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and when I left I showed it round to anyone I could get to look at it.
All my early freelance jobs I got on the strength of it and it was probably the saving of me.”
After nearly but not quite pho- tographing Sparrows Can’t Sing for Joan Littlewood, who’d been very impressed by his ‘showreel’, Watkin surmounted that hiccup by moving into the embryo world of commercials where he quickly began to make his name with an innovative use of reflect- ed light which would become his trade- mark. He always used it sparingly and when he came to employ the method on a Shredded Wheat ad for Richard Lester, the result was a breakthrough invitation to work on The Knack.
The Lester connection led to eight films in all, including Help?, with The Beatles, that anarchic brace How I Won The War and The Bed Sitting Room, a pair of Musketeer epics and the gently romantic Robin And Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. Only marginally less prolific was Watkin’s partnership with the late Tony Richardson with whom he made five films - or six, if you count Diana Ross’s troubled Mahogany during which the director was fired.
“I adored Tony. He was totally wicked which I loved and would always prefer to screw something up while at least trying to be interesting rather than ever shoot something ordinary. That gave people like me tremendous freedom.”
Typical was a hairy moment recreating The Battle Of Alma during
The Charge Of The Light Brigade: “It was one of those big wide battle scenes which took all day to set up. My only real contribution was to make sure they were shooting in the right direction for the light. With smoke, explosions and just the right amount of wind, the whole thing looked like a Delacroix.
“Then right in the middle of shot, an explosion went off in the foreground which was seen to have dislodged a flag (that had been set to keep the sun out of the lens). This suddenly made an appearance as a black triangle tucked in the top right hand corner. Everyone groaned at rushes but I argued that we’d never get a shot like that again.” At which point Richardson galloped in to the rescue with, “David’s right, of course it doesn’t matter. Who cares about an old flag?” All of sudden, Watkin notes, no one.
Of his five films - most recently, Tea With Mussolini - with Zeffirelli, another man ‘with a wicked sense of humour”, their first, Jesus Of Nazareth, sparked this memorable
yarn: “For the night scene inside the Sanhedrin,
I had a simple arrangement of refec- tors at different angles to each other above the set. It was already 8.30am. Franco then arrived with a precon- ceived idea of his own, very much the opposite, with tiny points from end- less oil lamps. ‘It’ll be ever so fussy and take till lunchtime,’ I said. ‘Never mind, I’d like to see,’ he replied. At midday I sent for him. ‘Na, na, na, don’t like it,’ was the reply. I turned everything out and switched in the two 10Ks which I’d been careful not to move. ‘Lovely, darling - we shoot.’
“This happened on our first day with Laurence Olivier who had been called up at an early hour for make-up and had had to wait around in the Tunisian heat wearing a heavy cos- tume. He was unwell and understand- ably displeased. I was told later that Olivier’s reaction was, ‘A cameraman who takes as long as this ought to be fired.’ I would agree with him. Franco came over to me on overhearing this and said, smiling apologetically,
‘Don’t worry, when I get my yacht, you can be my cabin boy.’
All in all it’s been a fascinatingly varied career full of fine films and some even better stories - from the award-winning Chariots of Fire, when they sent as extras a crowd of skin- heads instead of one hundred neat Cambridge undergraduates, Twenties- style, to Barbra Streisand’s notorious Yentl on which he was famously though quite mistakenly reported to have said to the perfectionist direc- tor-star, ‘There’s only one problem on this picture - and that’s your nose.”
Happily, most are included in Watkin’s splendidly titled memoir, “Why Is There Only One Word For Thesaurus?”. For a man with such a sense of literary history and whose beautiful Brighton mews house is already littered with wondrous bespoke artefacts (not even counting the Oscar), it was perhaps appropri- ate that such an obvious labour of love be privately published. The list of subscribers runs from A for Angela Allen to Z for Pinchas Zuckerman, via Sean Connery, Liam Neeson, David Puttnam and Tom Stoppard.
Now 73, Watkin’s latest “love affair” has been with Sidney Lumet. “He finishes the call sheet by afternoon tea,” is a suitably glowing testimonial for the veteran American director. Gloria, starring Sharon Stone, the latest of three consecutive collabo- rations, is due out here later this year.
Meanwhile, he prepares for an imminent two month shoot in Prague on a new version of Turgenev’s First Love. “Lovely place, great orchestra.”
DAVID WATKIN BSC
Photos top from left: Ray Brooks and Rita Tushingham in The Knack; a scene from Jane Eyre; Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Out Of Africa (Courtesy Moviestore Collection) above from left: David Watkin behind the camera; Sharon Stone in a scene from Gloria; director Franco Zeffirelli on the set of Tea With Mussolini
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