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camera operator
IN THE FAMILY
IN THE FAMILY
TRADITION
TRADITION
E very cameraman has favourite career moments to recall. For Jamie Harcourt, it was probably six weeks he spent 8,000 feet up in the mountain forests of Rwanda working with wildlife specialist Simon Trevor on the second unit of Gorillas In The Mist during the late 80s. Explained Harcourt, “We were based in a fenced camp with eight tents next to a potato field. Every day we’d load the 25 or so porters with the backpacks that had been specially made up with our equipment and head off to the location. Then about four or five of us would move on by foot fol- lowing two groups of gorillas. Sometimes we had the film’s stars, Sigourney Weaver and Bryan
Brown, with us. Sometimes, we used doubles. “We got some amazing stuff there. However, in the final film, as a percentage of what we shot I suppose they eventually used very little. The point was, you had to shoot an awful lot because the script was to a certain extent formed around what we had done and the practicalities of putting
the actors into that stuff.
“We deliberately didn’t send back any rushes
for a week. Exposure was very difficult because if you think about it these were dark furry beasts in dark green dense jungle. We had to get just the right lighting conditions and it took some time to get the hang of what we were doing.
“Eventually we got what seemed a suitably spectacular shot of Sigourney with a huge gorilla. It sat down beside her, looked at her almost dis- dainfully and then did the biggest yawn. Just the size of its mouth when it opened was the same as her whole face. Eventually we got a radio message
from the studio front office saying that ‘in 17 years at Warner Brothers, I haven’t seen anything so spectacular.’ That gave us all a great fillip.”
If Gorillas In The Mist was truly “memorable” then an assignment 10 years earlier, when Harcourt, as a humble clapper loader was involved with strange sci-fi shenanigans at Elstree Studios, is, in his own disarming words, “maybe my one true claim to fame.
“We all thought we were working on a load of rubbish. There was this little American guy run- ning the whole thing who seemed to be about 21 with a squeaky voice and hardly a beard. We cer- tainly had no real understanding of what we were involved in until about a year later when in Afghanistan on Meetings With Remarkable Men I got a copy of the Daily Telegraph and saw this lit- tle clip with the headline: Star Wars Breaks All Box Office Records! What we didn’t realise when mak- ing it was what a huge part of the film all the spe- cial effects would be. It’s amazing when the sub- ject comes up now during conversations with clapper boys and assistants just how much that film is held in such awe.”
For the past 10 years, Harcourt has worked steadily as an operator on films like Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, The Steal, Tomorrow Never Dies (the pre-titles sequence) and, most recently, The Designated Mourner as well as a string of success- ful teleseries such as Poirot, Soldier Soldier, Frost, Stay Lucky, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Catherine Cookson’s The Mot h, Bramwell and Bugs. However, he admits that he first strayed into the industry more out of good luck than judgement. Or, for that matter, any burning ambition.
Boasting a grandfather, James Harcourt, who appeared on stage and in occasional films (Young Mr Pitt, Night Mail, I Met A Murderer etc) and a father, David, who enjoyed an immensely distin- guished career in his own right as a camera oper- ator, you’d have thought the film industry would have been in this third generation’s blood.
Not so. As a young teenager Harcourt wanted to be an airline pilot but both that and education itself palled to the point that in just his fifth year, he decided to “give school the elbow.” Nepotism got him his first job as a runner on Loot. “I had no burning desire to be in the film industry but I got to see all the different departments and I liked the atmosphere in and around the set. The money was very meagre and I supplemented it by washing people’s cars at lunchtime.”
Then his father got him an introduction to the camera department at Merton Park Film Studios which in turn led to successive stints at other var- ious engineering and camera outfits. By the time he was 22 going on 23, he decided to dive into the free- lance life as a clapper boy. There were odd days on commercials and the occasional film but it was generally a question of waiting for the phone to ring. The best call he had at the time was to join the second unit of The Omen, shooting in Surrey. As things turned, he actually ended up on the main unit working under DP Gil Taylor, with whom he’d w o r k a g a i n o n S t a r Wa r s , M e e t i n g s W i t h Remarkable Men and, much more recently, The Steal.
By the time Harcourt was out in India on Gandhi doing second unit coverage, under Robin Browne’s supervision, of the massive exodus dur-
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