Page 6 - Fujifilm Exposure_4 Samantha Janus_ok

OSSIE RAWI
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his viewfinder or using his hand to frame a sequence, the crew is already moving to position. “Here, they tend to wait so it naturally slows
things down a bit more. Nevertheless, the job still gets done eventually. Also I love the humour on British sets; you don’t get that in the States.
“At the beginning of the shoot, Michael was looking through the camera quite a lot. I was oper- ating as well because he wanted only one man to talk to. After a while, he stopped looking because he seemed to think I knew what I was doing.
Any explosive moments? “Between him and me? Not that I was aware of. Anyway, I’m not a con- frontational sort of person. I’ve never liked this ‘them and us’, different camps approach. We should all be on the same side,” he says.
The son of exiled diplomats, Rawi claims he was always headed towards movies ever since commandeering his Edinburgh boarding school’s dark room. When he wasn’t doing stills photogra- phy, he was lapping up a diet of typical public school film fare which mostly consisted in those days of monochrome British war movies like The Dam Busters, The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story. Between those he “read everything there was to read about photography”.
School was followed by a year at Imperial College by which time he knew that he had to try and break into the film industry. After 17 months at Border TV in Carlisle working with the newsreel team, he headed South to Wardour Street which he cruised assiduously handing in his resumé to any- one who’d listen and to most who wouldn’t.
This was by now the late Sixties when, of course, anything was possible for an ambitious young man with long hair wearing Chelsea boots. Before long he’d broken into commercials - “my first was, I remember, for Jacob’s Club biscuits” - and soon he was working with Mike Hodges who then signed Rawi up as cinematographer on Pulp, the director’s second feature after Get Carter.
This big-screen break, shooting in Malta with Michael Caine and Mickey Rooney, was perhaps not quite such a leap up as you’d imagine because, apart from his operator, Dusty Miller, Rawi already knew many of the key crew from their work togeth- er with Hodges on commercials. However it was just the ignition his career needed and when he returned from the Med there was already a call from David Hemmings to make The Fourteen.
Rawi has had a remarkably eclectic string of credits since then, blending the fiercely domestic (Alfie Darling, Charlie Muffin) with exotic foreign locations (Gold, Zulu Dawn and Rachel’s Man). In amongst those were also a couple of close encoun- ters with so called Hollywood legends. By the time ex-blacklistee Edward Dmytryk arrived in the UK to film The Human Factor, a convoluted computer thriller with George Kennedy, he was, Rawi recalls sadly, “pretty tame. I never saw the magic.”
The late Don Siegel was, however, an alto- gether different case. He was here to make the spy drama, The Black Windmill, with Michael Caine, Delphine Seyrig and Donald Pleasence and,
according to Rawi, was attempting to be more politician than director. “His whole day seemed to revolve around a 6.00pm call to the US West Coast. ‘The producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, really call the shots,’ he told me, indignantly.
“It really seemed as if the Front Office was run- ning the show because he felt he couldn’t do any- thing without getting permission first.
“Also, he could never be wrong. If the produc- tion manager thought up a good idea, Siegel would take the credit yet he was never big enough ever to take the blame when things went wrong.”
In between the features there was also an extremely lucrative commercials career and it was after he’d shot Power Play, an Anglo-Canadian pro- duction, that began the sequence of events which would eventually lead to that fateful dare in Toronto. Wooed by a Canadian commercials’ com- pany to be exclusive, Rawi managed to structure a deal by which he’d keep a degree of freedom on work outside of Canada. When this inevitably necessitated zipping back and forth to the UK for other work, the frictions began.
“They somehow felt I was playing hard-to-get and ‘didn’t I know how hard it was to run an ad company?’ I barked at them about penny pinching and that there seemed to be no control over expenses, yet they would get annoyed about my purchase of a $50 lens. If you think it’s so easy to run a company try it yourself, they said. And so I stupidly, and to my great regret, took the dare.
“It was only about seven years later that I woke up properly and thought, ‘what have I done?’ At that stage I took on partners so I could get to London to shoot some features; that was the beginning of the end. Within the 18 months or so that I was away travelling, the company had sunk. A company that had money in the bank, payables no older than 30 days and respectable receivables now had used up every penny and had, incredibly, a large and worsening overdraft.
“It was all very sad but, happily, my own Rawi Film outfit was intact. Perhaps they did me a favour because I’m now truly back-to-basics. Los Angeles is my base. I’m British but also have Canadian residency and an American Green Card.”
Rawi segued from Parting Shots into more commercials on both sides of the Atlantic before moving back north of the 49th Parallel to film another feature in Toronto. It’s a film noir subject called Black Heart, co-starring Maria Conchito Alonso, Richard Grieco and Christopher Plummer, directed by Dominic Shiac, son of prolific Scots writer-producer Allan Scott.
After using Fuji stock for the first time on the Winner film, Rawi had no hesitation in ordering it up again for his latest assignment “I’m shooting this one on Fuji F250 and F500 because I was so pleased with the low-key results on Parting Shots. Black Heart takes place mostly at night. “Oh, those long night hours!”, he sighs. ■ QUENTIN FALK
Parting Shots and Black Heart were both originated on Fujicolour Motion Picture Negative
Parting Shots photographs by Sophie Baker and Tobi Corney courtesy of Michael Winner Esq
EXPOSURE • 6 & 7