Submitted by
Christoph Michel
[Note: All boldface by the author; obvious typographical errors have been rectified; idiosyncrasies have been retained. "Introduction" ran on pages 4-9 of the booklet, "Interview" on pages 12-21.]
Michael Powell
Article and interview by Kevin Gough-Yates, Deputy Curator of the National
Film Archive, London
Published on the occasion of Europalia 73
Programme established by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium with the co-operation
of the National Film Archive of Great Britain
Sponsored by British Leyland Motor Corporation
Brussels, October 1973
Filmmuseum/Palais des Beaux-Arts/Brussels
It would be very interesting to record photographically, not the stages
of a painting but its metamorphoses. One would see perhaps by what course
a mind finds its way towards the crystallization of its dream. But what
is really very curious is to see that the picture does not change basically,
that the initial vision remains almost intact in spite of appearances. At
the beginning of each picture there is someone who works with me. Towards
the end I have the impression of having worked without a collaborator.
Pablo Picasso to Christian Zeros (Cahiers d'Art 1935).
Introduction
After a series of quota films, Michael Powell wrote and made The Edge
of the World (1937) which was seen by Alexander Korda. Korda introduced
him to the Hungarian scriptwriter, Emeric Pressburger, who had worked for
UFA and had fled from Berlin via Paris to London. Their first film together,
The Spy in Black (1939) was the beginning of a collaboration on seventeen
films. Together they formed The Archers as a production company, taking
the name from a jingle by James Agate:
The arrow was pure gold
But somehow missed the target
But as all Golden Arrow trippers know,
It's better to miss Naples, than hit Margate.
Their films were all "Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger" and were ambitious and uneven. The arrow did not always
hit the bullseye. By the end of the war, they were beginning to involve
themselves in lavish colour productions. The nature of their collaboration,
however, remains ambiguous, for although the films were mostly from original
ideas by Pressburger, they have much in common with Powell's work before
and after their partnership.
Michael Powell's reputation rests on the handful of films in colour from
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) to The Tales of Hoffmann
(1951) on which he collaborated with Pressburger and on all of which
he had the design talents of Alfred Junge or Hein Heckroth who were both
German. Outside this frame provided by talented collaborators, only three
features have any personal distinction: The Edge of the World (1937)
which was promoted by Powell and conceived as a sound, as opposed to a "dialogue"
film, I Know Where I'm Going (1945) which was a successful reworking
of the idea for A Canterbury Tale (1944) and Peeping Tom (1959)
which is to many, the author excluded, his finest achievement, standing
in relation to the horror film as Singin' In the Rain does to the
screen musical. This is not to argue that others are without interest or
characteristic flourishes. The long moving shot that opens The Small
Back Room (1948) is a characteristic example. The camera seems to force
its way through the damp streets of London, until arrested by traffic lights,
when there is a cut to the inside of a car: the camera is in the front seat
with wipers sweeping the rain from the windscreen to make way for the eye
of the director. David Farrar, as a bomb disposal expert, who has already
lost a foot, has a personality not dissimilar to the main characters of
the other Archer films of the period, purposeful and lacking in sentimentality.
With sadistic ruthlessness, he interrogates a nineteen year old field gunner
dying from injuries (Bryan Forbes) caused by a plastic bomb which was found
in the heather. The sound throughout is used like a time bomb, ticking away,
until the explosion occurs. But had this not undistinguished film not been
made. Powell's reputation would not be affected one way or the other.
There is little point here in repeating my conversations with Powell which
are already available (Michael Powell - Kevin Gough-Yates - British Film
Archive 1971). He is both co-operative and difficult to interview, committed
to the cinema and to a theory of art, but slightly impatient and unhelpful
if you do not immediately see what he is driving at. His taste in films
is slightly eccentric as Sight and sound noted in its initial lottery for
the ten best films in 1952, and in the disregard he has for the British
documentary movement and the vogue for heavy naturalism" which he sees epitomized
in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Few feature film directors would
write as did Powell in 1946: "Why haven't I mentioned Walt Disney? Because
he is in a world of his own, the greatest genius of us all".
His view of cinema has remained unchanged despite fashion and the changing
methods of production. It is no longer possible to produce The Red Shoes
, to be a Diaghilev of the cinema, drawing on a huge range of talents,
artists and actors to demonstrate the Platonic view, which Powell took from
Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill that "all art is one". Not known for a type
of film, he might also have noted Kipling's advice to himself: "One of the
clauses of our contract was that I should never follow up 'a success' for
by this sin fell Napoleon and a few others. Note here. When your Daemon
is in charge do not think consciously. Drift, wait and obey". (from Something
of myself).
He is the teller of the tale, the eye that shapes and transforms the story
like Roger Livesey presiding over the immortal image thrown by the camera-obscura
in A Matter of Life and Death, saying: "This is my street, a village
street", indicating the deformed shape he is controlling on the projection
table. Similar, of course, to this is the distorting mirror with which Karl
Boehm confronts his victims in Peeping Tom. In both cases the brain
surgeon or the film maker presses his view on others to force "The Beauty
of Image" (the title of Powell's John Player Lecture at the National Film
Theatre, London 10th January 1971). The approach has not substantially altered
with the years. Most of the quota films can be dismissed as apprenticeship
pieces sometimes notable for an acting performance or for well paced dialogue
as in Something Always Happens (1934) when Ian Hunter down on his
luck, continually outwits restaurateurs to obtain meals on credit, or in
Crown Vs. Stevens (1934) where Beatrix Thomson murders a money lender,
putting in a polished performance against an abysmal script and a budget
which forces the opening and closing sequences to be played against a stage
curtain. By the following year, with The Phantom Light, the teller
of fairy tales begins to emerge as a personality. The opening sequence has
much in common With I Know Where I'm Going, made ten years later
and consciously constructed as a fairy story with its dreams and wishes,
its princes and witches, and a curse overshadowing the whole story.
The opening of The Phantom Light draws heavily on Powell's predilection
for the fairy tale. The plot, contrived and trivial as with most quota films
is redeemed by Roy Kellino's photography, the quality of the sound with
the cawing of gulls and the roll of the sea, and the strength of Powell's
images. An insurance investigator is dispatched to a Welsh village because
of the number of claims that emanate from ships going aground in the area.
His arrival allows for a series of visual shocks typical of Powell's later
work. The train emerges from a tunnel and the steam, which is hanging like
mist, gradually gives way to a dream-like Wonderland in which Ian Hunter
looks lost and suspicious. The witch-like figure in silhouette near the
track, turns out to be a woman in local costume and the new lighthouse keeper
played by Gordon Harker, pulls back his head as if to spit contemptuously
on the intruder. Similarly, in I Know Where I'm Going, Wendy Hiller
travels by train to Scotland in order to marry a rich business man, and
her own anxieties take hold of her, the shadows, the calls from the seals,
the Gaelic spoken in the dark and the roaring of the sea, all reveal an
uncertainty and vulnerability in her personality. This provides the opening
for the folk tales and omens to proliferate in her presence. Pressburger
has described I Know Where I'm Going as a script that "burst out"
in four days, but this raises the question about the nature of the collaboration
with Powell, as it is also raised in connection with the emphasis which
Powell provided to Leo Marks's script of Peeping Tom. Somehow, the
story-teller has shaped the tale so that it becomes his own.
Like Hitchcock, who somehow emerges triumphant over any writer, Powell intrudes
into those scripts in which he was never thought to have had a hand. The
story-teller emerges in yet another way. Characters like Lermontov in
The Red Shoes, played with great style by Anton Walbrook, clearly
express a viewpoint that in some senses at least is that of Powell himself.
The film is the clearest example of Powell at work, choreographing the divergent
abilities of Pressburger, Brian Easdale, Hein Heckroth, Jack Cardiff, Sir
Thomas Beecham, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, as well as a stunning
cast. The music, by Brian Easdale, is, in my view, less successful and the
ballet of The Red Shoes, while fascinating as an attempt to illustrate
all arts synthesizing as music, remains clumsy in its choreography, with
Helpmann not surprisingly providing himself with the best of the dancing.
Seemingly modelled on Stravinsky it is thin stuff. In Peeping Tom,
Karl Boehm as the film maker has Lermontov's dedication to art and Roger
Livesey, as the sophisticated and cultured brain specialist of A Matter
of Life and Death is able to reveal to David Niven, as the poet, the
beauty of the earth in contrast to the dullness of the heaven of his imagination,
while his brain-damaged mind rocks between the two.
In a cruder form, Powell himself appears as an actor to launch the stories
of some films. He plays the yachtsman during the prologue to The Edge
of the World and takes the visitors to the island of St. Kilda; the
despatching officer in the truck at the beginning of One of Our Aircraft
is Missing (1942) a similar role; and appears as the figure with the
still camera in the last shot of The Volunteer (1943). This extraordinary
propaganda film was made by Powell and Pressburger in association with Ralph
Richardson who was commissioned in the Fleet Air Arm and who stars in it.
More than any other film it seems linked with Peeping Tom (in which
Powell appears in the black and white sequences as an amateur film maker
with members of his family and provides the comforting words at the end
of the film: "Don't be a silly boy. There's nothing to be afraid of"). It
is a film within a film with everyone looking on voyeuristically. Pressburger's
script seems amazingly complicated for a recruiting film and it does not
need to be seen alongside similar projects of the period for Matisse, that's
for Picasso and for its inappropriateness to the war effort to be recognised.
Ralph Richardson tells the story of his dresser, Alfred Davey, who joins
up, is wounded and awarded the D.F.C. This takes place within the context
of training films being screened so that the audience is treated to the
classic film within a film, with the actors themselves looking at a screen
and they in turn, being observed by projectionists. In the last sequence,
Davey is leaving Buckingham Palace having collected his award, and a figure
pushes through the crowd to snap a photograph.
There is one more case of this kind, denied by Powell but nevertheless worth
mentioning. 49th Parallel (1941) was the first war film to be commissioned
by the Ministry of Information in 1940 and is important in Powell's career
because of the scale of production and in Pressburger's because he received
an Academy Award for the screenplay. To a modern audience, It is crude and
embarrassing in places, especially where Eric Portman voices Nazi sentiments.
It has a typical documentary-type opening with cloud and mist about to open
on a dream. The lightness of touch as in The volunteer reveals a sudden
sharp edge as the Nazi U-boat 37 emerges from the sea and the crow set about
photographing a ship that it has just sunk. The crew finds itself stranded
on land when the submarine is, itself, hit by Canadian aircraft, but, committed
to a notion of duty they march across Canada in the belief that their racial
superiority will enable them to outfox the Canadians and rejoin their own
forces. Towards the end, Eric Portman, the leader and most dedicated Nazi,
along with the only other remaining survivor, comes across Leslie Howard,
who has been fishing and is ludicrously living in a tent with a Picasso
and a Matisse. In this conspicuously incongruous sequence, they destroy
his literature and his paintings. It is Nazi nihilism at its height, for
Howard, like Lermontov in The Red Shoes, sees art, in the romantic
tradition, as the light which illuminates the world. "Wars may come and
wars may go but art goes on forever". Leslie Howard catches one of the fugitives:
"That's for Thomas Mann, that's that's for me!" [sic] Powell has denied
that the actor is speaking with his voice but cryptically adds that Leslie
Howard "was wearing my jumper".
This points to the difficulty in coming to terms with much of his work.
Never admired by English critics because of a questionable "taste" and a
European viewpoint, loathed by some because of a political outlook they
found In the films, the best example of which is to be found in the pathetic
booklet by E.W. and M.M. Robson -- The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp
--, his obsession with the cinema has passed them by. His oblique approach,
his notion of cinema belong to a man who can work no other way. It leads
him to prefer an uneven work like A Matter of Life and Death to a
more perfect film like Black Narcissus. One reason for this is, unquestionably,
that like The small back room, for which he has little regard, it does not
stem from an original story. He says of himself in an Interview in Midi-minuit
fantastique: "I am the Cinema", throwing his interviewers into contusion
so that they ran for cover and asked a question about Peeping Tom.
He means by this, simply, that his memories have coincided with the history
of the cinema and that the medium has illuminated the world for him. It
is the dedication or obsession easily found in the characters of his films
and present even in his literary work. His essays on the cinema tend to
repeat themselves and irrespective of the question, outline the cinematic
influences in his life. They are, on the whole, fairly obvious ones: Griffith,
Chaplin, Lang, Stroheim, Pudovkin and so on. They are often not communicated
directly for it seems that just as his films generally have prologues, as
it to prepare the path, so his writings have to be firmly argued from the
right premises - history of the cinema. "Don't be afraid", he can write.
"I have not forgotten the question and I am coming to it in my own way,
given space and time enough; the ground must be free from entanglements".
His films are indirect and confident in the same way, self-questioning but
in line with his initial vision. In his book 200,000 feet on Foula which
describes the making of The Edge of the World, there is a section
devoted to an episode with his fiancée (now his wife) who had a small
part. It throws light on many of the dedicated characters in his films,
and could, indeed, have easily provided material for a sequence in any one
of them.
Powell wanted her to appear in the prologue along with himself as the yachtsman
and found himself in a classic dilemma. "I had promised myself one thing.
Not a soul in the unit, not a soul should know that we were engaged or anything
more to each other than director and actress... During production of the
film I would treat her exactly as I treated any other member of the company...
In my anxiety to be impersonal I leant too far backward, overbalanced and
was rude. Accustomed to monopolising all Frankie's attention when I was
with her, I could not admit myself to seeing her made much of by others
while I had to take a back seat... We drifted further and further apart,
gradually losing all sympathy, and sense of humour. On my side this was
coupled with the nervous strain that we should fail and my lonely determination
that we should not. I would not care to part with the experience I gained
but I would not wish to suffer again as I did in the last stormy days of
September and October". To save the work the relationship was destroyed...
Although I shall not refer to R again except as incidental to my narrative
it must be imagined as the leitmotiv throughout all the stormy orchestrations
that follow". (p. 180/2).
The big films of 1946 and 1948 reveal this coincidence of life and art equally
well. Unquestionably, there are cinematic and other references running through
Powell's work, not simply as homages to other film makers but because there
is almost no other way to visualise the scene. I have not seen The Man
Behind the Mask (1936) but its images are clearly shaped by Lang's Metropolis.
Powell's use of Conrad Veidt in The Spy in Black (1939) was a conscious
use of Veidt's cinematic myth as "The Man in Black" lurking in shadows and
threatening rape. Similarly, the sequence in Black Narcissus where
Kathleen Byron, totally mad and devoured by jealousy, runs crazily through
the corridors of the convent/castle, finally toppling to her death from
a cliff top, seems to owe much to Disney's Snow white which Powell saw as
providing a crossroads for the cinema, opening up an opportunity for it
to revolt against naturalism.
A Matter of Life and Death is Powell's testament to the cinema. The
power of the imagination was already part of the Powell, Pressburger cinema
and is movingly explored in Blimp where Roger Livesey sees the nurse who
is ''his type", and who promptly disappears. "It's like the Indian Rope
Trick", he says. "First you want to see it and then you see it". Here, the
roots are to be found in the film of the fairy story The Wizard of Oz
, on which it is modelled. The impact of Fleming's film on Powell must
have been phenomenal and the monochrome sequences in Peeping Tom
can be said to stem from it. A Matter of Life and Death is a good
example of a film started by the Ministry of Information which surprised
its sponsors. Whereas, in The Wizard of Oz the colour is over the
rainbow, in A Matter of Life and Death it is on earth David Niven
jumps without his parachute from a burning aeroplane and recovers consciousness
on a beach so classically photographed so beautiful, that it seems he has
to be in heaven. Only he is not! The heaven he so frequently visits is in
his imagination, but to a poet whose raw material is on earth it is a grey
and gloomy place. The people who inhabit it are unsmiling, afraid of authority,
regimented and bored like the inhabitants of Metropolis. There is a delightful
shot where the camera lifts high to reveal the record office, a kind of
enormous computer system with details of everyone on earth and towering
above it is a clock face like that which dominates the subterranean factory
in which people slave in Lang's masterpiece. Everything and everyone that
appears in the monochrome heavenly sequences is, as in The Wizard of
Oz from an earthly experience. The characters, the shapes, the music
which signals his call are all shapings of Niven's earth bound imagination.
In spite of Powell's crystallization of "the cinema" in one film, his vision
remains basically the same as in The Edge of the World, bad luck
threatens those who can see the mainland and ghosts and memories become
substantial and all is part of one man's imagination. Early in The Edge
of the World the inhabitants of St. Kilda are given a sermon which relates
how Israel, with an inferior army defeats the Syrians who attribute their
defeat to the more powerful god. The easily explained is often too much
for man's pride. David Niven has simply fallen from an aeroplane and lived,
in A Matter of Life and Death, both the apparent impossibility of
it makes life seem impossible without divine intervention.
The artist, the creator, remains single-minded throughout these films. James
Mason is a practically celibate painter in Age of Consent but no
one can quite believe it. Artists are rakes, and even Cora, the young girl
played by Helen Mirren, whom he paints, cannot believe that his interest
is only aesthetic. The same notion affects Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes
. She rushes off, dressed like a princess in a turquoise gown and a
tiara on her head in answer to Walbrook's call. This is clearly a romantic
situation but she finds only that she is to be offered a part in a ballet
and has to bluff her way through her embarrassment.
The Red Shoes is, I think, Powell's total view of art. It is hardly
surprising that nothing has approached it since. The other opera-ballets
from Tales of Hoffmann to Bluebeard's Castle are small fry
beside it and Peeping Tom lacks its detail and subtlety. "All arts
are one" is shown in numerous ways. A girl must lose herself in her art;
"nothing matters but the music", the score will infect the imagination so
that the audience will see the ballroom which has otherwise been removed
from the ballet. The shoes, as in the fairy story, dance the heroine to
death but not before she becomes no more than an element of the score, lost
in her imagination in a unifying whole. With such confidence in communication
the ballet is performed after her death without her, with only a spotlight
tracing her movement. She dies in exactly the same posture on the railway
track where she has thrown herself as she would in the ballet itself. Art
and life are one. She had flung herself from the balcony of the Casino of
Monte-Carlo. It could have been elsewhere but Powell associates it with
a great cinematic experience. In his mind's eye he sees the Stroheim of
Foolish wives and Blind husbands shooting pigeons from the same terrace.
So absolutely typical of Powell's interest, it comes as a shock to discover
that Pressburger originally wrote the script for Korda before the war, with
Merle Oberon in mind. One longs to see the original script to see the transformation
from a Pressburger script to one by Powell and Pressburger. Dominating the
memory is the long shot of Moira Shearer's bow after the premiere of her
ballet. The camera moves in tighter and the shot seems of almost interminable
length. To some it is characteristic of Powell's failure to pace a sequence
but to the man that lives the cinema its explanation is clear. It was at
the Theatre of the Vieux Colombier in 1925 that Powell saw the audience
of The gold rush stop the show at Chaplin's ballet - The dance of the rolls
- and force its reshowing. Powell, like a painter with an old subject, wanted
to repeat the experience and attempt it too. Leonide Massine had just offered
the shoes forward to the audience with almost Chaplinesque self satisfaction.
At the premiere, the audience applauded wildly.
Kevin Gough-Yates.
Michael Latham Powell was born on 30th September, 1905 In Canterbury, Kent
and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Dulwich College.
Kevin Gough-Yates:
In 1947, you wrote an article in which you talk about 'the dark ages of
film'. You say that though the introduction of heavy naturalism by Orson
Welles with its low ceilings is felt by some to be a key to the future,
it is, as far as you are concerned, the wrong direction in which to be walking.
Do you remember writing it?
Michael Powell:
No, but it is an interesting remark coming at that particular time. Of course,
when Welles made Citizen Kane, he first saw everything, just as Noel Coward,
when he had his first film to make, saw every film he could lay his hands
on. Orson Welles, particularly -I think consciously - had films especially
run for him that he knew about but hadn't seen.
K.G-Y.:
But why did you feel it was a retrogressive step in the development of the
cinema? It was, even then, an unfashionable view.
Powell:
Oh! Because I'd seen the Germans like Dupont, for instance. I'd seen Piccadilly
and Moulin Rouge, which were made in London, with Junge as the architect,
doing it. Welles was only doing the same thing. It's a German heavy handed
realism and I didn't think that Welles gained anything from it. He had these
tiny sets built with four walls and a roof and he put everyone inside with
great discomfort. He seemed to think that something would come out of it.
All that came out of it was just like sweatboxes.
K.G-Y.:
Did you not think that anything emerged artistically?
Powell:
No, I didn't! I suppose that I'm not interested at all in naturalism. The
films that moved me from the very beginning, which because of my age, I'd
grown up with, were borrowing from all the arts and stirring our imaginations
so much visually that we hardly noticed the stories. You don't when the
images are exciting. You refer, in your article, to the title of my lecture
being The beauty of image and, I suppose that was, unconsciously, because,
to me, films are images - thousands and thousands of images with different
textures and things. So naturalism has never interested me. The danger of
films has always been their capacity to accept naturalism.
K.G-Y.:
But, you wouldn't think of Welles as having a penchant for naturalism, would
you?
Powell:
Not, particularly, but he tried to do absolutely everything he could in
one film. It was a tremendous box of tricks.
K.G-Y.:
Kane was recently voted in a Sight and Sound 1972 poll as The best film
of all time, whatever that means. Has your view about it modified over the
years?
Powell:
Well, I haven't seen it over the years, but I'm not surprised it's so admired.
I did see some of it recently and found it just as impressive as ever. It's
the last sequences in Xanadu, I think, which are wonderfully effective.
What was new was the talent of Welles, but even there one has to be careful.
The thing one remembers from Citizen Kane is the fabulous story telling
pattern and we now learn that a very great deal of it was Herman Mankiewicz's
idea. You can read about it in John Houseman's wonderful book Run through
(published by Allen Lane and The Penguin Press, London, 1972). The whole
idea of the March of Time interview and the gradual building up from fragments
of this titanic figure and these extraordinary attempts to capture, in texture,
excerpts that looked so realistic, that you were convinced they were realistic
- which, of course, he had learnt partly from the Mercury Theatre Radio
Broadcasts, was all from Mankiewicz. Evidently I did think it was the wrong
direction for the cinema to be going then and I don't think Citizen Kane
had a tremendous impact at the time, did it? But it's difficult to answer
the question in terms of the present.
K.G-Y.:
In the same article, you refer to 'the future' and look forward to a period
when the art director will assume a role of major creative importance in
the cinema. Do you think it has, in anyway, been a prophesy that has been
fulfilled?
Powell:
No, I don't think it has very much, although I still believe in it. I believe
in it just as much now as I did then. Of course, we were lucky to be able
to prove, over the years, how effective it can be, having got together a
wonderful bunch of people, all individualists and creative people, who worked
with enthusiasm with subjects that could take off. The reason it hasn't
occurred Is mainly because of the sort of Frankenstein hand of the American
producer who doesn't want, in general theory, in his past, present, or future,
a bunch of inspired artists, all working under one man. He likes to fragment
the whole thing up and say: 'that's the art director and that's the cutter
and that's the writer and they all do what I say.' It's not the best way
and it has only gradually become apparent.
It's a different approach entirely. You see, many of them were European
and cultivated people. Some, of course, were European film makers and came
from a continent where film making has always been entirely different. When
they were gobbled up by Hollywood in the late 20s and 30s, as refugees mainly,
some of them came at tremendously high salaries because they were the best
of their kind anywhere. They willy-nilly became part of this American film
making machine which had really adopted factory methods, but because they
had such enormous reserves of talent, as well as such tremendous amounts
of it, the factory method did not become as clear as it did later. The kind
of development that I would like to see can only occur consciously, I would
say. I don't know how far this new development in America, where Paramount
are backing a group of very creative directors like Peter Bogdanovich and
Francis Coppola will get. They've got their own company and they can, if
they want, get a group round them, as film makers, in the same way as Sam
Goldwyn did. Sam Goldwyn was the only exception to this rule in Hollywood.
The others really did insist on giving all the orders and making the final
decisions. Sam Goldwyn, although he was, in some ways, a great tyrant at
the beginning and end of a film, did assemble a great team, like Gregg Toland,
William Wyler, and that wonderful costume designer, all of whom were part
of a team. The results were very obvious in Sam Goldwyn Pictures over a
period of ten years weren't they? And, Welles, if I may revert to an earlier
point, being 'the wonder-boy' and being able to get anyone he wanted, grabbed
Gregg Toland, who had an enormous influence on the visual aspects of Citizen
Kane.
K.G-Y.:
Welles, of course, already had the Mercury Theatre group to bring with him...
Powell:
Yes, indeed, and Gregg Toland, presumably, brought his gaffer and camera
crew. Wherever a really creative man, like Welles was, or I suppose, like
I was then, is given a free hand to gather around him the people he wants,
it will happen again. But it doesn't happen naturally.
K.G-Y.:
How were you able to assemble your team? Of course, you met Emeric Pressburger
through Korda, but how did you come to work with Junge?
Powell:
I'd seen Junge's work at Elstree when I first went there in 1928 or 9. He
was working with Dupont and I could see that he was an impressive art director.
I met him again some years later when he was in charge of all art direction
for Mickie Balcon at Lime Grove in Shepherds Bush, where the studios are
now. It was the first time, in England, that they had a supervising art
director. Junge was a good organizer, a tremendous disciplinarian, and a
very good trainer of young people. He had all the qualities that made for
a head of department, besides being a very great designer himself.
On the first film I made for Mickie Balcon, The night of the party, Junge
did a lot of the work - the actual designing. It was a bad film from a bad
script, from a very poor play and was not very successful. I don't know
that it was ever produced in the theatre. It was very stagey and I couldn't
make much of it. It was very short when we finished and we had to go back
and shoot some more sequences later on. (I met Leslie Banks who was assigned
in it, and because of the contact Jerry Jackson and I wrote two original
films for him: The fire raisers and The red ensign, for he was a marvellous,
flexible actor to work with).
After The night of the party, Junge didn't have anything to do with the
other three films I made with Mickie Balcon, other than assigning an art
director to work with us. They were the two with Leslie Banks and The
Phantom Light. He lost interest in my work, and thought of it as just
small stuff.
Then I met him again when I went to Denham, where at that time, he had an
enormous big job as the supervising art-director and designer for M.G.M.
He did those wonderful pictures like Goodbye Mr. Chips and The citadel.
When Emeric and I decided to get our talents together and make this film
with Connie Veidt and Valerie Hobson, Contraband - which was the first story
film in the war, Junge being there to hand, and knowing how expert he was,
I grabbed him. It produced an extraordinary situation; I was shooting very
impromptu sequences in Ramsgate in the middle of the contraband control
with a German star and a German art director. We were drinking every night
with all the naval officers and they were calling Junge, 'Uncle Alfred'.
It was a wonderful situation in the middle of the winter of '39/40. Previously,
I had been to Junge, just a small director, and this was the first time
he had collaborated with me as an equal. We both realised that we could
complement each other quite a bit.
I took David Rawnsley on 49th Parallel. When I came back, Junge,
who like everyone else who was an enemy alien, including Hein Heckroth,
had been interned, was, I think, out again. They had all been clapped in
the jug after the fall of France, poor chaps! In the film business there
were an awful lot who had to be screened. Hein was sent to Australia and
Junge to Liverpool. To be on the safe side they were put in concentration
camps. Hein told me a funny story about Junge, who was always so efficient,
and helped camouflage the concentration camp he was in so well that they
couldn't find it.
And so, when we realised that we were going on making big films, I naturally
turned to Junge as the right man to head the art department side of it.
That was on Colonel Blimp. I turned to him as naturally as I turned to Georges
Perinal. Nobody had done colour photography like him and nobody has since.
I can't explain what he did or why, but human beings lit and photographed
by Georges seemed to be different human beings than they were with other
people.
K.G-Y.:
Would you say that working with you on Colonel Blimp affected Junge's art
direction?
Powell:
No! The main thing was that I was making my first colour film - after all
I had no real control over The thief of Bagdad. I remember saying that 'because
of using colour we've got to make it quite clear that the period of 1901
is different from 1915 and that the period of 1915 is different from 1942.
We'll use colour to do it I We'll also change the shapes of the women completely
- different figures, different corsets, different ways of walking'. Everyone
entered into it with great enthusiasm. I suppose this light touch came from
Junge - who had a great deal to do with the costumes as well as the decor
- having an overall conception.
K.G-Y.:
But we are talking about your conception and not Junge's, aren't we?
Powell:
Yes!
K.G-Y.:
It is much more painterly than you would expect from Junge at that time,
isn't it?
Powell:
I quite agree! Up to then he had been rather a builder. He rose with great
enthusiasm to the idea and carried it out beautifully, charmingly, and delicately.
This collaboration went through till Black Narcissus where you have
the same idea.
They all thought I was going to India and I said 'No, we're going to do
it alt here. I don't want two styles in the picture. I don't want to go
and shoot some wonderful stuff in India with doubles and then come back
and try to match it all in the studio. It would be awful. We're going to
have it all under our control here - and do it here'. This, of course, was
a wonderful challenge for the designer. But the conception was something
that came from me - that's correct.
K.G-Y.:
How did you come to collaborate so closely with Hein Heckroth?
Powell:
Junge knew Heckroth, since they were both Germans, as a painter and a theater
designer. He knew very well that he was extremely competent, not only a
very good painter, but a very practical man. As soon as we started to do
these very ambitious films, he put Hein on his staff, along with several
others who were very good craftsmen. Hein did a lot of work on A Matter
of Life and Death but I was never allowed to meet him; he was part of
Junge's staff. I might have seen a bulky figure nervously handing in some
sketches which were then passed to me by Junge, but that would be all. I
gradually began to realise there was a man called Hein Heckroth on Black
Narcissus because he did most of the costumes - and did some wonderfully
good ones - with very simple materials. He made all these native costumes
with ticking and whatever we could get, because everything was in short
supply at the time, for it was the immediate post war period. I became aware
of this assistant gradually, but previously I hardly knew his name.
It was only after I discussed The Red Shoes with Junge and told him
what I wanted to do and he said 'Well Mickie, I think you want to go too
far'. That's all! I immediately decided I would, drop him as I was not going
to be told by my own designer that I wanted to go too far. I wanted a designer
who told me I didn't go far enough. I hadn't any idea who I would find and
was bewailing the fact that I couldn't find anyone who did understand what
I did want to do, to an absolutely enchanting person called Roger Ramsdell,
who was an art director, designer, poet, and a gipsy - a sort of art hobo
- a lively man and a great friend of Roger Thursby. He said 'But you've
got the man working with you now - its Hein Heckroth. Hein would understand
exactly what you're talking about. So I sent for Hein. I could see at once
that he did understand exactly what I was talking about, and I asked him
to do some sketches right away. Of course, Junge discovered that this had
happened and there was practically a stand up tight between these two big
Germans.
I had a wonderful description of it some years later from Hein. He said
that Junge came to him and said 'I wish to speak to you, as a german'. Hein
said, practically 'Ja mein General'. They both stood up and glared at each
other and Junge said 'Are you doing sketches for Mickie Powell for The
Red Shoes? 'Yes'. Thank you that's what I wanted to know' and went.
I realised that I was treating Alfred very badly because he was the chief
designer. But he shouldn't have said that I wanted to go too far. Even though
he was probably quite right that wasn't the point.
K.G-Y.:
What about your music collaborators?
Powell:
With Brian Easdale, for example, I worked in the same way as with Hein.
We exchanged ideas really. There's a great deal in what you say in your
article about the actual music in The Red Shoes but his collaboration
on the way a composer feels and thinks in terms of motifs and things like
that was a great help. He steered me away from the banal things in the cinema
about composers and music. I wanted to actually see the mind of the composer
who already had lots of themes that he wanted to shove down people's throats,
gradually turn into being used by the guiding musician - the part that Walbrook
played.
Emeric had indicated this, but he also had a key scene which I think was
one of the best scenes which he has ever written. It took me a week to shoot,
but wasn't in the final film. It was a wonderful scene on the terrace of
the Cafe de Paris where Lermontov, who is sitting at one table listens to
the others all discussing among themselves. He puts in a word here and a
word there and gradually shapes the future ballet from a very highly complicated
and incoherent mass of ideas with five themes and so on, to one idea with
one set and one theme. I thought it a brilliant piece of work and longed
to shoot it and did. But I hated it when I saw it and besides by that time
I'd done it all myself. This was, of course, not in the script, but by getting
together with the painter, the designer, the composer, and the cameraman,
the work itself had been built up before the audience's eyes. You didn't
need the scene talking about it, showing how Lermontov got these wonderful
results. It's as you indicate in the article. I had done it. Hein and Brian
Easdale were part of this wonderful collaboration.
K.G-Y.:
On Bluebeard's castle, how did you work with Heckroth? How would a sequence,
like the opening of the last door be worked out? It opens as part of Bluebeard's
body, as if to reveal his soul?
Powell:
I'm not sure. The script I have is marked 'revised version', so there must
have been another version, probably before I discussed it with Hein. I cannot
find it, though, so it's very difficult to answer that. I may have suggested
something similar. At the same time quite a few of the images in Hein's
story-board are, what one might call, of the common currency of surrealism.
Hein was, above everything else, a surrealist painter and was a member of
one of the original surrealist groups. Surrealism is very sympathetic to
the cinema and very sympathetic to me. The script that I wrote first - this
doesn't differ from it much I think - was written after listening to a recording
several times and looking at the score quite a bit. Then I wrote the script,
visualising it in terms of a picture. It was a bit of a shock, I think,
to Norman Foster who probably saw it from a singer's point of view We were
going to do another one after it for Dusseldorf Radio but when we produced
the rough scenarios it was turned down. It was on Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice
- marvellous subject. I was going to shoot a great deal of it near Salzburg,
where there are fantastic mountain shapes and rocks. I found a wonderful
entrance to hell, as well as underground waters and things. The rest of
it needed a sort of Grecian atmosphere, I was going to play with real persons
in ordinary black clothes today, on top of that big plateau above Nice.
K.G-Y.:
It seems to me that there is a thread which links the great mass of your
work observable as early as The Edge of the World, but present during
the period of your collaboration with Pressburger, and remaining after your
partnership ended. At its most obvious, it appears through the use of the
camera in Peeping Tom, the way it links with the camera-obscura in
A Matter of Life and Death, and the way that memory bends the image
in The Edge of the World.
Powell:
Well, its not planned as an essential part of the films. It's playing, the
cinema is a wonderful toy.
K.G-Y.:
Would you say that the point I make about the themes of The Edge of the
World and that of A Matter of Life and Death with the invoking
of divine intervention to rationalise extraordinary but natural events was
a correct understanding of the films.
Powell:
I wouldn't have thought that it was a conscious working out of the same
theme, really. Emeric wrote the first script of A Matter of Life and
Death as a fantasy, just as fantastic as Here Comes Mr. Jordan
(Alexander Hall, 1941). I couldn't wear that, I said. First it was because
it didn't fit into the war atmosphere and second, I didn't think it was
very interesting. There was a scene where the heavenly messenger (Marius
Goring) talks to Peter Carter (David Niven) which I played in the library.
Suddenly someone looks away and there's a curtain waving in the wind and
he's gone. I remember specifically that scene. I was determined to anchor
it down, not only to the ground, but to what goes on in the brain of a highly
intelligent and sensitive man whose brain is injured from an ancient injury
and because of which he Is now suffering from pressure - adhesions on the
brain. You are perfectly correct when you say that I quite consciously made
earth look like heaven and heaven like a particularly dull earth - like
Metropolis as you say.
Emeric softened this treatment by putting in the line for Dickie Attenborough
saying 'It's heaven isn't it?' and the girl, Kathleen Byron saying 'for
many people on earth, it would be heaven to be a clerk'. Now that's typical
Emeric. I couldn't care less about such a remark. I'm more brutal. It's
a very subtle and beautiful comment but I don't think it means anything
in a film. I so love and respect Emeric's mind that I allow him to say all
sorts of things that are not even simply decoration. They get in the way
I'm imagining I'm telling the story. That's an example! I thought it was
a most lovely remark and l quite saw his point and I shot it and it's certainly
in the picture. But it wasn't sympathetic to me. It's just that I love his
mind. My mind is child-like, whereas Emeric's is like an 150 year old child.
There were many things I didn't understand of his, but I had implicit belief
in what he was driving at. Like all good writers, he I sometimes takes too
much trouble about planting things. Writers want everything to be planted
carefully and cunningly and sometimes this holds up the image. To come back
to the point, I don't see the theme of A Matter of Life and Death,
which you've described, very well, as the same theme as that of The Edge
of the World at all. There, are, of course, great parallels in the sort
of mysticism of the idea, but mine was of a very primitive sort.
K.G-Y.:
What about the parallels I draw between The Phantom Light and
I Know Where I'm Going?
Powell:
There must be parallels in them, I suppose. Although I know I had a lot
to do with The Phantom Light script, I didn't write it. Naturally,
they didn't write the way it does, actually, open, that was just me. They
wrote a sequence, presumably, about this lighthouse keeper, played by Gordon
Harker, coming to take over this lighthouse. I then just used it to build
up this atmosphere in a remote part of England. Lighthouses, I've always
been mad about.
K.G-Y.:
When Ian Hunter arrives, it is all so strange and disturbing to him. Surely
it is like Wendy Hiller's arrival in I Know Where I'm Going. Now,
Emeric Pressburger, had not, I think, seen The Phantom Light, so
to what extend did you involve yourself in the shaping of the scenes?
Powell:
Well, the shape of I Know Where I'm Going was certainly Emeric's,
but what we always did was that he would write the script and then I would
rewrite it completely in my version, sometimes with very little change and
sometimes with a very great deal of change. The changes would be because
I was naturally interested in how to present it, how to create the actual
atmosphere of the place, and how to get over Emeric's story line in the
most effective way. I can only imagine that - the situations being very
similar within the films with the new arrival in the remote Welsh Village
and the new arrival in the remote Western Isles - I must have worked very
closely on them. There is also the way it's seen with the loving exploitation
of all the local details.
K.G-Y.:
Was there a considerable difference between the script of The Red Shoes
which was originally written for Korda and the one you finally used?
Powell:
Not to the story. There was naturally much more dialogue than story in the
original. The incidence I've cited of the key scene, really was a tremendous
thing to shoot. It shows how the dancer's mentor manages to get his collaborators
to do what he wants. That's an example. And, of course, the ballet scenes
originally consisted of a few shots of doubles dancing and somebody saying
'Isn't she wonderful?' Then there were a few more shots of doubles dancing;
it was that sort of thing. I remember that I was a bit shocked at the tremendously
clever script, the way it was all worked out and was put together. Yet when
you came to the ballet you saw her mentor watching and then, it said in
the script: 'She dances across the stage' or 'Julian conducting and then
she dances across the stage again'. I could imagine close ups of Merle Oberon,
for whom it was originally written, and the long legs of the ballerina.
They actually chose the ballerina. She had wonderful legs - legs like swords.
That conception, however, was as dead as mutton, but that side of it hadn't
interested Emeric as much as the working out of the Diaghilev/Nijinsky story.
That's all it is, of course, with Moira Shearer as Nijinsky. The original
script had the same theme. I remember, quite clearly, reading it and saying
to Emeric, 'I think it's a marvellous script, but I can only do it if a
dancer plays the part'. This floored him a bit and he said 'But why? Alex
was quite prepared to double it with this dancer'. I said, 'Of course, you
can do it that way, and it has been done that way many times, but it wouldn't
be interesting today and it doesn't interest me. We've got to find someone
who will be able to act well enough and do the dancing, so that the person
you've seen from the very beginning gradually turns into this marvellous
work of art in the hands of all these people'. Well, he saw that. I don't
think he agreed particularly, but on the other hand he knew I would do it
if he said 'Yes'. So he agreed. I could see that from a writer's point of
view it would not have enormous importance. From a director's point of view
it was all-important. And I said, 'The other thing is', (and this really
frightened him),'l would want to create the ballet that you talk about as
a complete ballet'. He said, 'You mean a long ballet - many minutes'. I
said, 'Yes, about 20 minutes, I expect'. 'But you don't know anything about
making a ballet'. 'Oh well, we'll soon find out. We've got all the talent
in the world to draw on'. I don't think he liked this at all, but he realised
that if I didn't get my way, I wouldn't do it. Then he and Rank and John
Davis and everybody found themselves with a ballet company, because, of
course, we formed our own. We had our own wardrobe and everything and made
all our own costumes. Everything was all done at Pinewood. It was wonderful
- a fabulous enterprise. It was Brian Easdale's idea, once he was hired,
to do the score, to get Thomas Beecham to conduct it.
K.G-Y.:
When you worked on Peeping Tom, with Leo Marks, how did you work?
Powell:
I had heard about him, about one or two little things he had contributed
to spy pictures in the form of ideas and a code and I arranged to meet him.
I asked him if he had any ideas; he had one idea. I think it was about the
White Rabbit, the famous spy who was tortured, whom he knew very well.
[Wing Commander F.F.E. Yeo-Thomas]
He did write the script later on, but it was never done. Then we decided
finally, after several meetings, to do a film about Freud and the next week
it was announced that John Huston was doing one.
[Freud (1962) - not a big hit]
So when we met again, I said, 'We've got to think again, haven't we? Have
you got any ideas?' And then he told me this idea and I commissioned it.
I imagine that by this time, he had seen one or two of my films, because
he's a very smart opportunist as well as a very good writer. He had sized
me up and thought, 'This is the kind of subject he'll go for'. I did, of
course, go for it.
K.G-Y.:
The idea of the mirror attached to the camera. Did that come from Marks?
Powell:
Not with a distorting mirror, but with a mirror. The story was conceived
as The face of fear. It may have even been called that originally. 'Anyway',
he said, 'this is the idea of a young man who has been conditioned by his
father to continually observe, scoptophilia - the morbid urge to gaze'.
I said, 'That sounds fine. When do you start?' I did a contract with him
and paid him quite well. We had many conferences while he was doing it,
but he never would show me anything. Finally, he did deliver the whole script
and it was marvellous. Then Nat Cohen read it and liked it.
K.G-Y.:
Why I ask is because of the relation between this image and that of the
camera obscura. These characters have that much, at least, in common - observing
the world through a lens and studying an image.
Powell:
I suppose it's natural to me. Emeric would have written the scene with Livesey
in A Matter of Life and Death standing at the window looking down
at a village street. I'm sure that's what he would write. 'This is my street'
and so on! I would seize on this, introduce the camera obscura idea as a
wonderful trick to get everyone interested and excited - the cameraman,
the trick department and the designer - everybody. It's also a very interesting
thing to do, photographing the street as though it were a camera obscura
shot and it also makes Livesey seem more like God. Anyone can do a man looking
out of the window down a street, but a man who had under his control a camera
obscura table with two spaniels sitting on it is already a wizard. And they
all leapt into it with great enthusiasm. By everybody, I remember George
Gunn, who was the Chief Technical Adviser of Technicolor and afterwards
became Head of Technicolor, spent days and weeks trying to do it. It inspired
everybody.
K.G-Y.:
To what extent are these godlike figures like the director of the film?
The point I make in my article is that these figures, like Lermontov in
The Red Shoes, express attitudes that are not too different from
your own.
Powell:
Yes, that's quite true.
K.G-Y.:
Would you say it was conscious on your part?
Powell:
I think it's unconscious - it must be. It's just that I would be absolutely
physically incapable of having somebody stand at a window looking down at
a street with a straight shot of the street and a straight shot of him looking
down - I wouldn't be capable of doing that! It wouldn't satisfy me at all.
K.G-Y.:
Well, the sequence in 49th Parallel where Leslie Howard is living
in a tent with the paintings and catches the German and says, 'That's for
Thomas Mann, that's for Picasso, that's for Matisse and that's for me',
is a very curious sequence, if it's unconsciously done.
Powell:
It is a curious sequence and it's not very successful, as you say. I don't
think Leslie believed in it at all. He was a very difficult man... Yes,
I agree that it is like me talking. Leslie did not find it easy to work
for anyone else, he was a very tricky character. When he was by himself
he was very successful. It was a tragedy that he got killed. You can tell
what he was like from John Houseman's book. I can see and hear the Leslie
Howard sequences that he describes absolutely.
K.G-Y.:
Could I ask you about the way you figure as a personality within the films;
opening films like One of Our Aircraft is Missing and The Edge
of the World and, of course, the way you dominate Peeping Tom.
Powell:
You wouldn't be correct to infer that I wanted to do it. It's more that
someone had to do it. In the case of The Edge of the World, it was
much simpler if it was me.
K.G-Y.:
But in both this and One of Our Aircraft you actually open the tale.
Powell:
I think it was only important in Peeping Tom where I'm clearly the
director and the visual maniac. That was one of the main reasons why I played
my own son as my son. I thought it was such a strange story to get mixed
up in that I didn't feel like mixing up any other child in it.
K.G-Y.:
There's a similarity between you there and the Roger Livesey character of
A Matter of Life and Death, who puts things into focus. Both scripts
were written by different people, so what part did you play in constructing
these characters?
Powell:
Yes, that's a very good comparison. I suppose they are both an interpretation
of the director as God.
K.G-Y.:
Did The Wizard of Oz provide the source for A Matter of Life and
Death? There are enormously strong parallels, monochrome sequences,
the characters being knocked unconscious and the concept of 'over the rainbow'.
Powell:
Victor Fleming's picture had a big influence on me, yes! But I'm pretty
sure that the idea of Heaven being in monochrome and the Earth in colour
was Emeric's. How it's interpreted is a different thing! Fleming was a great
technician and I am, too, quite consciously, a great technician. I think
it's important to be one. I never thought of myself as being a great technician
until Alex Korda told someone else that he thought I was the greatest technician
he had ever worked with in the cinema. The Wizard of Oz would have
influenced my interpretation. Basically anything can be done in the cinema
and basically everything is fairly easy if you only take the trouble.
K.G-Y.:
The sequence in Black Narcissus where Kathleen Byron finally falls
into the ravine and which looks and sounds Disneyish. How conscious were
you of that?
Powell:
I think what you've spotted is the fact that it was prerecorded. It was
the first time in a film that I planned a sequence with the composer and
we did do a complete prerecording of the sequence before I shot it. I was
already feeling my way towards the idea of the ballet of The Red Shoes
and The Tales of Hoffmann because I was fascinated by the fact
that I had these continual struggles with Emeric over the words. By now
I was fairly convinced that writers were not able to be good writers of
cinema, because they would always go back to the words. Composers, on the
other hand, I felt, did write good films. The more experience I had, the
more convinced I became that composers and film makers think very much alike.
Their tempos are very closely related to our cutting tempos, their longueurs
and their statements are very similar to ours. Whereas, even with a writer
as clever and subtle as Emeric, I always had this continual battle with
words. This sequence was consciously a very big mounting pictorial sequence.
You remember, I'm sure, the snows, the strange mystical effect of the early
morning, and the feeling that she's being watched and haunted all the time.
I felt that if I could get all the sound clear first, I could do a much
better job on it. So armed with a stopwatch and a script, we worked it out
in terms of shots. Brian did me a complete pre-score on it. When I shot
it I naturally had these notes very much in mind, the actual length of shots
worked out. So possibly the feeling that it was a composed film came over.
The connection with Disney is only that it is heightened emotion and the
trying to make it like a bad dream.
K.G-Y.:
Can you account for your admiration for Disney, for thinking of him as the
greatest genius of the cinema?
Powell:
I think it is partly the time he came into the cinema. After the silent
cinema, which had discovered everything about timing, particularly about
comedy timing, but also timing of the image, came this horribly dreary ten
years period of sound, when the words were just pouring out. These terrible
documentary shorts of orchestras playing, like you still get on television.
To all of us who love the cinema, it was a most terrible period, you can't
imagine what it was like. The comedians were all destroyed by sound. The
comedians were great as you know - Keaton, Chaplin, Langdon and so on. It
had all vanished overnight - under words. Disney didn't believe in this
at all and fought against it. He was working with complete control of the
cartoon medium and he restored this wonderful timing of action and timing
to the screen again. He really brought it all back. Where Chaplin and Keaton
and the others had analysed comedy to the point when they knew exactly how
to photograph a common point, he was able to do it ten times as fast as
they, because he was dealing with images and not with people. He did a tremendous
amount for the cinema. No one will ever realise how much he restored of
what had been lost. Snow white had wonderful things in it, but it was not
a perfect work of art like Dumbo was from beginning to end. Walt had iron
self-control too. He wanted to go on to even more wonderful things. He knew
that if he did he'd go bust. So he had to keep on dragging it down to earth.
K.G-Y.:
What are your observations about the state of the industry now?
Powell:
I think it's in an awful state. It's very difficult to say more when, after
50 years of effort on the part of everybody, you see everything going backwards.
All the people who are anything to do with films are frightened. They don't
know why a film is successful or unsuccessful. The English film industry
has practically stopped - except for remakes of television shows. I think
it's really fighting for its life.
August 30th 1973.
© Kevin Gough-Yates: all rights reserved.
