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THINKING ON HIS FEET
THINKING ON HIS FEET
An interview with Tony Imi BSC
I had a young cameraman, Tony Imi, who just put up the camera on his shoulder and ran for four days,” recalled director Ken Loach looking back recently to the far-off days of his frantic shoot on the famous 1965 BBC Wednesday Play, Up The
Junction. “The theory back then,” explained Loach, “was that you were making TV plays, not films, so you had to make them electron- ically in the studio. But the BBC did allow you two to three days to do location shoot- ing, like shots of people getting into a car, dri- ving somewhere, then getting out of the car, whereupon you’d cut back to the studio.
“So we said, OK, we’ll take those two to three days but on Up The Junction we actu- ally managed to nick four days of location shooting altogether. And in those four days we filmed half of what would end up in the final 72 minute piece.”
Thefollowingyear,LoachandImiwere
back together again on another inspired, and even more notorious, steeplechase. Cathy Come Home - once memorably described as “agitational contempo- raneity” - was a heartbreaking drama by Jeremy Sandford about inadequate accommodation and intolerable housing lists, so controversial it even pro- voked questions in the House.
Imi, now 60 and a thirty-year veteran of movie and television productions filmed around the world with stars like Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Woody Allen and Kirk Douglas, remembers those days of black-and-white guerrilla film-making on the
mean streets of London with enormous affection. Shot in just three weeks, Cathy Come Home, with Carol White and Ray Brooks, was, reckons Imi, prob- ably “95 per cent film.”
The BBC was Imi’s film school but actually get- ting a foothold inside the old Corporation still seemed a distant prospect when he finished his National Service. He knew he wanted to be a DP ever since the days he was merely a film fan growing up in Kilburn. You could almost say he was weaned on cin- ema since his mother, a fanatical cinemagoer, often went to the flicks up to three times a week and would
breast feed little Tony in such hallowed picture houses as the Gaumont State, Odeon Edgware Road, Blue Hall, Connaught and Coliseum, known as “the fleapit.”
“The first film I saw? I asked this question of my crew the other day. For them, it tends to be things like Star Wars. ‘What about Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters?’, I wanted to say and then realised it’s such a generation thing. Back then it suddenly dawned on me that these films up there on the screen didn’t just happen. They were actually made and I thought, ‘Yes, I’d like to do that.’ That’s how the fantasy started for me.”
After school, Imi - whose grandpar- ents were Italian - went to work for a company called Fox Photos, a big nega- tive library. But he knew that with two years in the RAF hovering on the imme- diate horizon, life and a career were
effectively on hold. After National Service, he started hammering on doors again in earnest and finally the Beeb responded to one of his begging letters. There was a job going as a trainee cameraman so he put in for it but didn’t get the post which was allocated in- house. Instead, would he like to come in as a trainee projectionist? “They said I’d be handling film and it was clear that’s the closest I’d get to it at the moment. I applied and got it.”
Imi worked in the theatre at Lime Grove. “I saw rushes, rough cuts, fine cuts - the whole process. Miles of film every day, the whole of the BBC output.
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Photos main left: Tony Imi; inset top left: Shopping; centre: Tony Imi with Whoopi Goldberg onThe Sunshine Boys; right: Lighthouse; and inset centre: Ray Brooks and Carol White in Cathy Come Home.