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CHRIS
MENGES
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continued from page 4
They first collaborated 30 years ago on Frears’ first feature Gumshoe, which was followed by other memo- rable joint credits like the award-win- ning Last Summer (starring the late Richard Beckinsale), Bloody Kids and Walter & June.
For Menges, Dirty Pretty Things follows hard on the heels of Sean Penn’s acclaimed The Pledge, shot mostly on location in Canada and, more recently, Double Down, a caper thriller with Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo and Georgian teenager, Nutsa Kukhianidze, directed on the French Riviera by Neil Jordan.
Double Down proved another sort of full circle for, as with Frears, Menges had also worked on Jordan’s first fea- ture, Angel, before combining again to Oscar-nomination effect on the Irish historical drama, Michael Collins.
All it now needs is for a summons from Ken Loach and Menges’ career will have done a complete 360 degrees. For it was Loach who gave the then 29- year-old cameraman his DP break on the ground-breaking Kes in 1969.
The director recalls in Loach On Loach: “Chris had been the camera operator on Poor Cow and subse- quently worked with the Czech cam- eraman Miroslav Ondricek on Lindsay Anderson’s If.
“That was a very positive experi- ence for Chris in that it confirmed what he himself was thinking about in terms of how light should be pho- tographed, about which lenses were sympathetic and which weren’t, and about how to contain the action.
“We talked a lot about that and decided that the effort shouldn’t be to make the camera do all the work, but should be to make what is in front of the camera as authentic and truth- ful as possible.
“The camera’s job was to record it in a sympathetic way and to be unobtrusive, not slick. So when we came to do Kes, there was a con- scious move away from newsreely, chasing kind of photography to a more reflective, observed, sympathet- ically lit style of photography.”
Menges remembers the first day of filming only too well. They were shooting up the wall of a tall building, with ivy growing, to a kestrel’s nest: “We were doing dusk for night, and the net result was the whole lot was underexposed so badly it had to be re-shot. That was Day One.
“I still feel as naïve and vulnera- ble now as when I did that. Movies are a collaboration and I play wrong notes often. As far as I’m concerned there are dangers lurking on every page.”
Before and since (often some- times with) Loach, Menges has been steeped in documentary ever since landing a job as a teenage camera assistant to the late American film- maker, Alan Forbes.
Herefordshire-born Menges, whose father Herbert was a composer and Old Vic musical director, acknowledges Forbes as his first men- tor, “the first person who really taught me. He also introduced me to everybody which then led on to everyone else.” This trail eventually encompassed everything from Loach to his work with director Adrian Cowell on the Opium series in Burma and the multi-award-winning, The Tribe That Hides From Man, filmed memorably in Brazil.
Menges was also in at the begin- ning of Granada’s trailblazing World In Action series in 1963 and it was a programme on apartheid in South Africa that sowed the seeds of his first feature some 25 years later - A
World Apart, the poignant true-life drama about doomed white activist Ruth First.
Menges admits that he “always got a huge buzz from shooting Wobblyscope [his quaint nickname for docu- mentary]. I, along with more people than I could list, lived at a very wonderful and for- tunate moment in British TV when we could go and spend weeks, months, perhaps even a year or more in differ- ent parts of the world to make programmes that could be inspiring.
“Nowadays there are
still a few documentary film-
makers who have that
chance – but only one or
two. It’s very different now
from the days when a direc-
tor would form an idea, get commissioned and be free to make that commission with total control over the material. That’s pretty much gone now.”
Another “inspiration”, incidental- ly, was a cousin, the late Julia Smith, who before she helped create EastEnders, was a prolific if underrat- ed television director.
Menges decided to quit as a cam- eraman in 1986 and it would be more than 10 years before he resumed that craft. “I had a lot still to prove to myself,” he says, which included fol- lowing up A World Apart with a fur- ther two features – CrissCross and Second Best – as well as a fourth, The Lost Son, which came a couple of years after he’d resumed his DP duties in the mid-Nineties on Michael Collins.
For someone who has collaborat-
ed with others so regularly, it’s per- haps intriguing that he has used a dif- ferent DP on each of his four director- ial assignments – Peter Biziou, Ivan Strasburg, Ashley Rowe and Barry Ackroyd. Should one read something significant into that?
Menges explains: “I remember going for an interview for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Karel Reisz and I got talking about films. Four days later I received a letter saying something like, ‘Can’t really say why, but I don’t think it’s going to work.’ Relationships are all about dynamics. I have enormous admiration for the cameramen I’ve worked with, but I’m also kind of restless.
“If I do get to direct another film, I could as easily work with yet another cameraman. I just want to keep learning more. And I’m always curious about different
Photos l-r: Sean Penn directing The Pledge; David Bradley in Kes; Nutsa Kukhianidze and Nick Nolte in Double Down Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn in Michael Collins
Peter Riegert and Chris Rozyki in Local Hero (courtesy Moviestore)
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