Page 20 - Fujifilm Exposure_4 Samantha Janus_ok

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Performance, co-starring James Fox and Mick Jagger. Because he was then actually working for co-director Donald Cammell’s commercials com- pany, O’Dell had carte blanche to run fairly free, as it were, between the set and the labs. He was espe- cially able to observe, at first hand, complete total chaos. Organised chaos? “No. They had huge script problems and were dealing with artists, many of whom couldn’t basically hang together for more than an hour at a time. The result was the film went massively over budget.”
He was also very closely involved with one of the film’s most notoriously intimate sequences much of which would never actually see the light of day. “ You may remember there’s a scene where some of the characters make a 16mm film under the bedclothes. So they gave the camera to Mick Jagger and then left him to it. He shot probably 10 rolls, some thousand feet, and then the stuff was sent off to the lab. There was, as you might just guess, a huge outcry because the stuff turned out [surprise, surprise!] to be pornographic and in those days you could be had up for processing it.
“So one of my jobs was to go round to the lab and witness a man with a steel chisel and hammer chopping up the negative of the porn material. That’s how sensitive they were in those days and I can always remember seeing this prune faced, lemon lipped lab supervisor looking on. That was an extraordinary baptism of film-making for me.”
After several more false starts, most notably the agency going bust, and even the odd moment thinking it was perhaps now time to just give up gracefully, the union ticket eventually came through. With a camera assistant job secured at Alan King Associates, O’Dell’s career could begin in earnest. King provided crews and camera equip- ment to TV companies at a time when Current Affairs programmes were just beginning to flower and O’Dell managed to get alongside some fine cameraman like Mike Davis, Nic Knowland and Bill Braine in these early days of the process.
There was no career plan as such: simply sur- vival. But within three years, things were definite- ly looking up when O’Dell helped set up a produc- tion company called Platypus Films. “We bought our first Eclair NPR camera in the same year the then Tory Government reduced the working week. I can remember,” he laughs,” making films for Dutch TV about people who had to bathe in two inches of bathwater. I was the company’s first and only crew before we then gradually built that up to no less than five full-time crews. Then we started up a video company and even had five or six cut- ting rooms. I was there eight years but sadly [and here O’Dell remains extremely tight-lipped] it all came to a very sticky end.”
By this time, though, he had a good reputation and his documentary work would take him all over the world. There was Cosmos for the late Carl
Sagan, Granada’s Man Of Music and C4’s Heart Of The Dragon, the first-ever big series shot in China. His work took him quite literally to the ends of the earth where there’d often be no power supplies. “The equipment had to be basic, often limited just to what the crew could carry itself. “This gave me great experience of being able to make something work out of nothing,” he says.
The original dream of feature films seemed further off than ever and even TV drama appeared off limits because there were so many experienced cameramen around. “I thought,” says O’Dell, “I’d probably end my days with a camera in some savannah down South America way.”
Then Brian Eastman suddenly called him up on the phone. He and O’Dell had worked together years earlier on some music documentaries. Now one of television’s most prolific and respected pro- ducers was asking if the cameraman would like to work on his hit Poirot series for ITV which was about to start its third season of shooting. Naturally O’Dell jumped at the opportunity.
“I ended up doing 13 episodes of Poirot and continued to work for Brian for three to four years after that. When I first joined up, the series was already well established. The unit was already in place and it was very polished. It almost worked without my being there. Anyway it was quite daunting and I was very nervous.
“So I fell back on my old technical training. As I will say even now to my assistants, you don’t need it everyday but when the shit hits the fan, that’s the testbed of any cameraman. You can wing it, not understanding the basics of physics and chemistry. In fact you might get by without it for years. But when you’re really in trouble, you need that basic knowledge to get you through and it’ll always bail you out.”
O’Dell, who has since gathered around him his own semi-permanent crew, including operator Steve Alcorn, clearly sets great store by his legacy of not just the theory but also the hands-on expe- rience of college and film school.
“I suppose I was fortunate to do it when I did. I didn’t have to pay a penny as it was all State- funded. But now I see a new generation that has no such opportunities. They might be learning empir- ically how to do it but not necessarily the how and why? I actually try to do a questions and answers session with my crew perhaps once a week, to pass down a bit of experience and learning.
“If the nettle isn’t grasped now,” says O’Dell, whose next ambition is to light a cinema feature, “it could come home to roost. We’re beginning, I believe, to reap the whirlwind of woefully inade- quate technical knowledge. To succeed properly as a cameraman, you must, I believe, be truly interested in movies ...want to look at them... actu- ally get the sense of them... the smell, even the touch of them.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
EXPOSURE • 20 & 21