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Over the next year or so, Fry went to the odd ‘pitch’ meeting and chatted to this or that pro- ducer and financial person. In the meantime, he got on with what a polymath does, which was make three or four films as an actor, write three different books and generally feel “maybe or maybe not this thing will even- tually happen. It wasn’t as though I did nothing else for three years.”
Then, in early Spring last year he was in Paris doing a bit in the new Merchant-Ivory film, Le Divorce, when a call came from the pro- ducers telling Fry to head for Cannes where the film was finally to be announced properly as part of a new Film Four package.
Two weeks later, back in England, FilmFour collapsed and Fry thought “typical.” But he needn’t have worried. Almost before the dust had settled, the Film Consortium “galloped to our rescue and Icon came on board as our UK distributor. All slips that took place between cup and lip are history now and not that interesting. Essentially we are here now and everything hap- pened in the end very quickly by the usual standards.”
Fry and Waugh seem perfect- ly partnered – and indeed flirted once before on film when Fry had a small but telling role in Charles Sturridge’s A Handful of Dust, certainly the best film, to date, of Waugh’s witty and cyni- cal work.
“I’m sure this film will tell peo- ple very little about the 20s and 30s but you can tell them a lot about age, our obsessions and our interests... You must just accept that is always the way with period films,” Fry told me.
“We haven’t modernised it, though. Indeed, the more you go for authenticity, the righter it is. But one’s kidding oneself if one says it’s not about our own time, because why else would one want to make it?”
And then Fry has to get back to the set because there are more questions to deal with.
What does he least like about directing, I asked him. “Getting up early in the morning, every single morning. Mind you, I knew that stuff coming in because I’ve been on enough film sets to realise that’s how directors lead their lives.
“No,” he reflected finally. “It’s probably the fact you don’t have time to go to the lavatory. It would be so nice to go to the lavatory one day.”
obits
His non-Lean credits include A
KAenneth Rive
one-time child actor and cinema projectionist, Kenneth Rive, who died aged 84, became one of this country’s pioneering distributors of foreign-language films.
His company, Gala, founded in the Fifties, introduced to Britain the work of Francois Truffaut and also championed Bergman, Rohmer, Zetterling, Resnais, Fellini and Kurosawa as well as various Russian filmmakers.
The son of a German camera- man, Rive was also a cinema owner, running both the Berkeley and Continentale theatres in Tottenham Court Road. He did stout service too for the Cinematograph Exhibitor’s Association and the Variety Club Of Great Britain.
STir Anthony Havelock-Allan hough he will probably be best remembered for his long collaboration with David Lean, Sir Anthony Havelock-Allan, who died aged 98, was also very active in many other spheres of the film industry.
Havelock-Allan – who inherit- ed the family baronetcy in 1975 – was chairman of the British Film Academy in 1952 and, 10 years later, chaired the Society Of Film & Television Arts (now BAFTA).
He also served on the Cinematograph Films Council and was a member of a Home Office committee on child employment in entertainment.
Havelock-Allan, as casting director, and Lean, an editor, had first met in 1937 on the Jack Buchanan film musical, Brewster’s Millions, before resuming a more enduring partnership during the war on In Which We Serve.
He worked with Lean as, vari- ously, associate producer, pro- ducer and, occasionally, co- writer, on no fewer than seven films including This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Ryan’s Daughter.
Python programmes in its five years of gloriously surreal comic life between 1969 and 1974. He also helmed the team’s first foray on to the big screen, And Now For Something Completely Different.
Macnaughton, who died at 76, started out as an actor on stage and screen before moving behind the camera. Either side of Python, he directed shows like Spike Milligan’s Q5 (and its sequels) as well as the first series of Rising Damp.
This Man Is News, Orders To Kill, The Quare Fellow, Up The Junction, Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet and An Evening With The Royal Ballet which Havelock- Allan, befitting his wide-ranging talents, also co-directed.
CIonrad L Hall ASC
n the midst of chaos and the siege mentality that happens on a movie set, when Conrad puts his eye to the eyepiece of the camera, magic begins to happen.”
That’s director Sam Mendes talking about American cine- matographer Conrad Hall, who has died of bladder cancer aged 76.
Ian Macnaughton
Hall won two Oscars and two J
BAFTAs, including one in common for Mendes’ American Beauty. Hall, whose films also include In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, The Sting and Marathon Man, also earned a posthumous nomination for Road To Perdition.
Peter Tanner
azz-loving Peter Tanner spent 60 years in the cutting room earning a reputation as one
part from the first four shows, Ian Macnaughton directed all the Monty
of Britain’s finest editors.
After a series of films for Ealing
including Scott Of The Antarctic, Kind Hearts And Coronets, The Blue Lamp and The Cruel Sea, Tanner worked more widely and even had an influential spell as supervising editor on TV’s The Avengers. He was 88.
Cannes Film Festivals Accommodation Mobile Homes for Cannes 2003
14-25 May 2003 Cannes Film Festival (GBP375) + New this Year ‘Minibus’ Service
24-28 March 2003 MIP TV (GBP239)
15-21 June 2003 FIF (GBP282)
10-14 October 2003 MIPCOM (Subject to Demand)
Price is for 6 people to a mobile home, accommodation only. 20 Mobile Homes available for hire at a site called Pegomas, 5-6 Kilometres from Cannes. The mobile homes are 28 x 10ft and are fully equipped for 6 people at no extra cost - Bed linen can be hired on site.
Local leisure activities available are
Swimming Pool & Children’s Pool, and local Restaurant/Bar.
There is also a flat available for hire, accommodating 7 people 3km from Cannes.
For you convenience there will be a ‘Minibus Service’ to and from the Film Festival Site.
For further information or to book a Mobile Home/Flat please contact Donald Walker on: don@filmfair.fsnet.co.uk • filmfair.fsnet.co.uk Tel/Fax: (+44) 020 7385 6468
or send a SAE to 21 Bronsart Road, London SW6 6AJ
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PHOTO COURTESY FOYER LIBRARY