vice-president in charge of Woodward’s food operation said he loved the film and that he had been looking for a long time for somebody to make a film about asparagus and a film about eggs.”

Continued. . .

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