32  Gillies Mackinnon, Pia Di Ciaula and Roger Crittenden: A Conversation

Two weeks before lock-off on the film ‘The Escapist’ the director, Gillies Mackinnon and his editor, Pia Di Ciaula talked with me in their edit suite at De Lane Lea in London’s Soho.

Pia Di Ciaula on set with Gillies Mackinnon (Courtesy of Pia Di Ciaula)

RC:It might be best Gillies if you could talk first about your feelings about the editing process. GM: I’ll do my best Roger. I think it’s quite hard to talk about some things which are processes in film-making. That doesn’t only apply to editing. Whenever I get into a situation where I have to talk about how do you work with actors or how do you visualise how to shoot a scene, or whatever it might be, I always feel as if you don’t want to be too articulate, because if there’s any sort of magical process at work you don’t want to put too many names to it, you know.

I’ve been in a situation where I had to describe to a group of young film-makers, in a whole day session, trying to tell them in the morning what I do when I make a film. Then in the afternoon I had to demonstrate what I do, and I did everything opposite to what I had said. (Pia laughs.) So I got a bit of a lesson from that. I was quite stunned by the experience, you know. I bought a bottle of wine on the way home that night I remember.

At Film School¹ I spent a lot of time in the editing rooms. I thought that was very important background to be a director. In fact I don’t understand how people can direct unless they have done that, because it’s got to do with rhythm and in a way knowing what’s necessary to shoot. To be there in a cutting room and to have to face up to the problems of all the inadequacies of material and try to be inventive. That whole process gives you a really good background so you know what’s required when you are directing.

Actually when I first went to film school and I cut the first film I had I was so disorganised. We used to move from room to room you know, I wouldn’t always get the same room.

RC:The mobile trim bin syndrome.

GM:I’m afraid it’s worse than that Roger. I would never have wanted to say this until now but I had all my trims in one big plastic bag!

PC:We all did that!

GM:Oh did you, oh I’m so relieved, I used to walk around with all my trims bundled up together inside a plastic bag. Lots of time to experiment at film school. That was great. When I cut the film that was my graduation film, ‘Passing Glory’.² Well actually I didn’t cut it, it was cut by David Barry, we had all the time in the world to cut that film. He was physically cutting it and I was there working with him and between the two of us we could go round and round the film and finally come to a conclusion. Which is not a luxury we have now of course. Now we have a certain amount of time and we have to pace ourselves, but then it wasn’t like that and it was wonderful. Anyway film school was the last time I physically cut a film myself, which was the one in the plastic bag!

Since then I’ve worked with a variety of editors and the style is a little different every time. One thing I would say is that I think I’ve always worked with good editors. That’s something I’m very grateful for, because working with a bad editor can be a nightmare.

I think it can be quite difficult for editors because they often have to take a position with a director. They have to be quite tactful and that becomes like they are walking on glass. It becomes very tense, you know. It’s difficult for them to say what they really think sometimes. One of the good things working with Pia, is that she always says what she really thinks. She doesn’t seem to have a problem with that! Sometimes she’ll chew on it for a bit before it comes out, but it always comes out.

RC:Was that true from the start?

PC:I bit my tongue a few times on ‘Regeneration’.³

GM:I guess that was so in the first couple of weeks. I do remember that Pia was cutting in a style that I found too fast for the film. I didn’t say very much really, but I’d recognised that there was a style employed that wasn’t right for the film that was going to be made. That’s all I said, and when I came back four or five days later it was just completely different. I know there was some process that Pia went through to get to that point. After that I felt that she completely got the right note on what I was doing.

RC:I think that Pia said that and what was implied was that she had to let the material speak to her and breathe. You said you’d come off doing Movies of the Week back to back.

PC:NBC!

RC:A kind of heavy rhythm.

GM:That was interesting that Pia was able to make the adjustment. Some people would not have been able to, they would have been thrown into a state of panic, probably, not really knowing what to do. What was miraculous about it was how completely she got the note.

PC:I guess once you hit that rhythm, because obviously I had to find a slower pace and rhythm within myself in order to do it. Then once you find it you know you can go from there.

RC:In a way it needs a sort of courage doesn’t it? Letting something breathe is in a way so much harder than just cutting from moment to moment that is moving it along.

PC:That’s right, it was so different from anything I had done, because working for US networks they wanted to see everyone’s reactions, really quickly. It was a different style and pace altogether.

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RC:Do you, Gillies, see yourself as a European film-maker rather than a Hollywood film-maker. Can you see that distinction in your own attitude and style.

GM:I think probably European. I can sort of say that because I’ve had experience of working with the Americans you see. ‘The Playboys’⁴ was financed by the Goldwyns, but it still had a mid-Atlantic feel. It had three American actors, playing Irish, but it wasn’t an American film flat out. It had a European very quirky quality as well. So I learnt a lot about Hollywood on that film. I went through the test screening process etcetera. Then later I did a Touchstone film called ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’⁵ with Steve Martin. Then I was working completely inside the Hollywood system. That was a gigantic learning curve. To find out what Hollywood is and not what we think Hollywood is. I lived and breathed it for that year.

RC:Was it uncomfortable for you?

GM:No, actually, I find that people assume that it would be, but if I look back on it I went into it in a very realistic way. I wasn’t going in there with any illusions about what was happening. It was Steve Martin’s screenplay and he had asked me to do it because of ‘The Playboys’. To some extent we were quite close together creatively, which meant that the studio left us alone, to a large extent. They let us go and make the film. My impression when I look back on it was that I was making a film which was a little bit less personal than some of the other films I’d made. I was, maybe, making it more for Steve Martin than for myself although I think there’s a lot of me in it as well.

It was interesting on all levels to do. They were very generous was the thing that I noticed, but the downside of that is that you start getting used to a lot of luxuries. You begin to think that is what you should have. I recognised that funny little horrible gnome growing up inside of me, and that’s when I decided to come back and do ‘Small Faces’⁶ which is a low-budget film set in Glasgow. Creatively that was the right thing for me to do.

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RC:Going through the whole process from film school onwards is there any sense in which the experience of editing feeds back into even the scripting of new projects.

GM:Oh yes definitely. I’m writing something just now, a prolonged first draft which is a more ambitious kind of a film really, a period film set in Scotland. When I was writing it before I started making ‘The Escapist’ I think I was having real trouble being disciplined with myself, but after the experience of shooting this film which was so intense, when I came back and read it again, and boy I felt like a butcher. When I get into the cutting room then it makes me cautious in another way. I ask myself questions like will I cut this scene out. I think ‘yeah, I think I probably will’, so I don’t write it, you know. Yeah, it definitely has a kick back in that way.

RC:Did you or do you have models of film-makers whose work you admire and who represent the kind of film-making you would prefer to aspire to?

GM:I’ve got a few, heroes if you like. I’m talking here about people like Tarkovsky, Klimov, Visconti, Fellini, Pasolini, Kurosawa, Bergman,⁷ you know. So like I probably shouldn’t say that, but you know it’s the truth! These are the people who I think were really kind of geniuses in their way, and were very true and very real. I do think we are living in a time where we have a lot of very banal values being applied to cinema. There’s a freedom in these films and I guess a lot of them really weren’t made for very much money.

RC:They often had time but not money.

GM:That’s true, Tarkovsky had all the time in the world.⁸ I mean I think they were principally entertainers as film-makers, that’s how I see it. It kind of irritates me when people keep talking about being artists. It’s just a bit of self-flattery, actually, but I do think there are some artists in film-making.

RC:Do you two ever have conversations about other film-makers?

GM:Yes, we talk about other film-makers and other films, but we have slightly different tastes don’t we. Pia will enjoy the more mainstream film and it’s a problem for me. Pia can buy the ticket and …

PC:And I enjoy every minute of it …

GM:And I don’t do that you see, I go in there with attitude!

(General laughter)

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RC:What about the fact that the editing process begins during the shoot? Obviously an important part of the value of that is trust, isn’t it. That you are getting another pair of eyes from the moment you start shooting, which then feeds back into how you feel it is going and what you shoot.

GM:Absolutely. This film that we just made because of certain script complications was being re-invented during the shooting. I had no time to sit in the cutting room during the shoot. This was a six-day-a-week shoot from six o’clock in the morning to about nine o’clock when I got home in the evening. I rarely was in the cutting room. Now with an editor who I didn’t completely trust in that way, to cut it a bit like I would cut it, plus take a view, and add stuff in and try stuff. I am just basically confident that Pia will be doing a good job. By the end of the cut, there was a cut there of the whole story. It was a very good cut. It takes you quite far on (in a working relationship) to have that work happening, co-existing with the shooting. Plus Pia can call up the set and say there’s something missing here or why don’t you do that. If she says to me (aside) and I didn’t get you the wire shot, sorry (laughter) if she says to me, I really need a shot of a barbed wire fence, I will try and get it. Even if I don’t really understand why she wants it, that’s fine we’ll shoot it.

RC:You both have, in different ways a visual background. The relationship of image to storytelling is clearly crucial in what you’ve just said. There is a shot that you could get that will make a difference, because an editor could say there’s a problem here and then you have to work out what might solve it. If the editor can go one step further and say if we had that particular image …

GM:No Pia will be very, very specific, about what it is we’re missing.

RC:I understand from Pia that sound is very important to her in the process of cutting. Is that something that you value as well?

GM:Yeah, it is. Pia will always like create something to suggest at least where we are going, even if it’s not what we finally have. She’s very good on music too. She’s very good on finding the right kind of music for a scene.

RC:I remember you both talking about the research for music on ‘Hideous Kinky’,⁹ and all the listening you had to do.

GM/PC: Yeah!

GM:Big deal on ‘Hideous Kinky’ because we had to get stuff we could afford! For instance I’d let Pia listen to ‘The Incredible String Band’, which I had and she thought it was just terrible. In the end you did take a track and put it on there. It was not the kind of track I liked from the period, it sounded more like Cat Stevens,¹⁰ but actually it really worked on the scene. Now I would never have made that connection, so that is great and it’s in the film.

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RC:I remember telling Pia that Dede Allen¹¹ was once asked what people should do who want to be editors, and she said surprisingly to her audience, ‘Go to the theatre’. In this case it was New York, so it was ‘go to Broadway, go to off-Broadway, go to off-off-Broadway – unless you’re inside the way performance works you’ll never be able to cut’. Is that something you have a dialogue about? You, Gillies, obviously have a sense whether a performance is working or not – you have to.

GM:I’m not sure I am answering your question or not, but Pia is sometimes sensitive to emotional qualities that I have missed. Does that make sense, Pia?

PC:Can you come up with an example?

GM:It seems very familiar, that you are seeing something that has touched you, and you try to retain that in the film, but I haven’t valued it enough.

PC:Did I mention that Gillies gave me a script on ‘Regeneration’ that was just a sound script? He went through every scene and listed all the sound effects he heard. I’ve never received that from a director. So that’s how important sound is to him. I still have that script, because I thought it was so unusual.

RC:Talking about Europe in general, you can’t make generalisations, because there are so many different approaches to film across the continent.

GM:I think it is changing. I find that this American influx, starting up companies over here – a producer put it this way to me, it’s like everyone woke up one morning and had this great idea, ‘Let’s make a commercial film!’ This is such a pathetic interpretation of Hollywood and how it operates. The clichés that have been falling out of people’s mouths these days, are appalling. They’ve read it in a book or seen it in a movie or they’ve picked it up from somebody. It’s just not the way Hollywood operates. I find that when we adopt the Hollywood style it’s kind of like really banal. We should stick to our own way of doing things, but obviously money has become so important. The accountants seem to make the basic decisions now.

As for the cutting room, I think I am very comfortable on set, shooting a film. I get my boots on in the morning. I put on my armour, and off I go. I fight all day long struggle, struggle, struggle against time, against the weather, whatever it might be, the problems you might face. There’s never a moments respite, and I’m very comfortable with that you know, with that physically demanding process. It’s physically coming at you the whole time. Then, when that ends and I go to the cutting room, I’m not as comfortable with the cutting room. That’s why it’s good to have an editor. My stamina is not the same as when I’m shooting. It’s like I switch off a wee bit, because I can’t think it through.

When I was wondering what to say to you Roger, I was remembering one thing. I don’t know whether this is familiar to you or not Pia. When we come across a problem and it can’t quite be solved, I will express a lot of frustration and be very irritable and leave.

PC:No!

GM:(laughs) I mean rather than sticking with it. Then I will come back the next day and Pia will often have found a completely different way of looking at it. It’s not a conscious strategy on my part, but I think I – do I do that?

PC:You do it, but I’m very happy to continue on my own.

GM:There you go!

PC:Well, the problem is if someone’s with you the whole time you almost have to go in their direction, and then you can’t go off on tangents that you would when you are on your own.

RC:Yeah I know, and you’re almost dependent on their energy.

PC:I know.

RC:Which has to filter through you.

PC:That’s right and I just find that you end up taking a lot longer to get to the point. I mean I like working with you but it’s also healthy to have some time on my own.

GM:I think that’s definite. I can feel it myself. It’s like you all get bogged down in things. Actually when I do walk away I can almost feel it in a tangible sense, that this is what Pia needs. For me to not be around and often the film will make a lot of progress when I do that.

PC:That’s why I cant imagine getting all the material at wrap and starting cutting with a director in the room, for the whole time. I don’t think you are getting the maximum out of the editor if you do that.

GM:There’s also the issue of disagreement, and I think that can be a problem if there isn’t a basic relationship between editor and director. I think what tends to happen is that sometimes Pia won’t say that she disagrees but I know that she does.

PC:Well until it’s locked anything can be changed!

GM:But usually she will tell me. In the end there’s a moment comes when you recognise that whatever I felt or Pia felt before about what we were doing, if you find something better or something which is in advance of where you were before you drop it. I don’t think we have a problem about disagreement, do we?

PC:No I think it’s healthy.

RC:Actually it’s essential isn’t it?

PC:It is.

RC:Wouldn’t you feel more uncomfortable if Pia agreed with everything?

PC:Oh yes I’ll do that Gillies, you know, I’ll do that, oh yes!

GM:Oh no, no, no – I wouldn’t trust that in the first place. So there’s no problem with disagreement. There’s probably a problem with moods though! (laughs).

PC:How can you say that!

GM:No, I’m quite moody.

PC:You’re not moody.

GM:Och, I’m not moody, okay I’m not moody. I made a mistake there.

PC:(Laughs).

GM:I think she’s just being kind to me, really.

PC:No, I’m joking, but I’m also sensitive to maybe he’s bored right, because maybe …

GM:Just because I’m snoring it doesn’t mean I’m bored!

PC:No because it must be hard to sit in a room and watch somebody work, and not be hands on. I know I would find it frustrating.

GM:Well we have a process anyway of working. I feel I haven’t backed off enough recently because it’s getting near the end and I’ve got to be here and maybe that’s a mistake. The process is looking at it, both of us making notes in our own notebook, Pia works, then we look at it again. Then every Friday we have a screening. We just watch the film without making notes. Maybe ask a few people along to get some feed back.

RC:At what point does watching the whole film as a habit, when does that start? Are you saying that once there is a complete cut you will always review the whole film?

GM:No we also identify particular sequences to work on.

RC:With this film or any of the other films have you to any extent thrown the structure in the air?

PC:Well we did that on ‘Regeneration’ quite a bit. It starts with scene 25 then goes 7 to 11 and so on. This one as well, because it was a very linear script.

GM:No matter how much we refine that cut on this linear story, telling the story A to Z and no matter how many dramatic moments there were I always had this ultimate feeling of it being just not tense enough, you know. Then we started to experiment a little bit with time, and it seemed to create much more tension. The first time we ever did that I thought wow, this is really a different movie.

RC:Why do you think you have less stamina?

GM:In the cutting room? Maybe the word stamina isn’t the right work, maybe it’s concentration. It’s like when I have a problem when I’m shooting I am totally relentless in solving that problem. Even when I think I’ve solved that problem I’m still working on it, to see if there’s something I’ve missed. I work hundred per cent on the problems. I deal with the problems as they come up you know, bat them off! In the cutting room I don’t have the same capacity mentally. I’ll often want to go to sleep, no I mean really. It feels like the right thing for me to do rather than sit here and keep on thinking is to go to sleep and maybe I’ll waken up with the solution. Seriously that’s what happens with me.

RC:Of course the stamina with electronic editing is supposed to be harder to sustain that it was with film editing. Although it doesn’t stop people staying glued to their Avid for hours and hours on end.

GM:Well, that’s another issue by the way. Maybe that is related to it, because when we used to cut on film everything took a lot longer. It all happens so instantaneously now that if you are involved on any kind of a deeper level then you can’t possibly catch up with what you are doing physically. So maybe that’s why I either have to walk away or lie down there and go to sleep, for a wee while. I don’t think your deeper feelings and the electronic medium are in rhythm with each other. Not for me anyway, Pia you know.

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RC:That reminds me of Walter Murch’s comments on how you work as an editor and the comparison between cutting on film and electronic non-linear editing. You know he did the re-cut of ‘Touch of Evil’¹² according to the memo sent to the studio by Orson Welles after they had removed him from the film and finished it without his involvement or agreement. Walter found himself sitting opposite Robert Wise¹³ at some dinner so they said the first editor for Orson Welles meets the last, after his death. As I remember it from Walter, they ended up deciding that the way they cut was a combination of working from the end of a sequence to the beginning, mute with their eyes closed! Walter said that when he had to find a cut point on the Moviola he would close his eyes and hit the brake and if he stopped at the same frame twice he knew he’d got the rhythm right.

GM:The Zen of cutting.

RC:And the idea of watching a cut fast backwards on the Steen-beck actually told you something about the rhythm. You’re ingesting it in a different way.

GM:That’s like what they tell you at art school that you look at your painting in the mirror and you get to see it in it’s true light, because everything gets so adjusted to what you are doing, angles and shapes and everything, but if you actually look at it in a mirror you see it afresh.

RC:Like drawing negative space.

GM:That’s very interesting for me, because I do feel that taking out all issues of content that essentially its rhythm. You know its light and rhythm. That’s what film-making is really. Including sound – light, dark, rhythm – light and shade, rhythm. You can apply that to everything, picture, sound, performance, everything. You can boil it down essentially to something so abstract that you can play it backwards and learn something from it. That I find very, very interesting.

GM:I have a certain kind of madness to so with ignoring continuity. I remember continuity and the costume designer at two o’clock in the morning on an ice rink in Edinburgh saying to me, Gillies you cannot do this, because of a list of things that have happened before. It’s just absolutely in my mind that it’s going to be this way and I don’t care about the continuity. That is a kind of madness that overtakes me sometimes you know.

RC:Presumably you carry that particular madness into the cutting. It might seem perverse but you will ignore continuity because you want to do something else.

GM:It will never be the main thing in my mind. Even in the cutting room Pia will say to me well actually you can’t do that. I never take that as a very serious sign that I can’t do it. I don’t know why that is, because in preparing a film I give a lot of attention to detail, about what will be in a scene. So at the same time I’m going against the grain. If Pia says to me there’s a continuity problem I just never think that is going to be a reason for not doing it. You know I have actually with a certain amount of glee, presented things on screen with such glaring continuity errors that nobody has ever, ever mentioned.

RC:Then I remember looking at certain scenes in ‘Before the Revolution’¹⁴ the early Bertolucci, with Roberto Perpignani where there is no continuity of action at all. They were obviously playing. They had both absorbed the ‘New Wave’, and were enjoying that playing. But the rhythm is absolutely right. If you stopped at each cut you would say you can’t cut from there to there, there is no match of continuity. People are standing, they are sitting, they are in a different place.

GM:If the rhythm’s right, if it is dramatic enough you know it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to be bothering or seeing that you know, but I think we are touching on something a little bit different. I think it’s a little bit like the old masons who would build the perfect building, and put in a dud brick.

RC:Or the Turkish carpet which must have a flaw.

GM:I think there’s a little bit of that, because I think that one of the greatest thrills I have when I sit with an audience is when I know that a big mistake is coming up. I get really, really excited. What do I love in the old movies by people like Pasolini; it’s the mistake. It always touches me. When I see the bad camera move or the flaw, it always touches me. It really does. So maybe that’s why I get the big thrill in my own film if there’s something I know is wrong and I’m sitting with an audience, and it happens, and nobody throws anything at the screen. Nobody walks out.

RC:Are you saying that’s something that film-makers can enjoy for themselves or do you think there’s some value in imperfection?

GM:No I think it’s a perversion!

PC:I don’t think there’s a value in putting in a mistake for the sake of having a mistake in the film.

GM:No Pia would get rid of the mistake. If she could, she would you know.

PC:I would go for performance. Continuity comes second. So I wouldn’t change something if the performance was right.

GM:Pia will definitely be for the better performance, even if there is soft focus e.g. If other shots are worse for performance though being in focus.

RC:As Truffaut said if there’s a judder in a tracking shot I can’t do anything about it, then forget it, it doesn’t matter.

GM:The thing is it makes visible the human hand. The flaw the mistake makes visible the human hand. It’s no longer seamless illusion. I think that is part of what really touches me in a film like ‘The Gospel According to Saint Matthew’.¹⁵ There is a number of times in that film where you can see the flawed hand of a human being. I like that because it seems as if the idea in commercial film-making is not to see the human hand. You see the face of the actor but you don’t see the mind of the film-maker.

RC:That’s true of what I feel about early Renoir. There’s nothing perfect, but in a sense it’s perfect. He hated the second take anyway, let alone worrying about flaws in the technique. That’s part of the enjoyment. Part of a special pleasure.

GM:I suppose it’s a personal thing. Maybe we can make too much of it.

RC:It maybe is a personal thing but its part of what is addressed in the relationship between editor and director, in terms of what matters.

GM:The thing is it only really touches you if it is a really beautiful film. If it were a banal film then it just would irritate you.

PC:Then all the mistakes jump out at you and put you off the film even more.

RC:So you’ve got to make something that’s nearly perfect.

GM:If the microphone boom swung into the top of the shot in ‘Bicycle Thieves’¹⁶ I wouldn’t care.

PC:But you probably wouldn’t even notice. I would notice.

GM:Yeah!

PC:It’s true.

GM:Pia is very observant and she retains tremendous amounts of information, much more than I can. So when we go into the dubbing theatre and somebody asks a question Pia can backtrack to exactly where it was and what happened. Whereas when I’ve done something it tends to be gone.

PC:Yeah, well when you’re in a mixing theatre and the dialogue editor has replaced a syllable, it just jumps out at me, because every word and every syllable is how I’ve cut it, and so if one thing is out of place I know.

GM:I think probably that very exacting discipline that Pia has is quite a good thing for me, because I drive myself very hard when I shoot a movie, but there is also that slightly cavalier part of me, that will just change things. It’s part of what’s exciting about it for me. I think that Pia’s ability to notice things and also know what lies in the background is probably quite important for me.

RC:So you wouldn’t want to cut your own films.

GM:No. I’m very, very glad that I spent time cutting my own films, but no I would not want to take that responsibility. I wouldn’t want to be here when everything stops in my mind. I’d much rather go to sleep or walk away.

PC:Well sometimes you have to do that anyway. Even as an editor you have to walk away.

GM:But I also would want that other mind at work on the film, you see. It’s not enough to be only my mind. Some days Pia will have an idea that I will develop; an idea that I would never have thought of. Or the other way round.

RC:On the other hand some of the people you say are your heroes did cut for themselves. Kurosawa for instance, apparently had food passed through a hatch, rather than have any human contact whilst cutting his own films.

GM:Well you can’t knock Kurosawa. I think I can let the obsession go after shooting. I think I can pass it on. I’m glad to say. It’s not that I don’t still have the obsession, but you know I sort of carry it all myself when I’m shooting, with a lot of help from people of course, but everything is still my decision, whereas I don’t feel that in the cutting room.

RC:So do you see your relationship say with your cinematographer as very different, than that with your editor.

GM:I’m not sure if it is really essentially different. The thing is that when I come up to shooting a film, what is going to happen on the set there, the world that is going to be created which is a very important thing for me. That is, we are building a world for the actor to walk into and believe and be that character, a world that the actor can trust. A lot of work goes into that and that comes from a lot of different people. As Andy Harris, who is the Production Designer that I often work with said – he once said to me after an incredible battle we had fought about trying to get something done well and on time – he said you know everything that I do is only just a place for the actors to walk in and act. I thought that was such a brilliant thing for a designer to say, because a lot of designers wouldn’t say that. They’re designing something its their design, but Andy really is only interested in building that place, which is not only his. It’s something that comes from all of us. The same goes for the other contributors. By the time it gets to Pia, it’s all accumulated.

RC:But by then you do have the clay that you have to make the film from, whereas the psychology of everything building up to it is different.

GM:But you would probably know what the visual sources are for the film.

PC:Yes because I do start early. When I know that I am doing a film I do get involved. For instance Gillies starts his own little black book on every film, and he will collect postcards, or little images or do cartoons or whatever that pertains to the film.

GM:Draw story-boards or take notes or anything; we’re travelling along I see something, everything goes in the book.

PC:Or a colour.

RC:And you connect with that.

PC:I do, because then I can think about those images or just stories that Gillies tells me, while he’s in pre-production and I read the drafts as they come in. I start thinking about styles of editing but until I get the footage, you can predict a certain direction but once you have the footage is when you can really get down to it.

GM:The visual thing that you put forward is probably quite interesting but I would go further than that, because I don’t think that I approach film-making in a very intellectual way. I have no theatre background. My background is very visual, but working with actors is very important to me. I certainly don’t come with a lot of theories, and a lot of intellectualisation, definitely not. What I try to do, maybe this is where it starts with the visual thing, is try to build this world. My approach to the film is more sensual, in the sense of how does it look, and especially the light the shade the rhythm. So I wouldn’t sit here with Pia and rationalise what I’ve just seen in a very logical way. I’d be much more likely in an instinctive way to say, can’t we just put that there.

RC:I do get a sense that Pia is not just inside the material but inside what she feels you feel about it. About the world you’re creating. It’s not just a surface reaction to the images themselves, it’s about what they are supposed to be contributing to.

GM:I think that is actually something that I try to achieve all the way through. With actors also. The worst thing that I can do with an actor is intellectualise everything. For me it’s the kiss of death. It’s like you meet an actor, you go to a café. He’s not sure about this and that. I’m not trying to persuade him, I’m just trying to get him to see what I see about it. A certain moment comes when it’s almost like you pass something under the table and the actor takes it, and the actor passes something under the table and you take it. It’s an invisible thing this, it doesn’t happen. It’s a token of trust. After that you can relax because you’ve given each other the tokens. It’s the same working with others including the editor. If it isn’t there you have a problem. Everything is a problem if you don’t have that.

RC:But you are talking about a two-way thing.

GM:Absolutely. You’ve exchanged something and you can get inside each other’s heads. If you can’t do that you’re always talking to a brick wall.

Notes

1.  Film School – Gillies studied at the National Film and Television School in the 1980s.

2.  Passing Glory – Graduation film set in Glasgow.

3.  Regeneration – Gillies Mackinnon, based on the novel by Pat Barker, 1997.

4.  The Playboys – Gillies Mackinnon, script by Shane Connaughton and Kerry Crabbe, 1992.

5.  A Simple Twist of Fate – Gillies Mackinnon, 1994.

6.  Small Faces – Gillies Mackinnon, 1996.

7.  Gillies’ heroes include Elem Klimov (1933–2003) – Russian director e.g. ‘Come and See’ (1985), and ‘Larisa’ (1980), a tribute to his wife the director Larisa Shepitko who was killed in a car accident.

8.  Tarkovsky – Of course Gillies would agree that having all the time in the world was not much compensation for having to fight the authorities to even be allowed to make a film and when one was finished to have it shelved from distribution.

9..  Hideous Kinky – Gillies Mackinnon, starring Kate Winslet, 1998.

10.  Cat Stevens – Former folk singer who is now a Muslim activist as Yusef Islam.

11.  Dede Allen – She made these remarks when addressing an audience of students at an American College.

12.  Touch of Evil (1958) – Orson Welles. Restored according to Welles memo, which had survived in the Studio archives, by Walter Murch in 1998.

13.  Robert Wise – Born 1914, editor, ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) and ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942). Became director e.g. ‘West Side Story’ (1961).

14.  Before the Revolution – Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964.

15.  The Gospel According to Saint Matthew – Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964.

16.  Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio De Sica, 1948.