Director of film

You may not have heard of Barney Cokeliss but anyone who has recently looked at a television will have seen some of his work. Currently directing WW2 drama World on Fire for the BBC, Barney is the director behind the latest NHS films promoting awareness of heart attack symptoms in which people fall over in slow motion all over the place, and the one with the man and his Jack-in-the-Box in the cancer diagnosis campaign. The films have been shown on TV and at the cinema, and the stills are in print and on billboards everywhere you go. While he spends his working life working with the moving image Barney is also a big fan of stills, and especially stills shot on film. In his downtime and days away on location he swaps the massive cinema cameras, crews and bright lights for a somewhat simpler combination of one camera, mostly one lens, a bag full of film and a head full of ideas.

‘I have a bit of a disorder,’ he tells me. ‘If I’m sitting in a cafe talking to a friend there’s a part of my brain that’s constantly saying “Oh the light’s lovely by the window over there. If she just leans back a little bit I could get …” The person might be telling me something terribly serious, but I have this constant parallel conversation in my head which usually leads to me getting the camera out and taking a picture. If I haven’t brought the camera – because I’ve