The conversation with Mike took place in his edit suite as he was finishing off a film with Mark Herman, with whom he has collaborated several times. Mike has edited for a whole host of distinguished directors from Lindsay Anderson to Bill Forsyth, and including a prophetic thriller directed by Bertrand Tavernier set in Glasgow!
I was brought up in a flat at Notting Hill Gate in London by my mother and my granny. My father was an RAF pilot but he was killed a few months before I was born. My mother worked at the Ministry of Defence – I never managed to discover much about what she really did, but knew that her knowledge of the main European languages (having been born and educated in Switzerland) was quite a significant aspect. She sent me away to a school near Bath that had been recommended by a colleague at the office. There I developed interests in various activities – for instance I started a magazine and later formed a jazz band.
Mike Ellis in his edit suite (Courtesy of Mike Ellis)
Apparently my father had been pretty musical; he was a good banjo player and sang – so perhaps that’s where I got it from, although my grandmother was also very musical and used to play the piano at home. I had regular piano lessons from the age of about eight or nine and that carried on through school until I was eighteen. I was quite good in the classical area but I lost interest, which I regret now because I would like to be able to sit and play something by sight – something I have never learned properly. I can do it but only very slowly. You go to a music session on a film and see these musicians who haven’t prepared in any way and they play perfectly the first time – they’re fantastic. But a lot of them can’t improvise at all, which is what I was able to do quite early on. There was one session we had on ‘Brassed Off’1 when we wanted some bum notes and they just couldn’t do bum notes to save their lives. We ended up using what I had done in a synthesiser.
When I was eleven or twelve, I bought some sheet music of a piece I’d heard on the radio called ‘The Black and White Rag’ by a popular ragtime pianist of the time – Winifred Attwell – and I learnt it by heart in the holidays and went back to school and astounded everyone, not least the music teachers. One of them, who taught saxophone and clarinet, and was also a bit of a ‘jazzer’ off school limits got me some more sheet music and taught me quite a few things about playing with a band.
I recently found all my school reports and nearly every year the headmaster had written things like ‘if you applied yourself to (such and such) the way you do to jazz you’d get on a lot better’. The school prided itself on its music, with wonderful facilities for practice and performance. I used to have to get permits from the head of music for the band to be able to rehearse. So it was half-frowned upon, but it became a great success; we managed to pack the school hall whenever we gave a concert, usually to rapturous applause and by the end of my time there I think we were rather cherished, even by the music staff.
I did think for about two years that I would go into jazz professionally, but I got interested in so many other things – I started doing a lot of photography and making my own prints in the kitchen at home and in the school darkrooms. At the same time I was becoming very interested in writing and literature and I wrote short stories, a play, even a novel! I continued through university with a trio, and some well-heeled student actually paid for a record to be made of us, but as soon as I started working in films I realised that the frequent late nights demanded of you meant that it was hard to commit yourself to engagements far in advance, so eventually music became very much a hobby, as it remains.
*************
When I was wanting to get into the film business originally, I wrote letters to all sorts of people, and I received a very nice letter back from Richard Lester.2 I happened to have a Pentax S1A which was what he used, and he saw other similarities between my interests and the ones he had when starting out, including the jazz, so it was very encouraging even if it didn’t lead to a job. But I remember it being instrumental in pushing me on – I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to devote myself exclusively to music or photography or writing, so it was almost an intellectual decision to settle on film-making which encompassed all of those other things, and his letter put a seal of approval on my thoughts. Apart from anything, I had grown to love movies by the time I was finishing university, being a regular at the art cinemas of Oxford and London. So Dick Lester helped to set me off on course.
RC:Were you aware of cinema in a serious way at school?
ME:They did run films on occasional Saturday evenings for the whole school – they set up a 16mm projector in the gym – and I use to enjoy that. I also vividly remember going to the cinema with my grandmother or mother in London. I particularly remember ‘Gulliver’s Travels’3 at what was the Classic Cinema in Notting Hill Gate because the film broke down; the projector stopped, the frame froze and then the screen slowly appeared to burn up, quite spectacularly, until the projectionist realised what was happening. This was the first time I, a ten-year old, was aware that someone or some people, actually made films, it wasn’t just a sort of theatre that happened only in that building. Today people are used to slamming a VHS in a machine, rewinding, pausing, fast-forwarding and so on – in those days the cinema was the only place to see what celluloid could do.
RC:What did you study at university?
ME:I did a degree in ancient history, which I took up because I was interested in the subject – without any notion of teaching or doing anything practical with it and I saw a lot of films whilst at college. It was the time of the New Wave movement and I loved Antonioni, Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Fellini and so on. We would wait avidly for their next offering – rather as now one might look out for the next Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers, I suppose, but I do think it was a rich time, from all points of view – film music, literature, photography – everyone was experimenting and there was a sense of excitement.
I had a friend in London who went straight into documentaries, which he thought was an important medium and I used to visit him occasionally in my holidays and I saw film hanging up in bins and I remember thinking how exciting that was. I just thought ‘that was film-making’, and I realised the importance of editing.
*************
I came out of university determined to work in the film business and as one had to do, I walked around Soho and visited the studios. In those days you needed a union card for a job and a job for a union card. After about six months I was on the point of giving up and I started looking into the world of publishing, and I was actually offered a job in a publishing company, where they wanted to do a whole series of classics for children, shortened versions, rather dubious I suppose, and in the same week I got an interview with somebody in Rediffusion Television as it was then, and he had seen that I was a jazz enthusiast and he was too, and he ran the film library and he needed a trainee. So we had an interview in a jazz pub in Putney, The Bull’s Head, and that was it. I got that job and that automatically got you the union ticket, so I left after four months, as soon as I got my ticket.
So I got a variety of jobs, often just for a day. Then the opportunity arose to work with a director who was also going to edit his own film – a chap called Stephen Cross.4 We did a couple of films where I was assistant director and assistant editor. At that point we were at Document Films when David Gladwell5 was looking for an assistant and they seemed to think I would be alright so I got a job on ‘If’.6
RC:Had you already decided that the cutting room was where you wanted to be?
ME:Yes I had. I wanted to direct, like a lot of people, but I did feel that the cutting room was the place where films get made, but I didn’t lose my enthusiasm for directing, so that was like my ultimate goal. I’ve always enjoyed creating things. At home I had a puppet theatre and I used to write stories for these puppets and I used to bring my family in at sixpence a time, and then we did commercials as well!
RC:So with David Gladwell and ‘If’ were you aware of Lindsay Anderson7 before that?
ME:I had seen ‘This Sporting Life’.8 I may even have seen one of his plays that he’d directed at the Royal Court. It was just very new and very exciting. I can almost smell it now the feeling of the cutting room and having to go to the set one day. There I was synching up rushes for the first time.
David was putting it together while Lindsay filmed, but then when he came back he was in the room all the time. We were all in one room – looking back I realise how unusual that was – I guess it was a low-budget film: there was the editor and the first assistant and me, the second assistant, all in the same room and then Lindsay as well.
I was sitting at the numbering machine at one end trying not to go over each slate! So it was very good being so intimate, especially when Lindsay came because everyone had to look at things. From time to time he would say what do you think of this and you had to respond.
I remember we used to have lunch in the pub every day. Lindsay was such an ordinary man really. He was never pompous or pretentious. If any one came everyone was always part of it. Michael Medwin – Albert Finney – of course it was his company, Memorial Enterprises.9 I remember once in the pub I asked the most incredibly naïve question, I said, ‘Did John Ford direct anything else besides westerns?’ I got the royal look from Lindsay, the eyes to heaven – ‘My dear boy!’ But he was never nasty.
He could really rip people off. I heard him on the phone to mainly production people. He would just have them in ribbons, in shreds. His language was so meticulous – so exact – it just poured out – he was so articulate – brilliant to hear. I was terribly fortunate to be in this milieu.
Eventually we got the sound editing and I became an assistant to Alan Bell,10 and I was booked on to do the footsteps or Foley as it’s called now. The guy who recorded the Foley was this gypsy called Johnny Lee,11 who had quite a reputation at the time. He was a lovely guy to be around but he would nip off to place bets, go to the pub, he’d play cards. Eventually he was fired by Lindsay who found him during the dubbing, upstairs playing cards for money. He saw a good thing in me – he shot the footsteps and showed me how to fit them in an hour and I fitted all the footsteps. I was very happy to do so, but I’m sure this was frowned upon by the others who were not getting the benefit of a hardened professional – this was my first time.
As a result of that my next job was with Alan Bell. I then worked for about four years in the sound side. I acquired that experience which I was very grateful for in retrospect. I suddenly realised four years had gone by and I don’t want to be in the sound side anymore, but I’d done some wonderful things. I’d worked in the dialogue area, the effects area and on music.
One of the things that Alan Bell used to do, for fun really, when he had a spare ten minutes, he used to make up loops. It was just putting together sounds in a certain way, usually to make something comic. It was like a wonderful use of sound, if you can imagine a thirty- or forty-five-second loop of things going on, and crazy things – putting in dialogue. It’s that sort of playing which I thought was very creative actually. How it relates to picture editing – I think it’s to do with the rhythm and pacing. There’s all sorts of ways that the sound experience was useful. For a start you know what can be done and what can’t be done. I did subsequently work for some editors who had no idea and they would do a cut from one scene to another and you’d think this is going to be a problem for the sound editor to make that smooth. Sometimes I know you’ve just got to sort the sound out and the picture has to take second place. I think working with a good effects editor as Alan was, you learn the importance of good sound effects and how sometimes it’s good to hold something for a period of time where you can afford to listen to something and feel a mood.
It’s a bit like music. You place a piece of music and you can feel that you need more time to make a mood out of it. I did a stint on ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ with the music editor. That was fascinating, because it was recording two musical numbers before it was shot, and that was just the technical business of recording the orchestra recording the vocalist and watching it all being cut together by this American music editor who had worked on ‘Some Like It Hot’12 and things like that. He had made Marilyn Monroe sing in tune, which he claimed would be an impossibility without certain tricks. It was great to see this expertise, making it into what would be used for playback later on. I thought afterwards, my God, they are paying me for this – I would pay to have this fun.
*************
I was working on the sound side of ‘Galileo’ which Joseph Losey13 directed for the American Film Theater, but I was realising that I wanted to move back to the picture side. So I made this known to the editor on ‘Galileo’, a chap called Reggie Beck,14 and he took me on as the first assistant on the next picture which was called ‘The Romantic Englishwoman’.15 It was just very pleasant from that moment on. Reggie had decided I would be good editor material – he was seventy then – but incredibly fast – but he wanted his trims handed to him, while he sat there like an oracle – it meant that you were looking over his shoulder all the time. So I would see exactly how he cut and how he would have a cut and move it in relation to the sound. He would move the picture a frame, two frames until he felt that the cut was in the right place. Then he’d cut it in sync as it were. You could see how he tested for the perfect place for that cut, rather than actually lacerating the film with splices. So in other words I learnt the importance of the cut – not simply going from A to B but actually when that moment occurs in relation to the sound, which is vital really. You can have two very easy images to cut between if you’re cutting on the first syllable of the word or the last, or even many words earlier.
RC:Was Losey with you all the time?
ME:Losey hardly ever came to the cutting room. I remember him there once maybe. For an emergency actually. There was one occasion when Reggie couldn’t see a way to do something at the beginning of a scene which Joe had wanted. I had privately thought well you could you know if you did this…
I must have said this to Reggie and he said you try it then. So I did it and then Reggie said well okay let’s get Joe. So he called Joe into the cutting room to look at it and Joe thought it was fine. That was the only time I remember Joe coming to the cutting room.
One would have a day. There was a theatre in Audley Square he liked to go to. You’d run the film in the morning then you’d stop for lunch in the pub round the corner – everybody – I worked on ‘The Go-between’16 subsequently and I remember Pinter17 came and we all sat around having beers. In the afternoon we would rock-and-roll, and maybe we went to that theatre because it was one of the first where you could rock-and-roll and you just had three buttons in front of you and you could just go back over things if you had to. Joe would be there commenting and I would be next to Reggie making notes, which is exactly what would eventually happen on a Steenbeck. Lindsay was totally different and liked to be there all the time. He was obviously a great exponent of editing and very interested and that was a vital part of the whole procedure for him. Whereas Joe was an old Hollywood director who never stopped working really. At least once we went from one film to another. Literally you finished dubbing one film on a Friday and started shooting the next on the following Monday.
RC:Somewhere in here was ‘My Ain Folk’ with Bill Douglas.18
ME:Yes, I was the sound editor, at the British Film Institute (BFI) in Waterloo. One day I chased Bill Douglas through the street market – he had run off with his film under his arm – he had six reels, and he was probably pleased to be relieved of some of them and I made sure I got all the picture. He just wanted to make a gesture I suppose. It wasn’t because of something I did – he had been on the phone and was clearly disturbed. He was given to volatility – I didn’t see much of that but you hear stories.
There was something that I did which Mamoun19 used to talk about to other people as being so brilliant and I thought it was a temporary solution. At some point when the boy is taken away in a van, Bill wanted the sound to be as if from his point of view – sort of muffled, although we were on the outside of the van. I did something that I’d learned in Hollywood, amongst other little tricks with magnetic sound, I just turned it over so that the sound bled through the base.
One of the tricks one did was to scratch the magnetic off the film with a razor blade so if you had something which was too harsh and sharp leading up to a cut you would scrape off a little bit to give it a fade out basically.
*************
RC:You said just now that you learnt things in Hollywood – when were you there?
ME:I was in Hollywood on ‘Straw Dogs’20 in 1971. I went as the assistant sound editor and then I became the dialogue editor. The reason it moved from Twickenham was that Peckinpah was doing another film in the States called ‘Junior Bonner’21 with Steve MacQueen and he was setting that up. So lucky me had to go for four months.
RC:So when you said you ‘learnt that in Hollywood’ it was clearly a learning opportunity.
ME:Yes, there were sound editors, old hands, that we worked with and they would teach you these little tricks. To begin with it seemed such sacrilege – you turn the film over – what! – but its just so delightfully simple and a very organic solution to a problem. Later in the dubbing theatre I said well I’ve done this but I will give you the track and you can do it properly, but they could never actually duplicate the effect, so that particular sound is what we went with.
During the mixing of ‘Straw Dogs’ Sam wanted to make a trailer and it was decided that I should cut it, being the most expendable having finished my work on the dialogue. I had three days to cut a trailer which Sam remembered and was very complimentary – they didn’t use it in the end but they used some of the ideas in it: Dustin Hoffman had this little toy thing on his desk with these balls that bang against each other and I used that as the basis for the trailer, as a sort of time machine, ticking, and that’s what they used and Sam remembered that and subsequently I got the job on ‘Cross of Iron’22 with Tony Lawson, as one of the editors.
RC:So was ‘Cross of Iron’ the real breakthrough for you into picture editing?
ME:That was my first proper credit, yes. At the height of the editing I think we probably had two cricket teams23 working on it, including all the sound and music editors. So it was quite an atmosphere and this was at Elstree Studios and on the lawn right outside the cutting room block was a caravan where Sam lived. Sometimes he’d take the weekend off and go into town and live it up, but basically he lived in this caravan on the lot all the time. He had two assistants who, together with him, would stoke up a barbecue every night, so we’d have very good food and a very good salad and wine, he provided. We’d be there until eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock every night – it was living the film. If you think of the way he directs, what he does is set up a situation and shoot it like a documentary. So his films are to do with setting up the event – its not make believe – he really makes it happen and I feel that was how he liked to be – the editing was a bit like that. He wanted to forget we were in London, it was like we were in our own little universe doing this great film. We were his group like the ‘The Wild Bunch’24 actually.
He used to go from cutting room to cutting room – we had Steenbecks – and sometimes he would run scenes in the screening room upstairs and one of us would come out and shout ‘Next!’ Just like going to the dentist – you would go and run your scene and if he was in a bad mood you would come out with a toothache rather than going in with one. It was all very good humoured, obviously competitive between us editors, but everyone was totally committed and loyal – no sort of back-stabbing.
RC:What Tony Lawson said was working with Sam Peckinpah taught him to be organised because of the amount of material and it was suicide if you got lost amongst it.
ME:Yes, the first scene I was given to do had forty thousand feet of rushes (seven hours). I mean that’s a lot of film. I was sort of prepared for this – I had spoken I think to Kevin Brownlow25 and I had a plan of how I was going to do this. I devised a scheme of how to deal with this vast amount of footage, which involved going through every piece and cutting out good bits. I divided the scenes into a, b, c, d, e, f, g and I’d have pegs in the bin and I’d put the good bits on to these pegs accordingly. So having gone through everything I had a bunch of bins in a rough order.
It happened to be very well received, the scene I did, and I wasn’t there when they ran it one evening, but he was so impressed with it they ran it three times and it was only on the third screening that he or someone else spotted a cameraman in blue jeans. This is a whole bunch of the platoon when there’s a birthday party and one of the soldiers goes a bit nuts – he’s had enough of the killing and goes mad and they all end up singing, and in the middle of this – I hadn’t spotted – there was a cameraman – right in the middle. So they hadn’t seen him until the third running so I could be excused that!
Peckinpah’s watchword was ‘Go for the moments!’ He did set it up in very much a documentary style. With three cameras and often slow motion, which he used so well, which explains a lot about the amount of footage. Working on a film like that is like working on three other films, you know, you cut it so much. People might well say that Peckinpah’s films got over cut, which is possibly true in some cases, but despite that one did get to work the material so much. He would always be pushing for something better – it was never completely forgetting what he’d said before – like some directors will say well why didn’t you do that and forget that you were going down a certain path – he always remembered the path he was on, and he’d never come up with new things that didn’t fit with that. He knew how to manipulate the material – he was a very good editor I think.
Mad times – I remember he went off the wagon – he started drinking again and to celebrate he gave us all a bottle of brandy, a very nice Dellerman brandy, one of the finest which I have enjoyed ever since, which was his way of justifying it for himself that everyone would have some, so we’d all be in the same boat.
*************
RC:How did you get involved with Bertrand Tavernier on ‘Deathwatch’?26
ME:I had cut a little film called ‘The Godsend’.27 It was a small horror film – a sort of ‘Omen’, with a little girl who had evil powers and this was for a women called Gabrielle Beaumont.28 A very nice woman who subsequently went to Hollywood. Any way she knew Bob (Robert) Parrish, writer and director, and ex-editor indeed, who was a great friend of Bertrand Tavernier, and so I think that’s how I got that job.
RC:I caught up with it recently at Canterbury – he came over and it was his print and I very much enjoyed it.
ME:It was slightly odd one in that I worked on the film from the beginning up in Glasgow, where it was shot and when I finished I had cut the whole film and then it went back to Paris and another editor took it on from that point, but I went over for the mixing and actually they hadn’t changed it much at all. I got on very well with Bertrand – it turned out that we had very similar jazz record collections and that was a big connection and I worked very hard – I really loved it – it was a beautiful film to cut, but subsequently I would have wanted to trim it down a bit. I thought it was a little bit indulgent, which a lot of films are. It was bit mournful, a bit melancholy, that maybe was part of its character. Some wonderful performers: Max von Sydow and Harvey Keitel. Harvey was there with his girl friend, whose father was a fire chief in New York, and I was the only person who he invited to his hotel for dinner. I realised that it was really that he wanted more closeups. He used to come into the cutting room and look over my shoulder and say, ‘Wouldn’t that be good if we had a closeup of me there?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, Harvey, that’s an interesting idea, I shall think about that’.
RC:So you would have enjoyed cutting Tavernier’s jazz film, ‘Round Midnight’.29
ME:Oh, very much so – I wish I had so much. In fact I keep in touch with Bertrand and he has a plan for a film about Billy Strayhorn, who wrote for Duke Ellington – I’ve certainly put in my word to be on that if it happens.
*************
RC:Then there was ‘Britannia Hospital’30 after ‘Take It or Leave It’.31
ME:That was a film about the pop group ‘Madness’ – how they started and eventually achieved success. I had cut some promos between features including some for that group so Dave Robinson, the head of Stiff Records, who directed and produced the film asked me to cut it. The script consisted of five half pages and it was all improvised and great fun to cut because we were inventing much of the film in the cutting room. It was shot with two 16mm cameras and blown up to 35mm, and is still available on video!
RC:Then back to Lindsay Anderson.
ME:Yes, I think the producers, Clive Parsons and Davina Belling, knew I was cutting by now and I had seen Lindsay from time to time since ‘O, Lucky Man!’32 anyway it was a very good experience. I had an assistant at that time called Denis Mactaggart, a very, very good assistant, but he was so amazed by the force of Lindsay’s personality that it took him several weeks to get used to it, he was a very strong character – someone who was never relaxing. A lot of directors would at some time just want to sit down, have a cup of tea and be quiet, but Lindsay was never like that; always mentally on top form – he never coasted, and that’s quite impressive to come across when you are not used to it.
On ‘O, Lucky Man’ he hadn’t wanted David (Gladwell) to be cutting whilst he was shooting and eventually that was taken over by Tom Priestley,33 but on this film we discussed it a bit and I thought it was useful for me to be cutting without the constraints of a director saying this is how it should be. So I did cut it during the shooting and it was fine. Afterwards he came in and did a full days work with everyone. Lindsay was of that school – if you’re doing a film this is what you are occupied with and you don’t do anything else.
There’s one cut right in the title sequence that I still don’t like. It’s a terrible continuity thing, where a nurse is walking along and she throws a cloak over her shoulder and then you cut and she’s doing the same thing again, and it was purely to accommodate titles or music or both. Lindsay’s attitude was oh, it doesn’t matter, of course it doesn’t matter!
*************
Then I did ‘The Lords of Discipline’ with Franc Roddam,34 for Paramount, probably his best film, I would say. The one he did before it was quite famous – ‘Quadrophenia’.35 He picked me because he liked the ‘Madness’ film – he probably liked the slight roughness of that. It was all set in a military academy in America, but shot in England, except ten days on location over there. We did a lot of previews on that – I think I had five trips – to and from California, all first class and a Concorde trip to New York at one point.
The person in charge of Paramount at the time was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who subsequently started Dreamworks with Spielberg and Gethin.36 He used to just sit down and make notes – go through the film one, two, three and in one case I remember he had forty-two points all neatly written. Frank would get so mad about this. It was one of those films – set in the deep south, Frank envisaged it as slow paced, lazy Mississippi feeling with occasional bursts of violence and this didn’t work really. His images just weren’t Kubrick images that you could look at for ages – you know – they didn’t have whatever it takes for a Kubrick image to be something you want to watch for five minutes. You have to have that intensity and drama within the frame and it ended up being quite a pacey film, very well regarded in that sort of way, instead of a lazy three-hour Mississippi epic.
RC:Was that hard work, actually getting it down or did the material allow you to?
ME:The material seemed to be more comfortable at that pace. I never quite got this slowness thing – the images weren’t there. It was probably the first major experience I had with the problems of endings. We ended up with a freeze frame.
Then it was ‘Comfort and Joy’ with Bill Forsyth,37 for which I had an interview with him and Clive Parsons and Davina Belling. Having done ‘Britannia Hospital’ they thought I might be good with Bill. I remember he hardly ever looked at me and I thought he’s not going to like me, but he did and I got the job and went up to Glasgow for two months.
Bill loved to come to the cutting room to see what I’d done – often at the end of the day. The shooting process is not his favourite thing so he always enjoyed being in the cutting room and he could be very creative in a unique Bill way, as he is in the writing.
RC:Then ‘The Bride’.38
ME:Yes, Franc Roddam again. Jennifer Beals and Sting. It was a strange film really – Franc wasn’t concentrating, partly because he was concentrating on a certain person. Columbia again – the American circus, the previews – one learns things politically as you go along the executives especially. Frank didn’t want to hear what they had to say, and if I could see there was some sense in some of the suggestions then I had to try and express this without appearing to be on the other side. It’s silly not to try good ideas, just because of the person who said them. That’s a frequent conundrum really.
*************
RC:I suppose you get used to it, but since I’ve never experienced it I always think if you think you’ve done your best with the cut, and then someone or several people come along and say no this isn’t the finishing line you’ve got to do another lap and then another – it can be tough I’m sure.
ME:It’s very tough and it’s happened on this film really. You get executives coming and not wanting to leave it alone. Thinking it can still be better and you can do this and that and sometimes they are not altogether bad ideas – sometimes they are – sometimes they are stupid and you think how could you imagine that, but sometimes there are things which are worth implementing. It seems to happen quite frequently now and whether this is the result of the famous Robert McKee39 – all executives going to script writing classes – I don’t know what this is, but everyone seems to think that – there’s a sort of language isn’t there – the third act and redemption and all that sort of thing that people talk about and they think they have something to say. A lot of the time it maybe justified but you think well, it’s not their position to say – it’s certain people’s position to say things, but part of the reason we’re in the job is to make a contribution and you have a say – so this is a political thing in itself. In the olden days you get one strong executive who would be a film enthusiast too, which nowadays nobody is – they’re business people really and that’s a little bit sad. I mean we were given locked picture last week, but there was no sense of happiness amongst the executives, it was just sort of oh well that’s another job done. Even the dreadful or dreaded Harvey Weinstein is an enthusiast – he’s one of the last moguls who you know loves film. He may be pretty brutal in many ways, but for better or worse he really does enjoy – he can be a child in the cinema, which the grey executives can’t, and they’ll never make a decision.
*************
RC:Then there was ‘Jewel of the Nile’.40
ME:I met Michael Douglas when I was on ‘The Bride’ in Los Angeles. I think there had been a recommendation from another editor to see me. The director came over here five months later and I was on the list and got the job – as though it had been set up. Michael was the producer as well as the star. It was a very good experience. There was one unfortunate aspect – they were shooting in Morocco and France, and so on and I used to go out and take them scenes. One time I was supposed to go with a very important part of the film where an aircraft gets taken over by mistake and Michael Douglas can’t fly it and he ends up driving down the main street of this town with all the donkeys and animals, and it was quite a big set piece. I had planned to have it mixed – to have all the sound effects put on, so it would make it work, but they advanced my trip by about five days. I went without it being dubbed, which was a mistake. So they started to worry, probably about me. Until they came back at the end of shooting – they saw the whole film and it was great – it was all rough mixed – but I had sensed disquiet – it needed to have sound – I could see it mute and know it was working, but they just saw it as a series of rushes. It’s like making a scene out of, as I did once with Laurence Olivier, when he could only remember one line at a time, and I had to cut this together, so all his lines eventually flowed beautifully and he could actually read the legendary telephone book and make it sound like a piece of Shakespeare. When you string things together that’s what you are doing – you’re sort of taking little tiny sections and knitting it together, but if you are the producer and director, and you’ve only seen the bits – it takes a little bit of eyewash – something to make them see it as something different.
Anyway it all finished happily and for a time I kept in touch with Michael – sending him the occasional script and so on – he was always good at getting back in contact.
RC:So you’ve kept doing literary things.
ME:Yes I kept knocking off the odd script.
RC:Scripts rather than any other writing.
ME:Yes, film scripts, well it’s a great way if you are not working – we all of us have a period of months – we have our retirement spread out over our working life – that’s a great time to make films without it costing a penny – sitting at your table and writing.
RC:And are these original scripts?
ME:Yes, although I wrote one based on a novel, which I tried to get – this was my push for directing – in fact it was Bill Forsyth – he suggested I show it to his agent, and he suggested I should go to Australia which was where the script was set and he put me in touch with an agent there who was William Morris in Sydney, and I spent six weeks there setting it up and when I left somebody had said that they would make it and it was in a go position. Then it collapsed – it was a shame really! It was a Colin Wilson novel called ‘All Day Saturday’ – a love affair between young people set in the sheep farms of Australia. I suppose it was written in the 1930s. So that was my main attempt to direct a movie, but I don’t feel any great regrets at not having done so – especially seeing the nonsense that some directors have to go through – every day they have to put up with idiot executives – and I really enjoy playing with the toys, and now that we have Avids there’s so much more possibilities because you can now play with the sound in a way one never did.
RC:When did you make the transition to non-linear from cutting on film?
ME:It was ‘Samson and Delilah’, which Nicolas Roeg41 directed. That was made for – it was part of a long biblical series – co-financed from Italy and America. I worked on ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’42 as a sound editor and Nicolas remembered me from that. He was going to be shooting in Morocco for eight weeks and I thought that would give me the opportunity to learn the machine. The producer paid for me to go on a two-day course at Lightworks and I took to it like a duck to water, because I’d already done a lot of computer music at home – I’d been doing this for a decade or more and I just loved it. I wouldn’t go back to film now – by comparison it is so slow and cumbersome.
RC:Do you however create your own thinking time – rather than do another version of a scene?
ME:Oh yes, but I don’t do alternative versions and, touch wood, I haven’t worked with a director who says lets do another version – I’ve heard about this – but its never happened. Once on this film we went back to the cut I did originally of a scene and its quite good for the ego – ‘Why don’t we try?’ – ‘That’s how I did it first’ – and out it comes. It’s a funny thing – a bit like the first impression on meeting someone – your first impression is something that lasts forever – and I’m sure its true of a film in a way – if you see a certain version it often sticks in your brain and you realise you are spending quite a lot of effort trying to recover that and there it is, now, in the Avid at the click of a button.
*************
RC:So would you say its been a ‘normal’ career – a combination of serendipity, accidents, fate and going back to people you have worked with before?
ME:Well, its good working with people that you know, and you know that there is mutual trust, but its also good to work with new people – actually its funny how many of them were first time film-makers, but Mark’s43 the only one who has gone on to make five – it’s a tough world really. It is very organic you realise its all people – you never benefit immediately from a film it takes four or five years usually.
RC:If someone wants to be an editor now do you think that the route that life took you – was a good way to develop?
ME:Oh, very good, oh yes – I think the sound background has been invaluable especially now with computers. On several films I’ve done previews in a cinema from the sound that I create here in the Avid. I’ve got a permanent eight tracks up – two or four of them devoted to music and the others with dialogue and effects. You just know how to deal with it. Also you can do EQ here, I can change the pitch, I can change the length. It’s just a wonderful toy to play with. So I think that sound career was very useful for me.
RC:And watching Reggie Beck have that flexibility.
ME:Absolutely.
RC:Looking back, have there been films or types of films you would have liked to cut?
ME:I would have liked to cut a musical. What’s that film with Michelle Pfeiffer where she sings ‘Making Whoopee’ draped across the piano?
RC:Oh, ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’.44
ME:I would have loved to have cut that film – all sorts of aspects to it: the comedy, the music, the story – it was just something I would have liked to have done. I would have liked to have snuck in one or two big films. I did enjoy ‘The Jewel of the Nile’ very much – a sort of adult romp. The day-to-day work on one of those big Hollywood films is quite pleasurable and you have a great support system. The studio post-production department is there at your call to help you, and its fantastic. I enjoy the pressure – just delivering on time – I’d have liked one or two more opportunities like that.
RC:Looking at another aspect – did the Tavernier experience – would you have liked to have done any more European films?
ME:Um – yes – yes I would absolutely. Funnily enough last year I had a meeting with a Portuguese director – he’d made one award winning film. I really tried to make it happen. It was a really good story too, so that I would have liked to have done. European films are not quite the same as they were, you know. One of the other sound jobs I did was I worked for Antonioni in Rome on ‘The Passenger’.45 Not for long – only about six weeks, but I went out to do the automated dialogue replacement (ADR) for the English actors in it. He asked me to bring some sound effects and Antonioni had cut three frames out of about twenty or thirty shots and they were mostly desert and some city shots and he asked me to find sound effects for these shots, based on these frames. It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever had to do. I tried to put my imagination to work – I wasn’t sent a script, apart from the scenes I was going to ADR. So I went out there with all the sound effects and it was interesting except I never got to see the film.
There was one screening and the windows all around the projection area were covered in newspaper and there was a tiny little thing for the projectionist to focus. I sort of assumed that I would be going to the screening because it was just him and his editor. We were in the bar having very pleasant discussions about this, that and the other and then he went off and shook my hand and said goodbye. He was very protective of his movies even though you were working on the film. Interesting and sad – I mean it was quite a good film.
RC:No, I like that film a lot. I’ve been reading Wim Wenders diary of working as Antonioni’s amanuensis on ‘Beyond the Clouds’46 – a very sad book really – not being able to communicate properly – having to find a way of conveying his desires. Maybe it’s partly his personality even before he became ill.
ME:Probably a combination, but one of his films would be in my top ten if not two. ‘L’Avventura’47 I just thought was superb. It was so impressive to see these films coming out at the time. A great visual sense – a great intellectual sense too. One looks to America for films like that now, I feel. Films like ‘Being John Malkovich’48 are the sort of films you might have expected from Italy thirty years ago. It’s that sort of film you know – Spike Jonze and those sort of people.
RC:Yes, there’s a ‘European’ feel to the Coen Brothers.
ME:Well I think that America borrowed from Europe a lot. You think of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’49 and they actually wanted Godard to direct that on the basis of his film, ‘Breathless’.50 I think there’s a whole bunch of other films too, like the Taviani Brothers in Italy who have influenced – and it obviously takes decades before people can do this with a sense of authority.
Notes
1. Brassed Off – Mark Herman, 1996.
2. Richard (Dick) Lester – Director particularly anarchic comedy, e.g. the Beatles in ‘A Hard Days Night’, 1964.
3. Gulliver’s Travels – Jack Sher, 1960?
4. Stephen Cross – Editor, film-maker.
5. David Gladwell – Editor, director – ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’, 1981.
6. If – Lindsay Anderson, 1968.
7. Lindsay Anderson (1923–94) – Stage and film director. Passionate leader of ‘Free Cinema’ movement in Britain in the 1960s.
8. This Sporting Life – Lindsay Anderson, 1963.
9. Memorial Enterprises – Michael Medwin and Albert Finney’s film company.
10. Alan Bell – Sound editor, highly regarded by peers.
11. Johnny Lee – His true identity remains a mystery.
12. Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder (1959) – certainly Monroe sounds convincing.
13. Galileo (1975) – Joseph Losey (1909–84) who came to Britain to escape the witch-hunts of the Macarthy era and whose films were never less than interesting.
14. Reggie Beck – Editor for Joseph Losey from ‘Eva’ (1962) to ‘Steaming’ in 1985.
15. The Romantic Englishwoman – Joseph Losey, 1975.
16. The Go-between – Joseph Losey, 1970.
17. Harold Pinter – Very distinctive writer for stage, TV and cinema. Also actor.
18. My Ain Folk (1973), Bill Douglas (1937–91) – The middle part of his autobiographical trilogy. His was a great talent that left us too few films.
19. Mamoun Hassan – Editor, producer (‘No Surrender’ – 1985) formerly Head of BFI Production Board and passionate supporter of radical talents like Bill Douglas.
20. Straw Dogs – Sam Peckinpah, 1971.
21. Junior Bonner – Sam Peckinpah, 1972.
22. Cross of Iron – Sam Pekinpah, 1977.
23. Two cricket teams – At least 22 editing staff.
24. The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah, 1969.
25. Kevin Brownlow – Editor and champion of ‘silent’ cinema for whom we have to thank for some remarkable restoration of gems like ‘Napoleon’ (1926), Abel Gance. His books make wonderful reading especially ‘The Parades Gone By’.
26. Deathwatch (La Mort en Direct) – Bertrand Tavernier, 1980.
27. The Godsend – 1980.
28. Gabrielle Beaumont – Director, most recently, ‘Diana, the People’s Princess’, 1998.
29. Round Midnight – Bertrand Tavernier’s tribute to jazz, 1986.
30. Britannia Hospital – Lindsay Anderson, 1981.
31. Take It or leave It – Dave Robinson, 1981.
32. O, Lucky Man! – Lindsay Anderson, 1973.
33. Tom Priestley – Editor, including ‘Deliverance’ (1972) and ‘Tess’ (1979).
34. The Lords of Discipline – Franc Roddam, 1983.
35. Quadrophenia – Franc Roddam, 1979.
36. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dreamworks, Spielberg and Gethin – The company formed to create a different kind of ‘Studio’ in Hollywood.
37. Comfort and Joy – Bill Forsyth, 1984.
38. The Bride – Franc Roddam, 1985.
39. Robert McKee – Script guru.
40. Jewel of the Nile – Michael Douglas, 1985.
41. Samson and Delilah – Nicolas Roeg, 1996.
42. The Man Who Fell to Earth – Nicolas Roeg, 1976.
43. Mark Herman – Talented writer/director, most recently ‘Hope Springs’, 2003.
44. The Fabulous Baker Boys – Steve Kloves, writer of the Harry Potter screenplays, 1989.
45. The Passenger – Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975.
46. Beyond the Clouds – Antonioni with the collaboration of Wim Wenders, 1995.
47. L’Avventura – Antonioni, 1960.
48. Being John Malkovich – Spike Jonze, 1999.
49. Bonnie and Clyde – Arthur Penn, 1967.
50. Breathless (À bout de souffle) – Jean-Luc Godard, 1960.