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WHEN THE LEAN
TIMES WERE GREAT An interview with Guy Green BSC
H ad it not been for some forward-thinking individ-
ual at his school, Guy Green might never have even entered the film industry. That might have deprived us of at least
two of perhaps the finest post-war mono- chrome movies ever made in Britain - Oliver Twist and, in 1946, Great Expectations, for which he won the Oscar for black-and-white cinematogra- phy.
“I used to go to the movies a lot as a child,” the spritely 86 year old recalls, as we talk at his home in Beverly Hills. “I would sit through favourite films two or three times. So it was a great opportunity when my school bought a projector. They were hand cranked in those days, and I vol- unteered to be the projectionist.”
Green’s career proper began at Sound City, Shepperton, working as a focus puller on quota quickies - films that were shot for a pound a foot to make up a legally required proportion of British movies, for release in an industry dominated by American product.
After that Green got a job working as a camera operator at British International Pictures. There he came under the influence of German cine- matographer Gunther Krampf, who would have a profound influence on his approach to lighting. He also struck up a friendship with Ronald Neame, in those days a cinematogra- pher too, and later a director and pro- ducer of note. But it took the outbreak of war for many of Green’s peer group of technicians to find opportunity
knocking in unexpected ways. “Before the war we were all doing second tier jobs,” he recalls, “with the
top jobs held by Germans or Americans. But they all left and there was a gap for people like me, David Lean and Carol Reed to break through.”
The association with David Lean is significant, for after working as opera- tor on Lean’s In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed , it was his director who recommended him as a potential cinematographer to Carol Reed halfway through the shoot. As a result Green photographed the rousing wartime flag waver, The Way Ahead.
Then, in 1946, he received a call from David Lean asking him to photo- graph Great Expectations, when Robert Krasker left the project after only a week of principal photography.
“I don’t know why David didn’t get on with Bob because he was a wonderful cameraman,” Green muses. “He had shot some exteriors of the boy running over the moors and one or two things on the Thames Estuary. But that was as far as he had got. So I did virtually the whole picture.” The official reason, according to Kevin Brownlow’s biography of Lean was that the director considered Krasker’s rushes “flat and uninteresting.”
Green clearly didn’t do too bad a job as the stark expressionism and stylised photography helped Great Expectations became an international hit. It also earned him an Oscar in the same year that Jack Cardiff won for best colour cinematography, for Black Narcissus. It was inevitable that the
same team should be reassembled for another literary effort, and so it was that in 1948 Green, Lean and Dickens brought out Oliver Twist.
“There were no particular chal- lenges about the film,” Green recalls, “but I did invent something that they’re using all the time now. I started to use what they call bounced light, by putting heavy diffusers in front of arc lamps, because I wanted to get the feel- ing of light struggling through the work- house windows. And it came off, because lots of critics since have said that they feel that.
“These days they use it to photo- graph actresses, to make them look beautiful because there are no hard shadows to it. But it’s the antithesis of what I usually do, which is to use very strong directional light. I was always interested in feeling the presence of the light and, with that in mind, instead of illuminating everything that needed to be seen I thought it was important to feel something about the composition.”
Shot entirely on studio sets, the degree of control this allowed Green and his director was total. “That’s what I love,” he smiles. “Outside you’re at the mercy of the weather and the time of day, and other terrible problems. I love to be in the studio, there’s a set with people on it, and it’s pitch black. Then I turn it into a picture by turning light on where I think it should be. That’s marvellous fun.”
Green looks back with much deserved pride on these two Lean films. And he recalls a fond friendship
with Lean himself, although the direc- tor did sometimes know a little bit too much about the cinematographer’s art for his liking back then.
“I didn’t appreciate that too much at the time,” he chuckles, “but I certain- ly did afterwards when I worked with lots of less talented directors.” In later years, after Green had transformed him- self into a successful director, he only seriously considered returning behind the camera on one occasion - when David Lean asked him to photograph his long cherished project, Nostromo.
“It would have brought the wheel full circle. We talked about it a couple of times, but it never came off. I don’t know if it would ever have worked, but now we’ll never know.”
During the 1950s Green continued to work across a contrasting range of movies. He enjoyed success with colourful Disney romps, The Story of Robin Hood & His Merrie Men and Rob Roy, that seagoing epic Captain Horatio Hornblower as well as further Lean col- laborations on The Passionate Friends and Madeleine.
But he hankered after making films of his own and so after alternating between the two jobs for a few years he began to establish himself as a full time movie director. Highlights include Sea of Sand, The Angry Silence, The Mark and (his personal favourite) A Patch of Blue, an Oscar-winner in 1965. After so many years shooting other peoples’ movies, directing proved a rare thrill.
“When I was in the camera depart- ment, everyone’s ambition was to be a lighting cameraman. We all had that drive, and I was lucky enough to do it.
Photos left to right: Julie Harris and Laurence Harvey in I Am A Camera; Guy Green on the set of Rob Roy And The Highland Rogue (1953) with Richard Todd
Guy Green(first from left) on the set of Great Expectations with David Lean(second from left); Valerie Hobson and John Mills in Great Expectations (Courtesy Movie Store Collection).
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