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“When I was 12, he bought me a camera – an Admirer A8 with a three- lens turret system – for Christmas and I remember going out and shooting a little film on that morning. Although I didn’t really pursue it as a hobby, I suppose it was always in the back of my mind and I used to sit in with my father and watch him editing; I found it very interesting. I suppose that’s what started it all off.”
When he left school at 16, he still didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted to do even when he answered an ad in the Evening News proclaim- ing: “Film Company Seeks Messenger Boy”. However, when he secured the ‘prentice post in Wardour Street, it turned out the company had its own studio where Willoughby was able to watch a cameraman called Bill Holland shoot commercials.
After that job and his next work- ing in the special effects department of a company in Wandsworth - where he was involved in doing titles and overlays on a rostrum camera – he said that he began to get a better idea of what he really wanted to do. “I think I identified the job of camera operator as the great place to be on a film set. I felt that was really the focus and the hub of the unit.”
Mind you, everything then went on hold for a number of years when Willoughby, suddenly overcome with wanderlust, decided to travel and live abroad. Returning to the business in the late 70s after almost nine years away, he resumed as a loader, principally on doc- umentaries working with cameramen like Alan Jones, John Davy, Bryan Loftus and Clive Tickner. It was under Tickner’s wing that he got his first break as a focus puller and then, finally, as an oper- ator on the feature, Billy The Kid & The Green Baize Vampire, followed by the first half dozen episodes in the Inspector Morse teleseries.
At 35, he felt – just as he would nearly 20 years later in his subsequent
role as DP – that operator was “a good place to be. It was a great environment for learning. You have quite a lot of responsibility and the chance to watch what’s going on all around you. Fundamentally, I think I’m quite a lazy person and, as far as I was concerned then, I felt I had reached my goal. It was never in my mind then to be a DP,” he admitted.
Intriguingly, in view of his much later incarnation as Ken Loach’s cam- eraman, not only on These Times but also on the director’s segments in the portmanteau movies, 11’09”02 – September 11 and, most recently, for Loach’s three-minute contribution to a 60th Anniversary Cannes Festival Tribute, their paths crossed twice some years earlier. The first was when Willoughby was invited to operate on a couple of sequences for Hidden Agenda and then, five years later, on Land And Freedom. It’s fair to say that those encounters, albeit brief, proba- bly marked him out as a future collab- orator if the occasion ever arose.
When he eventually graduated to DP, the growing frustrations of his job as an operator were not so much over- come as interweaved, for Willoughby would then go on to combine the two roles that he saw as “inseparable”. He explained: “I work these days with directors who seem to like the fact that I operate and I think I’ve done the films I’ve done for the very reason they want that sort of direct contact.”
Having already paid tribute to Stuart Dryburgh, London-born but long New Zealand-based, for nudging him into lighting, Willoughby also credits him with some especially good advice as he tackled his first feature. “Stuart said he’d just been working with the most amazing gaffer, Tom Gates, and that if I continued lighting I should try and get him on my film. Which I did.
“Tom joined me in Ireland when we were about two weeks in. We got
on very well and I felt much more comfortable with him there. I knew that if I went wildly wrong, Tom would tell me. Good gaffers are perfectly capable of lighting and I once asked Tom why he hadn’t ever done it and he told me that he ‘just couldn’t stand the bullshit’.
“You can’t put a price on a good gaffer – especially when you’ve got pre-lights and you can send the guy in to do that for you. When you turn up it can be 90% there. Yes, a good gaffer is priceless,” he purred.
Since The Escapist, Willougby has moved regularly between film and tele- vision, the latter including Spooks, Rehab, The Key, Sharpe’s Challenge and The History Of Mr Polly.
For the big screen, there’s been Peter Mullan’s remarkable true-life drama, The Magdalene Sisters (set in Ireland but actually filmed in Scotland), Comme T’Y Es Belle (Luxembourg doubling for France) and, of course, the Loach-Roeg double.
There was perhaps an element of luck to his being selected for Puffball because he was a last minute replace- ment for a cameraman for broke his arm just three weeks before shooting. Based on a novel by Fay Weldon, Puffball centres round the intercon- nected lives in contemporary Ireland of four women, played by Rita Tushingham, Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson and Leona Agoe.
Explained Willoughby: “Everybody’s been trying to give it a genre – but it doesn’t really have one; it’s there on its own, unique. I went to Montreal to grade it and my colourist there had obviously watched the film several times as we graded it without sound so didn’t have any real ideas what it was about. One day he said to me, ‘this is a horror comedy, isn’t it?’ I think we’ve kind of stuck with this.”
Puffball marks Roeg’s return to directing after more than a decade away and Willoughby admitted that
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Main: Nigel Willoughby with Ken Loach on the set of These Times (photo Joss Barratt);
above l-r: a scene from Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters; Kelly Reilly and Rita Tushingham in Nic Roeg’s Puffball
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