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behind the camera
2001, and John Alcott, the focus puller, and got offered a job as loader. I hon- estly didn’t know what a loader did. Luckily it was downtime on the film because they were planning to go to Australia to shoot the Dawn Of Man sequence.”
Trouble was the BBC, for whom he was working on The Troubleshooters, wouldn’t let him leave and when he got back to Elstree a week later he
discovered he’d lost his job as loader only to be told by Alcott, now elevated to operator, that Hannan would now be focus puller. “I didn’t
know what that did either but I learned very, very quickly. John was the best teacher in the world and I was on 2001 for two years. During that time I probably resigned three times because Kubrick would always find something wrong - and then he always gave me more money to stay. It was like being paid to go to university.”
Hannan remained as a focus- puller for five years during which time he returned to Australia working on Walkabout and Outback before gradu- ating to operator there on Sunstruck, with Harry Secombe. Back in the UK, the feature industry was in one of its
regular doldrums and so he lucked into commercials working for director Richard Loncraine, a fruitful ongoing collaboration which resulted in every- thing from classy ads to features like Flame (by which time he was DP), Full Circle, The Missionary and Brimstone And Treacle to the original titles for BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World.
More good luck but, one suspects, his deservedly gathering reputation saw Hannan work on a succession of fine British films throughout the Eighties, notably Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life (and its famously explosive Mr Creosote over-eating
sequence), Nic Roeg’s Insignificance, Mike Newell’s Dance With A Stranger, about murderess Ruth Ellis, and The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, directed by Jack Clayton. Before work- ing for Clayton, Hannan had heard some pretty “terrifying stories” about the legendary film-maker, “like smash- ing up Pinewood and throwing Bowie knives. From the start I knew I was in the presence of someone special. If I can, I always try to sit on the front of the dolly during takes. These days, most directors are a hundred yards away watching the monitor. Jack would ask me politely if he could share my
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Photos: A Handful Of Dust (courtesy BFI Stills & Posters) and Jeremy Irons in Longitude.