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remained “amongst the people I’ve worked with, the man least ready to sit on his laurels.
“One of the secrets of his liveli- ness and his vitality was that he still approached the job with such tremendous hunger. He was part of that older generation that assumed nothing about where the next job might come from – so even very lat- terly he was still thrilled to be employed and be employable.
“He came to the set not only with that childlike delight that he was still wanted but also approached it with the excitement of someone doing it for the first time. That’s a quality I see shared among great actors. He was also a problem solver not a problem finder; man of solutions, even if he ini- tially, and amusingly, would throw his hands up.”
Branagh –who also provided the Foreword to Out Standing Stills - recalled the time on Hamlet when they were preparing for a particularly com- plicated sequence.
“It was practically decided before I signed up for Hamlet that it would be in 70mm. The fabulous advantage of 70mm is the sharpness of detail
it gives, which can look three- dimensional at times.
The film had glorious sets and costumes, and the widescreen format really brought them out. In an ideal world, every film should be made on 70mm because of the quality you get with the large negative.”
“We were going to do a shot of per- haps six or seven minutes of uninter- rupted action that carried Julie Christie and Derek Jacobi from one end of B stage at Shepperton across a
very complicated set, through the adjoining door into A Stage and all the way through to the end of it passing through a hall of mirrors in which the camera was required to do a 360 degree shot movement.
“Here’s [Love’s Labour’s Lost] high romance, musical comedy and musical at the same time. It’s, as Chris Challis used to call it, ‘lit to the edges’. I think we managed that with some style. The Fuji film helped enormously. It’s a lovely stock; the blacks are great. I tend to overexpose by half a stop – well, I usually do that anyway – but we are getting very rich negatives. It all looks so lush. It’s not an expensive picture... but it looks it.”
“As we were rehearsing it, Alex was telling me constantly, ‘You are going to cut, Ken?’ ‘No, I’m not going to cut,’ I replied. ‘This is a tour de force. This is to get your name on the envelope’. I asked him how long it would take to light it, expecting, say, 45 minutes, per- haps an hour maximum.
“’Eight hours, sir,’ he said. I said he couldn’t, and told him I’d come back in a wee while. Which I did because he actually blew the electrical sub-station at Shepperton, and half of Shepperton was plunged into darkness. This was because the amount of light required for 70mm across two sound stages was all on at the same time.
“I remember the studio manager came running down, concerned that the local council was on to him. Alex said: ‘Tell him we’re shooting f****** Hamlet..! That’s what we’re doing!’” ■ QUENTIN FALK
in memoriam
Photos above l-r: A scene from The Krays; daughter Chyna Thomson on the set of The Sicilian;
Alex Thomson on the set of Excalibur with John Boorman; Kenneth Branagh and Natascha McElhone in Love’s Labour’s Lost
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 13