Conversations with jack cardiff

‘Not only is Jack one of the greatest cinematographers of all time (as further demonstrated by his well-deserved Honorary Academy Award), but he is also a man who always got the job done, never wasting time and always bringing fresh ideas and incredible imagination to any picture. During the filming of an exterior duel scene between Henry Fonda and Helmut Dantine in War and Peace, for example, we were discussing with King Vidor how best to shoot it when Jack surprised us all by suggesting we film it indoors by building the set on stage. The result was a truly wonderful scene with snow softly falling on the actors that, thanks to Jack’s extraordinary lighting, nobody could tell had been filmed on stage. Jack Cardiff is a true master filmmaker.’

‘I wish I could be the way you have created me. You are the best in the world. I love you.’ Marilyn Monroe—Actress, The Prince and the Showgirl

JBHad anything you had done previously prepared you for the arduous location work on African Queen [1951]?

JCOh yes, because don’t forget I had worked on the World Windows travelogues. We shot in the desert, carrying equipment, and made five little films in India. This wasn’t cosy studio conditions, so I was fairly used to it. Of course, African Queen had a lot of production money; not a lavish budget, but we were well looked after.

I liked John Huston very much because he was so laid back. Having worked with people like Hathaway, who was the very opposite, I noticed that nothing seemed to bother Huston. He did have this iron control and would never be talked out of anything that he had set his mind on—but he would always get his own way in the nicest possible manner.

JBWas he aware of the travelogues you had shot? Was that part of the reason he chose you to work on the film?

JCI really think I just had a certain reputation by this point and was sort of on top of the tree, so when they were casting a picture, there were certain people they would look for, rather like picking a football team.

JCWe were supposed to make the film on British territory, in Uganda; that was part of the deal. Huston went out on a recce while I was still on The Magic Box and he sent a message back to the English producer, John Woolf¹, saying that he didn’t like the Ugandan locations. And then he just disappeared for something like two weeks. Maybe he had been eaten by a crocodile—we just didn’t know.

But then we got this cable saying that he had found a wonderful place in the Belgian Congo. The place was two days outside of Stanleyville [now Kisangani], right in the wilds of the Congo. This really affected the production, but it was what John wanted.

JCWhen we arrived, we couldn’t believe it. They had already prepared a number of little huts, which were made of dried leaves. It was a pretty ghastly location and a terrible jeep drive from Stanleyville. So yes, right from the beginning it was very tough going.

JBThis was an intelligent and experienced crew and studio. Did anyone have the slightest concern about dragging major stars off into the ‘heart of darkness’?

JCWell, they might have had, but that’s the film business for you. It so happens that if there had been any real trepidation about the danger, John Huston would still have got his way. It wasn’t unusual then to go to wild and tough locations. The philosophy was you got the rough with the smooth; sometimes you had a very nice location or were in the studios and other times you had to go out into the wilds.

JBYou had already recreated the Himalayas and the Antarctic in the studios. Was there no question of shooting this on a set too?

JCThat is something that Huston would never have agreed to. He had a very quiet way of getting what he wanted. For example, what he insisted on, in his very quiet way, was that the engine noise from the boat, the African Queen, was to be left running so that the actor had to speak above it. He was quite right because it made it far more realistic. So we shot almost all of the film with that terrible engine noise going.

JBDid Humphrey Bogart’s tough-guy screen persona translate to his real-life character?

JCYes, in a way, but the funny thing was that he was an extremely nice guy and he wasn’t really tough, but he put on the tough. You would say, ‘Good morning, Bogey.’ And he would always reply, ‘What’s good about it?’ It was part of his manner, and the films he made created that part of him, I suppose.

Bogart could be a little argumentative when he had had something to drink, and on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948], which Huston also made with him, they had a big argument and Bogey started swinging at John. John was very tall and had a tremendous reach so he just reached out and grasped Bogey’s nose and left him there thrashing about until he had cooled off.

JCWe all had this terrible sickness and Kate was as sick as the rest of us. Of course, Bogey and Huston were never ill and the joke is, it was because they only ever drank whisky and never touched the water. The rest of the unit were very ill and so was Kate, but she was very brave to go in front of the cameras and act like that, because her face was often white or sickly green. She sometimes had a bucket just out of camera range, which she would throw up into between takes.

Of course, at the time, we didn’t know it was the water making us sick, but the irony was that it was known that Kate was using bottled Evian water to wash her hair, which was considered very wasteful. If only she had drunk it instead of washing in it, she would have been fine.

The flotilla of boats used for filming The African Queen (1951)

JBAnd Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, was along for the ride on the shoot too.

JCOh yes. They had this amazing dialogue between them and whatever they talked about together, it was slightly challenging. It was very much like a parody of the films they had made together, particularly To Have and Have Not² [1945]. They really were like that.

They weren’t argumentative and she took it all very calmly, but Bogey would grumble sometimes, mainly because he had a yacht of his own back in California and he thought the whole flotilla thing was crazy, and would try to take over as if he was the admiral.

JBWhat do you mean by ‘flotilla’?

JCWe had this meeting to discuss how we were going to make the film and Huston said he wanted to put the boat, African Queen, on a raft and go down the river on that, so that we could be on the raft but outside the boat filming. It was funny really, because that made it like a stage and we had gone to such lengths to go out into the wilds. Perhaps 80 per cent of the film took place on this little boat.

The raft was towed, which was a wonderful idea, but also I had two lamps. It’s amazing, but I made most of African Queen with two lamps. John Woolf had said, ‘My dear Jack, you don’t need lamps, you’ll be in Africa where all the sun is!’ But I did need lamps to light out the shadows. In fact, for the first week or two, it rained a lot and we were able to keep shooting with these lamps. So they paid for themselves. But the lamps needed a generator and that meant another raft, and then the sound department had another boat, and then a boat for Kate Hepburn’s dressing room, and another for props. So we had a whole flotilla going along the river like a string of sausages. It was fine going straight, but when we went around bends, things often just crashed into the bank.

JBBut Bacall was happy to come along and put up with this hellish location misery?

JCYes, she was, and I’ll never know why she did such a crazy thing, but she came out and I don’t really remember her being sick; perhaps she drank whisky too, I really don’t know. But the fact was, she would bring us our food when we took a break for lunch. We had these weird sort of lunch boxes that probably came from Stanleyville or somewhere, and she used to bring them out on the set. I told her she was the most expensive waitress in the world. She was very nice.

JBYou have taken many beautiful photographic portraits of stars over the years; didn’t you take any of Bacall?

JCNo, I didn’t. Of course, it would have been impossible on location apart from horrible snapshots and when we got back, it just didn’t work out. She was very beautiful, though.

JBHuston, I understand, was just as interested in shooting animals as film. Is that part of the reason why he insisted on real locations?

JCOh definitely, I think that might have coloured his choice of location to a certain extent. Although I don’t think he realized there wasn’t much where we were, apart from crocodiles, and there’s not much sense in shooting a crocodile because we had hundreds in the river. It would have been like shooting at fish.

We got quite used to them and they never attacked us, although we wouldn’t swim in the water, of course. The water was jet black and the crocodiles were on the bank and then would just slither down into the water. They never bothered us.

JBDid Huston get to hunt any big game while he was there?

JCNo! Kate had a certain masculinity and she used to go walking in the jungle sometimes with John, who would have a rifle. But we never heard it go off. Kate was a strange person, she was all woman, but she hated to be considered a frail female. If you offered her your hand as she was getting off the boat, she would slap it away, because she wanted to just jump off like the men did.

You couldn’t legally shoot animals anyway because there was a law in the Congo that you needed special permission to hunt. So it was a disaster for John from that point of view.

JBHave you seen White Hunter, Black Heart³ [1990], Clint Eastwood’s dramatization of the filming of The African Queen?

JCI saw some of it, but to tell you the truth I didn’t have the heart to really watch it. I think it is a very loose adaptation.

JBDo you still consider that the toughest shoot of your career?

JCI think so, yes, because it was so painful working like that. We had temperatures of 104 or 105 degrees. The sound man got malaria.

JBHow long were you out in the Belgian Congo?

JCThere were two main locations: one was Beyondo, which was in the Congo, and that, I suppose, was about eight weeks, perhaps a little more. Then we had this very long journey by train from Stanleyville. I clearly remember the African Queen being loaded onto a train. And we went from Stanleyville across to Uganda.

We thought we were over the hard times and that Uganda was going to be a holiday. We were going to be on this great big liner, that we would work on and sleep on. But the moment we got there, we felt even sicker. It finally turned out that we were drinking water that wasn’t being filtered so we were really drinking hippo droppings.

JBWhat were you doing about communicating with London when you were out there? And how about the rushes from Technicolor?

JCSam Spiegel, who always wore beautiful white shorts and a white hat, would make the trip every few days to Stanleyville and then from there he would phone England. There we would have an editor, who had to be completely trusted, and he would see the rushes himself and report back. The director never really has the chance to see the rushes for himself on such a location.

Huston, like Hitchcock, was no fool and really knew what he was going to get just from looking through the camera. That’s why I can’t stand to see modern directors who just watch on a video monitor, because they just can’t see the nuances on an actor’s face— they are missing the human factor, like a glint in the eye.

JBSadly that’s perhaps because today many directors know that their films will predominantly be seen on the small screen.

JCYes, indeed, I know what you mean. In that case, they should be perfectly happy with what they see on their little televisions, but in my day it was all for cinema, of course.

Later, when I worked on The Far Pavilions⁴ [1984] in India, they used to send out tapes of the rushes for me and I could run them in my bedroom each evening. That worked quite well.

There used to be times, when working on location, when a whole lot of rushes, which we hadn’t seen for some time, would arrive all at once and we would set up a projector, like a hastily organized Christmas show, and project on the wall of the hotel. It’s certainly never easy to watch rushes on location.

JBWith the cameras being so heavily blimped was there less chance of getting hairs in the gate and that kind of thing?

JCNo, that was a big problem for years. Most of these little hairs in the gate are tiny fibres, often from the black paper that the film comes wrapped in. They can be a pain in the arse. You do a wonderful scene and then the camera assistant tells you that there is a slight hair in the gate and the big question is: is it going to be noticeable on the film? In most cases you have to do it again, for safety.

JBThere was some respite at the end of The African Queen with a little studio work.

JCYes, because there are scenes where Hepburn and Bogey have to get out and pull the boat and we couldn’t do that in Africa because there is a terrible disease called bilharzia that comes from being in the water. So we had to do that in the studio.

We had a very good set with all these reeds and things. It was quite easy to do and a good match.

JBYou had been offered, and turned down, the chance to be paid for The African Queen by taking a percentage of the box office. Is that right?

JCWith The African Queen, a funny thing happened. On the previous picture, The Magic Box, which was a prestigious film selected for the Festival of Britain, the producers offered us half salary with the other half coming from the box-office takings. Well, it was a very nice film, but not a big financial success and didn’t make a lot of money at the box office. So we never really got the other half of our money. So when the contracts for The African Queen were being drawn up, Sam Spiegel, the producer, offered me a profit cut and I said, ‘No way!’ and turned it down. That’s got to be the silliest thing I ever did—it made so much money that I would have been a millionaire.

JBYou worked next with Errol Flynn on William Keighley’s⁵ The Master of Ballantrae [1953].

JCYes, we started the film at Elstree Studios and then had some location work in Cornwall. I only saw the finished thing once, at Errol’s. He was a terrific swordsman and really made it thrilling to see. He was like a ballet dancer and had a quite brilliant manner.

JBYour old friend, Roger Livesey⁶ from A Matter of Life and Death, was on the picture too.

JCYes, it was good to catch up with him. He was a fine actor, and strangely enough, years earlier—I must have been about 11—I had worked with his father on a stage play, The Octoroon⁷.

That was one of the few times I appeared on the London stage and I was thrilled about it. I had to open the show and I had black greasepaint on (I was supposed to be a little coloured child). It was at the Little Theatre near Wardour Street and I remember my parents couldn’t go on the first night because they were rehearsing another show, but I finished the show and took the make-up off my face and rushed to get a tram. I saw people staring at me with incredulity and disgust, and I realized I had forgotten to take the jet black greasepaint off my legs.

JBYou formed a very close friendship with Errol Flynn. Did that strike you as unlikely given that you were such different people?

JCAbsolutely. To start with, I didn’t really drink; I liked wine, though. I think Errol just seemed to have a regard for my capabilities and we talked about a lot of things. He trusted me, which is the important thing.

JBHis reputation has taken something of a battering since his death, but he was simply viewed as something of a rogue at the time, wasn’t he?

JCHe had this attitude that any girl was a piece of cake and he could go to bed with them, no problem. He was married, of course, at the time. Later, when William Tell [1953] was finishing and I was about to start on The Barefoot Contessa [1954], I went to several gettogethers that Errol had. He had just made friends with the ex-king of Egypt, Farouk. Now Farouk was like Flynn, but perhaps far worse; he was girl-crazy. I saw him follow one girl out as she went to the loo and he came back with a big red slap mark on his face. He and Flynn were a great couple and had all the fun in the world together.

Shooting Errol Flynn, The Master of Ballantrae (1953)

JBYour next film, Crossed Swords⁸ [1953] was also with Flynn. Was that pure happenstance, or had he requested you?

JCI think again it was just that I had a certain reputation. Flynn was the boss and as we had just worked together, he knew I was all right.

The film was an interesting story about this ageing Don Juan character, which was Errol, who teaches young chaps how to escape from irate husbands. I know Errol was very happy about the story.

JBWas his drinking even heavier by this time?

JCHe was really on the booze at this time, and halfway through the picture Flynn collapsed. He was taken to the hospital in, I think, Naples, and kept there. Barry Mahon⁹ phoned the hospital and asked when Mr Flynn would be available to return to work. The hospital said that really he had no liver left, that the booze had taken his liver, and that perhaps his relatives should be contacted. They thought he was going to die at any moment.

Jack Cardiff presents Gina Lollobrigida with a gift. Crossed Swords (1953)

The doctor, when pushed, said that he thought it would be at least nine months to a year before he could come back to work, if he ever could. So ever optimistic, what we did was use this very good stand-in, an Englishman that looked ever so much like him. We used him in all the long shots, and for the closer shots on Gina [Lollobrigida], we would have him with his back to the camera. We did a lot of work like that and got through quite a bit.

But after just a few weeks, Flynn rolled up on set. The doctor had said it was a miracle, but he must never touch a drop of drink again—ever! Flynn came on set looking terrible and in his hand he had a glass of neat vodka.

Well, he finished the picture and still went on for another few years. He must have had a gut like no one else.

JBWhat did his co-star on Crossed Swords, Gina Lollobrigida, make of his antics?

JCThere was never anything between them. She was married to a guy who was very nice and very good looking, and they were very happy together¹⁰. I think Gina was not a sophisticated woman, in the sense that she was just a very ordinary, uncomplicated Italian woman—not dumb, but just simple and honest. I think that she would have been horrified at the idea of leaving her husband or having an affair with Errol Flynn. She was too pedestrian; she was just decent and honest. Of course, it is quite possible that Errol tried it on!

JBHe was clearly already drinking himself to death at this stage, was he still doing his own stunts?

JCYes and no. He did the duelling and that’s what impressed me, he was so good. We had an Italian who choreographed all of the duelling scenes and he was quite brilliant. He might have made it quite easy for Errol, because he had this stock kind of movement with his quizzical expression and one eyebrow raised.

JBDo you think he was being deliberately self-destructive with his drinking?

JCI think basically he must have been. But he was a tough character.

JBTell me about the William Tell project that you and Flynn developed together.

JCWell, my chance to direct came in a strange way. After I had worked on those films with Flynn he went off and I began working on something else. Then I had a phone call from him, from Rome. He said, ‘Jack, come on over to Rome, it’s great fun. Come and do a picture.’ He wanted to make a film of the William Tell legend and he wanted me to direct it.

I worked on the script with John Dighton¹¹, who was ever so good.

JBAs a first-time director, did Flynn’s drinking reputation concern you?

JCPeople said to me before we started the picture, ‘Jack, you’re mad having your first film with Errol. He’ll get drunk all the time and won’t show up on set.’ So I brought my own caravan from England and I had it all cleared out and fitted up as a bar for Errol. In this caravan, there was every kind of drink that he could want and it was right on the set. He was delighted and he was never drunk on the picture because he had it there if he wanted it, and there was never any question of sliding off somewhere. This worked psychologically very well.

JBHow was it to be financed?

Touching up Errol Flynn’s makeup on location for Crossed Swords (1953).

JCWell, Errol and his associate, Barry Mahon, who was an American ex-pilot, had a system: so many people, particularly in places like Rome, were trying to get Errol Flynn in their picture that they would ask him and then go to the banks and say, ‘Look, we need money for our film, but we have Errol Flynn in it.’ And the banks would give them the money. So Flynn’s system was that he would tell anyone who had a proposition for a film for him to be in, that he would only consider it if they could put $60, 000 in cash on the table while they discussed it. That kept the phoneys away and made Errol some money.

There was a chap called Count Fossataro, who said he could finance William Tell and organize everything. He must have talked Errol out of the $60, 000 thing because the bank told him and Barry that Fossataro was wealthy and owned a lot of property in Naples. They said his account was in good standing, but later we found out that the joke was that in Rome, if you had $10 in the bank you were considered to be in good standing! So it all added up at the time to seeming like Count Fossataro was the right man.

We were to shoot in Eastman Color and in CinemaScope. It would have been only the second CinemaScope film ever made. So we were in good shape and Fossataro was to pay for the Italian crew and the locations and the hotel—those sorts of things.

I started work on it and this was the big break of my life.

JBWhere was it going to be shot?

Location scouting for William Tell (1953)

JCWe had this wonderful location in Courmayeur¹², which is very near Mont Blanc. You could pan around in a complete circle in the Alps, and wherever we looked, there were these amazing snowy views. It was the perfect location.

We had a wonderful art director and he built this wonderful village made from real stone; it was fantastic.

JBAnd so you were all set to go.

JCYes, I had a good cast and started off with fine enthusiasm, but after a while it became apparent that no money was arriving to pay the crew. Well, this was quite usual for the Italians, it does happen.

Barry went to Rome and got in touch with Fossataro, who gave him a cheque, but when he went to cash it, it bounced. Then the truth came out that Fossataro didn’t have a lot of property in Naples; it was all in his wife’s name. He had nothing, and very little money; so that was the beginning of the tragedy.

JBHow long did you manage to keep on going?

JCWe carried on shooting and the Italian crew were wonderful; they were used to not being paid on many films. But eventually the electrical crew, who had a strong union, sent an order to confiscate the lamps. So the lamps were taken away and we used reflectors for a few days and then the reflector people took the reflectors away! So we made our own reflectors from the silver paper in cigarette packets. At last, the hotel people commandeered the two CinemaScope cameras and locked them up, and that was that!

Cast and crew of William Tell (1953)

We went back to Rome, hoping we could sort it out, but no one would take the finance over because at that time, you see, Errol’s reputation was on the way out. No one would dare to take over.

JBDavid Niven said of him, ‘You can count on Errol Flynn. He always lets you down.’ Yet you pursued your feature début with him!

JCYes! That’s a lovely saying, isn’t it? But I found him very genuine and he tried so hard. He and Bruce Cabot, his co-star, had been buddies for years and had fooled around with women together in Hollywood, but in the end it got nasty, and Bruce sued Errol and confiscated his cars, I think. The whole thing just dissolved.

But I still have the telegrams from Errol when he had gone to Rome to try and get more finance and they say, ‘Don’t worry. Stay with it, pal!’

JBHow much had you shot?

JCI guess there is no known record, but I think I shot about half an hour’s screen time in about six weeks.

Now there is a company in Hollywood who want to make the film and have asked me to come in on it in an advisory capacity. I certainly wouldn’t want to direct a film any more at my age. But I think things are going ahead, although you can never tell in this business. The original script is quite good.

The New York laboratories sent our original rushes over, but somewhere along the way the soundtracks went missing, so it was all silent.

JBDid you ever work with Flynn again?

JCNo, but I saw him occasionally in Rome. I was in terrible financial trouble because I hadn’t been paid anything. But then Joe Mankiewicz¹³ came up to me in a restaurant and asked me to come and photograph his picture, which was The Barefoot Contessa.

JBMankiewicz had been a writer before turning to directing. Did that encourage you to direct?

JCHe knew that I had the tragedy of William Tell behind me and he told me I should stick with it.

JBHe had an amazing career behind him as a screenwriter.

Jack Cardiff takes up arms on the set of William Tell (1953)

Directing Errol Flynn on WIlliam Tell (1953)

Jack Cardiff takes the director’s chair on William Tell (1953)

JCOh yes, he was a brilliant writer, one of Hollywood’s best. But for a long time he didn’t realize it and people were taking advantage and friends would ask him to do them a favour by reading scripts that had been sent to them. They wanted Joe to tell them if it was any good. All of a sudden one day he thought, ‘What the hell am I doing this for? I’m an expert and I’m giving free advice.’ So that’s when he started to say, yes he would read it but that it would cost $10, 000. That soon put a stop to that.

What really made him, furious, though was that a writer completes a script, gets his money, and says goodbye to it. He may have been well paid for it, but once he has done it and it’s gone, it is a fact that many producers, directors, and even actors want to change the script.

So Mankiewicz used to get hopping mad about this, because he liked his work. So he then organized things so that he would direct as well as write—that way he had much more control. If he was directing, his script wouldn’t be changed.

JBAnd this was the case with The Barefoot Contessa?

JCYes, when he was making The Barefoot Contessa, he had written it, was directing it and he was the producer. So no one could touch his script: not even a question mark or a full stop.

The only problem there was that he did write beautiful stuff with wonderful dialogue, but on a page of script, instead of having an inch or two of dialogue, he would have half a page in one go. Humphrey Bogart used to complain that he couldn’t remember it all, and I think that was fair enough. Mankiewicz was a very clever director, though, and fairly bold.

JBSo you think that he had started directing purely to protect his written word?

JCYes, although he liked directing anyway, he liked the drama of it. A good writer is sensitive to good drama, and as a director, he then knew how to direct a scene. He knew how to do it and he would bloody well do it that way!

JBIn addition to working with Mankiewicz, did the thought of being reunited with Ava Gardner attract you to the film?

JCI guess so, because she was so nice to work with and pretty easy-going.

JBHow did she get on with her co-star, Humphrey Bogart?

JCI wish I could remember, but I just recall that she was loyal to the picture and she did her job well. I don’t think Bogey was really a troublemaker; he was what I would call a ‘surface man’. He would say funny things, but he would never really complain much, so it was fine.

JBDino De Laurentiis¹⁴ contacted you at this point to ask you get involved with War and Peace [1956]. Did his reputation precede him?

JCI never thought about it before, but he did come from very lowly origins—he was a taxi driver in Naples, so they say. He was far more astute than, say, Sam Goldwyn¹⁵, although Sam Goldwyn did have a genius about him.

Dino made a big impression on people with his grand gestures and his, ‘I make you a great-a big-a star!’ and ‘we make-a the greatest film-a!’ To his credit, he certainly got War and Peace together! I forget who financed it, but it had a huge cast.

JBIt was a massive undertaking all round, just tackling Tolstoy for a start.¹⁶

JCYes, indeed. Of course, by the time I came onto it, they had already gone through the agonies of the script, although it was still formidable.

JBWas King Vidor¹⁷ already attached to direct?

JCOh yes, I think so.

JBWhat was Vidor like to work for?

JCKing Vidor was very earnest and really laboured with his direction. He would call a meeting every morning on the set to go over everything and we wasted so much time doing that. But that was the way it worked.

JBAnd De Laurentiis had the whole thing set to shoot in his native Italy by this time?

JCI know that Dino must have suffered because he wanted the best of everything for the film and that included the biggest stages. But the Americans, bless their hearts, in the same way that they have taken over all the cinemas in Europe, had already hired all of the biggest and best stages at Cinecittà.¹⁸ So it was impossible to get the stages he wanted. In his own country! Here were these bloody Americans and they weren’t even using them, they had just hired them.

Jack Cardiff and director King Vidor discuss a scene on War and Peace (1956)

JBWhat was De Laurentiis’s solution?

JCWell, right opposite Cinecittà in Rome, right on the other side of the street, is another little studio called Sperimentali. The actual stage size was nowhere near as large as the one not being used at Cinecittà, so can you imagine how Dino was feeling?

We had to build this huge interior set of a palace hall. Against all of the fire rules, Dino ordered it built to within about a foot of the studio walls—usually you had to have at least 5 or 6 feet so that you could run in the case of fire. Someone probably paid a few bob to get away with it.

What was unbearable about it was that the stage was incredibly stuffy and we started shooting there in the middle of summer. The cast, who were supposed to be freezing in Russia, were all wearing big fur coats and capes. They were absolutely collapsing with the heat.

Later on, some weeks after we started, the stages at Cinecittà became free. We were nine months shooting the film.

JBAll studio interiors?

JCNo, of course, we did the battle of Borodino¹⁹ on location!

There were also exteriors in the snow with lines and lines of soldiers and that was a terrible difficulty for me to match with the studio stuff. The big stage at Cinecittà was covered in snow and I had so many arc lamps, probably two hundred, around the stage with architects’ tracing paper across each one to diffuse the light. It gave a blank softness like a day without sun. It matched very well in the end.

JBYou were reunited with Henry Fonda on this. Was he still playing his old tricks?

JCNo, and I don’t think he was terribly happy with King Vidor, he hated all of these long discussions. I don’t think Henry remembered me from Wings of the Morning, though.

In one scene, Fonda was supposed to walk for miles through the snow and Johnny Mills had left him in the previous scene, I think he had been shot. Well, Johnny’s character had given Henry his dog and he then had to carry this dog on this long walk through the snow.

Fonda just kept saying, ‘I don’t want that bloody dog!’, but he had to carry it. We would be on a dolly following, and when we got to the end and Vidor called ‘Cut!’, Fonda would just open his arms and drop the poor dog straight down in the snow. Every take. Poor bloody dog! How it survived I’ll never know.

JBCan we talk about the amazing duel scene that you shot?

JCYes, there was this famous duel scene, of course. The amazing thing about Cinecittà was that although it had a huge stage the spot rails were quite low, perhaps only 25 feet from the ground. We did the duel scene with a wide-angle lens for a long shot at dawn, and of course, with a wide-angle you got all of the spot rail in the picture too.

So what I did was put the camera on a six-foot rostrum and I put a big piece of glass, about six foo by four, six feet in front of the camera. I got the same paint that they had used for the backing and I spray painted it onto the top of the glass so that it masked the spot rail. The first time I tried it, not being a professional spray painter, it all ran down the glass just as Dino De Laurentiis came on to the stage. He demanded to know what was going on and wanted to know why I was taking so much time. I assured him it would be okay, and I had another go and this time it blended perfectly. I lit it very carefully and it was a wonderful effect.

Jack Cardiff with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, War and Peace (1956)

I shot the long shot of the duel with a slight fog filter on to take off any hard edges, and when Dino saw it in the rushes, he went mad with joy and would show it to all the visitors to the set. From that moment on I didn’t have any problems with Dino.

JB War and Peace was the first time you met Audrey Hepburn, wasn’t it?

JCYes, she was lovely and, of course, very beautiful. The only thing was, we had a ballroom sequence on another colossal stage at Cinecittà, and she was in it wearing a very low-cut dress. Now she really had no breasts, she was a model and very thin, a typical model. I suggested that she wear a necklace or something with this low-cut dress and she said, ‘Jack, I’m just me. I am what I am and I haven’t done too badly like this.’ But you could really see her ribs.

We shot the scene and when Dino saw it, he went mad. She was very silly because there was no need to accentuate her ribs.

JBOne of your most beautiful photographic portraits is of Audrey Hepburn. Was it at this time that you photographed her?

JCYes. I just told her one day that I would like to take some pictures in the lunch hour and would she mind? It was a very daring thing to do in the sense that you can’t really achieve much in a twenty-minute lunch break. I used two lights and set them the best I could with some filters. I had to work like mad to get those pictures, and when you see them, I don’t think it’s obvious that they were done in a terrific hurry. She liked them and it all worked out okay.

JBAre they the portraits you are most proud of?

JCI think so, yes. She had such a lovely face and the portraits have that light, dark, light, dark combination that worked very well.

Someone had told her that her eyebrows were too thick, but that was part of her. She was a sensation in England and girls, as they still do, copied the stars. They copied her eyebrows, and thick eyebrows became the vogue.

JBWhat was the public reaction to War and Peace?

JCI remember going to the opening in London and Audrey was there with Mel [Ferrer], her husband. It went down extremely well. Today we have instant notoriety or instant fame and it is all overstatement, but that didn’t happen then with War and Peace. The press were very good and they thought it was well made. Of course, Dino made a lot of money from it.

JBHave you ever seen any of the later versions?

JCI have seen pieces. I saw the big Russian production.²⁰ Of course, they had the advantage over Hollywood and Dino, in the sense that they could take years to make it in the real Russian locations. They did wonderful work on it.

JBOn Legend of the Lost [1957], you worked again with Henry Hathaway. So your previous encounter with him hadn’t put you off?

JCNo, we were quite chummy. His wife was called Skipper and she was a remarkable person, because to spend a large part of your life with Hathaway must have been a terrible strain! He was always looking to have a row with someone, always looking for trouble.

He had an unerring instinct about people who had something to hide, and when he was on set and someone had come in a little bit late, he would always discover it and make their life hell.

JBAt what point did you get involved with the film?

JCI was involved from quite an early stage, which was a privileged position to be in. Most cameramen wouldn’t have been involved so early with the script discussions and the like.

The scriptwriter, Ben Hecht,²¹ was a very famous Hollywood scriptwriter, and Henry and I went to see him. He had a large room and all the way around it on desks and tables were dozens of pencils in pots: literally hundreds of pencils. And they were all sharpened; he had an electrical sharpener for them.

He would say, ‘Well, how about this?’ And he would grab a pencil and a piece of paper and he would write a scene in half a minute. Hathaway would read it and say he didn’t like it and Hecht, would screw it up, throw it away and write another one. That was how the whole script was written, which is so Hollywood. Always keep your pencils sharp!

JBAn unusual approach to constructing a story!

JCYes, but we thought we were on to something good, although the story was rather preposterous when you came down to it. John Wayne played a drunk in the French Foreign Legion and Rossano Brazzi²² played a character who was an explorer and was looking for his long-lost father. Brazzi wanted to go to Timbuktu to look for him, and he uses John Wayne as a guide. Then Sophia Loren comes along and joins them, and she is supposed to be a sort of tart. It was all so preposterous and really just a case of them thinking that they had to have a woman in it. It didn’t add up. She looked gorgeous and wore this very sensible dark green dress that went down almost to her ankles, but it was very un-sexy. She didn’t look a bit like an Arab tart.

Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer and Jack Cardiff examine test shots for War and Peace (1956)

JBThis was another gruelling location shoot—the desert this time.

JCYes, the Sahara. The places where we slept were just a few dusty old buildings and it was so hot. In the morning it would start off very cold and by 11 am it would be unbearably hot. The Technicolor blimp still weighed a tonne and we would have to carry it about.

We also used a place in Tripoli that had a lot of old ruins but looked nothing like Timbuktu. Absolutely ridiculous!

Hathaway used to go mad if anyone wandered about, because they would make imprints in the sand and spoil the shots. He used to really scream. It was a real nightmare.

JBI don’t think the press were too kind to the film, were they?

JCI went to one of the trade screenings. The press can be lethal and I could tell from the beginning that they thought John Wayne was crazy in the role and Loren was much too beautiful for her part. It was the most embarrassing time of my life, because it really wasn’t my responsibility and Hathaway wasn’t there. They tore it to pieces.

In one scene, Wayne and Loren follow this sound of sobbing and they find Brazzi on his knees in front of three skeletons and he sobs, ‘I knew my father was dead, but to see him like this!’ I went to a trade show with the press, and when that line came up, they all fell about laughing. To make it worse, John Wayne then says, ‘Which one is your father?’ Well, that got another big laugh.

JBWayne wasn’t the world’s greatest actor, and when he was playing anything but his cowboy persona, he often looked terribly lost. He even played Genghis Khan²³ once, didn’t he?

JCThat’s right. Of course, Ford had wanted to mould him into a great big star, and he did.

Later I think Ford wanted to do the same thing with Rod Taylor.

The funniest thing was, that despite the fact that John was supposed to be a French Foreign Legionnaire, he was always dressed as a cowboy with his Stetson and guns and holsters. He had to wear the cowboy outfit in every film.

Jack Cardiff and Sophia Loren on location with Legend of the Lost (1957)

Jack Cardiff and John Wayne, Legend of the Lost (1957)

JBWhen it came to The Prince and the Showgirl [1957], I understand that Marilyn Monroe insisted on you photographing the film for her.

JCI don’t know about insisted, but she had mentioned me to Larry [Laurence Olivier].You get a certain reputation, I suppose. I had never met her at that time so maybe she had seen something that I had done or she knew of my reputation.

JBAnd Olivier wanted you too?

JCI had an uneasy feeling that Larry might have had his own cameraman in mind and it might have been that he wanted Marilyn and Marilyn wanted me. So I said to him, ‘Is that all right with you? Do you want me to do it?’ Well, he assured me he did and that settled that.

Laurence Olivier had an office in London’s Piccadilly, close to the house where the Queen had lived as a young girl. One day when we were working there, Larry said, ‘Hang on a minute, I want to go outside because the queen is coming by.’ So we all traipsed outside and this was so casual and could only happen in England, because there was no fanfare and no crowds. Along came an open carriage with Queen Elizabeth in, and by she went.

JBHow did Olivier know she was about to go past?

JCThat’s a good question and I have wondered that myself. I suppose someone must have told him—he knew a lot of people.

But anyway, he had very prestigious offices and I used to go in almost every morning. The very first time I went in was when Larry told me that Marilyn had put in the request for me to photograph the picture.

JBHad you worked with him before?

JCYes, going back some time, I had. When I was an operator at Elstree, I worked on a film of As You Like It [Paul Czinner, 1936], which he was in. It didn’t make us buddies and I don’t suppose he would even have remembered me from back then.

Funnily enough, on As You Like It Olivier was the first film actor I had ever lit in a close-up. The cameraman was ill one day and I got to do the shot. Larry had a quite knobbly face at that time and he hadn’t quite matured—he wasn’t very pretty. I had lit him in a particular way and Lee Garmes, the great cameraman, said ‘Let me give you a tip.’ And he showed me an easy kind of lighting to do on it: we had lights called ‘cans’, which had one big, soft bulb—and we put one on one side of his face with a silk on as the key light, and we put a second sidelight about 18 inches away on the other side of the face with about six silks on it. I had never seen that before, and it made him look marvellous. So my first lighting lesson for faces was with Larry.

JBWhen did you first meet Monroe?

JCI went to see her at the house they had rented for her and her new husband.

JBArthur Miller?²⁴

JCYes, Arthur Miller. He opened the door and told me that Marilyn was still asleep. After we had a coffee, Marilyn came downstairs—and I had looked forward to meeting her as she was without doubt the biggest sex symbol in Hollywood—but I was staggered because she had just woken up and her hair was all tussled and she looked like she was about 14 years of age. She had no make-up on and she looked like an adorable little child. I really thought, ‘This can’t be Marilyn Monroe!’

JBYou clearly fell under her spell! Do you think her naivety was a tool she used or was it genuine?

JCI think it was 99 per cent genuine. The fascinating thing about her was that I saw a lot of her, I used to go into her dressing room and talk to her and we became very good friends, and not once did I hear her swear. She had this kind of wondering look about her that was incredible, and there was never anything smutty about her and nothing cynical.

JBHow well did she and Olivier get along?

JCFrom the first, it was evident that she was going to be a problem for Larry on the film. Most actors will come on the set and chat, but she would never come on the set. I felt quite sorry for Larry trying to act in and direct this film. She went through so many agonized times with Larry because he was, to her, a pain in the arse. She never forgave him for saying to her once, ‘Try and be sexy.’

Marilyn had this ghastly obsession with method acting and was always searching for some inner meaning with everything, but Larry would only explain the simple facts of the scene. I think she resented him; she used to call him ‘Mr Sir’, because he had been knighted.

I saw Larry years later on The Last Days of Pompeii²⁵ [1984], which was made for TV. We talked a lot on set and I asked him one day what he had thought about Marilyn and he just said, ‘She was a bitch!’

JBThe film was adapted from Terence Rattigan’s play, The Sleeping Prince. Was Marilyn familiar with the work?

JCWell, it’s a good point to mention the play, because in the first week or two of the picture Vivien Leigh would come on the set, and she had played Marilyn’s part in the stage play.

Vivien was a superb actress, very sophisticated and well educated with a lovely accent, and she would come on and she would terrify Marilyn with this authority that she had about her. I think perhaps Larry should have kept her away. I don’t think that Vivien ever stayed to watch any of the acting because that really would have been in very poor taste.

JBDid you see Marilyn socially?

JCLarry had this play, A View From the Bridge, coming up and I was invited to go with Marilyn and Arthur to the opening. We got mobbed when we got to the theatre; the crowd was just surging in, looking at Marilyn.

When we got inside, we were sitting in the stalls about ten rows back and everyone sitting in front was just turned around looking at Marilyn. It was explained to us that during the interval, to stop her being mobbed, they had fixed up a little room for us. Somehow we all squeezed in.

Jerry Wald, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Cardiff and Paula Strasberg.

The first bell to signal the end of the interval went, and we got ready to go, but Marilyn asked for another drink. Then the second bell went and she still wouldn’t go. I looked at her and she was obviously terrified about going back and being stared at. That’s when I realized that one of her big problems was people staring at her. It doesn’t sound much, but if everyone is staring at you wherever you go, it can be a tremendous problem.

Probably that was the reason that she didn’t come out on set. She never got to know the unit like most actors would. I’m sure she thought if she came out on set everyone would stare at her. She was in a nervous state.

JBTell me about the photographic portraits that you took of Monroe.

JCWell, I had said to her that I would love to do some portraits of her because I thought she looked like a Renoir girl. That amused her, so she asked me to come over to the house one Sunday morning, at 9.30 am.

I went along with my camera and when I got there Arthur said that she was still asleep, so we had some breakfast. She was still asleep, so we played some tennis. Still asleep, so we had lunch. Finally she came down at 6.30 in the evening, looking gorgeous, and I had to work very fast to take the pictures. I probably did them all in less than an hour.

She said to me one time, ‘Jack, come and look, I have the most wonderful disguise.’ And I went to her dressing room to see it and she took out the most fantastic bright orange wig you have ever seen! So there was really this side of her that was very naive and childish.

JBYou saw Marilyn just a little before her death …

JCThat was after she had done The Misfits²⁶ [John Huston, 1961]. I was staying at a hotel in Hollywood and I found out that she was staying there too in one of their bungalows. I phoned her up and she told me to come on over.

I went over and it was a big room with just one dim light on and yet she was wearing dark glasses; she couldn’t have been able to see much. We sat together on the settee and had a drink and she told me what a terrible time she had been having. She told me that she went to what she thought was a health farm and it turned out to be a loony bin. She noticed that the door handles were missing on the inside and she couldn’t get out. She also realized there was a peephole and they were watching her through it.

She had been told that she could only leave if a relative came and took her; but she had no relatives by this time. She was also now separated from Arthur Miller and in the end Joe DiMaggio,²⁷ who was a wonderful guy and who had always stood by her, came and got her out. She was so upset about the whole thing and had had a terrible time.

JBOf course, the tragedy of her life and her early death are, in part, the very things that have made her an icon.

JCYes, she was such a tragic person. I have read the book The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe [by Donald H Wolfe], which states that Monroe was definitely murdered. The reason I believe this is that it describes in great detail how she came to be murdered and how some people had seen Robert Kennedy there that night.

Of course, Marilyn, who was always very silly, had kept a diary while she was with Jack Kennedy, before Bobby got involved, and in the diary Jack had told her a lot of stories about the Bay of Pigs episode, which was hot stuff. But she put it in her diary, and at a certain point Jack had wanted that back. I feel it makes sense to me, because she had this diary. She was just such a tragic figure.

Jack Cardiff stands in for Olivier with Monroe on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)