From Olympian to working with Barry Keoghan, Lanigan O'Keeffe on course in new career
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Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe remembers walking out of the editing room after the first colour grading for the Manchester United adidas Originals’ kit launch video. Tears filled his eyes.
It was a big moment, both for his nascent career as a director of photography and for the production company, We Go Again Studios, which he had founded with Tom Day.
“I thought I'd fucked it,” he says. “It was like ‘Tom has trusted me with this and it hasn't landed’.”
Calculated risks had been taken with the shoot. There were safer options available but they would not have given the film the hue of 1990s nostalgia they wanted. Lanigan O’Keeffe had hit the runway. More tweaking was required for him to realise it.
It’s three years since, just three weeks out from what would have been his third Olympic Games, he was forced to retire from the modern pentathlon due to a hip injury. Four months later, when he made his retirement public, he was already on the road in his new career.
The then 30-year-old enrolled in a masters at the London Film Academy. Its span was broad but two months in the Kilkenny native knew cinematography was the route he wanted to go down.
Lanigan O’Keeffe and Day had both attended the Millfield School in Somerset, the Irishman on a modern pentathlon scholarship and his future business partner on one for football. It was a common denominator but there was no connection until Lanigan O’Keeffe asked Day, a well-known commercial director he’d admired for years, if he’d meet him for coffee.
At the Tokyo Olympics, there was a major controversy in the modern pentathlon when German coach Kim Raisner punched a horse. Lanigan O’Keeffe thought it would make a good documentary subject. He and Day travelled to Germany and spent six months working on a project which did not come to fruition. What it did bear was a good working relationship.
Day gave Lanigan O’Keeffe opportunities: A green screen shoot with Tyson Fury for a TNT Sports promo, an ad for the Women’s World Cup. Work on several documentary features followed.
When the brief for the Manchester United ad came in, the look it needed – a lick of imperfect 90s – was obvious from the outset. It was to be set at the club’s old Cliff training ground, and feature Jaap Stam, Bryan Robson, Dennis Irwin and Frank Stapleton along with current players Luke Shaw, Rasmus Hojlund and Kobbie Mainoo.
“It was like a love letter to football,” he explains.
“We had all these star football players from the present and the past that were going to be kind like Easter eggs for people to pick up on. The real heroes were going to be the everyday Sunday league guys.”
The ideal scenario was to shoot it on 16mm film. The practicalities of a tight shoot, squeezed by the tiny window they had to work with the current Manchester United players and actor Barry Keoghan, meant another medium was needed.
That was Lanigan O’Keeffe’s task: Find a solution which gave them the qualities of film using a digital camera. He did it using a combination of what he calls “the best camera in the world” and a Hurt Locker lens, the one used to capture the Oscar-winning film.
“I'm very proud of the Manchester United one because it was the first time I've done something that I haven't tried to emulate from someone else,” he says.
“I take a lot of pride in saying this was my own testing, my own development and something that has gotten me recognition.”
All that preparation was the training ground work. They still had to get a result at 3pm on Saturday. Keoghan, the star and the narrator of the ad, was available for just five hours. It was calculated pre-shoot that they had five minutes to get each shot.
“It was high pressure,” says Lanigan O’Keeffe. “It's still not quite the same pressure as picking a horse that you don't know, and having all your friends and family watching you for those two minutes [in the Olympics].”
The thoroughbred on set that day was Keoghan, a Manchester United fan and cousin of Stapleton. He bought fully into the project.
“You're on edge a little bit because part of his brilliance is his quirkiness,” says Lanigan O’Keeffe.
“He makes you feel uneasy because he challenges you as well. He's as into it as you are.
“He actually joined the creative process. The shot when he's walking into the Cliff, he turns and the Manchester United logo is behind him, that was his idea. It's one of my favourite shots in the in the commercial.
“He's very respectful. Whenever Tom, the director, had notes for him – no matter he if was joking around, playing football - he stopped all that instantly, went over, gave him full attention. It was an amazing switch that I saw. He was just so chill.”
When he first stepped through the doors of the London Film Academy, Lanigan O’Keeffe was apprehensive about revealing too much detail from his past life, believing people might perceive his sporting career as meaning he lacked the necessary creativity. Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe the athlete was reinvented as Arthur LOK. He even got a new Instagram account.
“You had people with reverse mohawks. They were just much cooler than me instantly. I was like. ‘These guys look like they should be on a film set. And I look like I should be on a running track’."
It took a year before he realised that he was wrong.
“No one cared about sport in LFA. Suddenly I'm amongst these people who just love cinematography and films and we have completely different conversations. No one asked me how training was going. When they found out I was an Olympic athlete, they were like, ‘Oh, that's cool, weird, but cool. Like why did you waste your time running around?’
“When I got to a certain level and they found out about it, they're like, ‘Jeez, that's amazing. That explains why you can leg it up and down with a camera’.
“You're holding cameras that are 20kg for 10-plus hours a day. We do a lot of movement. One of the things that we became semi-known for was the fact that they can give me a camera, and I can run around with the athletes. I can get into a boxing ring. I've been inside a ring with every single heavyweight in the top 10. I can move with them.
“When they start sparring with their coaches, it's very similar to fencing footwork, keeping distance. Having the sporting background there is extremely beneficial.” For their first Netflix feature, the Battle of the Baddest, they took a gamble on the high speed Freefly Ember camera.
No one was giving MMA fighter Francis Ngannou a chance against Tyson Fury but the bout did have one intriguing element: Ngannou’s power. What if he could land one earth shattering blow to Fury? If he did, they wanted to capture every millisecond in the slowest of slow motion. The Freefly Ember gave them that ability.
“It was just one of those weird moments where we were in the right place and the unthinkable happened - he got that punch.”
Though Lanigan O’Keeffe was not the one holding the camera when they got the shot – that was director Tom Day – he was the reason they had it in their arsenal. There were only two units in the UK at the time, one of them on a National Geographic shoot. He rang around and managed to get it before their crew travelled for the fight.
“We all went behind where we had all our computers,” he explains with a smile, reliving the moment.
“When we put it on the screen, it was probably the best feeling I've had doing this job. I remember all of us erupting in screams because we've got this amazing money shot.
“We went back to the hotel with Francis Ngannou’s coach. We showed it to him. I just remember him just crying and telling us the significance of everything.
“I'm very proud of that, just the nerdiness of ‘we should try this’.”
Like many others in the business, Lanigan O’Keeffe’s hero is Roger Deakins, the 16-time nominee and two-time winner of the Best Cinematography Oscar. Deakins believes working on documentaries early in his career gave him the skills which made him so successful.
Lanigan O’Keeffe wants to follow that path. Doing documentaries allows him to make all the right mistakes. He’ll learn from them, gain more experience before moving into the next phase of his career. Working with Keoghan left him with a “huge buzz”.
“I remember calling my mom being like, ‘Jesus, I now get it. Imagine working on a film with five Barrys, they're interacting with each other and you hit roll and then just magic happens’. I just thought, ‘Wow, this is this is it’. I'd love to do a film with Barry, people at his level.
“I’ll probably moved back to Ireland in five years’ time. While I'm over here, I hope to work on as many commercials, as many short narrative bits and documentaries as I can.
“I'm very excited about our new Undisputed film about Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk. We followed them for six to seven months. It's an amazing film. I think that's probably going to be a huge one for me, visually it's very bold.
“When I come home, I'm going to jump into long form narrative and hopefully find some good people.”