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REFLECTED GLORY
REFLECTED GLORY
An interview with David Watkin BSC
I f he ever hears a director ask for smoke, David Watkin will probably inquire politely but
pointedly, “Why, is the set on fire?’ Shooting wet streets at night or printing nights blue are a couple more cinemato-
graphic “clichés” absolutely guaranteed to raise his hackles.
But after more than fifty feature films spanning 35 years - from The Knack in 1965 to Tea With Mussolini, now on release - Watkin has also retained the priceless ability to step back from the work with an ever amused detachment: “Others worry a lot all the time. When I’m working I’m really switched on but afterwards I don’t think about it at all. Away from work there are things I would much prefer to do like play the piano or listen to music.”
Watkin thinks he probably owes his relaxed attitude to some advice given him way back before his feature ‘break’ by a “wonderful cameraman” called Jimmy Ritchie. At the time they were both working for British Transport Films and Watkin was anxiously preparing to photograph his first documentary on 16mm reversal stock about Blackpool and the Lancashire coast. “Most important of all,” Ritchie told him, “never worry about the results. Do all the right things. Next, go back over it and make sure that you’ve done all the right things - then forget about it. Next day if there’s anything wrong,
don’t blame yourself, and don’t blame anyone else. Then find out why, so it doesn’t happen again.”
Long before Ritchie’s Law, a much younger Watkin received another piece of advice which if not exactly what he wanted to hear at the time would very indirectly lead on eventually to a glit- tering career including remarkable col- laborations with directors like Tony Richardson, Richard Lester, Franco Zeffirelli, Ken Russell, Norman Jewison and Sidney Lumet, not to mention an Oscar for Out Of Africa.
He recalls the moment: “I once asked my father if I could have some music lessons. He said firmly I wouldn’t make any money out of it and it would also make a noise in the house.” To be fair this sharp rebuff would be followed up a few years on by a much more practical piece of help. The war had come and gone and after demob, the 22-year-old ex-army man surveyed civvy street with some trepidation: “I thought I just can’t wear a suit and go into an office every day. What could I do that would be fun? What about films?
“My father was the solicitor for what was then the Southern Railway and he discovered there was a tiny lit- tle documentary film unit stuck in the tunnels under Waterloo Station. He said he could get me in there. So you could say he proved a lot more help- ful with films than he had been with music,” Watkin adds, wryly.
Within a year the whole trans- port system was nationalised and with the famous Crown Film Unit about to be wound down, British Transport Films came into being, cre- ated and run by Edgar Anstey. Part of the Nationalisation Act was that no- one should lose, or be coerced into changing, their job as an outcome. So, at 24, Watkin was now suddenly a properly unionised messenger boy with Anstey’s nascent outfit.
In due course he graduated to the camera department, eventually going solo on Holiday, that Blackpool film, followed by a personal
highlight not just of his time at BTF but of his whole career.
This was the prestigious The England Of Elizabeth, designed to showcase a second Elizabethan era by photographically recalling places and things which had been in evidence during its first manifestation 400 years earlier. That brief spanned certain types of tree to a gloriously
lit interior of the whole of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.
“Not a bad start,” he says with still obvious pride, “but the best thing
is that the music was written by Vaughan Williams who’d been my idol since I was 14. So at least I’ve got my name on the same film as him. And I think I’m prouder of that than any other credit.” Even handier, though, when it came finally to contemplating a career beyond BTF - “after a while you found you were going around putting your tripod in the same holes as ten years before” - was a little seven-and-a-half minute movie which effectively became Watkin’s most potent future calling card.
One of the stock companies had brought out a new colour film and sent a roll over to BTF for testing. Watkin hinted to his boss that tests per se were boring so how about he make a short film. Anstey agreed and suggested a large railway station. Now it so happened that John Schlesinger had just been borrowed from the BBC to make Terminus, portraying 24 hours in the life of Waterloo Station. Not fazed, Anstey sent Watkin off to Paddington but was less than pleased with the result which had been edited to music by the Modern Jazz Quartet.
“The result was a commercial. Edgar didn’t think it was a film at all and felt I’d been grossly extravagant printing everything in colour. Just how I was supposed to test a new colour stock by printing everything in black and white he was not able to tell me. The cutting copy lay untouched the rest of my time there
Photos main: David Watkin; from left: Nigel Havers and Ian Charleson in Chariots Of Fire;
Cher in Tea With Mussolini; John Gielgud in Charge Of The Light Brigade(Courtesy Moviestore Collection); Oliver Reed in The Devils
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