Page 4 - Fujifilm Exposure_8 Wildlife John Downer_ok

behind the camera
LEADING FROM
LEADING FROM
THE FRONT
THE FRONT
An interview with Freddie Francis BSC
A t an age when he might have been easily forgiv-
en for choosing the quiet life, an eighty- something Freddie Francis was recently to be found back on the
film frontline supervising light in one of the remoter corners of rural Iowa. On strictly his own terms.
The current President of the British Society of Cinematographers and a double Oscar-winner during a distinguished 60-year career had decided to swap a trophy-lined home in cosy London suburbia for American Midwest cornfields and seedy motels at the seductive bidding of his old friend, director David Lynch.
Francis, 82 in December, explains: “These days I don’t want to work all the time because I think the hours are terrible; ridiculous, in fact. So when David, with whom I’d made
The Elephant Man and Dune, called me out of the blue and asked me to work with him again I made it clear I didn’t want to do sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Life’s too short, I said. ‘Well, how many hours will you work? he asked me. I told him ten hours a day. He kept to his side of the bargain and we finished the film two days ahead of schedule!”
Their third collaboration, The Straight Story, co-starring Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek, was rather appositely about a feisty old man who defies all the odds in an extraordinary true tale of endurance. Determined to see his mortally ill, long-estranged brother just one more time, Alvin Straight,
legs dodgy, eyes wonky, set off alone on a 378 mile cross-country trek... by motormower.
Travelling at just three miles per hour, the incredible journey took him seven weeks. An Easy Rider for the Nineties?
Francis effectively began his own colourful career odyssey - which also encompassed much later a string of directorial credits - as a clapper boy at the old BIP Studios, Elstree on The Marriage of Corbal, a lush, Sabatini-authored French Revolution adventure with Nils Asther, Noah Beery and Hazel Terry. He had secured his entree to the camera department run by one Bill Haggett - “whom one never saw
without a hammer in his hand” - via a master carpenter who used to bet with Francis’ street bookmaker father in North London.
Before that, apart from an uncle who dabbled in amateur photogra-
Photos: from left: John Hurt as The Elephant Man (Courtesy Moviestore Collection); David Lynch and Freddie Francis during Dune; Robert De Niro in Cape Fear (Courtesy Moviestore Collection)
EXPOSURE • 4 & 5