Conversations with jack cardiff

‘Jack Cardiff deserves to be recognized not just as one of the all time great cinematographers but as a great artist in his own right. His films for Powell and Pressburger possess a startlingly unique visual quality that lives on in my mind above and beyond the story or characters. There is a little bit of magic there.’

JBWith your wartime adventures behind you, how did your next big break come about?

JCWell, the situation was that I was working for Technicolor, but still aching to become a director of photography, a fully-fledged cameraman. And I was doing all I could to achieve this.

I was doing work for the laboratories, doing tests and things, lighting shots and doing my stuff. But there is a big gap, of course, between lighting some tests for exposures, and lighting Ava Gardner and James Mason! But at least I was able to do all of these experiments myself.

I did shoot a commercial. They had a few in those days, but really very few. They liked it very much and it was good for me because I was lighting sets and actors and I had plenty of experience just from having done these bits and pieces.

JCCadburys, I think. But the important thing was that although there were a few cameramen in the country at that time, even people like Freddie Young, the doyen of all cameramen, hadn’t yet shot a colour feature.

JBDo you remember when you first became aware of the names Michael Powell¹ and Emeric Pressburger?²

JCI can’t recall exactly. There were always a number of productions going on at the studios, most in black and white. But in Powell’s case I had heard that he was a bit of a bright spark. He could be quite difficult, a bit of a live wire, that sort of thing. But I had never gotten near him, although I may have crept on set one or two times to watch him direct.

JBBut you did get some work on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943]?

JCYes, I was set to work second-unit on Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, with a cameraman who was French, Georges Périnal³; he photographed Sous les Toits de Paris [René Clair, 1930] and many other very big pictures. He was able to shoot the main feature as he had worked with Mickey [Powell] before, although I don’t know why he didn’t do again later.

Anyway, I was filling in odd jobs on second unit. When the main unit is flat out doing the important stuff and there is just a small shot left to do—say a close-up of something like an ashtray or a letter heading—the main unit wouldn’t be bothered to do it and they would leave it to the second unit, who would have a couple of shots to do every few days. It was pretty miserable work because there was nothing very creative. You might make some shadows on an envelope or whatever.

JBSo it was pretty small stuff, but your work on second unit came to the notice of Michael Powell himself?

JCThere was one set that was quite complicated, and it was very rare to have left this for a second unit to do. I was by myself and it was a wall with animal heads on it—it was supposed to represent the period in Colonel Blimp’s life when he went hunting all over the world to forget his lost love.

So that was the shot I was left to do: a wall with all these animal heads on. It was incredibly difficult to do, because it obviously needed several lights, but every time you put a light on it, it made shadows of the animal horns on the wall; three lamps on it made three sets of shadows! I had to light these heads, which were heavy, dark faces and required quite a lot of light. I had to put kicker lights all over the place.

JCYes, but it was a fascinating problem to work on. I had more or less got it ready and was thinking that it was pretty good, when I heard a voice behind me saying, ‘very interesting’. I look around and there was the great Michael Powell studying the shot very carefully. I remember he had his arms folded with one hand up to his mouth and he turned to me and he said, ‘Would you like to photograph my next film?’

Well, that was it! The great break in my career. If I had only known that this was the beginning of such a great, great period, I would have probably fainted.

JCOh yes. He wasn’t the sort of man to say anything facetiously. So I just said: ‘Oh yes, Mr Powell, very much indeed.’ He told me we started in three months and he bounded off the stage; he never walked anywhere, he always bounded. I thought it was wonderful news; but then again, between now and three months he might get a top cameraman. I was worried that I would be forgotten.

JBBut you obviously weren’t forgotten and he lived up to his word. When did you hear from him next?

JCA couple of months later, I was on second unit in Egypt for Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra [1945], with Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains. Funnily enough, Freddie Young was the second-unit director on that and I was the cameraman, which was very odd because I had been his tea boy many years before and he had always been the big cameraman in my eyes.

JCWhat it consisted of mainly was lines of soldiers marching over sand dunes, some of them on horseback. It was very funny because we were shooting just outside of Cairo and the extras were all Egyptian locals, who didn’t like the costumes and they didn’t like having to carry the shields about. So when they used to ride out of shot, they would throw their shields away in the desert. Every day, we had to send out people to try and find them again.

So I was in the middle of all this second-unit work, which I still thought was quite boring stuff. When I got back to my hotel in Cairo one night, I had a cable waiting for me from Mickey saying, ‘Where the hell are you? We start in three weeks.’

JCHe wasn’t the sort of director who would shout. He was crisp and decisive and he always knew what he wanted. He could be rather cruel to people who he thought were stupid; he would really tear them to pieces. If there was someone he didn’t like on the set, he would simply say, ‘You’re not very good are you? Who’s your agent?’ Crushing!

In Michael’s autobiography,⁴ he says he was wondering what cameraman to have for his new film and wasn’t quite happy about the cameraman he had been working with. He then spoke to Technicolor and asked if they had any suggestions and apparently they told him I was a bright young thing worth considering. Obviously for Michael it wouldn’t have been good enough to say, ‘OK, let him do the picture’, just on their word. It just set a train of reflection off in his mind so that later, when he saw me lighting the wall, something clicked and he decided to give me the chance.

JBIn his autobiography, Michael Powell says: ‘I never had the slightest doubt that I was born to be a film director.’ Did he carry an arrogance about him?

JCI don’t think so, no. He was very lucky to have formed the association with Pressburger, though, because they were two completely opposite types. Michael was the volatile, very openly enthusiastic one—an extrovert with a great sense of humour who spoke fluent French. He was keen, incisive and just occasionally sarcastic. Pressburger was highly intelligent, but quiet and thoughtful.

When Michael would say, ‘We’re going to do it like this and come from over here and go upside-down …’, Emeric would just calmly say, ‘Well, yes, okay Michael but don’t forget that in the next sequence we have to consider this or that’—and he was always right. So it was a wonderful combination of two opposing elements that were also creative and constructive individually.

I asked Michael, quite casually, once, ‘Are you making pictures so that the audience can know everything you intend or do you not worry about it?’ And he said, ‘I don’t worry about it. If they can’t understand what I’m trying to do, that’s their problem.’ That was so contrary to someone like Hitchcock, who was always worried that the public wouldn’t understand, so he had all these rules and regulations. In his supporting cast, everyone had to look completely different so there was never any confusion about who was who. Michael was the complete opposite, you see. He just made pictures the way he wanted to.

Jack Cardiff taking lunch with Michael Powell on location for A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

JBIsn’t that arrogance? Or was he just crediting the audience with a bit more intelligence than most directors gave them?

JCI think he was just asserting what he considered to be his rights as a filmmaker and he didn’t want to be bogged down with ‘will they understand it?’

JBDid Powell’s manner influence your own way of working?

JCI remember working with them [Powell and Pressburger] and doing some second-unit camera work; it was a difficult shot in London with lots of people and traffic. Very rarely for me, I was really pushing people to hurry up and get on with things and being decisive; really being very tough with my crew. I had the strange feeling that Michael was somehow watching me and listening to what I was doing very carefully and I knew he liked someone who was in a hurry. I was always in a hurry and in many ways that was something of a failing of mine. I would work instinctively and sometimes get it wrong, but that was the kind of cameraman that Michael wanted.

JBThe sheer scale of A Matter of Life and Death [1946] must have been daunting. Was there part of you that just wanted to run away?

JCI didn’t want to run away, but I was truly terrified for the first couple of weeks, particularly in the studios because I had never had such a gigantic set to light. I appreciated what [production designer] Alfred Junge⁵ was doing with the sets, but I didn’t want to get too close to him because he would tell me how to light it and I wanted to be free to do what I could.

JB A Matter of Life and Death contained both colour and black and white photography. Ironically, you had never worked as a black and white cinematographer before, only in colour, so was it your suggestion to shoot those sections in Technicolor and then print out the colour?

JCNo, not my suggestion, that idea came from the laboratories. We had to do a transition from colour to black and white. So we shot the pure black and white sequences with a black and white camera and the transition scenes with Technicolor. It was nearly perfect, but not quite. What we called the ‘Technicolor black and white’ had this sort of strange look about it—not pure black and white, but with rather an iridescent sheen on it like a beetle’s wing; just some bits of colour around the edges.

A few years ago when they were making a new print, there was a lot of trouble with it. There was often shrinkage on the negative with old Technicolor film; that was a big problem. There were a lot of problems making new prints from the old negatives because of that.

JBDid the idea of having to shoot black and white scare you a little?

JCThe thing is that light, in itself, is light. It doesn’t change from black and white to colour. If you look at a light, the only difference is that in colour a light might be warm or slightly yellow and in black and white it would just be bright. But it’s still light in terms of the direction, so lighting a film was exactly the same, regardless. It’s simply a question of getting the right balance and it can be very delicate. I just concentrated on getting the right level of lighting and it all worked out okay.

JBDid Michael know you hadn’t previously shot black and white?

JCNo, it was never discussed and we never talked about it.

JBWhat was Michael Powell’s working method like?

JCMichael had this way of working that I don’t think I had seen before, or since. On the stage, Michael had this big triangular desk, perhaps six or seven feet long, and he had a secretary, and a lamp and typewriter on the desk. He would agree on a setup for a scene and I would go and start lighting it, and he would go to his desk and start writing letters or whatever. Sometimes I would have to go and ask him a question and he would stop and answer it before going back to his work. In other words, he was divorcing himself from the setup and just getting on with other work until it was done. That was quite a vote of confidence in my work.

JBIs the reason why he largely kept the same crew from film to film to do with that trust and confidence?

JCYes, I think he liked that feeling very much. He was also very loyal to his friends and he knew who he could trust and who he couldn’t.

JBTechnicolor must have been quite used to your demands on the technology by this time …

JCTechnicolor were still very strict and insisted that you had to measure every light precisely. I didn’t do that, I always used to light it and look at it and do it mainly by vision. I realized quite early on that if you kept to the strict letter of their law, you quite often lost the effect you wanted.

There was one shot where there was light coming through a window and I had a big lamp and it looked great. But then one of these Technicolor technicians came up with his light meter and said, ‘Jack, that should have been 600 foot-candles and you’ve used 3000 foot-candles. You have to take it down.’ I did, and the whole effect had gone, so I spotted it up until it looked great again.

JBIt sounds as if it were a constant battle.

JCI was always fighting that element within Technicolor—the people with the meters. They called me into the office once and told me that my exposures were not level; which was probably true. They had a scale of 20 printing points so that if you were underexposed you might be printing at 3 and if you were overexposed by quite a bit you might be up at 19. That was the whole idea of their scale. It’s a bit like when you take your rolls of film to the chemist shop.

So they insisted that unless I used a photometer (light meter) they weren’t going to let me play any more. So I said I would and I did. I used it from then on because it is a fact that your physical eyesight can let you down from time to time. One or two cameramen, like Douglas Slocombe⁶—a quite brilliant cameraman—don’t have to use a photometer much, as they have trained their eyes to see any change in the level. But I started using a photometer just to get the key light, so that I could get that right, and then work from there.

The enormous Technicolor blimp—A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

These were the sorts of teething problems I had at first with them.

JBYou can almost understand why Technicolor were so touchy. For example, there is scene where time is frozen in the film, and you lit it with an odd, yellow glow.

JCOn that occasion, I said, ‘Michael, this whole sequence is unreal and magical and goes beyond any kind of realistic approach. How would it be if the sunlight in this table tennis sequence had a sort of lemon colour?’ I used to use a sort of amber filter on the arc lights to make the sun effect quite warm, but I just thought that this touch of lemon would make it more unreal. He agreed and I did it, but I don’t think the effect really came over so much.

Looking back on it now, and it is a little late in the day to be thinking about it, but Technicolor used to do the most incredible things. There was a famous and probably apocryphal story that the letterboxes in Ireland are green but Technicolor printed them as red [to match British ones]. That sort of thing did happen. On one picture, I had a shot with a woman near a window; the light coming in was very strong, but with very little light on her face, which was all quite fitting for the tragic tone of the scene. It was a lovely shot, but when I saw the rushes the next day her face was all ‘Technicolor bright’ and everything else was overexposed to hell.

Later, on Scott of the Antarctic [Charles Frend, 1948], I checked a shot [a tent interior] myself by going inside this tent, and because the light inside was coming through green canvas, there was a green light falling inside. So when we did the actual scenes, I used a soft green filter on the faces. The next day, I had a call from Technicolor saying they had a problem and it would be a few days before we got the rushes. After a few days, we got them and the faces had been printed back to normal white faces; that was what they had spent the time on. A typical attitude.

It is possible that they had tried to correct out the lemon light on A Matter of Life and Death because it never did stand out quite as I had intended.

JBYou have a tremendous admiration for David Niven. How was he to work with on the film?

JCHe was terribly good in A Matter of Life and Death. He was such a terrific representative of the typical Englishman, wasn’t he? He was great fun and had a tremendous sense of humour and was also a great raconteur. He had so many wonderful stories.

He really had an extremely lucky life. To start off with, he wasn’t trained as an actor, but somehow he just managed to get there. He told me once that in Hollywood, when he had his first tiny speaking part, it was in a ballroom scene with hundreds of people and he was absolutely terrified. He did the first take and he knew that he was so nervous he could hardly speak, but at the end of it the director called ‘cut’ and said they were going to do it again. Two or three of the extras came up to him and said ‘you were great, absolutely marvellous!’, and he said ‘Really? Do you think so? Oh!’—and in the next take he was much better. The director had told the extras to praise him to get the performance out of him!

JBYou also struck up a long-running friendship with Marius Goring⁷ on the shoot.

JCYes. He was such an intelligent man and we got on straight away. Later, when I directed Girl on a Motorcycle [1968], I cast him as the bookshop keeper. He was great fun and there is the famous scene at the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death when Marius, as Conductor 71, comes down to earth and walks out among the flowers and says: ‘One is starved for Technicolor up there!’ I don’t know whose idea that line was, probably Michael’s, but it always gets a big laugh whenever I see it screened. I have had to sit through it dozens of times at festivals and the like.

JBDo you get bored of watching it?

JCOh yes! If I have to do a talk, either before or after the film is screened, when I sit down I always get a seat near the exit so that I can duck out during the film.

JBI understand that Marius Goring had tried to persuade Powell to cast him in the David Niven role; did you know about that, and did it cause any friction between him and David?

JCReally? That’s news to me. It could be true, because Michael had his favourites like Kathleen Byron, who he used on two or three pictures. He did like to stick to the actors he knew.

JB A Matter of Life and Death was intended as a propaganda film⁸ in a sense, wasn’t it?

JCI had read that Churchill had been horrified at Colonel Blimp because it depicted the British army heads as idiots, and he tried to get it banned.⁹

JBSo was this film a conscious effort to redress the balance?

JCI really don’t know. I think Blimp was a very amusing film and a marvellous story and that was all.

JBMichael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were always credited together as ‘Powell & Pressburger’, as if they didn’t have individual identities. Do you think that they ever resented that?

JCI guess that is true, but I think that a lot of the idea behind coupling the names was directed towards getting contract agreements and getting a film off the ground. It was a more formidable thing than just saying, ‘I’m Michael Powell’ or ‘I’m Emeric Pressburger’. It was a team approach and a very wise thing.

I know Mickey didn’t resent that joint credit, because as soon as we started shooting a film there was only one man and that was Michael Powell. He was ‘The Captain’.

It was sort of a gimmick really, something different. It might have just been an agreement that worked between them. It was a stunning beginning to a film to see that arrow go plonk into the centre of that target.¹⁰

JBI understand that Michael Powell disliked the editing process but Pressburger enjoyed it.

JCI wasn’t aware of that. But if that’s true, then I was a similar character to him with regards to editing. I couldn’t bear the waiting about when you are editing; it is such a bloody bore. You go to the cutting room and look at this and that, and you are waiting all the time and sitting in a chair and being bored. It is a slow process with no incisiveness about it.

When I directed Sons and Lovers [1960], my plan was to roughly edit the picture as we went along. I had a very good editor and I used to get him on the set and explain the shots to him. Otherwise editors, who are a strange breed, want to contribute creatively, and that can be different from the director’s ideas. It happens so many times that a director is busy and the editor is cutting away and when the director finally sees a roughcut he says: ‘No, I didn’t want it like that at all.’ So I used to get the editor on set as often as possible so that we could discuss things together and we both knew in which direction we were going.

On location at Saunton Sands, Devon for A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Jack Cardiff, centre, with Michael Powell crouching to the right

The other thing with editors is that towards the end of the work, the last two or three weeks, something strange happens and they are a little bit laid back. What has happened is that they are having a conflict of loyalties, because the producer, who often wants to be a director, is asking for something against the director’s wishes. It has happened that directors have lost control. Of course, people like David Lean had it in their contract that nobody else could touch a frame of the film, and he always had final cut.

JBThinking about it, it would seem ironic if Michael Powell didn’t like editing because he eventually married an editor.

JCYes, Thelma Schoonmaker,¹¹ who is considered the best in the world. I think obviously Michael appreciated the usefulness and wisdom of good editing, but he was by nature impatient and he didn’t want to spend a long time doing things. It is quite possible that Emeric spent time in the editing.

JBAs you mentioned, the production designer on A Matter of Life and Death was the great Alfred Junge. Tell me about him.

JCWhen we started to prepare the picture, I immediately became aware of the presence of Alfred Junge, who was a brilliant art director and a terrific authority. He would make the most wonderful sketches, but that skill seems to have faded away now; today art directors don’t seem to make too many sketches. But in those days all of the scenes were sketched out in the most wonderful drawings or paintings.

JBHe did have something of a fearsome reputation as an autocrat. How did you handle that?

JCThe one thing that stood out right from the word go, was that he was attempting to dictate to me where the lights should be on his sets. That’s okay up to a point, but when it comes to lighting whole sequences, you have to light actors and so on; it’s a bit more than just lighting a set.

So we didn’t have any antagonism towards each other, but once or twice he would say, ‘You must give me light over here!’ And I would have to explain why I couldn’t, for whatever reason. I managed to get my own way, but it kept me on my toes.

JBJunge’s sets for the film were quite monumental and obviously complex for you to work with.

JCReally it was quite a frightening experience because his sets for A Matter of Life and Death were unique, in a sense. We had the entire stage at Denham, which was huge, with this huge white rock in the middle that needed to be lit. We also had this aurora borealis effect to light behind it. Looking back on it, I think I could have done much better. At the time, Alfred had the idea of these shivers of light. Strangely no one has ever said that they didn’t like it, but in my heart I have always felt I could have done something more vibrant.

JBThere is also the stunning stairway sequence.¹² In fact, Stairway to Heaven became the American title, didn’t it?

JCYes, because the Americans didn’t want to have the word ‘Death’ in the title. Never mind that it also had the word ‘Life’!

The stairway wasn’t easy to light. It had cost something like £160, 000 to build, a huge amount of money. It also had a very small engine in it to power it and it went right to the roof of the stage, which must have been a height of 60 feet or more. It worked beautifully and was incredibly silent. It started beautifully and always stopped in just the right place—quite extraordinary.

There was a vast backing behind it that had to be lit, and these huge statues either side of it that also had to be lit. There were several shots that had to be done later with special effects, long shots mainly. But otherwise it was all done on a real set.

JBIt wasn’t all studio work, though, was it?

JCNo, we started the picture on location in the southwest of England, in [Saunton Sands] Devon. We had to show the scene with David Niven when he believes that he’s in heaven. The first thing was a long shot, taken from quite high up, that is supposed to be David seeing this beach and thinking it is heaven. The morning we shot it, Michael came to me and said, ‘My God, the script says “Fade in”. That’s a corny thing. I wish we could do something different.’ So I had this sudden idea and told Michael to look through the camera while I went around to the front of the camera. I breathed on the lens, which fogged it completely, and then after 3 seconds it became clear. Michael said, ‘I love it! Let’s do it!’ So right from the beginning, I knew I was able to suggest things.

Almost always he would say, ‘Do it! I love it!’ That’s why I admired him so; he was very brave and incisive and welcomed ideas.

Going right to the other end of the scale, when I worked on War and Peace [1956] years later, King Vidor, the director, was an awfully nice man but he would have these conferences every morning before we started shooting that would last an hour or more, to discuss every shot. There was a case when I know Michael would have said, ‘Do it! I love it!’, but not Vidor. The scene was with Audrey Hepburn in a carriage and she is told that the man she loves is in this column of prisoners that is approaching and she asks to see him. She is sitting in the back of the coach and she leans forward into the light and when she is told that she can’t see him she slowly sinks back, crushed. I had a light fixed on the front and suggested to Vidor that she came forward into the light and when she sinks back she goes back into the shadows, so that if there is a slight tear it will just glisten. Well, Vidor said simply, ‘I want to see her face, Jack.’

It was fascinating to work with someone like Michael who was so ready to accept ideas.

‘Ethel’, the enormous mechanical stairway built by the London Passenger Transport Board for A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

JBYou’ve described Michael Powell to me as ‘a cameraman’s dream’. Is that for the reason you’ve just outlined?

JCWell, he was a dream in the sense that he encouraged the kind of brilliant work that a cameraman can be capable of. Most cameramen would welcome the chance to be that creative, but most directors are too cowardly. Some directors today are more like Mickey.

JBDo you think the secret of the success of the Archer’s films was that they encouraged creativity from those around them?

JCYes, absolutely true. They were a great combination, with Emeric always in the background ready to put in a wise caveat.

JBWe’ve spoken often of Michael Powell, but very little of Emeric Pressburger. Did you simply have less contact with him?

JCI saw him socially once or twice. He had a wonderful flat in Eaton Square in London. Today you are probably talking about many millions of pounds for a flat in Eaton Square, but during the war when those flats could have been blown to smithereens by the Nazis, you could have bought one for a couple of thousand. Well, his flat was very nice indeed and I used to go and see his family.

He did used to come on the set a couple of times a week, sometimes more often, but he usually just sat in the chair and watched, and then later had a conversation with Michael. Nobody knew what they were about, but maybe Emeric was just reminding Michael what needed to be done.

JBTo nicely round off the Matter of Life and Death experience, it was chosen for the very first Royal Command Film Performance. That must have been a great honour.

JCIn those days, a cameraman wasn’t considered important enough to be presented to the King or Queen. Actors, directors, yes: but not cameramen. I felt I would have liked to be presented, but that’s just kid’s stuff. Later, David Lean, who had real power—of course, so did Michael Powell, but he didn’t realize he could have used it—insisted that his cameraman, Freddy Young, was presented. So I did feel a little left out. I did go there that night and it was a very impressive evening.

David Niven and Kim Hunter on location at Saunton Sands, Devon for A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

JBAs A Matter of Life and Death was finishing, was it apparent that you would work with Powell and Pressburger on whatever they planned to produce next?

JCYes, I think it was. We got on so well, so I don’t think there was any doubt. Maybe there was a point on A Matter of Life and Death when I thought, ‘I wonder if Michael is going to ask me?’ But I don’t think there was any question really, it was almost automatic.

Towards the end of A Matter of Life and Death, the next film was already being vaguely talked about. Perhaps just the idea that it was going to be in India …

JBAnd that film, of course, was Black Narcissus [1947].

JCYes, but I’m not certain what interval there would have been between A Matter of Life and Death and this, because obviously there would have been editing and there must have been some time off. The big thing was when we started preparing the picture: the whole unit, the art director, the camera department, my crew, all assumed we were going to India. I had already been several times, so I wasn’t so thrilled at the prospect and didn’t particularly want to go.

But then we had this production meeting very early on and Michael told us we were going to make the whole film in the studio! That was a big shock. One immediately started thinking about the story and how it all took place in India, high in the Himalayas. The idea of doing it in the studio sounded awful.

JBIt was presumably for financial reasons?

JCYes, but I think Mickey, on the whole, was an extremely lucky person. In some way, things always seemed to work out alright for him. He wasn’t a pushover, but I never knew him to be wretched and dejected and down about things; he was always bright and saying, ‘Come on, let’s do it!’

JBThe physical environment—the mountains and the wilderness and the wind—is very much a character in the film.

JCYes, absolutely. The whole story was about the fact that the place was so beautiful and the atmosphere so thick that the nuns failed in their enterprise. That was the whole point of the story. I think that the fact that this beauty was a key actor in the film is what made it such a joy for a cameraman to work on.

JBIs that why Alfred Junge also jumped at the chance to be involved?

JCAbsolutely. I forget, but obviously there wouldn’t have been any sort of objection to the decision. Michael may have already had a talk with Alfred Junge before he and Emeric reached their decision not to film on location. I’m sure he would have done, just to ask him if he thought it were possible to do in the studios. Alfred would have said, ‘Yes, I think we can.’

JBBut the decision to film Black Narcissus at Pinewood Studios really passed much of the look over to you and the design team. Wasn’t that a heavy responsibility?

JCAt first, we were sort of shattered because we thought that out in India we could get so much more. But when you analyzed it, it would have been incredibly expensive to take a whole unit not only to India—which is expensive anyway because of the fares and hotels and everything—but then this was supposed to be high in the Himalayas. God knows what sort of primitive existence we would have had to live there, or where we would stay. So it really was out of the question that we could possibly do it in situ.

JBYou know that when Bernardo Bertolucci¹³ was shooting Little Buddha [1993] in the Himalayas, he said that the real thing didn’t quite measure up to the image you had created …

JCReally? Did he say that? That’s interesting.

JBSo how did you go about recreating the Himalayas in a studio?

JCThe first thing I thought of was backings: we would have to have those, and that was the one thing that worried me very much. At first, Junge and I were worried about painted backings; they can be brilliantly done, by very good artists, but they never look real. They are alright out of focus in the background for one or two shots, but not through the whole picture. It would have been phoney as hell.

It was most probably my idea that we have photographic backgrounds, but then again this was a Technicolor picture and the point was that coloured photographic backings were going to cost more than the whole of the rest of the picture. In those days, it was a tremendous expense to have a colour enlargement of that size, they went back for something like 100 feet. So we decided to make black and white backings and colour them.

JBColour the backings by hand?

JCYes. We hadn’t started the picture at this point and we were just doing tests. I think we had just one part of the set built, where you could look through a window at the backings. Junge started to paint the black and white backings and it was awful, absolutely awful! He didn’t paint it himself, you understand, he had it done by someone.

So I made the suggestion that it might be better to just use a little light chalk. Pastel chalk. Which Junge agreed to. I thought that if it were done with a certain amount of delicacy, it would work. And it did. We put a lot of blue in the sky, obviously, and a little blue and ochre in the mountains and it all worked beautifully.

So that was our first big problem over.

JBHow did you then light these?

JCWell, in most cases just with a very flat light, because the actual modelling was in the picture itself. But sometimes I would emphasize something like a snow-capped mountain with just a little extra light on it or something like that. Not a great deal of work.

The other problem was that we had this gentle breeze blowing throughout the picture, so we had the agony of choosing a wind machine—and they were very primitive in those days. We had these sort of electric propellers, which made one hell of a row and meant that you couldn’t use any sound. Finally we used a sort of long sleevelike tube that ran straight out of the studio’s air control vents. That was silent.

JBBut you did have some locations. Just not quite as exotic as the Himalayas …

JCOn the road to Brighton, roughly 25 or 30 miles outside of the town, some chap in Victorian times had bought a lot of land; a huge estate. This man was a bit of a nutter because he had brought back hundreds of thousands of foreign trees and plants and things, which he replanted on this estate. So it was just a huge estate full of the most exotic looking plants.¹⁴

I don’t know how we found out about it, but the estate was there and we used the location for one or two days. One scene was the nuns’ departure at the end, filmed at the lake, and another was to show the young prince trotting along on his horse. So those were the only things we did outside.

JBEverything else was inside?

JCIn a way, but the actual palace was built outside in the grounds of the studios, outside the stage on the lot. So right there, near the door of the studios, was built this palace and, of course, if you looked in most directions all you would see behind it was chimneys or whatever from other stages. So what we did then was use the incredible skills of ‘Poppa’ Day.¹⁵‘Poppa’ Day [Walter Percy Day] had been a painter, but he was now quite passé because he painted very realistically; beautiful stuff. He was almost a Victorian-era painter. But somehow he got started making paintings for glass shots, and they were exquisite. So we could shoot this palace on the lot and he would mask out the chimneys or whatever with his paintings.

JBSo the glass was simply placed between the camera and the set?

JCNo, that’s a different system. What we did was we would matte out the ‘NG’ parts of the frame with black card very exactly and then rephotograph the painted glass with mountains and clouds as a second exposure of the film. It worked wonderfully.

It was a great bit of luck having him. It’s a very romantic story that a man like him, who was virtually finished in his profession as a painter, suddenly finds himself in a whole new profession where he can become very successful.

It was a combination of elements and people that made it all look so good.

The rain machine in action on the set of Black Narcissus (1947). Michael Powell crouching

JBWas Alfred Junge still being as irascible as ever?

JCI forget who employed him, but the guy in charge of costumes was Hein Heckroth,¹⁶ who on the next picture [The Red Shoes] became art director, and not Junge. He too was a German and the two of them seemed to work together as a good team. I remember distinctly that Junge had these huge rooms for his art department and he used to lord it up and down them. I remember from a distance hearing him have a huge row with Hein Heckroth and they were shouting at each other. I heard Junge simply saying, ‘Hein! Remember you are a German!’ and Hein just said, ‘Ja, ja.’—and that was the end of the argument. I have no idea what it was all about: perhaps simply that Junge meant ‘we don’t argue like this in front of others because we are German together’!

JBTo me, Black Narcissus is the film that most obviously demonstrates your love of painters, particularly Vermeer.

JCYes, many people say that, and it’s partly true, I suppose. There are two artists I think of: one is Vermeer and the other is Caravaggio. They both lit with very simple light. Many painters did, but with Vermeer and Caravaggio you were very conscious of it; they really used the shadows. Caravaggio would just have one sweeping light over everything so that you were aware of the single light. A lot of other painters cheat like mad and have faces clear when they should be in shadow. In other words, they paint them up.

In Rembrandt’s case, he got into a lot of trouble because when he painted his very famous large painting, The Night Watch, he was at his most creative. These people had paid a lot of money to be painted in the picture and some of them found that they were out of focus in the back or in deep shadow. They were furious because they would have liked every face perfectly sharp and visible and lit.

JBDid you discuss the idea with Michael Powell or Alfred Junge?

JCNo, funnily enough. One would have thought one would have done that, but no. Really and truly, I didn’t have a great creative friendship with Junge. We were friends socially and we lived almost opposite each other in Kensington and I would go and call for him in the morning sometimes and have a coffee at the breakfast table. He really ruled the house and his poor wife used to have to get up and get breakfast for him and the family. He was very dictatorial.

I had more going creatively with Heckroth, so that really worked out well later on The Red Shoes [1948], when he took over. But I think that Junge was apt to be dictatorial and would try and make me do this and that; he wouldn’t take ideas too easily.

JBYou employed a lot of candle effects on Black Narcissus. Tell me about those.

JCTrying to perfect the candle effect was like a hobby for me. I did get some marvellous results.

I always loved candlelight effects because they were such a challenge. If you have a candle burning in the middle of a room and that is the only light, you have to exaggerate it. Today you could almost just use a real candle for the light, but with early Technicolor you couldn’t dream of doing it, because you needed a hundred times that light. So I would have a 2k lamp up above the candle, hanging down out of shot and it would have a snoot on it, which makes a very small soft light that would just hit the top of the candle. That way, it lights the top of the candle and makes the shadow of the candle on the table. I would get one of the electricians up on the spot rail above to stand with a long piece of wood and nudge the rope so that it would move a bit and you would get the flickering movement of shadows. I also had orange filters on the light and it was on a dimmer so that I could take the brightness up and down.

If you have a shot with just two people, say just you and me, for example, then it’s a piece of cake, because if we shoot one way, the light is obviously one way from the candle, so you just use one lamp onto you and it looks like the candle is lighting you. Just one light, that is all.

JBBut that was never the case on Black Narcissus, and there was also a lot of movement.

JCYes, and when you’ve got actors walking about, then you really have to work it out carefully. It is possible with incandescent lights that you could fade things in and out on dimmers so, as you walked about, one light would fade down and another fade up. I loved doing that work. But the problem on Black Narcissus was that we only had arc lights then, and you can’t fade those up and down, except by putting dimmer shutters on the front—which we didn’t have. The nature of an arc light is very hard and nothing like candle light, so I had to put all sorts of diffusion on them to bring it down. I got away with it, just! But I knew I could have done much better.

With a candle, the flame lights the top part of the candle itself, going down through the wax an inch or so, making it translucent. So the top would have this sort of ochre glow. What I would do is spray ochre paint on the candle, so even when you didn’t have a light on it, it would look like the candle was alight. It was quite uncanny. All these things combined to make marvellous candle effects.

JBYou also diffuse the Technicolor to such an extent in Black Narcissus it is rendered almost monochrome. How did Technicolor react to that?

JCI was, as I said before, rather the bad boy of Technicolor. At one stage, I’m sure they hated my guts, because I was always doing something with the light that they didn’t think was normal. But I had gone through all that and I think they had come around to appreciating my work a bit when we started A Matter of Life and Death. By the time we started Black Narcissus, they were far more on my side.

JBDid shooting in a studio throw up other problems beyond sets and lighting?

JCThe only thing that was terrible, when I come to think of it, was the all-but-last scene in the picture. It was outside at the palace, which was so huge that often we could work without shooting off the edges of the set.

We had to shoot the scene where Deborah Kerr comes out at dawn, something like 6 in the morning, to ring the bell. So it was to be outside and Michael Powell said that he would really like to shoot it at dawn to get the right light and atmosphere and everything. Now at that time there was a works committee at Pinewood with a big, bolshy, socialist attitude. They insisted that we would have to finish at 5.20 pm on the dot, and if we were in the middle of a scene, the assistant director might call up to the electricians on the spot rail and some of them would be terribly bolshy if it were getting towards the end of the official working day.

Scene from the Black Narcissus (The Kobal Collection/ The Archers)

JBWas that situation peculiar to Pinewood?

JCNo. One time at Denham, I was moving a lamp around to test things out and I was called up to the top office to see the head of the union and he said, ‘Jack Cardiff, you don’t touch lights, that’s an electrician’s job! You tell them where you want it and they’ll move it.’ That’s how bolshy they were.

JBSo the scene with Deborah Kerr …

JCIt was virtually the last sequence and Michael wanted to shoot it at dawn and the works committee said that we couldn’t do that because the weather in England is so unpredictable and if it rains we would have wasted a whole day at our expense. Michael told them that he was usually very lucky with weather and that he really wanted to do it outside at dawn. They said, ‘Right, Mr Powell, but don’t forget that we told you, we warned you!’ A terrible situation.

As it happened, we all got to the set for 4 or 5 am and the weather was perfect. We got the shots we needed in the dawn light. I suppose I was a bit slaphappy with ideas and I said to Michael, ‘I thought as it was dawn I could use a slight fog filter on the camera.’ He agreed, but in those days Technicolor, although they didn’t forbid it, hated any kind of diffusion on the camera, because the light was all supposed to be as sharp as anything. But I used a number two fog filter, which today a lot of cameramen use all through a picture; it’s very soft and just takes the edge off hard light.

The next day we had a note from Technicolor saying that everything we had shot that day was ‘NG’, it was all out of focus and had to be retaken. I could just imagine the works committee saying, ‘We told you so.’ I really felt sick, realizing that this was Deborah Kerr’s last day and if we had to re-shoot, she was in for an enormous amount of overtime. So this was disastrous.

Technicolor brought the print over to the studios to show us that it was unusable and Michael and I sat in the screening room. As it came on the screen, I could see it was fine and Michael said, ‘That’s great, just what I wanted, Jack.’ He turned to the Technicolor people and he said, ‘Why the fuck don’t you guys learn something about art?’ He gave them such a bollocking. They argued and said that in the drive-ins in America it would look out of focus and he just said that he didn’t give a shit about that and this was what he wanted.

JB Black Narcissus had an amazing cast. For a start, Jean Simmons, who was very young at the time, around 17 or 18 years old?

JCYes, I had some slight misgivings because I was never happy with putting dark make-up on, but it seemed to work with her—just! She was very beautiful and had a real quality about her.

JBSabu¹⁷ was considered by many to be simply ‘exotic’, but I think Michael Powell really saw something more in him than that.

JCHe had just the right voice somehow. I was just the cameraman, of course, so not really present at the big meetings, but I think Michael and Emeric would have talked a great deal about the cast.

I thought that David Farrar was perfectly cast because he had that combination of cynicism and masculinity and a certain way of looking at Deborah Kerr. He was awfully good. He did several pictures afterwards, but he didn’t really become a very big success.

JBAnd Deborah Kerr herself?

JCShe had a lovely voice and carried herself with a lovely dignity. She was simply wonderful to work with.

JBI have read that Emeric Pressburger wasn’t keen on Kathleen Byron for the role of Sister Ruth. Do you know anything about that?

JCI didn’t know that, but the facts are that Michael had her on A Matter of Life and Death and I think they were obviously good friends. It might have been that the difference of opinion came because Michael was being loyal to her rather than casting her for being a great actress. Perhaps that was behind it. Nothing came out on set and it would definitely have been behind closed doors if it happened.

JBIn Pressburger’s defence, it has also been said that she had difficulty in accepting that her character was supposed to go insane. Do you remember any problems over that?

JCShe had to be like that [insane]—it was central—but I don’t know. When she went to see David Farrar’s character, Dean, and he tells her to get lost and shouts at her, Michael had the idea of using a quick flash of red screen. I thought at the time it worked very well and showed a terrific intensity and a great flash of drama.

JBIt fits with the colour of the lipstick …

JCA lot of people have talked about the fact that when she puts her lipstick on, it is very dramatic. I had had enough experience with Technicolor by then to know that some things were always exaggerated. I warned Mickey that the tests that we shot made it look like they already had lipstick on, because Technicolor exaggerated their naturally red lips. Also because they had the white robes and pale faces, the lips really showed up. Michael agreed at once that we should use a little bit of flesh-coloured lipstick just to take it back down.

JBI believe the composer, Brian Easdale,¹⁸ wrote a section of continuous score leading up to Sister Ruth’s death, and the sequences were then filmed to the music. Is that right?

JCI don’t think we ever had playback on the set. That end sequence was bitty to shoot, not like the sequence in The Red Shoes where you had a flow. This was a lot of little shots, so I find it hard to believe that we did it like that. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have had a guide track.

JBYou were telling me that you had some problems grading the film.

JCTechnicolor usually looked after the print and grade, but on this occasion when we finished the film and it was cut, it was agreed that we should grade the print reel-by-reel by running it in a real theatre, the Odeon Leicester Square—which we could only do when the regular day’s programme was finished. So about six of us, the Technicolor people and Michael and myself, would gather at around midnight and we would run these reels and we would make notes: ‘That should be warmer and that’s too cold and that should be more red.’ It took about a week or ten days and was very tiring and we got to the last reel and knew we were all agreed. But as we were getting up to go, I noticed that there were workmen putting up ladders against the screen and I was told that they were about to clean and repaint the screen because it was too dirty. So all the work we had done was rubbish because it would have made it all two or three points lighter! It was a complete negation of everything we had done.

We did a lot of adjustments and it finally turned out to be a very good print of the film.

JBDo you remember when you first heard about your Academy Award nomination [for Best Cinematography: Colour]?

JCIt would be in my diary, but I can’t really remember it all. A Matter of Life and Death had the Best Picture Oscar, which was wonderful because it was my first picture. I should have been overjoyed at my nomination for Black Narcissus and I might have just thought, ‘Isn’t that fun!’ But I didn’t really feel like I might win it.

JBAnd, possibly a redundant question, but how did it feel to win?

JCI didn’t go out to the ceremony, of course. I had no thought of going because, for one thing, I was already working on The Red Shoes by that point, and for another thing I couldn’t possibly afford to go. You have to pay for the whole thing yourself, the flights and the hotels, everything … even in those days it would have cost a pretty penny, and I was living quite austerely. I think my salary was something like £40 per week, which was not much.

JBThe Oscar didn’t just turn up in the post one day, though, did it?

JCIt was sent to Mr Rank, and they had a ceremony somewhere in town. Of course, Junge had one too for the art direction.

I had my first taste around that time of critics, as I was very enthusiastic about going to see the press shows. They would start at 10.30 in the morning and there would be very few people there and I would notice that some of them would wander in about a quarter of an hour or half an hour after the film had started. They would just drift in. Some of them would be coughing and look like they had had a night out and got pissed, and they would make a few notes and leave! I thought, ‘My God! This is the press?’ How could they possibly judge a film like that? It probably still goes on.

JBAnd so directly to your third consecutive film with Powell and Pressburger—The Red Shoes.

JCMichael asked me on the set of Black Narcissus what did I think of ballet, and I said ‘Not much’. I thought it was a lot of sissies prancing about. So he asked me if I had ever seen a ballet, and I said ‘No’. Touché! He told me that the next film would be all about ballet and that I had better get acquainted with it. He organized for me to have a seat at the ballet several times a week, almost every night in fact. I thought, ‘Oh God! No!’ But I went and I fell in love with it.

It was magical because Covent Garden was a new world to me and it was such a beautiful theatre. It had such an atmosphere and as the curtain went up, you could smell the greasepaint and the other smells of theatre. The audience was always so enthusiastic there and there was spontaneous applause. I saw [Margot] Fonteyn dance and Moira Shearer. It was a completely new world.

I also had to go to classes and watch them practising.

Poster for The Red Shoes (1948). (The Kobal Collection)

JBYou went to watch them rehearse at Covent Garden?

JCNo, at a place called Madame Volkova’s. She was a strange woman, but she knew all the top people. I remember one day someone came in late, halfway through the class—it was Fonteyn, and instead of going to the front, as was her right as this great ballerina, she just went to the back to the barre with girls that were quite unknown. That was wonderful, there was no ‘side’ to her at all. But there was a complete spirit of sharing among them all—a wonderful spirit.

It was like religion to these girls. At that time, they only got a couple of quid a week, and most of that went on shoes; I didn’t realize that at first until I got into it. They used to wear out so many pairs of shoes a week, which had to be repaired. In other words, they worked for practically nothing.

JBDo you think that part of the reason you fell in love with ballet was because it was reminiscent of your childhood?

JCWell, very slightly, yes. This was a much bigger theatre than I had ever known, of course, but there was this indefinable smell that was a mixture of size used in the paintings and those things. It was wonderful.

I do remember watching films of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova as a kid.

JBBut now you had to completely immerse yourself in the ballet world?

JCYes, but the great thing was that I remember watching a ballet called Symphonic Variations and Moira Shearer would dance in that. There were three or four people in it¹⁹ and Moira was just perfect. She was absolutely perfect and looked so beautiful, but when you saw Fonteyn on the same stage, you could see that she had something that Moira didn’t have. She had this extraordinary personality that radiated from her and it went far beyond technical ability.

I met her a number of times. Once, when I was in Japan, she was performing and I went backstage and said hello. She was perfectly charming. She truly had a greatness about her.

JBI believe that a ballet project had been around for a number of years in various people’s hands. Do you know why the Archers chose to make it when they did?

JCWhat happened was that Pressburger had a contract with Korda to work for him as a writer and Korda had this thing going with Merle Oberon²⁰ and he wanted to put her in a big picture. Pressburger had been working on a script about ballet and Korda asked him to make it a part for Merle. So he worked on it for Merle!

JBBut Merle Oberon wasn’t a dancer, was she?

JCShe had never danced in her life! And it was the most ridiculous thing. She couldn’t possibly dance in it.

JBHad Korda assumed that she could just be replaced in long shot with a real ballerina?

JCYes, just use a double and do close-ups of Merle. Ridiculous! So Pressburger had this script and later, when he left Korda, he took it with him. Mickey and Emeric would have been discussing what properties they owned and up came the idea again of The Red Shoes. That was the beginning of it.

JBGiven that Pressburger was Hungarian and was trained in Germany, it was amazing that he managed to write such quintessentially English pictures.

JCYes. Mind you, although they officially shared their credits, everyone knew that Emeric did the basic writing. I think that Michael Powell’s influence was probably the ‘English influence’ and he could simply put the English twist into the dialogue or whatever. Emeric was a good writer, and there is something magical about a good writer. It isn’t so much what the dialogue says, but there is something else that they put in that is pure magic. It can be a single phrase that makes a film.

JBMichael Powell entered this film without Alfred Junge. What happened?

JCAlfred was his usual overbearing self in how he visualized the pictorial side of ballet and Michael didn’t want that, so I think they fell apart there. But Hein, who had worked on Black Narcissus, had a lot of experience of ballet in Germany, working on several theatrical productions in art direction. He was very well up on ballet, so it was the most natural thing in the world that he should do The Red Shoes.

JBDid Alfred Junge take that as a terrible slight?

JCAbsolutely, but something went wrong and they parted company. Michael told me that at one stage Alfred was going to have a new contract and he wanted the right in his contract to instruct the cameraman exactly how to light his sets. Michael made a joke of it, but that was it. Such a shame because he was such a great art director, but he was so sure he was entitled to dominate everything.

Oddly enough, as I mentioned, Junge lived almost opposite me in Palace Gardens Terrace in Kensington and I saw quite a lot of him; but Hein also lived reasonably near and we were great friends. He took an interest in me and my painting, and he told me all about the hazards of being a painter and what to look for. He befriended me in that way.

Hein was the opposite of Junge; he was easy to get on with and ready to help and didn’t have any particular ‘side’ to him.

JBWas this house you were living in the one that you had an entire studio come and decorate?

JCYes, I had rented this house in Palace Gardens Terrace just after the war and the whole street was virtually empty, because it had been knocked about a bit by the Germans with firebombs. My then wife [Julie] and I had been living in Slough—a terrible place— and she had always wanted to live in London. So she looked for somewhere and found number 14, which had hardly been touched by the fires. Also, the rent was only £7 a week for this vast house that had about 20 rooms.

We had a lot of ideas about getting it into shape. Hein used to come around and advise me on how to do things, and he did some paintings for me.

The funny thing was that this was just after the war and it was austerity time and there was a limit of £10 that you could spend on refurbishing. No more. But I knew so many people at the studios and I asked them to come and help me decorate. A whole team of painters came along and painted the whole house beautifully. I wanted a Robert Adam ceiling and the plaster department came out from the studio and made the most elaborate ceiling for me.

JBAnd you were never caught for overspending?

JCSomeone from the council did come round and almost fainted when he saw it. He asked me where I got everything from and I told him I was in the film business and had it done for almost nothing. He laughed and said that he used to be in the film business too, so he would let it go. I got away with murder, really.

I had my Oscar celebration in that house with something like 70 or 80 people, and police outside controlling the cars. A fantastic evening.

JBBack to The Red Shoes …

JCYes, so on The Red Shoes we were all full of enthusiasm and going to ballet every night and we were all full of ideas. But then Michael said: ‘Look, we have gone into this and we have decided that the public aren’t ready for so much ballet in a film. So we are restricting the ballet sequence to 18 minutes.’

By that time, I had made a lot of interesting camera tests: slow motion; fast motion; stop motion for the paper dance sequence. Michael loved them, but it had been decided to produce the music first and then work to the music. He thought if we didn’t do that, we would go crazy and get lost with what we were doing. So some of the test shots might have been done to three bars of music, and in the end we only had one bar to do that shot in. It was quite sad in a way that the length of the sequence restricted all of those things that we wanted to do. But it was still a really fascinating film to work on.

JBAgain, there was some brave casting. How did you find Moira Shearer to work with?

JCShe was the opposite to a film-struck person. She didn’t really think a great deal of films. Ballet was her heaven and she wasn’t at all star-struck or even thought it was that wonderful to be offered the principal part in the film. She just thought it might be interesting. While others might have given their soul to be the lead in a film, she wasn’t that crazy.

I took her to see Russell Flint²¹, the painter, who was a friend of mine and who lived quite close by. Well, it was two Scots together, and she would tell him, ‘I don’t think you’ve got the leg quite right, ’ or this or that—very critical. A tough one.

JBWas she tough to work with on set?

JCShe wasn’t difficult to work with. She was no idiot and knew what could be done and how she could contribute to the film.

Even though she was the principal star, after a few days everyone liked her and she was friendly with everybody. She even came up to the camera department and asked if she could get anyone a cup of tea!—first time that had ever happened with the star of a picture. She was like that. Typical of the ballet world, where everyone pitched in.

JBWere the dancers reluctant about what you might do with the camera? That you might somehow dilute their performance?

JCThat didn’t really arise and the only time it might have was when [Léonide] Massine²² did his big leap on to stage. By that time, I had swatted up and I knew that there had been this colossal jump onto stage in Spectre de la Rose [a ballet choreographed by Michel Fokine for the Ballet Russe in 1911]. I thought the only way to get the shot, as Massine was already 50 by then—very fit, but probably not able to make quite such a jump— was that I could get the camera speed altered, just for a second, when he springs onto stage, so that it would increase the time. So as he jumped, I got the camera up to 48 frames and straight back again. It worked beautifully. The ballet purists might have said that was cheating, but we were making a film, not a ballet.

JBMassine had worked with many of your great artistic heroes such as Matisse, Dali, and Picasso. Did he ever discuss that with you?

JCThat was what awed me. I was amazed to think that this little man, who was very quiet but had a tremendous presence on screen that would always steal the shot somehow, worked with all these people. We had lots of talks and he was an extremely nice man. He had worked with the greatest in the world. During the picture, I was talking to Massine about one of my favourite ballets, La Boutique Fantasque, because I wanted to make a film of it.

Jack Cardiff lights The Red Shoes (1948). Note the huge ‘brute’ light

At Pinewood, they had previously had a problem where the normal workers, the electricians and carpenters, could never book their holidays because they never knew when they were going to break on a picture. So they tried out this idea where the whole studio would shut down in August for two weeks. They did it that year [1947], but never again, because although it worked out for the workers, the stars and their agents hated it. So we had these two weeks off and I suggested to Massine that I could photograph the ballet on stage during this break; just shoot it straight as a ballet and preserve it for posterity with the great Massine.

He was enthusiastic and very happy to do it, so he and I organized the rights to the music and Moira was enthusiastic to get involved. So then I needed a corps de ballet. I went to see Ninette de Valois (founder of the Royal Ballet) and she said, ‘No way!’ She hated films and thought they were a terrible idea … and that was that! We never made it.

JBIt must have been quite the most dynamic and vibrant set to be working on with such a fusion of creative talents. Did it ever threaten to fall apart under the strain of opposing personalities?

JCWell, there was what I would call good-natured tension. Massine, at 50, was the hardest-working man on the film. He would always be there early practising at the barre. We had a barre made on set for all the dancers.

What was tough was that the ballet dancers were used to dancing on a stage that was wood and had a certain amount of give and spring in it, but here at Pinewood they had to dance on concrete floors. They were very good about it. But it was so much harder than the stage.

JBDo you think there was something political about the lack of Oscar for The Red Shoes?

JCThat was sad. I had a big friend in Hollywood called Lee Garmes,²³ who had won an Oscar for Shanghai Express [1932]. A very fine cameraman and we were big friends from the time I spent out there. When The Red Shoes came out the critics liked it very much and when it came to Oscar time several of them said that they knew that my photography would win the Oscar. So I thought I was in with a chance because everyone was telling me I would win.

Then I got a phone call from Lee Garmes, who said, ‘Jack, I don’t know how to tell you this but we had a meeting with the ASC [American Society of Cinematographers] last night and it was generally felt that you would definitely win and that would put the American cameramen in a bad light.’ So the only way to stop me winning was not to nominate me. You can’t get the award if you’re not nominated!

Most of the people that voted on that are probably under the ground now …