Conversations with Jack Cardiff E-Book

Justin Bowyer

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 489

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Jack Cardiff was responsible for some of the most visually stunning fims in cinematic history. Tile Red Shoes, A Matter of Life of Death, Black Narcissus, Rope, The African Queen, Sons and Lovers, Girl on a Motorcycle and the blockbuster Conan the Destroyer are just a handfulof films that bear his creative hallmark. His work has been hugely influential, inspiring countl ess filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Mike Figgi s, who writes the foreword. This book i s an insight into the visual art and craft of cinema by one of its greatest exponents. Entertainingly and accessibly presented in question and answer format, it is written for all film enthusiasts. particularly those who enjoy or study the art of photography in film.

Leseprobe

About Batsford

Founded in 1843, Batsford is an imprint with an illustrious heritage that has built a tradition of excellence over the last 168 years. Batsford has developed an enviable reputation in the areas of fashion and design, embroidery and textiles, chess, heritage, horticulture and architecture.

conversations with

jack cardiff

art, light and direction in cinema

conversations with

jack cardiff

art, light and direction in cinema

by justin bowyer foreword by mike figgis

First Published 2003 by Batsford an imprint of Pavilion Books Company Limited 1 Gower Street London WC1E 6HD

www.batsford.com Twitter: @BatsfordBooks

© Justin Bowyer 2003

The right of Justin Bowyer to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Illustrations supplied by Jack Cardiff (unless specified otherwise)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, displayed, extracted, reproduced, utilised, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or scanning without the prior written permission of the Pavilion Books Company Limited.

First eBook publication 2014 ISBN 978-1-84994-253-9

Also available in paperback ISBN 978-0-71348-855-5

For Helen and Callum

Contents

Foreword: Mike Figgis

Tribute: Bill Taylor

Introduction

1 Into the LightA theatrical family • An education … of sorts • The early Britishstudios • First acting roles: My Son & Billy’s Rose • Alfred Hitchcock • Behind thecamera onThe American Prisoner& Loose Ends • Freddie Young • Sir Alexander Korda •Knight Without Armour& Marlene Dietrich

2 Painting the World in ColourDefining the cinematographer • PioneeringTechnicolor •Wings of the Morning• Henry Fonda • Punching His Majesty: TheCoronation of King George VI • Count von Keller &World Windows• To War … •Western Approaches

3 The Golden YearsMichael Powell & Emeric Pressburger •Caesar and Cleopatra•A Matter of Life and Death: Battles with Technicolor • David Niven & Marius Goring • Thebloody bore of editing • Alfred Junge •Black Narcissus• Studio Himalayas: Alfred Junge& ‘Poppa’ Day • Caravaggio & Vermeer by candlelight • Academy Award •The Red Shoes• Learning to love ballet • Moira Shearer & Léonide Massine • Oscar snub

4 Fire and IceScott of the Antarctic& John Mills •Under Capricorn– one shot wonders• Method in Hitchcock’s madness • Ingrid Bergman & Joseph Cotton • Henry Hathaway•The Black Rose& Tyrone Power • Orson Welles • Directing Montmartre •Pandora and the Flying Dutchman• Ava Gardner •The Magic Box

5 LegendsHell in the jungle:The African Queen• Huston, Bogart, Hepburn & Bacall •The Master of Ballantrae• In with Flynn –Crossed Swords• Gina Lollobrigida • Almost a director – William Tell • Joseph Mankiewicz andThe Barefoot Contessa• Ava Gardner •War and Peace– King Vidor • Dino De Laurentiis • Lighting the duel • Audrey Hepburn•Legend of the Lost: Sophia Loren and John Wayne • Olivier and Monroe

6 Fighting Vikings and Directing FeaturesThe Diary of Anne Frank• RichardFleischer •The Vikings• Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine & Janet Leigh •Directing at last:Intent to Kill• A second feature:Beyond This Place• Fanny and the Oscarnomination •Scent of Mystery: The first “Smelly” • Peter Lorre

7 Sons, Lovers, Lions and MotorcyclesDirectingSons and Lovers• Trevor Howard• The trouble with censors • Oscar nominations •My Geishaand Shirley MacLaine •Never work with children or (wild) animals:The Lion• Fighting on The Long Ships •Walking out on Widmark • John Ford’s boots: directingYoung Cassidy• Rod Taylor •The LiquidatorandThe Mercenaries• Cult classic:Girl on a Motorcycle• Marianne Faithfull •Stunt rides and Technicolor effects • The critics

8 Madmen and MusclesPenny GoldandThe Mutations• Scalawag: back with KirkDouglas •Death on the Nile– Ustinov, Niven & Davis •Prince and the Pauper– OliverReed • The curse ofAvalanche Express• The Fifth Musketeer •The Dogs of War•Ghost Story& Fred Astaire’s feet • Michael Winner:The Wicked Lady•The Far PavilionsandThe Last Days of Pompeii•Conan the Destroyer• David Lynch andBlue Chairman of the Board Velvet•Rambo: First Blood Part II– Sylvester Stallone •Tai-Pan

9 ‘If you don’t like it …’Million Dollar Mystery• Showscan:Call From Space• ClassicalMusic Videos • Lifetime Academy Award • Going digital

The Milestone Films

Filmography

Awards and Nominations

Technical Glossary

Notes

Film Index

General Index

Foreword by Mike Figgis

‘Necessity is the mother of invention’

Usually the best ideas in cinema come out of situations where a tricky problem arises and there isn’t a piece of equipment around to solve it. Jack Cardiff seems to have spent much of his life and career solving problems. Starting very young and rapidly working his way through the not-so-permeable layers of the film industry, he quickly established a reputation as a cameraman with an incredible eye for light and a very sound understanding of the psychology and frailty of artists. Being an artist himself must have helped somewhat. Being a natural risk taker puts Jack Cardiff into a more rarified category than most of his peers. There is an anecdote in the book in which Mr Cardiff describes the ‘men from Technicolour’ coming onto his set and handing him a light-meter and telling him to use it, or the camera would be withdrawn from him. I re-read this passage—did this mean that he wasn’t using a light-meter prior to this? Apparently so. Respect to Mr Cardiff!

Film-making has always been expensive. It’s always someone else’s money and therefore there is always a huge pressure to be conventional. To paraphrase Billy Wilder, ‘No-one ever went to see a film because it was conventional’ (Wilder actually said ‘No-one ever went to see a film because it came in on budget’). Without the Jack Cardiffs of this world, we would never have great cinema.

This fascinating book allows Jack Cardiff to talk us through the history of cinema. He talks freely, but never unkindly, about the greatest actors, directors, producers, designers and writers of the last 80 years. There is a refreshing absence of bitterness or rancour about the things that went wrong, the money that vanished or the things that could have been. There is so much to be learned from this great man—the way actors behave (in certain conditions), the way light behaves (in certain conditions), and the way directors behave (in certain conditions)...

Jack Cardiff is a great cinematographer, one of the best. But clearly he is also a great artist and a great film-maker. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for all his work; he’s certainly been a great inspiration to me. Thank you, Jack.

January 2003

Jack Cardiff: A Tribute by Bill Taylor

I first met Jack when he shot Ghost Story for Universal, back in the late 1970s. In those days, a foreign cameraman working in the studios had to have an American ‘shadow’, and since I was already working on the film as Al Whitlock's cameraman, I was the logical choice. What a dream experience for a young cameraman, to be paid to watch Jack Cardiff work! He was delightful, generous, and happily answered all questions.

I had expected that a man with his background would use many lights in complex set-ups and work at high light levels. Instead, the first shot I saw him light was a good-size real Vermont church interior, with a total of three 9-light PAR fixtures (one through a window) and some tracing paper diffusion. Of course, it looked beautiful, just as if the pale wintry light outside had done it all.

So my first lesson learnt from Cardiff was: you don't necessarily need a lot of lights if you put a few in exactly the right place.

As it turned out, I learned my craft from two great Englishmen who loved painting. Al Whitlock taught me composition and observation through his matte painting, and Cardiff taught me how to light.

Bill Taylor is Director of Photography at Illusion Art and Vice Chairman of the Board of the Visual Effects Society.

Introduction

In a previous life, before film journalism took its full grip on me, I was working as a visiting lecturer in video production on the Mixed Media Arts degree course at the University of Westminster. As the course title suggests, my students were a disparate (and often desperate) group, from a broad spectrum of disciplines and backgrounds and with an even broader appreciation of the film and video arts. One of my students, an outstanding Scottish fine artist with impoverished garret ambitions, finally challenged me to prove that what I was teaching had any relevance to his chosen field. I sent him away with instructions to watch Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, undoubtedly Jack Cardiff’s most painterly collaboration with the great filmmakers. He returned the following week full of praise and unbridled enthusiasm for filmmaking, and subsequently created some of the best work I ever saw produced on his or any other course at the University. I have no idea what he is doing with his life now, but I sure as hell hope he’s making films.

Jack’s continued influence on film and filmmakers cannot be underestimated. He has worked with the finest directors and most accomplished actors to create a body of work—approaching 100 features, shorts and documentaries—that is unequalled in its breadth and depth or artistry. Directors as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Fleischer, Henry Hathaway, King Vidor, Mike Newell, Laurence Olivier and Michael Winner have called upon his gift as a cinematographer, and actors ranging from Sophia Loren and Maurice Chevalier to Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe have relied upon his unfailing eye to light them at their very best.

Often overshadowed by his accomplishments as a cinematographer are the films that Jack Cardiff has helmed as director, an eclectic range of titles from mad scientist monster movie The Mutations (1973) to psychedelic road-movie Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and the sublime and multi-Oscar nominated adaptation of D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960). This book redresses the balance as Jack talks at length about the trials and tribulations associated with the director’s chair.

In a career that has spanned almost 90 years since Jack first stepped in front of the camera as a child star in 1918, there have, inevitably, been projects that have fallen by the wayside: his collaboration with Orson Welles on Ulysses, the ill-fated William Tell project with Errol Flynn, the discussions with Peter Sellers about casting him in a James Joyce biography, and Jack’s long-held ambition to direct a film based on the life of Turner, to name but a few. We can only wonder what these collaborations might have yielded.

Despite the complete mastery of his craft, Jack is the last person to describe himself as in any way technical (‘a mathematical dunce … a technical ignoramus’), but as in any industry, the film business has its share of jargon and arcane terminology. For the uninitiated. the specialized terms that have arisen in this book are explained in the Technical Glossary. As for the definition of cinematographer itself, it has been described in literary allusions thus: while it is the job of the director to define the paragraphs, it is the responsibility of the cinematographer to render the sentences.

It is perhaps a flowery definition, yet one Jack wholly supports, but for further clarification his extensive definition of the art and responsibility of the cinematographer can be found at the beginning of Chapter Two. The only film term that Jack quite regularly uses in conversation is the abbreviation ‘NG’, simply short for No Good and liberally applied to all situations —film related or not.

The 20-plus hours of interviews that have formed the core of this book were conducted over the long summer of 2002, interrupted only by Jack’s frequent departures to film festivals, awards ceremonies, speaking engagements and, on one occasion, a brief trip to America to shoot a new film. At the age of 88, Jack managed to cover three continents while we worked together, an impressive feat and a tribute to his continuingly tireless efforts to define (and on occasions redefine) the art of cinematography. This book is not a tribute to Jack—his films perfectly fulfil that function—but a glimpse behind the curtain at the collaborations, personalities, and craftsmanship that have created some of the cinema’s most enduring images.

1 Into the Light

• A theatrical family

• An education … of sorts

• The early British studios

• First acting roles: My Son and Billy’s Rose

• Alfred Hitchcock

• Behind the camera on The American Prisoner and Loose Ends

• Freddie Young

• Sir Alexander Korda

• Knight Without Armour and Marlene Dietrich

‘With his painterly use of colour and light, Jack Cardiff pushed the boundaries of motion picture photography, creating memorable images that will live forever.’

Phil Meheux BSC—President, The British Society of Cinematographers

‘Jack Cardiff’s career as a cinematographer and a film director just about encompasses the entire history of British Cinema. His contribution to filmmaking is truly extraordinary, both in photographing masterpieces, like Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and John Huston’s The African Queen, and in directing notable British films such as Sonsand Lovers and Girl on a Motorcycle. Jack has continued to work into the 21st century and remains a massive influence and inspiration for new generations of filmmakers.’

Adrian Wootton—Executive Director, Regus London Film Festival

JBYou were born in 1914 into a theatrical, vaudeville world of limelight and greasepaint, which is easy to romanticize, but the reality must have been far tougher.

JCOf course, I didn’t know any different or know what reality was supposed to be like. I was born into an atmosphere that was wonderful. Later on, I could see that other people didn’t have the same experiences, but for the first few years of my life, perhaps until the age of six or seven, I thought it was a perfectly natural existence. Obviously, thinking about it now, it wasn’t!

JBThe year you were born also saw the outbreak of World War I; your father was never called up to fight?

Jack Cardiff’s parents, the musical hall ‘Pros’.

JCNo, and I’m trying to think why that would have been. In 1914, my father would already have been 30 or 40, so he would have been getting on a bit.

JBIt sounds as though it was a very close and loving family, despite the unusual circumstances.

JCI was extremely lucky because my parents were so very happy together. You hear so many stories where the father got drunk and beat the wife up, but that didn’t happen with me at all. My parents were very much in love with each other and I was in this splendid cocoon of innocence and happiness. Of course, the whole background is exciting to a young kid: the lights, the greasepaint, the fact that it was all make-believe. That was the pure essence of my childhood. Contrast that to someone who’s born of a man who goes to London to the office every day and you only see him at weekends or whatever … my surroundings were pure fantasy.

JBA child’s dream, I would think!

JCOh yes, it was. Of course, my father was a comedian and as such was wonderful to get on with, and in turn got on with everyone. He was very popular and a hero to me right away. My mother was a doting mother, as all mothers are. She appeared in the shows too; she was always at pains to point out that she had a bit of ‘patter’ too. Which simply meant she had a line or two in the shows.

You see they weren’t repertory entertainment players. My father considered that not to be of his world at all, because that was for the intelligentsia. My father’s metier was just happy-go-lucky vaudeville and pantomime. Ah yes! So that was part of my youth too— Mother Goose and Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves—all kids’ stuff, and that fitted into my perfect happy life.

JBDid you consider the lives of the ‘ordinary’ children you met as you travelled around to be rather prosaic?

JCWell, I don’t remember thinking that specifically, but let me explain the routine to you, which was disastrous for me from an education point of view: each week we would arrive on the Sunday afternoon in a new town and the next morning my mother would have organized a school place for me. I don’t know how it was possible to do it so quickly. as we were only in each town for a week; but she did it. So I would be put into this school or that school for one week and obviously the teachers weren’t a bit interested in me at all; what could they do with me? They had no idea if I had any aptitude for education or inclination for any particular subject, and really no time to find out. So I would be given the most basic sets of questions, a modicum of subjects with no depth. I learned practically nothing.

JBAnd friends?

JCWell, of course, being the new boy for just one week meant that you weren’t really known to anybody, the kids didn’t know me and so I had no time to make friends.

But I did have one trick up my sleeve that was very useful: there was some kind of reciprocal arrangement that those who were connected to the show at the theatre could go to the cinema for free, and vice versa. So I could go to any cinema for nothing and I could also take a friend or two. Obviously that would make me an instant hero to the other kids.

JBMost of the constants in your life, in terms of friends, would have been the adults from the theatrical company, then?

JCOf course, the company was only constant for the period of the show, which might last several months on tour and then you would start another show. I suppose, unless it was a tremendous success like My Fair Lady1, it would never be more than a few months. The pantomimes like Mother Goose would be automatically engaged on a season of perhaps six weeks, but no more. In other words, you only worked with these people in the company for a few weeks or a few months. So even that wasn’t really constant. Sometimes you would meet the same people again later, on different shows.

In my little world, I used to make friends with the chorus girls. I would be in their dressing room and as I was only six or seven they didn’t regard me as any threat to their privacy. I used to think nothing of them peeing in the washbasin; it was as if it were the most natural thing in the world!

JBThis vaudeville existence of your childhood was very similar to Charlie Chaplin’s. Did your father work with him or ever meet him?

JCYes, he did a bit, though not much2.Years later, when I lived in Switzerland for a while, I lived close to Chaplin and we had dinner once or twice. He was a fascinating man, and the first time we met, I mentioned that my father had worked with him, and mentioned the show, and he remembered it. Of course, when my father knew him, Chaplin was unknown and he didn’t stay long in England. He went to America very early when films were already being made in Hollywood on a fairly large scale and he walked right into them.

He told me that once, just for fun, he had entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. He came third!

JBDid the cinema make an impression on you as a child?

JCWell, in the very earliest times, when I say ‘went to the cinema’, one rather imagines going to some grand, purpose-built picture palace, but in those early days it was just a town hall, a silent film and a piano accompaniment. But the time I am talking about, say 1920, there was a little bit more sophistication in the presentation, I would think. I do remember the huge Wurlitzer organs rising up out of the floor. Perhaps they were just coming in at the time.

JBHow did the music hall ‘pros’, as your parents liked to term themselves, view film work? Did they consider it to be beneath them, somehow frivolous?

JCNo, it was just a different ballgame. When we finished a show, it was called ‘resting’, which just meant you were out of work. At those timesm, we used to go to digs [lodgings] in London, usually in Kennington. They were pretty awful digs, with bugs on the walls, and I remember my father burning them off with a candle. Generally speaking, we would spend a couple of weeks in London, depending on how long it took to get the next engagement for work. More or less every morning, we would get the bus up West [the West End of London], to where the theatrical agents’ offices were, and see what was happening for jobs.

It would sometimes be the case that the agents would say that a show was starting in a month and perhaps rehearsals in two weeks, so there would be gaps, but work was fairly continuous. My parents were very much in demand and my father, who had appeared before King Edward VII, had very good reviews, which kept him in demand as a dancer and later a comedian.

JBSo they just fitted in film work where they could?

JCThe thing was, there was always the odd day here and there to fit in a bit of film work. Again, that was a very happy thing for me, going with them to work as an extra and other odd things. I had the occasional part too.

JBHow did it compare to the theatre?

JCTo me, it was just like the stage, only bigger; you had exterior lots where you had all of the fantastic sets, but they were still just sets, and I was very used to those. I got to see behind the fantasy of moving pictures, cranking the handle on the camera, and the lights and the make-up … Leichner make-up—Leichner number five, I think it was. Because it was monochromatic film, it didn’t show up the red colour band very much, so we used to have very dark red-lipped make-up.

Still, there was this thing of not going to the same school for more than a few weeks. There was one time—I know this sounds ridiculous—we were living in Brixton [in south London] and my mother and father put me into a local college where we had to wear a cap, which I thought was fantastic! One of my regrets in life was that I never worked hard at Latin; I’m still working on it, to tell you the truth. So I had my first lessons in Latin at that college. I was probably only there for a total of five weeks and didn’t learn too much.

JBThe great painters heavily influenced your later career. When were you first exposed to them?

JCThe thing in my life that has made such a huge shining light, ‘shining light’ being very much the right phrase, is painting. I remember one thing about all the digs and little apartments all over England, and that is, I don’t think I ever saw a single painting in any of them. They were very humble places and they might have had the odd drawing on the wall, but maybe not even that. I had never even seen a painting at that time. I tried to think the other day what age I would have been when I did, and I think I couldn’t have been any older than seven or eight. At this particular school, the teacher said: ‘Today, children, we are going to see art.’ See art! Well the word itself really meant nothing to me, but we traipsed along to this building—in the north of England somewhere, I forget where—but I remember it being very grey, which made what was about to happen even more of a stark contrast.

We got inside this large room and there were literally hundreds of coloured pictures. This was a fantastic and overwhelming surprise and I was instantly fascinated. I don’t remember what paintings I saw, and I don’t suppose it had all of the wealth of the top painters that say the [Royal] Academy in London had, but I vividly remember being overwhelmed by so much colour.

JBDid you then decide to take matters into your own hands as far as your artistic education went?

JCIn a way, because after that I had a complete fixation with seeing more: I wanted to know so much more. From then on, every time we went to a new town, I would find the galleries, and over the next few years I picked up more understanding and learnt to recognize the great painters. And I have had this great love of painting ever since.

Not long after that, I remember a point when it hit home very forcibly that the thing that motivated the artists, beyond their choice of subject, was this one word: ‘light’. I realized that whether it was a long shot of a country field, or just a bowl of fruit, light was the all-important thing. So I began to study this motivation more and more, particularly the way a good artist uses the light.

JBWere there any artists specifically that stood out?

JCI realized that Rembrandt was hugely innovative because most artists had this ‘north light’ in the studio, but he was never content with using the orthodox 45-degree top light, which made shadows around the eyes and under the nose. He would experiment with really weird lighting. He was very brave.

This fascinated me, but please understand that wanting to learn about light had absolutely nothing to do with me wanting to be a cameraman. It was just that I associated it with painting and I was madly in love with painting.

JBDid you complement those visits to the galleries with books? Was this when you started your collection of books on the great artists?

JCNo, not at all. If I had been a bit more intelligent, I would have realized that I could have gone to a library, but I was far too young and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to join. Today there are so many books on painters, but at a price. I was completely without money in those days, so even if they had been available to me, I wouldn’t have been able to afford them.

It’s quite extraordinary when I think about it, that at that time I had no ambition to do camera work or photography; I barely knew about photography. What was so interesting was that the pictures were so much larger than life and so dramatic.

JBWere you yet equating what could be achieved on canvas with what could be done in film?

JCI don’t think so. I wasn’t of an age to analyze these things. All that I had an interest in was the wonderful, exciting pictures that were so moving to me.

JBThe scale of film production in Hollywood was already vastly outstripping what we had in England at that time. What do you remember of the early studios here?

JCWell, at St Margaret’s Studios,3 I remember that the general setup was that there was a very pleasant and happy country background. My mother, father and I would catch a train down to St Margaret’s and walk up to the studios. It was all countryside and I clearly remember these huge Klieg lamps that were used. When Technicolor4 started years later, all the experts said that you had to use a lot of light, which was true because you had three films running through the camera at the same time, but the same was true of light in the early days of filmmaking. The film stock was so slow, you needed just as much light. All of the terrific light that the Klieg lights gave off was still a very flat light, though.

A young Jack Cardiff

JBAnd things were predominantly shot outside, even for the interior scenes?

JCYes, I remember at Wharton Hall they used to shoot a lot outside. I also remember that the camera had a handle at the back and not at the side, as you might imagine. Very awkward to operate, I would think.

JBThen you were already starting to take notice of the technical paraphernalia surrounding filmmaking?

JCNot when I was a child actor, no. I still had no ambition to find out about cameras; I had no interest at all. I was always interested in the fantasy of filmmaking, though.

JBYour first acting role was in 1918 withMy Sonwhen you were aged just 4.

JCI remember that there was a scene on a lawn with Violet Hopson5, who I remember thinking was a very pretty woman, but I obviously don’t remember any details of what I had to do or say.

JBAnd by 1922 you were taking the starring role inBilly’s Rose.

JCWhat was sad was that when I was doing Billy’s Rose, the film was a real sobbing weepy. My sister in the film, Little Nell, is very dangerously ill, and the one thing she would love to have is flowers. So my character goes out looking for some and I see a woman throwing some roses out of her Rolls Royce and I run over to pick them up and get run over.

So I have this scene where I am on a bed dying, and what is truly touching is that my parents had lost a child before I was born. His name was Jack too, Jackie. He was very talented on stage and had great potential, but when they were on tour in Wales he caught some sort of infection and died, a terrible thing. So when I was acting in this film, dying in bed, my father and mother played my father and mother in the scene, and my mother was crying her heart out. They were genuine tears and it was very sad indeed.

JBDo you remember seeing any of these films you had appeared in? Taking your new friends from school to see them?

JCNo, this was such a long time ago—70, 80 years ago. But I wish sometimes that these films could be rediscovered. Funny things do happen and somebody at the BFI [British Film Institute] was telling me that someone in Brighton had been looking through an old bin and found some film that had been thrown away. So it does happen that things are rediscovered.

JBYou were telling me that you were watching some footage recently and you saw your father.

JCYes, that was fascinating. I knew he had done some acting at Elstree Studios6 and had worked on a film called The Informer [Arthur Robison, 1928], which was really the last silent film. I had worked on it as a tea boy and a general gopher. I had a still of my father from that film, but that was all.

There was a possibility that my hands were going to be in the film, because there was a scene at a board meeting and the director wanted my hands right up in the foreground. Well, I went to see the archive footage at the BFI and my hands were on screen for about half a second. Then, just as they were about to shut the film off, I saw a cave on screen and said, ‘Hold it just a moment!’ And my father enters this cave and does his scene. Having a still picture of a dead relative is normally as good as you get, but here was my father in movement, smiling and laughing and living. A very interesting experience.

JBWhile you were working onThe Informer, Hitchcock was shootingBlackmail[1929] in the same studios. Did you meet him at this time?

JCNo, not on Blackmail, but shortly after that on The Skin Game [1931], I think it was called. On that one I was the numbers boy, a pretty lowly role, and obviously I didn’t know he was going to become ‘The Great Hitchcock’. But what was already very evident was his diabolically cruel sense of humour; he was always playing jokes on people. I was close enough to him on that film to see this sense of humour and he certainly liked to tell funny stories; he was a great raconteur. I remember him making a few sketches on set and now of course, I own a few of those myself.

He did have this extraordinary sense of humour. But then, in the film business there is this thing—I don’t know what you might call it apart from a ‘film humour’. And it even happens when you are working on pictures with very prestigious people and great big stars. The camera department, for instance, would have an almost secret sense of humour—they could whistle a tune for example, which would mean something. It was a laconic, mysterious sense of humour. That sort of thing goes on all the time.

JBDoes that come from the fact that despite the preconceptions, there is very little glamour in working on a film and a hell of a lot of hard work?

JCYes, that’s true. There is a propensity to the ridiculous that you might not get in an office if you were dealing with figures and market prices. On a film set, people are making mistakes and perhaps being conceited and the director may be shouting and putting on a big act—then the sense of the ridiculous comes out. Also, the fact is that in film, ever since I started, you can be lucky and find yourself working on The Importance of BeingEarnest [Anthony Asquith, 1952] and be on stage every day; or you can find yourself, as I have so many times in my career, in the middle of the Sahara Desert and in terrible trouble. So the humour is a backdrop and maybe an antidote to that tough life.

Most seem to develop this humour in the film business. I know that Dick Fleischer,7 one of my best friends in the business, has a fantastic sense of humour.

JBHad you left school behind completely by this point?

JCNot quite yet. What happened was that in 1926, just a few weeks before my twelfth birthday, my family and I moved from our digs in London to live permanently at a film studio, where my father had been offered some kind of job. It was so cheap and we rented a cottage for practically nothing; it was right outside the studio gate. So I was then put into a permanent school. It was called Medburn and was about 21/2 miles away. It was very pleasant and I was very happy there and it was around this time that I read Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves.8 He was a very well educated man and even went to Germany so that he could learn German and read Goethe in its original form. So he was a bit of a hero to me. He had a reputation for being a terrible liar. He told Oscar Wilde once that he had been to every stately home in England and Wilde replied, ‘Yes, dear Frankie, once!’

So he wrote his five-volume memoirs, My Life and Loves, and 70 per cent was, I think, outrageous lies about his prowess as a lover. I bought it and something stood out, again rather like the paintings had. I suddenly realized: ‘My God! What a world!’ I went to Foyles bookstore in London and I bought every book that he mentioned and I read them and each book led me to another—a lot of classical books.

Jack Cardiff as camera operator. Date unknown.

JBHow did you first come acrossMy Life and Loves?

JCI just remember it was so cheap to buy! It was an education in itself.

JBSo you began immersing yourself in books as much as you did paintings?

JCYes, but also, at about the same time, I started to buy a magazine called The Magnet.9 The first one came out in 1911, before I was born. It was about a school called Greyfriars and the popular boys in the comic were idolized almost like film stars are today. Wonderful characters, and to me they were very grown up. I became engrossed in these weekly stories and it became like my public-school education and formed my ideas of behaviour and manners—to be honest and to stick to your guns. It probably sounds very naïve today to talk about it, but I learned so much from The Magnet.

JBGoing back toThe Informer, this was the point that you really got your hands on a camera for the first time, isn’t it?

JCRemember that at this time I had no ambition for photography—I didn’t carry a No.2 Brownie camera and take snapshots.

But on one occasion, just a few weeks before my 14th birthday, something happened on the camera crew, someone was away or ill or something and they wanted somebody to work at changing the focus on the lens and I was called over. My father was ill by this time, really in bad health, and so I had to work to provide the money. I earned the enormous salary of 15 shillings a week, which even in those days was not very much. So I was called over and the first assistant on the camera said, ‘Now look here, sonny, this lens has some figures on it and I’ve made a few pencil marks on it. During the scene, when I tell you, I want you to rotate the lens from one pencil mark to the next.’ So the scene was shot and I twisted the lens around when I was told to and afterwards I said, ‘What did I just do?’ and he said, ‘You followed focus, son!’

JBSo your big break came and you were hardly aware of it happening?

JCYes, but although that was my first break, I still wasn’t that keen. I never thought, ‘Ooh, I must do more of this!’ But what did happen was that I realized the camera department often seemed to be going abroad on films and I thought it would be marvellous to be paid to travel abroad. What a wonderful idea, I’ll join the department!

JBDid your plan work out?

JCOf course, not at first because the next job I got was The American Prisoner [Thomas Bentley, 1928] where I had to haul all these camera cases all over Dartmoor, tremendously hard work, and I had to reload film at night when everyone else was having a great time. I was down in the cellars reloading the film—a tough beginning. So it took about a year until I crossed the sea and that was just to the Isle of Wight for a day and a half!

JBNot quite the romance of travel you had imagined …

JCNo, but then a dramatic thing happened to change that. My friend Ted Moore,10 also a camera assistant, called me and woke me up and said, ‘Our studios are on fire!’ So I put on some clothes over my pyjamas and rushed over and, sure enough, the studio was ablaze.

I remember because I was the smallest person there and the windows were very small, I was the person who got pushed in through the window. I dropped inside and opened the doors and everyone rushed into the hall and we saw everything ablaze with the roof timbers falling down. We thought we would just have time to get the cameras out, figuring they were worth a lot of money. We managed to get something like ten cameras out and the next morning we found that the management weren’t very happy at all at our actions because they were heavily insured!

However, one camera, a Debrie,11 a French camera loaned on approval, had not been insured and was worth a lot of money. So Debrie gave Ted Moore £10 as a reward and offered me a trip for three days to Paris. So I was off! First time abroad!

That seemed to break the curse of not going abroad!

JBWas the Debrie the camera you were using most of the time at this point?

JCMostly Debries. The Informer was silent and the next year I worked for Richard Eichberg12 on The Flame of Love [1930]—what a title! Again that was using a Debrie. On The Informer we shot at 16 frames per second, but for sound the speed was 24 frames. At that time, if you switched the camera on and it was running at 24 pictures, it would jam, because it was such a violent action. So it had two switches: the first cranked it, like the first gear of a car, at seven or eight frames, and then you switched the next one to get it to full speed.

One of my jobs on The Flame of Love was to switch the camera on and the entire crew was German and I didn’t realize that the German word for ‘on’ is ‘auf’, which sounds just like ‘off’. So every time we were due to start the scene, the cameraman would call ‘auf’ and I would say: ‘Yes, yes, it’s off.’ I got a good whack around the head for that … in fact, they used to whack my head a lot on that picture. I fell off a scaffold at one point and the director, Richard Eichberg, caught me in his arms and I was very grateful because it was a good eight-foot fall. But then he gave me such a whack for daring to fall off his scaffold. I eventually picked up enough German.

JBWhat sort of films were you working on now and what was your role on them?

JCThe American Prisoner was quite straightforward stuff with Carl Brisson13 and the lovely Madeleine Carroll.14 I was the numbers boy and again had to carry lots of equipment. We had a lot of location work on that, which was tough. The tripod had a head on it that was solid steel and very heavy. But it was all the cameraman’s rites of passage.

Madeleine Carroll was so charming and years later, it must have been 1940-something, I was in Rome with my assistant Christopher Challis.15The hotel we were staying in had a huge circular dance floor and Chris turned to me and said: ‘I’m going to ask that girl over there to dance—she’s very pretty.’ He was just getting up and making his move towards her and I said: ‘Hang on, better not, that’s Madeleine Carroll.’ Who knows, she might have agreed, but I doubt it.

JBSo you were finally enjoying the glamour of travel to some extent by now?

JCFunnily enough, when we were staying in the same hotel, some time earlier, there was this big crowd outside and they said that Hitler and Mussolini were about to drive past. I had a camera magazine case, quite big, and as I couldn’t see properly I stood on the magazine. Along came the car with Hitler and Mussolini, passing no more than 20 feet away. I still have the most vivid impression of seeing the Führer and Mussolini, but just as I was enjoying the moment, I was dragged off by the police, because they thought I was standing on explosives and was attempting an assassination. Eventually they looked in the magazine and just saw film. I could have changed world history there: if only I had …

JBAt what point did you meet Freddie Young16for the first time?

JCWell, when I went to B&D17 as an assistant, the chief of the camera department was Freddie. His operator was Francis Carver (son of Lord Carver), the focus puller was John Wilcox, the second assistant was Kenneth Wilcox, the make-up girl there was Sonja Wilcox. Gwen Wilcox was the chief make-up girl and the editor was Derek Wilkinson, who was engaged to either Gwen or Sonja. So they were literally one happy family.

But Freddie ran the camera department beautifully: everything was in tremendously good shape, even the stools we had were wonderfully painted. Freddie ran it like clockwork.

JBThat practice was quite uncommon for the period?

JCI certainly don’t remember any other department at the time that ran with such a high profile. He was called ‘chief’ and his word was law. I worked on occasions for Freddie when they had more than one camera on something.

Also, and I know this was quite uncommon at the time, the cameraman would shoot a quick couple of feet of a difficult set up and then I would take the magazine off and take it into the darkroom to develop the strip in a thermos flask. I could then dry it quickly and make an enlargement: a photographic print. So within a quarter of an hour I would be bringing them a photograph of the scene. It was a real luxury and very innovative.

Freddie had all this wonderful equipment and Ted Moore, who later won an Oscar for A Man for all Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), was my focus puller. So he was in charge of maintaining the camera, keeping it well oiled and in pristine condition, and on this front he did a wonderful job. But the problem was, the viewfinder was an inverted prism so that you would see things upside down and reversed left to right. When you were trying to pan left to follow an actor it was terribly difficult not to pan right. We worked our arses off getting that right!

JBWas the fact that Freddie Young was turning the camera department into a real art form resented by the directors?

JCThe directors at B&D, apart from Korda,18 were on their own and rather isolated, but they were very well served by people like Freddie.

I was really working on the complete opposite end of the scale, though, because I had been working on ‘British quota pictures’,19 which was a really tough schedule and you couldn’t make any mistakes as the operator.

JBWas Freddie Young’s way of working and his department setup something that greatly influenced you?

JCI think so, yes, although there was this attitude at the time that we, Ted and I, were the Cinderellas, doing all of the rough stuff, with no time for mistakes or retakes. It was quite terrifying, but wonderful training. I became very fast.

JBAlexander Korda was already building his empire at that time …

JCHe was a family man again—like Wilcox, who had all his family working in the business—and Korda did too. He had his brother, who was a director, then another brother, Vincent Korda, who was an art director—quite brilliant, and incidentally he used to go to Paris and buy wonderful paintings for Alex, incredible bargains, he even got a Van Gogh at a knocked-down price! Later, when Alex had a sale, they made huge profits. So anyway, there were plenty of other relatives around.

JBAlexander Korda was a mix of shrewd businessman and great visionary artist. What are your memories of him?

JCThe great thing about Korda was that he managed to get his backers to invest millions although they lost everything. He built a complete empire with the money. He built Denham Studios20 and a funny story happened: I had finished Ghost Goes West [René Clair, 1935] and I took a holiday in France just as the construction of Denham was being finished off. I was under contract there: £15 a week, a lot of money in those days.

So I had just finished working with René Clair21 and I drove to St-Tropez to his house. He had invited another woman from England, who had just flown in, and I had taken a week or several days to drive there. Well, we had lunch and she said, ‘Isn’t it awful news about Denham?’ I said, ‘What?’ and she told us that it had burned to the ground. So at the earliest opportunity I went to the nearest village to a phone and called England and found out that a complete stage had been destroyed by fire, but not quite the disaster it could have been.

JBWe really don’t have anyone like the Kordas today, do we?

JCKorda was a great entrepreneur. No, today we don’t have enough Kordas or Sam Spiegels,22 we are terribly short of good producers and that is our tragedy.

My son and I were discussing this and one of the problems is that we don’t have any proper studios in England any more. In the early days, you worked for a studio, but now they are just what are called ‘four-wall studios’; it’s just an empty space that you hire for three weeks or two months. In the old days, you had the big studios that had a full time, permanent staff, and that included the actors. They would give an actor a script and say, ‘There you go, Mr Cooper. You start on Monday.’ No argument. It was a job of work for an actor and no matter how big or humble, they had to work for the company.

Now there is no company and the actors today have become so big and so terribly powerful. Now the studios go to the stars and beg them to read the scripts. The star has script approval, director approval, co-star approval and even cameraman approval. It has even happened that actors have demanded the final cut of a film.

JBKorda wouldn’t have had much truck with that!

JCNo, he wouldn’t believe the changed position today. I guess he saw the start of it before he died, but still …

JBYou worked with William Cameron Menzies23onThings to Come[1936]. He was a fearsome talent.

JCYes, he was a truly great art director. I was working at Denham with Korda and we also did a little work at Wharton Hall Studios, which were sometimes used as extra studio space.

JBThis was predominantly special effects work?

JCYes, I was working with a chap called Ned Mann,24 who was the head of the special effects department and my job really was still just an operator, but this was highly technical work.

JBWhat sort of technical work?

JCI remember one scene in The Man Who Could Work Miracles25 [Lothar Mendes, 1936] and it was a shot of a shoe that had to get larger and larger in the frame. So we had an expert from London who could carve beautifully and he made this shoe out of plaster or Plasticine or some such, and it was painted. It looked absolutely realistic and we would shoot one or two frames of that—everything was fixed, so you couldn’t move anything—then the sculptor would take off a thin layer. We were shooting in reverse, and we would take the next shot, and this went on all through the day and through the night. Two frames, re-carve, two frames. We went on until something like three in the morning before we finished. It was terribly difficult and onerous, but with wonderful results.

When we had to do shots where people had to suddenly appear as if by magic, we would have a big hall and I had a big 10 x 8 camera and when the actor was due to disappear Korda would shout, ‘cut!’ and I would make a quick sketch on the glass plate on the back of my camera. Then the actor would change costume and I would get him back in the same position according to my drawing. Those films were full of complicated tricks and I wasn’t truly happy there. But at least I was working.

JBAnd things were about to get even worse …

JCWell, outside of my area, there must have been at least five other operators working on films, and a man arrived from Hollywood called Hal Rosson,26 and he started a picture with René Clair and he was a demon who wanted perfection.

He wasn’t happy with his first operator and he fired him, then fired his next one too and the one after that. The manager, David Cunningham, called me into his office and told me that I might have to go and operate for him. I told him I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to be fired like the rest, and that was inevitable. I begged him and he said that it was up to me, but I might have to go sooner or later. Well, he fired the next operator too, so I was the last one left and had to go and work for him.

I was furious that I was going to be fired by this monster, but I went to the set and he was perfunctory with me and rather snappy. I called him ‘Hal’ instead of ‘Mr Rosson’, which was risky. And then he tried to show me these handles on the camera for operating it and tried to tell me it was the best way. I said: ‘Well, Hal, you may think so, but I feel differently and I’m the operator.’ I was so sure I was going to be fired that I hardly thought it mattered, but after that we got on perfectly well, partly because I tried these handles out and they really were very good. I worked with him over the course of two years following that, but he was a weird character.

JBDo you think directors often project this image purely for effect?

JCThere is certainly a lot of it in the film business. John Ford is a case in point and I have heard the most terrible things about him. If an actor told him they didn’t like a scene, John would say, ‘Don’t you?’ and simply tear the page out and leave the actor with nothing to do. He was impossible at times.

JBHenry Hathaway was another one.

JCWell, of course, Hathaway, at one time, was Ford’s assistant. You could make a film about Hathaway. If anyone had a tough time getting to be a director, it was Henry. He wanted it so badly and he was a prop man to start with—a real labour job. He did become an assistant director and was very tough; in fact, he fired a cameraman for being late. An assistant director firing someone! He was impossible, but very often right.

JBYou had a slightly easier time on your next film,Knight Without Armour[1937], which was directed by Jacques Feyder.27And you met Marlene Dietrich.

JCShe took an interest in me in quite a motherly way. I was just out of my teens, I suppose, and she was always very kind to me.

Knight Without Armour was with Harry Strandling28 on camera. Dietrich was so charming and so was Jacques Feyder, the director. Looking back on it, I was young and pretty naive, but I knew he was a good director. He had made a film called La Kermesse Héroïque [1935], a big classical French film. He was a very French director; he had a long overcoat that went almost all the way to the floor and it always had a little bottle of Cognac inside, which he would sip at.

I learnt a lot from him, he knew the angle and the composition he wanted. He would cut in close, perhaps across a shoulder or even the top of the head; what I later equated with Degas—a clipping technique. Degas had gotten it from the then-new vogue for stills photography that often cut in. So Feyder had the same idea of getting into a scene, something that Hitchcock later used, getting as close as you could because there was no point of getting lots of air around someone.

Harry Strandling was a very fine cameraman. A lot of so-called creative people put on a bit of an act and all that crap, but Harry Strandling was this genial American who really knew how to light quite simplistically.

Jack Cardiff as camera operator on Knight Without Armour (1937)

Marlene Dietrich takes a bath for Knight Without Armour (1937)

JBDid Dietrich ever discuss her relationship with Josef von Sternberg29with you?

JCShe spoke about him as if he were a god and she always referred to him as ‘Mr von Sternberg’. He really made her what she was. He was a great director and Dietrich obviously thought the world of him.

What was amusing was that Dietrich had worked so much with Josef von Sternberg, who was a great cameraman as well as a director, and she learned everything about lighting from watching him. She was probably one of the first stars to realize what all the great stars in Hollywood now know: that they must be well lit, as their future fortunes can depend on it!

Years later, Faye Dunaway carried a little mirror around with her because she had bags under her eyes and would say, ‘Jack, do you think the key light is a bit too high?’ And I would deliberately put it too high so that I could bring it down when she asked me to the point that I wanted it in the first place. That way, she was happy.

But Dietrich was the first to learn all of this. She knew that a light at forty-five degrees would make a little shadow under the nose and on her lips and with her physiognomy it looked splendid. So regardless of her being in a cellar or under a waterfall, she would always have that key light.

JBShe had the power to demand that?

JCOh yes. And she had a full-length mirror positioned by the side of the camera, which she would adjust her hair and clothes in. Very funny. She would say to Harry sometimes, ‘Harry, is that kicker light high enough?’ And Harry would always say to me, ‘You know, she is always right.’ And she was, she really knew her stuff.