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Photos: main; Jamie Harcourt Gorillas In The Mist starring Sigourney Weaver Bille August’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow poster Tomorrow Never Dies pre-titles shoot David De Keyser, Miranda Richardson and Mike Nichols in Designated Mourner.
ing Partition as well as a big matte shot for the funeral sequence, he’d graduated to focus puller. Cut to five years on and another of those career- making calls, this time from operator turned DP Kelvin Pike asking Harcourt to join him on a Donald Sutherland thriller shooting in Bergen. “I assumed,” Harcourt recalled, “he was asking me to be focus puller. He waited right to the end of the conversation before suddenly throwing in, ‘by the way, I want you to be camera operator. Bye, bye.’ Pike had, in fact, given Harcourt his first opportunity to operate some years earlier during the Alhambra Theatre scenes on The Dresser.
“He sent for me and said he had this shot for me to operate on upstairs. I remember him describing the shot he wanted which would start up in the gods on the faces on the soldiers, sailors and their girlfriends before tipping down to the people in the stalls then pan across to the stage where they’re spouting Shakespeare. It was a mas- sive shot and I was very nervous but he was very supportive and helpful.”
And that’s how it proved again in Norway when Harcourt, taking what he described as “a hell of a step in a very risky business”, was reunited with Pike on Apprentice To Murder. “Kelvin was such a good teacher and, like other pivotal people in my career such as Robin Browne and Chick Anstiss, has taught me a lot not just in the way you do your job but also how you handle people and about the time to say things... and the time not to.”
Harcourt and his father, now 82 and happily retired to Wiltshire, managed to work together only once. And that was for just one day but on different cameras during the Pinewood studio interiors on Meetings With Remarkable Men.
“Once I got going in films, the yardstick has, I suppose, been my father’s career, which was very stable. He was certainly very well respect- ed for what he did. As far as words of wisdom are concerned, he once said to me, ‘put yourself in a position where you can afford to say no.’ Unfortunately, I have to say I have never really been able yet to take that advice,” Harcourt junior sighed. ■ QUENTIN FALK
The Designated Mourner, photographed by Oliver Stapleton BSC and due to be screened on TV in the autumn, was originated