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part of a trilogy and luckily was still in the cutting room.
“So they got that and showed it to Harry who quite literally said, ‘let’s give the kid a break!’ Remember I was 37 at the time. That turned out to be my first big picture - anamorphic, lots of hand-held, six weeks in Finland, six weeks at Pinewood. I’d never really been in a major studio situation like that before. Talk about going in at the deep end and, of course, Ken was a very challenging director, always prepared to have a go at things that hadn’t been done before.”
Two years later Williams was re-united with Russell for Women In Love: “Photographically it was the best opportunity I’ve ever had in terms of what the script was offering. It had every kind of challenge. Apart from the usual day and night interiors and exteriors, there was candlelight, snow scenes, dusk and dawn, and the nude wrestling scene. Alan Bates and Oliver Reed agreed to be fully nude for one day only, on a closed set. After that they’d only do waist upward scenes.”
The film earned Williams the first of three Academy Award nominations, culminating a decade later with the Oscar itself - among a total haul of eight - for Gandhi, which he shared with co-DP Ronnie Taylor. It more than made up for the disappointment when, a year earlier, he was in the same Dorothy Chandler Pavilion nominated for his work on On Golden Pond only then to be pipped to the statuette by the great Italian Vittorio Storaro (for Reds).
Vilmos Zsigmond had been origi- nally due to light On Golden Pond but was unavailable so recommended Williams to director Mark Rydell: “Around that time Vilmos was very much into flashing the film to soften the image and using various filters
to take the contrast away. Mark was
very keen I
should do some-
thing like that
too. I wasn’t,
though, because I
didn’t like the
idea of the film
looking too
chocolate-boxy,
too soft and sen-
timental. I
thought the
actors (Henry
Fonda was 76
playing 80 while
Katharine
Hepburn was 72)
should look their
age.” Eventually he managed to persuade Rydell to do away with filters altogether apart from “a very fine black net on the extreme close- ups of Hepburn and Jane Fonda.”
Among more than 35 features - which have garnered three British Academy nominations and a pair of BSC awards (for Eagle’s Wing and Gandhi) - are two which also dragged Williams on to the other side of the camera. Blink and you’d probably miss his spit-and-cough as expert witness Professor Alpert in the court- room thriller Suspect. Much more substantial, if dramatically curtailed by rampaging Berbers, was his earlier stint as the British Vice-Consul to Tangier in John Milius’s handsome period epic, The Wind And The Lion.
Milius, from the macho, pistol- waving school of American directors, would take Williams off in the early mornings to show him how to use a gun. “But what about my lines? Williams asked him anxiously. “Forget
the lines; you’ve got to get the action right. The scene, very early on in the film, involved the diplomat chatting to Candice Bergen and her two children in the corner of a beautiful North Africa garden as, suddenly, rebel horsemen burst through a trellis and charge across the duckpond. The action then involved Williams shouting
loudly ‘Brigands!” as he gets up draw- ing a Browning, moving to his mark and then shooting the leading horse- man who is to take a spectacular fall into the adjacent pond.
“So we shoot it and everything goes terrifically... except I forgot to fire the gun. The horseman fell, it was a terrific stunt but I hadn’t fired. It was the one thing that mattered most to Milius and I managed to get it wrong. It certainly made me think about how much technical stuff actors often have to remember, stuff which we maybe tend to take for granted. Anyway the scene ends up with my getting killed, which was going to be the highlight for my youngest daughter Jo who was watch- ing. Except for the moment when I actually get cut down Milius decided to put in a double. Jo was in tears that I had to relinquish my final shot.”
If you saw the recent 25th Anniversary re-issue of that classic satanic shocker, The Exorcist, then
you’d realise just how crucial the opening 11-minute prologue is as a scene setter to the subsequent hor- rors in Georgetown DC. Williams had last worked in Iraq 18 years earlier making an oil company documentary about the cultural history of Mesopotamia. His assistants then, now leading figures in the local film industry, joined up with him again for a belated reunion to shoot the eerily atmospheric and scarily effective sequence set among the excavations.
The film, which had been famously jinxed during its American shoot before moving to the Middle East over-schedule and over-budget, now suffered one more piece of bad luck. Director William Friedkin and Williams were in the remote Northern Kurdish area sorting through 200 pieces of equipment, the biggest of which should have been a huge packing case containing a fibre-glass statue of the demon Pazuzu. It was missing and without it, there could be no film. Eventually after yet more delays and inaction, Pazuzu was finally tracked down to Singapore where it had been offloaded after being accidentally left on a plane.
These days Williams has drawn back from the day-to-day grind of feature films preferring instead a love- ly home and garden, grandchildren and a new interest in carpentry.
“And,” says Williams, “as I now spend between eight and 10 weeks a year teaching, I haven’t really hung up my light meter yet. One of the main reasons I was attracted to it in the first place was that it forced me to analyse how I approached my work. When you’re actually doing it, it seems instinctive, sometimes almost automatic. We are, after all, in the communications business and it’s the job of the teacher to communicate to the students. That’s really very rewarding.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
BILLY WILLIAMS BSC
Photos top: Sean Connery in The Wind And The Lion; above left: Sammi Davis, Ken Russell, Paul McGann and Billy Williams on the set of The Rainbow; above centre: young Billy behind a Vinten Model H camera with his father Billie Williams in Arbroath, Scotland shooting an RAF training film in 1944; above right: the scene of Father Merrin’s confrontaion with the statue of demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist (Courtesy BFI Stills).
EXPOSURE • 14 & 15