Good evening.
For those of us here tonight
that are 70 years old or younger,
Jack Cardiff was shooting film
before we were born.
I don't do many interviews.
But when I was invited to speak
about Jack Cardiff, my friend,
I couldn't resist,
because Jack Cardiff
is a...an amazing guy.
Every time I saw certain names,
and one of the names
that kept cropping up was Cardiff.
Every time I saw these names, I knew
I was in for something very special.
And I began to have a very strong
affinity towards British cinema,
because of my recognition
of Cardiff's name, actually.
The way a movie is photographed
creates a mood,
and creates the mood of the movie,
so that the audience is prepared
for the kind of movie it's going to be.
Cinematography is central to film.
Motion pictures is...
is the art form of the 20th century,
and you can't do them
without the camera.
Going over to Bogie, he's dead.
She's dead, she's dead, she's dead.
She's alive.
I'm just alive.
It's fantastic, isn't it?
- You've outlived them all.
- Yeah.
Incredible.
I don't know. Do you think
it's a tragic industry to be in sometimes?
No, I don't think so, I think
it's a nonsensical thing...job to be in,
because it's full of, um...
full of hypocrisy, hyperbole.
Just about everything you can think of.
At this moment
your room is still not ready.
- Thank you.
- Your name?
If anybody said, "Who is that guy? "
because I don't think anybody
really knows who I am,
I'd say, "Well, I used to be
a stand-in for Frank Sinatra."
- That was made 50 years ago.
- Cinquante ans.
How are you?
Pleased to meet you.
- Nice to see you.
- Hello.
Come up a bit on this one,
and they're putting on a narrow one
on the number four.
How old are you now?
A couple of weeks ago, I was 91.
- And you're still working?
- Yes, well, not for long.
Another ten years,
and I'll have to take it easy, I think.
- Can you put it on now?
- Yes, sir.
Where you are now with the smoke.
That's it.
- When did you begin, Jack?
- In this business?
Er...well, I started in 19...
As a kid actor.
That's a long way back, isn't it?
And that's myself
when I was about five years of age.
- You'd already been in a movie.
- Yes, I had.
Do you remember, as a child,
the first film you acted in?
Very, very fuzzily. I know
that it was called "My Son, My Son".
I was four years of age,
and it was a silent picture, of course.
The director used to shout
the instructions through the megaphone.
"Now smile a bit, look over to her.
You love her. Come on, you do this."
That was...that was easy, you know.
In between stage shows,
my mother and father
would work as extras sometimes.
The standard rate of pay in those days,
the extras got one guinea a day.
And there was something like,
I don't know, 150 or 200 extras.
They were paid at the end of the day
by filing past a little booth.
After a while,
they realised what they could do,
they'd get to the end of the queue
and they'd change hats,
or put on a different coat,
and they'd go by
and they'd take another guinea.
They were making a fortune
until they were found out.
The queue was filing by for hours
collecting guineas.
I had a different home every week.
I went to about 300 schools in my youth
and learnt practically nothing.
So where did you pick up
all your skills?
I read a pornographic book
by Frank Harris.
But in between the porn, there was
all these great names he mentioned.
He'd met all these great writers
and painters and musicians.
And I went out to Foyles
and bought all the books he mentioned
in his book, and I read the lot.
That started it,
and I kept on reading ever since.
So you learned
in between bits of pornography?
Yes.
The first job I had was really
a kind of runner boy. I was...
The director had
some kind of flatulence problem.
He was...
he had to be given Vichy water.
I had to hand him fresh, cold
Vichy water at any time of the day,
so I had to sort of have it all ready.
That was a silent picture.
And then the next picture
was the beginning of sound.
Hitchcock was in the next stage.
When sound films first came out,
they had to be, obviously, synchronised,
and to do that we had clappers.
which was just two pieces of wood
that did that,
and then you'd put the sound
against the picture as it closed.
And the first clappers, they thought
it was such an important function,
that they gave it to the director,
and he would solemnly
announce the scene
and then clap and sit down
and say, "Action."
It was considered a very vital thing.
But after a while, he found
it was a bit of a bore doing that,
so they put the job with the young
clapper boy, as he was called.
He was a number boy, and he became
a clapper boy, and I used to do that.
While I was at B&D Studios,
I was working on British quota pictures,
which had to be completed
in two to three weeks.
I was then operating the camera,
and you couldn't make any mistakes
cos they'd never do another take,
there wasn't time or money.
Korda brought over
a lot of very good people
and, I think, was instrumental in founding
the sort of British school, if you like.
I mean, he gave people the opportunity
to learn from masters of their craft.
Run, run, Orlando.
A lot of fascinating stars
were coming over, and big directors,
and, what was most important,
very good top Hollywood cameramen...
What are you waiting for?
Dietrich was a big sensation, of course,
and she...she used to put
gold dust in her hair.
She knew about lighting,
she'd worked with Josef von Sternberg.
She would have been
a great cameraman,
and she knew that
that lighting had to be so high,
to make a shadow under the nose,
and most cameramen over the years
have done the same sort of lighting.
She had a slightly turned-up nose.
Like Marilyn Monroe, in fact.
So to straighten it out
she had this white line down here,
and then inside here,
inside the eyes, she put this white.
See this white inside.
It must've been painful to do this.
She looked gorgeous.
But she was in command of the lighting.
She used to have a full-length mirror
by the side of the camera.
She'd look in the mirror and say, "Harry,
the back light could get a bit hotter,
"and how about the kicker light? "
She used to comment on it,
and Harry would whisper to me,
"Goddamn it, she's always right."
- Have you had luck so far?
- Wonderful luck.
And the most wonderful of all
was to meet you.
- Do you think so?
- Yes, I do think so.
Even if tomorrow
means the end of us...
...as it may do.
What about this one?
We had this scene in the bath,
and she came on the set,
and we thought she was going to be
in a swimming costume,
which was the usual thing.
When she took off her dressing gown,
she was stark naked.
Within half an hour of doing these shots
in the bath, the place was crowded.
There was about 16 electricians
on the spot rail
trying to look technical,
holding lamps and things.
The ground, which was a paper floor,
was getting wetter and wetter.
And as she got out, she slipped on
the soapy water, and fell with a crash,
and the towels missed her completely,
east and west in the air,
and there was the great Marlene
floundering about on the floor,
stark naked.
He started very early in colour.
Started about when
they started doing colour, I believe.
It's a different medium, really.
You light in a different way,
which, of course, is the cameraman.
The Technicolor people
had come over
to choose one young operator
to be trained in Technicolor,
and they came out shaking
because the technical questions
were absolutely...very, very tough.
So, when it came to my turn,
I said right away,
"I'm afraid on the technical side,
I'm zero,"
and there was a shocked silence,
and they said, "How are you
going to get on in the film business? "
I study painting and light
and lighting buildings and so on,
and they asked me, "Which side
of the face did Rembrandt light? "
I took a chance and said, "This side,
and it'd be reversed in an etching,"
and then I talked about Pieter de Hooch
and his interiors
and the camera obscura and that stuff,
and the next day I learnt
that I had been chosen.
Light comes through the front,
obviously, through the lens,
and there's a prism here, which is
the soul of the Technicolor camera.
Twenty-five per cent of the light
comes straight through the prism
on to the one film in this gate here.
That's the green record.
And then the other...rest of the light,
comes through
and is reflected on to a bipack.
This is a bipack of the blue
and the red records.
And, of course,
the magazine holds three films.
Of course, these things free the
sprockets. They do nothing except that.
But I used to put on this big act and say,
"I think I'll put a bit more green here,
"a little less blue there,"
and they believed it, they thought
I was creating colour with the camera.
The whole camera department
were American
and Jack was the only one
on the camera crew who was English.
And he was the camera operator
on it at Denham.
Here they come.
Donnerhill still in rather a pocket
on Wings Of The Morning.
It was a fascinating new world,
because I was into
the Impressionists at that time,
and I was mad
about the Impressionist painters,
and I thought, "Well, this is it."
The surface of anything
you look at is absorbing some colour rays
and is reflecting the rest.
What it reflects strikes the eye and that's
how we get our impression of colour.
Colour is light and light is colour.
He always liked to experiment.
He liked to apply certain things
which he felt he'd learnt from painting
to cinematography.
As you see, I've always collected a lot
of interesting paintings and drawings.
I learnt a lot about painting...
Well, I'm still learning, let's face it.
And the main idea is I copied
some painters, like I liked that Boucher.
I couldn't afford to buy the real one
and so I copied it,
and that's the way to learn.
A lot of real painters copy
other painters, you know,
because this way they learn from each
other, in a way, it's an interesting thing.
Some people say it's a copy.
Yes, it's a copy.
But it takes a long time to analyse
the painting, to make the copy.
Then I had a big break, because
a German came in to Technicolor,
who was a count, Count von Keller.
He was a great traveller.
He was a sort of...I don't know,
you know, sort of buccaneer, almost.
He was a wonderful character.
Somebody suggested to him,
"When you're on these travels,
why don't you make films?
"Why don't you take along
a Technicolor camera and crew
"and make travel films? "
The work and spirit of
the immortal Lawrence lives to this day,
for Lawrence,
in his quiet unobtrusive way,
imparted to the dwellers
of this wild territory
a sense of law and order
of which they had never dreamed.
Jack is in the middle and I'm
on the right. That's in Palmyra in Syria.
We went to Africa and India
and all over the world
with a Technicolor camera.
The outside walls are richly
carved with incidents from Hindu legend,
so rich that not one panel
resembles any other.
Most people
hadn't been abroad.
And to see places in colour
was marvellous.
He is Nundi the bull.
Nundi the joyous.
Worshipped as an embodiment
of the force of reproduction.
But Jack was
the creative drive behind them.
Nobody else had much idea
about how to set about
making it original and different.
When Vesuvius was on, and
splotches of molten lava were falling,
we had to sort of choose a moment
to dash in and just point the camera.
...while from the lips
of its many gaping mouths, the lava...
I broke the prism
and burnt the tripod legs.
Burnt my shoes, anyway.
But that's another story.
"Western Approaches"
is an extraordinary film,
because it's the first ever
Technicolor documentary
that isn't a travelogue.
- What have you decided to do, sir?
- Make for Ireland.
Prevailing winds in part of
the Gulf Stream should be in our favour.
You had a lifeboat
with 22 merchant seamen in it
and the Technicolor camera, it was
very clumsy and very difficult to work,
and the director and myself
and a few assistants and so on.
And we went out every day in the Irish
Channel, which was absolutely horrible.
This is the "Forces Programme".
Now here's a short recital
of gramophone records.
We're on the home stretch now.
You can tell when you hear the old BBC.
It won't be long now.
For the first time
in living memory,
British film-makers
had a British audience.
People enjoyed seeing British films.
They actually preferred them
in some cases to American films.
They felt they came closer
to the scene of the action.
How could Americans understand
what people in Britain
were going through during the war?
So towards the end of the war, I think
British film-making was really on a high.
At that time,
I had not yet photographed
a feature film in its entirety.
I'd done lots of little pieces and
I'd worked mostly on the second unit,
and I was desperate
to get the big break.
The main character,
played by Roger Livesey,
is trying to deal with his loneliness
by going on safaris
and shooting animals all over the world.
Jack Cardiff was doing the shooting
of that as the second unit cameraman
and my husband came in
and watched him doing it.
I heard a voice say, "Very interesting,"
and there was the great Michael Powell,
and he said, "Would you like
to photograph my next film? "
and I said, "Oh, yes, Mr. Powell,"
and he went,
and I thought, "He's just said that and
he'll forget all about it," but he didn't.
Are you wounded? Repeat,
are you wounded? Are you bailing out?
- What's your name?
- June.
Yes, June, I'm bailing out.
I'm bailing out but there's a catch.
I've got no parachute.
Oh...hello? Hello, Peter?
Do not understand.
Hello? Hello, Peter? Can you hear me?
Michael Powell just felt
that Jack was the man at that time
who knew the most about how to get
colour on to film in a new way.
The Archers had what was described
as the longest period
of subversive film-making
within a major studio ever,
and because their films were
very popular, commercially successful,
they got away with murder.
We were our own bosses.
We produced it,
we wrote it, we directed it,
and if anybody said to us,
"May I suggest you do this? "
we just said, "Eff off!"
It was a wonderful combination,
because you had Michael,
who was daring and running around
and doing outlandish things,
and Emeric,
who was a brilliant writer anyway.
He would be the one
who occasionally would say to Michael,
"This is going too far, because of this
or that," and he'd usually be right.
They were fantastic.
Fertile, imaginative mind.
A very unique person in his own way.
And then you add Jack to the mix,
you have a pretty powerful cocktail.
It was daunting for me,
as my first film,
and even for Michael Powell
it was an ambitious project.
We were doing an exterior and Michael
said, "Wait, I'd love to have a fade-in,
"but instead of just a fade-in
"I'd like to have something different
like a mist thing or something."
And I said, "Look through the camera,"
so he looked through the camera
and I went to the lens and went...
When I saw the Archers logo,
I knew I was in for something special.
Then I saw the name Cardiff
attached with that,
and.I knew this was a unique...I was
about to undergo a unique experience.
- Child, where were you born?
- In Boston, sir.
I've made a bunch of films in Hollywood
but nothing to compare with this.
It was an enormous production.
The court will adjourn.
It was, I've always thought,
as pure cinema as Disney, really.
I mean, you couldn't do it on the stage
or in any other way.
I remember,
in the first preparation days of the film,
I said to him, quite casually,
I said, "Michael,
I suppose heaven will be in colour
"and the earth will be in black and white."
He said, "No, the contrary."
I said, "Why? "
He said, "Everyone expects that."
That was typical in his nature.
He was perverse to the extent
that he would like to do
anything that was different.
I mean, the ordinary
was anathema to him.
A little trick of mine, you remember?
In order to get the transition
from black and white to colour,
we would shoot the main sequence
in black and white
but the penultimate shot
was using the Technicolor camera
so that they would be able to start
in black and white
and then bring in the colour.
Marius Goring ad-libbed
a line during one of the scenes
and Mickey Powell immediately said,
"Keep it in, good line."
One is starved for Technicolor up there.
Really throughout
all of my life, I do not go to dailies,
except that when we were doing
"A Matter Of Life And Death",
I was so curious that I did go, early on,
I think for the first time
that they had colour in the dailies,
they clearly were not happy
with the colour.
They said, "Send it back,"
and, "Do better than that,
"we must have it better than that!"
So I have a feeling that Jack
was very much behind all that.
Outside the Empire,
thousands crowd the approaches
to see the royal family and also
the many film stars and notabilities
attending the Royal Command
film performance.
Michael Powell, one of the two
producers of the film, on the stairway.
At the end of the picture,
either the cameramen
would collect these, put on one sheet,
or Technicolor would do it for him.
I have several,
and they're great fun to look at them.
Mopu is 8,000 feet up.
The peaks on the range opposite
are nearly as high as Everest.
The people call the highest peak
Nanga Devi. It means the bare goddess.
On "Black Narcissus", we all
expected to go on location to lndia,
and we were greatly surprised when
Michael Powell the director told us
the entire film was going to be made
at Pinewood Studios in England.
I saw it as a wonderful
exercise for all...for all of us,
to produce a real perfect
colour work of art.
Michael collected around him
the best technicians that were available
and he had a brilliant art director,
Alfred Junge.
He was very German
and highly organised,
and if he designed a set,
when you walked on for the first time,
there would be a cross on the floor,
and he said, "That is the camera
position with a 35 millimetre lens."
Alfred Junge the designer
and Jack Cardiff the cameraman
would have endless arguments
and conversations about settings,
first of all on paper
and then when they were painted,
then in detail,
and then when the set was there.
The exteriors out on the lot
at Pinewood, with the Himalayas,
were absolutely marvellous,
because they were plaster mountains
in perspective,
but the result was just unbelievable.
You looked out of the window
and it looked real.
Sometimes Alfred
would have to tear half of it down
and Jack pointed out that
the kind of lighting that he wanted
for this particular sequence
couldn't be done because
there was a wall in the way.
Alfred would be furious.
But together they just worked miracles.
I mean, you never get
the slightest feeling of studio, do you?
After the film was released,
I believe Micky got a letter
from someone in India
who said that they knew the locations,
they'd seen them.
It was a good, good idea!
Vermeer was the sort of painter
that I had in mind on "Black Narcissus"
because the light had to be clear
and as simple as possible.
When I did this green,
having green filters in the filler light
and sort of pinkish colours
in the sun effects,
it was a thing of anger,
I tried to use
the same kind of mood in that...
I mean, any cameraman
would get ideas from Van Gogh
and moods of light and things.
Light is the principal agent,
and that should be the same
with photography,
that the use of light is like a painter,
that you use it in a simple form.
The emotional
and psychological connection
that was made through
certain lighting in paintings,
I felt, watching those pictures
that he photographed.
He made them special.
Because of that, you wanted to be
in that world with them.
You can't order me about. You have
nothing to do with me any more.
I know what you've done.
I know that you've left the order.
I only want to stop you from
doing something you'll be sorry for.
Sister Philippa is going back in a few
days' time. I want to send you with her.
That's what you would like to do,
send me back and shut me up.
Michael Powell
felt colour was part of the narrative.
Sister Clodagh, Sister Clodagh!
- You know what she says about you?
- Whatever she said, it was true!
- You say that because you love her!
- I don't love anyone!
Clodagh. Clodagh.
Clodagh! Clodagh!
Clodagh! Clodagh!
When I saw their work on screen,
this was like being bathed in colour.
It was palpable. It was...it...
I don't know what...
The colour itself became
the emotion of the picture.
The atmosphere that was
created around me was fantastic.
I was most inspired by it.
I mean, I thought I was just going out
looking a bit malevolent.
But when I saw it on the screen, I was
amazed at this great blare of music
and this incredible face with the wet hair.
He gave me half of my performance
with the lighting.
When Arthur Rank...
he took it to California,
showed it in Hollywood,
it got the most wonderful
technical praise.
The art direction got two Oscars.
Jack Cardiff's photography
got another Oscar.
The whole communication
of the film, what it tries to communicate,
is combined through costume,
the positioning of people in the frame,
the movement of people
within the frame,
sometimes the movement
of the frame itself, light, shadow, colour,
and cutting, all to music.
All designed specifically to music.
Then they took it and went further
with it with "The Red Shoes" ballet.
The last day but one
of "Black Narcissus",
Michael Powell said to me,
"What do you think about ballet? "
I said, "Not much, all these sissies
prancing about, I don't think much of it."
And he was amused
rather than horrified.
He said, "Jack, you'd better get to like
ballet, because this is your next film.
"I've got tickets for you to go practically
every night." I thought, "Oh, my God!"
Very shortly, of course, I became
absolutely wrapped up in ballet
and I loved it.
Actually, Miss Page,
I want more, much more.
I want to create, to make something big
out of something little.
The theme
of "The Red Shoes", of course, is that...
Michael was saying that if you want to
be on the cutting edge of your art form,
you have to be prepared
to pay the consequences,
because you're challenging everybody
when you start breaking conventions,
and you have to be aware that
some people may be able to attack you
and bring you down when you do this.
Why do you want to dance?
Why do you want to live?
I don't know exactly why, but I must.
That's my answer too.
Some ballet enthusiasts feel
that it's not the best shooting of ballet.
The best shooting of ballet, to be literal
about it, would be from head to toe,
Fred Astaire had in his contract
that you had to keep photographing him
from head to toe.
But they changed that completely.
They paid no attention to that.
They made a film about what goes on
inside the dancer's head.
It's how the dancer, he or she,
sees themselves, while they're dancing.
So you get the spirit of the dance,
you get the spirit of it,
and I applied that later
to the boxing scenes in "Raging Bull".
What they hear, what they see.
What they hear and what they see,
very important.
Michael Powell had courage.
He would risk, he would take a risk,
a big chance to do something,
which might seem crazy
but it usually came off.
The camera devices
are welded to the material.
They're welded
to the emotion of the film.
They are for the purpose
of impacting the audience.
I think because Jack had vision,
you know,
about what he was going to do,
he didn't feel curbed
by the restrictions of that time.
I had the idea of increasing
the speed of the camera very rapidly,
that as he jumped,
I went from 24 frames to 48 frames
for about less than a second.
So it went up, and as it got up
it was going much faster,
which slowed him down imperceptibly,
and he seemed to linger in the air
on the top of the jump.
They were coming up
with great ways to use the camera,
and when you see how big that thing
was, how they did it, I don't know.
I mean, they did call it the "enchanted
cottage", cos it was so huge.
How they moved that thing around,
I don't know. It was amazing.
- Can you imagine?
- Things have changed.
It was enormous, and you didn't have
much room to get the lights round it.
That's the famous
Technicolor camera. Jack, me.
The camera flying in and out as though
from the point of view of a dancer.
Would be a hand-held shot these days,
but the camera is on a sort of bungee
slung from a chain in the roof.
You begin to see, I must
say, flourishes, where the camera cut,
or a piece of composition
for the length of the shot,
that you begin to realise that
he's using the lens like brush strokes.
It becomes like moving paintings.
You know, it's a painting he's made.
Along with Hein Heckroth, Michael and
Emeric Pressburger, there's no doubt.
But it's a painting, paintings that moved,
extraordinarily moved,
not only moved visually but emotionally
and psychologically also.
There was something so audacious
about "Red Shoes",
and something that was so utterly, um...
unique, different from any film
being made at the time.
Qu'est-ce que tu as?
Mon petit.
Et ou vas-tu?
Mon petit!
No!
The lessons of those films have never
left me. I still keep drawing upon them.
It's had a huge influence. Particularly
on Scorsese and Brian de Palma.
De Palma. De Palma, easily.
The expressionism.
It's about expressing colour,
it's expressing, you know, the glint
of a knife and the colour of the blood.
It's all there with Brian.
Look at "Scarface".
And Lucas and Coppola.
And then of course you have
Francis all the time. "Godfather".
Clearly in "One From The Heart".
It's about passion, I think.
You could feel these people were
really, really dedicated and involved.
When it was cut,
it was shown to Mr. Rank.
Usually if a film isn't very good,
you know,
they might sort of put on a little bit
of an act, and say, "Most interesting,"
and, you know, and say, "Well done,"
or something and walk out.
But on this occasion
they walked out, they got up,
and they walked out without
saying a word to Michael Powell.
They just ignored him,
just walked straight out,
because they were convinced
that it was a disastrous film.
J Arthur Rank thought they'd gone mad
and said, "This is terrible, we have
to stop this kind of film-making.
"From now on, we will tell them what to
make", and Michael said, "You won't."
It was a very sad end
to a great, great period of film-making.
I mean,
they're seminal films, you know,
but they're a particular aesthetic.
It's the kind of aesthetic
that actually will be great art.
- And then it will be kitsch...
- Yes.
...and then it'll be art again.
I've signed all over England
and America too,
and I just lost count.
- I'll put happy birthday.
- Yeah, that would be very good.
I'm outside the studio gates once,
I'd just come back from seeing
Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier,
and as they came through the gates
they're all screaming.
I went by and they said, "Who's that? "
and somebody said, "He's just nobody."
- So how did you feel?
- Well, just like a nobody.
After working
with Powell and Pressburger,
Jack had a remarkable career,
because in quite a short space of time,
in less than ten years,
he worked with many of
the greatest film-makers in the world.
It's a real roll call
that starts with Hitchcock.
Hitchcock had just made "Rope",
and it was 80 minutes,
it was supposedly one take.
A lot of eight-minute
and nine-minute takes put together
so that the picture
appeared to be in actual time.
I think Hitch
was in love with this idea,
because he felt
a certain technical satisfaction.
Ingrid Bergman,
she is alleged to have said,
"You care more about the technicalities
than you do about the acting."
He put everything
in the preparation of the picture.
He rarely looked through the camera,
because he knew what it was getting.
He'd say to me, "Jack,
you've got the 35 lens on? " "Yes."
"You're getting the hands in the picture? "
He knew what he was getting.
It was the first crane of its kind
that ran entirely independent of tracks.
The camera started
in the front of the house,
through the kitchen
and then into the drawing room.
Talk, talk, talk, and went into the hall.
Parts of the set
would have to slide open
to allow the camera crane
to go through them.
We'd pan round to where
the walls had been closed.
I had to light six or eight sets,
more. Dozens of different positions.
Round and round. Back to the hall.
All in one shot
without the camera stopping.
I had electricians holding lamps, and
dodging under a table and coming up.
On one occasion we had a shot
where we had to go upstairs,
through the door,
and as we approached her bed,
we went into a big close-up
when instead of going up,
looking down on the bed like that,
which was a cumbersome thing to do,
we approached her straight
and the bed was on electronic things,
and as you tracked in,
the bed would come up like this,
so that you'd have a big close-up
without the camera going too high.
It ended up
by not being ten-minute takes.
There were some very long takes
but it became impractical to do.
It couldn't possibly be
wonderful photography
because everything was a compromise.
But it was really my greatest
achievement, in a funny way,
because it was doing the impossible.
I'm just going outside.
I may be away some time.
It was probably one of the most
marvellous pictures I've ever been on,
...and I had the luck of having
a fantastic cameraman.
There was something
very special and unique
about the English use of Technicolor,
particularly by a man like Cardiff.
That became something else, and had
a lot to do with emotion, and painting.
Not to say that the American
cinematographers didn't use painting.
They were brilliant.
But how should I put it?
That was a different type of commodity.
Jack joined Hollywood
at the point at which it really began
to march out into the world.
I think that was a very exciting
moment for a cinematographer,
to be working
with those Hollywood film-makers.
He worked with Henry Hathaway.
He was a toughie.
On "The Black Rose",
he fired so many people
that we had a plane
called the Hathaway Special
which flew people, every couple of days,
that had been fired, back to England.
He would devote his life to that picture.
He would die for that picture, you know.
And he expected everyone else
to die for the picture.
And if they were not ready to die,
he would just crucify them.
I never saw anyone look less like young
gallants going off on a great adventure.
He said he'd play Genghis Khan
on condition that his coat
was lined inside with mink.
They said, "But, Orson, we don't see
the mink coat, and it's expensive."
Orson said, "I've got to do it that way."
So, OK, they got the mink
and they put it in.
You never saw it inside, the lining inside.
Of course, at the end of the film,
when his part was finished,
he slipped off with the coat
and went off to do
some more scenes on "Othello"
and turned the coat inside out so that
he had the mink coat for "Othello".
What are you stewin' about,
mon capitaine?
Bonnard told you
where we were going last night.
- Where?
- The Sahara Desert.
Straight ahead and turn to your left.
On the first day of shooting,
when John Wayne...
He played the part
of a Foreign Legionnaire.
He came on the set and he had...
he had a cowboy hat on,
and the holster and the boots
and the gun, just like a cowboy.
And I said to Hathaway, "Henry,
why is he wearing that cowboy outfit? "
Hathaway looked at me
like I was an idiot
and he said,
"He always wears the cowboy outfit."
He was always doing the
withdrawing-the-gun business, you know,
and flicking it round
and flicking it back again.
I did a lot of shots of him doing that.
Someone gave Sophia one of
these things you blow and it comes out,
and she loved that.
Hathaway was a wonderful director,
but he was a man who,
in a sense, bulldozed his way along.
He had got far worse
on that picture,
because we had this desert,
which had to be virgin desert, you know,
no sign of a footprint or anything.
And you can imagine a film unit
walking about. He was going crazy.
The English crew were having
a cup of tea in this so-called place,
and he'd put up a notice on the board
because he hated the whole idea
of the English unit having tea.
He said, "In future," on the notice board,
"the English crew
will drink their tea standing up."
And he said, "Come on, Jack,
let's find these locations."
I said, "Henry, you've blown it.
You've made a terrible mistake."
He said, "What the hell are you
talking about? " and I said, "Well...
"at the moment
the English crew respect you.
"They don't particularly like you
but they respect you.
"But now you've done that, English tea,
forget it, you're a villain from now on."
He said, "Oh, you're full of shit,"
and he just thought for a moment,
then he turned the car round
and drove back,
and he tore the notice board
off the screen.
I've got something for you too, and it's
my heart, black as it is, but all of it.
The assistant director had come
on the set and said, "Flynn's arrived.
"He's gone straight to the bar
and he's drinking double whiskies
"followed by beer chasers."
So when I got to the bar
and I was introduced to him...
He was never really drunk. He was
always slightly sort of pleasantly drunk.
Errol fell ill
halfway through "Crossed Swords",
and he collapsed
and was taken to hospital,
and the doctor said,
"Well, I'm afraid we think he's dying.
"His liver doesn't exist any more.
He has no liver."
And the producer said, "You don't
understand. We're making a movie."
We carried on shooting with a double.
We did mostly Gina's stuff.
And in something like three
or four weeks, he came on the set,
and he did look pretty awful
but he had survived.
The doctor said, "Well, it's a miracle,
"but, of course, he must never
touch a drop of drink again."
And he came on the set
with a glass of that much neat vodka,
and as usual...carried on as usual.
You have been studying my style,
monsieur!
One has to understand
at that time films were still enter...
I was going to say
films were still entertainment.
No, today they're entertainment too.
But at that time they were coming out
of the old Hollywood system.
There were Westerns,
they were genre films,
and Technicolor was used
for heightening the genre.
In the '40s and '50s, colour was still
relegated to films as a special element,
rather than what happened
in the late '60s and the early '70s
where all films became colour.
Jack was suggested
by the producer of the picture,
who also happened to be the star.
That's Kirk Douglas.
The shooting was very difficult.
It seemed to be raining all the time.
And once, in exasperation,
I asked one of the young
Norwegian kids,
"Hey, does it rain all the time here? "
He said, "I don't know.
I'm only 18 years old."
I suggested to Dick,
"Why don't we shoot in the rain?
"Because these Vikings
are tough guys, you know,
"and they would be out in all weathers."
Dick agreed
and Kirk Douglas was overjoyed,
because it means that we could shoot,
wouldn't lose so much money.
But as people know in the film business,
ordinary rain doesn't photograph.
So we had to supplement it
with hoses coming down.
The local villagers thought
we were out of our minds.
It was already raining and
we were adding rain to it.
But it worked very well.
Kirk Douglas,
he liked doing his own stunts.
In fact, he was a very good...
He had a good sense of timing and all
the things that are good in a stunt man.
- He does the shot walking on the oars.
- That's right.
He fell in once or twice
but he soon got the hang of it.
But that was considered a must,
that he had to fall off,
cos he was too perfect, in fact.
When he climbs up the wall of
the castle, after having thrown the axe,
he climbed himself.
With Jack's ingenuity,
we were able to do
some pretty remarkable shots.
And looking at the film now, I'm really
astounded at how well they turned out,
knowing how they were made,
which is really with spit and cardboard
and some rubber bands,
and it worked great.
Jack and I were very worried,
how are we gonna make this scene,
where you have all the Viking ships
going into a fog bank and disappearing.
And it's essential to the story
that you have that scene.
And Jack solved the problem with us.
He said, "If we could just get
a patch of fog,
"where the ships go
into the patch of fog,
"that's all I really need,
and I'll make up the rest of the fog,
"I'll make my own filter,
"and paint it, a white filter,
"which we'll just put up in front
of the camera and leave a square,
"where the real fog is."
And that's what we did.
And it's absolutely convincing.
It's a fantastic shot.
Every time I see it, I get a chill,
knowing how it was made,
but also the beauty of the shot.
Jack, certainly, looking at his work,
and having worked with him,
is probably the greatest
colour photographer that ever lived.
Turner, well, I mean,
he was the perfect cameraman.
If he'd been alive today,
he would have been probably
the best cameraman in the world.
I mean the way that he got dramatic
emphasis by over-lighting things
which takes courage,
with a cameraman, anyway,
but he had plenty of courage,
you can see that.
I mean, that church is burnt out
but it's so dramatic.
I wouldn't start to dare to compare
myself to what Turner did,
but I learnt a lot of lessons from Turner.
You should go out and do something
that's different and bold,
and that's the whole essence
of photography, in a sense.
We wanted an extreme long shot,
with a wide-angle lens,
of the duel in the snow,
and these two guys
facing each other, long shot.
But, of course, long shot,
we saw the spot rails,
so I had this idea of putting a piece
of glass in front of the camera,
about six feet away.
I painted the glass,
in other words, the same colour.
Then behind my shoulder I put
a little lamp that shone into the glass
Iike a reflection of the sun.
But the first attempt I made,
I was using the sprayer,
and I overdid it, and the paint
was running down the glass,
and Dino de Laurentis the producer
came on the set and said,
"Cardiff, what do you do?
Wasting time! What do you do? "
I said, "I'm painting the glass,"
and he said...
He was furious and walked off the stage.
But later, it was a very effective shot
and he was showing it to everybody.
Of all the love stories
France has given to the world,
this is the one to live in your memory.
I had a call from New York
from Josh Logan.
He said, "Jack, I want
you to photograph 'Fanny'."
I loved the film.
It was great fun working with
Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Caron.
One of the most
beautifully photographed pictures
of this whole canon
would be "Pandora
And The Flying Dutchman"...
When do you want to marry me, Steve?
...which was produced
and directed by Albert Lewin,
who'd had a big success
with "The Picture Of Dorian Gray".
"Pandora And The Flying
Dutchman" was a unique film.
It had fantasy and exotic locations.
I am predisposed to that,
mainly because of where I come from.
Neo-realism I had right around me.
If I wanted to go to a movie, I wanted
to see something more fantastical.
With one bloody blow,
I killed all that I loved on God's earth.
It was so romantic,
you know, it was so romantic.
It took you to another world.
There was something
about the way it looked
which put in my mind
Powell and Pressburger.
Faith is a lie
and God himself is chaos!
Silence!
It had the magical quality of Ava
Gardner as almost a mystical figure,
a mystical sexuality.
Hello?
She said, "Jack, I'm pleased
you're gonna photograph me,
"but you have to watch when I have my
periods, because I don't look so good."
I said, "I'll look after that."
That was the first thing she said to me.
Al Lewin used to do take after take, not
that he really wanted to do another take,
but he just wanted to keep going
so he could gaze into Ava's face.
And in a way that's true.
I've changed so since I've known you.
He said, "I want you to go
to Wallace Heaton's in Bond Street
"and buy yourself a 16mm camera."
Which I have here, and it's just about
the cheapest one you can get.
And I took it out to Africa
on "African Queen".
Well, I've taken it on many films.
A little to starboard, Miss!
No, no, the other way!
John Huston had the idea
of doing the whole thing in Africa,
and he said
it was going to be so easy.
Huston went out there and said he didn't
like that location, it was too pretty.
He disappeared for a couple of weeks
and we wondered what had happened,
whether he'd been eaten by crocodiles,
but he then sent a telegram
saying he'd found the perfect place
in the Belgian Congo.
It was right in nowhere land.
It was called Biondo, this place,
and it was beyond anywhere.
It was two days' Jeep ride
from Stanleyville.
He was not always thrilled
with the choice of locations
because if there was
an impossible location to be found,
John Huston was the man to find it.
I was there for the whole shoot,
and I think Jack had
tremendous admiration for John.
John always tried to get
almost impossible shots,
really difficult ones,
and Jack always got what he wanted.
Huston was quite easy-going, in a way.
But ever, beneath the casual
kind of attitude, was the artist,
was the perfectionist.
He had the utmost regard for Jack,
that I know,
because they basically
talked the same language.
We were towing this raft,
and we had Katherine Hepburn's
little place as a dressing room.
I had a tiny generator for my two lamps.
I only had two lamps on the picture.
And one or two others,
the sound department, had it.
So it was a string of little boats
being towed along.
Of course, when we came to a corner,
they were like a row of sausages,
and they couldn't turn
so we would crash into the bank.
You could find yourself
with one leg, on "The African Queen",
on the boat with Katie and Bogie
sitting down there,
and your other leg up
on the bank of a river,
holding a boom like that over them
and liable to go in,
and in those rivers
were rather nasty creatures.
In Uganda on Lake Victoria,
we were all sick, very, very sick.
I mean all kinds of dysentery,
all kinds of vomiting, everything.
Sam Spiegel, our friend
and our producer, came to the location.
He was furious cos the movie
had to shut down for three days.
We got yet another doctor to look at it
and he found exactly what was wrong,
that the filter, the water filter...
We were on a houseboat,
you see, and the filter wasn't there.
So we were drinking just river water with
the droppings of hippos and crocodiles.
And the only two persons who weren't
sick was Bogie and John Huston
because they never touched water,
they only drank whisky.
- I could give you a hand.
- Close your eyes, please, Mr. Allnut.
I'm all right. I'm all right.
Hepburn was an incredible lady.
She was very strong-minded,
and in some ways she didn't want
to be regarded as a frail woman.
She wanted to be tough and accepted
as a woman of character and courage.
She did go in the jungle
and she was a very, very brave woman.
Ain't no person in their right mind
ain't scared of white water.
I never dreamed that any mere physical
experience could be so stimulating.
How's that, Miss?
Bogie, of course, put on
this big act that he was a tough guy.
I mean, he told me at the beginning
about makeup.
He said, "Jack, see this face?
"It's taken me many years to get
all these lines and crinkles in it.
"That's the way I want it. Don't light me
up and make me look like a goddam fag.
"I want to look like this." So I did it.
Bogie was not an actor who
cared much about the way he looked.
But he appreciated good photography.
And he loved effective photography
that worked for the story.
I wrote and directed
all three of the movies Maria was in,
her short, full career
from start to finish.
It was a frightening film
for a young person to see.
I'll never forget the opening scenes
in the graveyard in the rain.
And his colour, his use of colour,
particularly when they're in Monte Carlo
or on the yacht.
She unveils, in a sense, and Edmond
O'Brien, all the guys, just look at her.
It's an extraordinary picture.
The world's number-one
symbol of desirability
on display all over the world's
number-one showroom
with the world's number-one
customers wanting to buy,
and nobody wrapped her up
and took her home.
Oh, she was gorgeous,
of course. She was so good-looking.
I was on location
with that one as well, and that...
Yeah, but I think that Ava Gardner
was certainly not hard to photograph.
I mean, Bogie may have been,
but Ava was such a great beauty.
The first time I met her,
she was very happy with Frank Sinatra.
The next time I worked with her,
she was leaving Frank.
Something had gone wrong
and she was taking Soneryl to sleep
and that made her a bit sleepy,
the eyes had to be looked after,
so I was lighting her more carefully.
And it is a fact, they rely
on the cameramen very much.
I think I am pretty enough, but I would
not want to be that kind of star.
Pretty enough? Any woman that
can use the moon for a key light...
Key light? What is that?
That's your light
when the stage is all lit up,
the light that shines only on you.
You took a lot of portraits of actresses,
didn't you, over the years?
- Yes, I had...
- Could we have a look at those?
I used to take them
usually in the lunch hour.
And, um...I only had time to do a few.
Audrey Hepburn was one
I did on "War And Peace".
That's a typical type of lighting,
of light, dark, light, dark, you see.
Dark, light, dark, light.
- What's the name of that again?
- Chiaroscuro.
Pierre.
I tried to photograph them
as many times as possible
to get used to their face and study
any kind of flaws and things.
Janet Leigh? That was on "The Vikings".
And then we have Anita Ekberg,
who had a lovely face.
And that was on "War And Peace".
They all had different qualities. I mean,
Loren had the most gorgeous eyes.
Very expressive eyes.
Audrey Hepburn had these
very thick eyebrows, which was...
She made a fashion out of that, and
she made a fashion out of many things.
That's Sophia Loren,
with a big hat.
This is when I became like an amateur
enthusiast who takes pictures.
Why does he take them?
He likes to take pictures, you know.
And these women
were beautiful women.
And, you know, like you collect stamps,
I collected beautiful women,
photographically, of course.
Marilyn was always
sort of perfectly made up
and she had a face
which was virtually perfect.
She had a slightly tipped-up nose,
which was very attractive.
She specifically asked
for you once. What was that?
Well, that was because I was in vogue.
It's almost like footballers
that are getting around.
They want a certain footballer
to be in a certain position
and they find out that
that's the best man, they get them.
I don't know. And she asked for me,
and I was very flattered.
You have pretty eyebrows.
Love. What a universe of joy and pain
lies in that little word.
Larry was...he was supposed
to be in that position.
But he wanted to look through
the camera to see what the shot was.
- He was directing.
- He wanted to see what the shot was.
So I took his position and Marilyn
put her arms round me like that,
and later on she wrote,
"Jack, I'll tell you what we'll do,"
and Arthur Miller, the husband, said,
"Oh, no, you don't," so that was that.
- What were you gonna do?
- I don't know.
It was a tough job for him
because she was...
I think she was a darling girl
in many instances,
but she...she had a lot of problems...
- Do you reverse?
- Just try me!
She would come on the set very late,
and it was a tough picture to do.
Between Marilyn and Olivier,
who also directed,
there were occasional reports of strain.
We had a wonderful
make-up man, Whitey,
who was with her for years.
When she died, there was
an urgent call to New York,
for he was in New York at the time,
and he had to fly back,
because it was in the contract he had
to make her up when she was dead.
The idea of making up this gorgeous
creature when she was dead,
and putting on the lipstick and
the usual thing, it was a tough break.
He told me he had to have a couple
of stiff drinks before he started.
Some weeks ago,
I had a celebration party,
celebrating my 80 years in the cinema.
No matter how good the cameraman is,
or thinks he is,
he's got to serve the director,
that's absolutely important.
The director has to be the one who
has the responsibility for the final film.
It became apparent
when we were doing "The Vikings"
that Jack really was
very interested in the actors
and in the direction of the picture.
Jack had every potential
of being an excellent director,
and we discussed that,
and as a matter of fact, I let him direct
one short scene in "The Vikings",
just to see how he handled it,
and how he felt directing a film.
I worked
on a couple of B pictures,
and the first one,
the critics said, in effect,
why on earth did I want
to be a mediocre director
when I'd been on top as a cameraman.
And they suggested that I went back
to photography as soon as I could.
Anyway, soon after that I got
the big break on "Sons & Lovers".
What is it?
It's the mine.
I thought "Sons & Lovers"
did a marvellous job.
Some of them don't make the transition
very well, do they? But he did.
Local people, many of them
from mining families, became actors,
to help recreate a mining disaster.
Jack Cardiff was the director.
I do think that cinematographers
are inclined to be suspected
of concentrating
on the look of the picture,
which I don't think Jack did,
and I think that he was very clever
to want to work with Freddie Francis,
who was a very established
cameraman at that time.
I'd just done a film for Jack Clayton,
called "Room At The Top",
and I guess Jack liked the look of that
and decided he'd like me to do his film.
Either that, or he thought I was cheap.
I can't remember.
I would never go to Freddie
and say, "Is the back light a bit hot? "
Whatever. I would never say anything.
It's a beautifully lit and
beautifully directed black-and-white film.
It's one of the classics
of British black-and-white
cinematography of the postwar period.
Forgive me.
Forgive you? I love you.
I always thought, being a southerner,
I always thought that going up north,
it was dreary and dark like that,
so I was quite happy
to shoot it that way.
Action,
and the local actors jump to it,
producing a scene which will be
one of the highlights of the film.
You found yourself
nominated for best direction
at the American Academy Awards,
alongside Alfired Hitchcock.
who'd done "Psycho "that year.
- I'd worked with him, as you know.
- And he'd seen "Sons & Lovers ".
He said, "I've seen 'Sons & Lovers'."
He said, "It was bloody good."
He looked at me as much to say,
"How could you make such a good film? "
Because to him, I was a cameraman,
you know.
Mother! We're here!
- Hey!
- Come on, Paul!
- Go on.
- Quickly, quickly.
They'll be waiting to see us.
It had a tremendous reception
and I felt this was really something,
that the lights were coming on
and everyone was applauding.
And Buddy Adler, who was the chief of
"Jack, you must enjoy every moment of
this. It may never happen to you again."
In fact it never happened
quite as good as that.
Didyou see "Sons & Lovers"?
Of course. That's a beautiful film.
I have a print of it, a Scope print of it.
And I liked...I liked "Sons & Lovers".
"Young Cassidy" I like a great deal.
I have a print of that also.
- We'll win freedom yet, you bastards!
- Shut up and get back!
Was it hard for you to go back to
cinematography after "Sons & Lovers "?
Not really. I've always loved
photography anyway.
And that was the time after that,
some years after that, that...
I made about a dozen films in all,
and then the film business in England,
as you know, more or less collapsed.
There was no work at all.
I think it was...must have been
a very wrenching, angst-ridden decision,
and I really felt for him
when he had to do it, in one way.
In the other way, I was happy
because I grabbed him immediately
to be the cinematographer
on the next picture that I made.
Your Majesty,
I'm not the Prince of Wales.
There are good cameramen
and fast cameramen.
There are very few good and fast,
and Jack was one of them.
That one's "The Red Shoes"
and that's "Rambo",
and I think most people
are very surprised
that a CV could incorporate
"The Red Shoes" in the late '40s
and "Rambo" in the '80s.
I had fun on the "Rambo" picture.
I see you are not a stranger to pain.
Perhaps you have been among
my Vietnamese comrades before.
A totally different ball game then,
because, with Sylvester Stallone,
he was very masculine, very tough,
and the film that I made with him
was a toughie.
I couldn't try any beautiful composition
or anything. Everything was tough.
But it was successful.
Hurgh!
Jack was the same
dedicated, brilliant creator
that he always was.
He didn't change in all that time,
and he put
the same amount of enthusiasm
and extreme professionalism
into the last film he made
as he did in the very first.
The only other cameraman I worked with
who was that fast and that good
is Sven Nykvist.
Sven is lightning-fast and so is Jack.
He had this box of filters
and he always carried it with him..
We were up in North Mexico,
in the desert,
and the sky was really bad, it was like
all grey, and there was nothing there,
so he pulled out a little thing and started
painting, and he put it in the camera,
and all of a sudden instead of being a
grey sky, he made it magical, you know?
He's just a genius.
Today there's a big difference.
The days when I was working
on "Red Shoes", with all these effects,
and any film which had a lot of effects,
I wanted very much to do it myself,
even if it meant, like I said before,
breathing on a lens to have a fade-in
through mist or whatever.
But nowadays anything that comes up,
like a shot, is going to be made,
which is really fantastic,
they say, "Jack, don't worry about that,
special effects will do that."
So I've always felt a bit left...
left in the lurch.
Digital imagery looks real,
but it lacks an authenticity,
it lacks the used feeling in a way, it
lacks the feeling that you're really there.
And then the attack.
But what I'm saying now
won't matter at all,
because, er...it's already gone,
it's all finished.
Today this scene
you see being filmed
has been processed in Technicolor.
And cinematography
is definitely an art form,
and it is, I think,
the main art of the 20th century.
There's no question that it is,
because it involves every element of art
plus one, which is movement.
I would like to think
it's an art form,
but there's always the stigma of cinema
because it's populist,
but those who are, you know,
wonderful literary figures,
critics et cetera, intellectuals,
will feel that cinema is a popular form,
therefore it's not really art.
When I see him,
I see the young eyes of a child peering.
It reminds me of the eyes
of Chagall the painter,
very inquisitive.
How do you get...almost
like a spiritual image in your mind
and try to make that concrete?
An idea that hits you here,
an image that hits you here,
and then you have to translate it
through this piece of equipment.
Some people, in an effort to be
kind and complimentary, say, "Ah, Jack,
"they don't make films
like those old Technicolor films."
But that's all nonsense.
To me, the standard of photography
has improved, you know, enormously.
Go on, keep going, keep going.
OK, quiet, please, everyone.
See what I'm going for?
- Why don'tyou want to retire?
- No...I think I'd hate the idea.
I've got a big horizon.
There's painting in between,
which is nice to do.
And hopefully, one of these days,
I'll just drop dead on the film set.
This is the first time
an honorary Oscar has been given
to a cinematographer.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is
my special privilege to present to you
Mr. Jack Cardiff.
Thank you.