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London with some tasty black-and-white stills which he’d printed up in his own darkroom at home using an enlarger made from a vacuum cleaner.
“Now suddenly,” Trow recalls, “from messing about in the school’s photo- graphic club I had thousands of pounds worth of equipment if not exactly at my disposal then at least all around me. Mind you, at first I wasn’t allowed to touch much of it. My job was mostly moving tripods and lights about. But eventually I began to do everything from printing black-and-white stills to pro- cessing 35mm movie film in deep tanks.
“I was attached to something called
the Line Landing Experimental Unit
which was developing systems for auto-
matic landing in, say, the fog. As a result
I got to do an awful lot of flying and we’d
have a Bolex camera on a cabin mount shooting from the co-pilot’s seat. Then, on to that film, would be superimposed altitude levels. If I
revolutionary front-and-back projection system, the team had graduated to a nine week shoot and an $8 million budget. “ It was fascinating being there at that time,” Trow recalls. “We were at Introvision between Fearless and The Fugitive and had many of the same technicians shoot- ing our special effects stuff.”
But eventually, the endless round of car chases, explosions and special effects do begin to pall and a couple of years back Trow decided to make a conscious effort to move away “from these genre things for which I had begun to get a label.”
There was perhaps two years between being first contacted for Up ‘N’ Under and actually shooting the film: “John Godber had struggled at first to get money for it perhaps because, on paper, it didn’t look like a great cinema
film. Everyone was anxious it shouldn’t just end up as a small Channel 4 film or a photographed stage play. I came up with the idea of shooting it wide in ‘Scope using Super 35 so that the tableaux would be big.”
By the time they were on the floor during a miserable wet winter, the original location in the heart of Godber’s own rugby league country near Hull had been switched pragmat- ically to rugby union territory in South Wales with a suitable co-production deal in place.
It’s just this sort of typical industry vagary which perhaps characterises Trow’s career as a kind of guerrilla film-maker. “I’ve had an unconventional career and have had to do things on the hoof, as it were, because I started late. It’s as if I had packed a 30-year career into just the past ten years. I’ve always been able to work fairly quickly and luckily I’ve managed to learn as I go along.”
Trow, who also counts episodes of the TV thriller series Mind To Kill, and a couple of recent shorts, Hester and Rendezvous,
among his credits, hasn’t ruled out the possibility of becoming a director himself.
“When you’re working with a lot of first-time directors, as I have, then you have directed to some extent. I have a project, but then doesn’t everyone in this business? Making films is all about being creative and surely the ultimate creation is about total control,” he smiles. ■ QUENTIN FALK
Up ‘N’ Under, Mind To Kill and Rendezvous were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative.
ALAN M TROW
remember correctly we may Arriflex 16 BL to work with.”
It was all, Trow agrees, very good training but in the final analysis “not all that exciting.” This was, after all, the dog-end of the Swinging Sixties and he was keen to enjoy his share. After being turned down by the BBC, he decided to move into stills work with the idea of being another David Bailey or, bet- ter still, Don McCullin, whose work regularly graced the pages of the prestigious Camera User magazine.
have had the first
He worked as a freelance
and on newspapers but still in
the back of the mind was the
desire eventually to get into
movies. His heroes were cam-
eramen like Jack Cardiff and
Douglas Slocombe and he regularly devoured the wisdom and gossip of periodicals like American Cinematographer.
The “break” came when during an exhibition of his award-winning stills work at St David’s Hall in Cardiff he met up with an aspiring director who persuaded him to collaborate on a violent, sexy, star-less, no-budget feature called The Comic. This in turn led to an altogether more significant meet- ing in the mid 80s with another pair of unconven- tional film-makers, John Eyres and his partner Geoff Griffiths, who ran a chain of video stores in South Wales.
Trow explains: “John’s a very forthright Mancunian who saw people all over the place mak- ing movies for what seemed tiny amounts of
money and
decided ‘why
don’t we try
it ourselves.’ HegavemeacallandaskedifI’dbehisDPon Goodnight, God Bless, a police thriller. Whatever you think about its qualities, the film made its bud- get back and spurred John on. He started going to all the film markets to check out product and eventually set up production companies, first in Canada then in Hollywood. I ended up shooting five films with him.”
Some of the collaborations may have been made for peanuts. But by the time they were occu- pying three stages at Introvision on the sci-fi thriller Monolith using the eponymous facility’s
Photos: Samantha Janus in Up ‘N’ Under, Alan Trow with Lou Gossett Jnr on the set of Monolith and John Hurt as Villano in Monolith. Alan Trow with director John Eyres (2nd right) and crew of Project Shadowchaser.
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