Features

Jack Cardiff is arguably Britain's finest cinematographer. A pioneer of TechniColour, he is most noted perhaps for his belief in simplistic lighting in such films as The African Queen, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. With the Crown Film Unit of the Ministry of Information during WW2, he photographed many documentaries, including the excellent Western Approaches. His descriptions of working with famous directors such as Michael Powell, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock paint a rich picture of filmmaking from the 1930's onwards, but he remains honest and justifiably proud of his contribution to cinema. Steve Applebaum spoke to this inspirational artist about life, his long career and the queer mechanics of Academy Award nominations.

Is it true that your father played for Watford?
Yes, a long time ago, he was centre-half. I had a book sent to me a couple of years ago with a letter asking if I have a photograph of him. I did – an early photograph – and I sent it to be included in a book of ex-Watford players. So I have become a fan of Watford. We haven’t done much good, but there you are.

Did you ever live in Watford?
In between shows I used to stay with my grandmother, for a week at a time sometimes, so I virtually lived in Watford for a while; 7, Sutton Road, in Watford, I remember it well.

How old were you?
Six or seven, something like that.

What are your earliest memories of being on stage?
I didn’t have a home but we had digs, and I used to call the land lady ‘Auntie’, that was my idea of family life. I knew that when I got older I would be a Call Boy – that was the boy that called the actors, overtures and beginners or something. Then, in between shows, when we were ‘resting’, we used to fill in with film work. Which was very nice, very pleasant stuff. I did a bit of acting, of course, I worked for some time as a child actor. Then at a certain point we all moved to Elstree, which was then the beginning of the film business. I went to a different school every week from the time I went to school, until about the time I was about eleven or twelve and it was a weird life. I didn’t really have a stable existence at all. I got my first job on the silent version of The Informer, in 1928 – I was two weeks short of 14. From then onwards I worked behind the camera.

I have read that you did some camera work on The Informer.
No, on the silent version I was not even on the camera. I was sort of an office boy on the set who used to get drinks for people, run messages. I had to give the director, Arthur Robison, Vichy Water all day. This is a funny story because people think I always had an interest in photography. I hadn’t a clue about photography. I had no interest in it. But what fascinated me about when I was on The Informer was that I noticed in the camera department, all the young lads used to go abroad a lot. They used to go to France and Italy, Germany, and maybe even Egypt. I thought, ‘That’s the job for me’. I managed to get a job in the camera department as a number boy not because I was fascinated with photography, but because I wanted to go abroad. The joke was I didn’t go abroad. In two years, the nearest I got to going abroad was the Isle of Wight one afternoon. After that the studios caught fire and we rescued some cameras. One of them wasn’t insured, that was a French camera, so for the French Debris they gave me three or four days in Paris. That was it, that broke the notch, and from then on I started doing all kinds of pictures abroad.

What was the moment that you really grew to love cinematography for its own sake rather than the opportunity it gave you to go abroad?
It came very slowly. It wasn’t like a settled thing where you go into a trade and work for so long and then get a promotion. The thing is on a film set you work on a certain job – in this case I was a Number Boy, and I used to do the clappers when sound came in – and you keep your eyes open, you watch the camera and the movement. I didn’t watch lighting too much at first, obviously, but I got a job eventually as a Focus Puller on the camera. Usually something happens where the director wants so many cameras and there aren’t that many operators so they give you a camera to operate a bit. Lucky breaks ease you into it.

Eventually, I remember I was working in Elstree, I was supposed to be the camera operator on a test of Freddie Bartholomew, an important test for David Copperfield, and on the day of the test the cameraman was ill and couldn’t turn up. The Chief Cameraman was somewhere abroad, and I was the only one in the studio to do it. They said, ‘Could you light this test, it’s very important?’ So I said ‘Yes’, I lit the test, and they were very satisfied with it. But when the Chief Cameraman came back he was furious. With good reason I suppose. If I had mucked it up, we would have been responsible. As it was they liked it and it was that moment I felt I could do things here.

There was a time I felt I made a wise decisions. I could have got an early break as a cameraman but I wasn’t sort of confident that I would be ready to photograph anything. I thought I would stay as an operator working with good cameramen. This was at Denham with Alexander Korda – he brought over lots of people from Hollywood and I worked as an operator with them to gain experience. I came home one evening - I had just driven from Isleworth to Borehamwood, which is a long drive, and my mother said, ‘You’ve got to go back to the studio right away’. I was furious. I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘They’re testing operators for something – TechniColour or something – so you’ve got to go back to be tested and have an interview’. Those that had been in came out shaken because the questions were highly technical. When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’. So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m very fond of painting, and I also watch the light’. I had formed a habit, oddly enough, of watching the light in a room. Anyway, they said, ‘Which side of the face does Rembrandt light?’ I said ‘This side,’ which was a guess, really. ‘And for etching, of course, it would be reversed’. That was another bluff. But the next day they told me I had been chosen.

That meant I was automatically working under contract for TechniColour, as a kind of junior staff cameraman. Then came the big problem that I couldn’t photograph a feature. I did two years of travelogues, which was invaluable for experience, and finally I got the big chance. I used to do a lot of Second Unit work, which usually is a bit dull. You know, a close-up of an ash tray or a postage letter, all very dull. But the first unit wouldn’t have time to do those little things and they’d leave it to the Second Unit.

But one of the things I had to do was complicated, on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I was lighting this thing and it looked pretty good, and I heard this voice say, ‘Very interesting’. I turned around and there was the great Michael Powell. He said, ‘Would you like to photograph my next film?’ and that was it. That’s how it all started.

Did the love of painting feed the cinematography or did it arise from the cinematography?
It became a background of knowledge. What I had picked up from painting was that light was the most important thing. The lighting played an important part. So it’s easy enough to analyse it and work out what looked good or what worked and so on. The only difference was I realised early on that because film was a transparency, and the Hollywood photographers used to use a lot of back-light because it made everything look crisper and glamorous. I realised that back-light and I relied very much on what I had picked up from paintings - a simplicity of lighting. Mind you, I recognised that painting’s a still picture where it’s easy enough to have a lighting effect, and on film where the actor gets up and walks around the room, you had to bear that in mind. But I still felt then, and still do, that you stick to a simple form of lighting.

The ballet sequence in The Red Shoes seems to be informed by lots of painters, including Van Gogh.
Yes. I fell very much in love with Van Gogh and on Black Narcissus I remember saying to Michael Powell that Van Gogh had used on a picture of a billiard table saloon green and red. It was a harsh dramatisation and had a kind of interest to it. I said to Michael, ‘I’d like to use green filler-light in the shadows’; it wasn’t strictly true to nature but it gave a subtly dramatic effect. One in ten might have seen it, but it was there. So these things definitely made a difference.

Did you try to use lighting to create emotional effects subliminally?
Yes I did. Because later on I had an added love, in a way – my original love in painting was Rembrandt, Caravaggio, people like that – but then I fell in love with the Impressionists. The Impressionists exaggerated everything. If someone is sitting on the grass, they would reflect the green light on their face. I sometimes used subtle green filters that probably one in fifty would notice but I got satisfaction out of it. That was the great thing. I used to use on the spot rails – in those days we used lots of arcs and arc-lights – when light was apparently coming from the sky. I used to use a faint blue filter so that it’s cold, and I used to use their methods by exaggerating the colour. I was always fighting with TechniColour because they wanted complete realism, whatever that was.

In A Matter of Life and Death you used colour and black and white and the latter was a challenge, I believe, because you’d never shot in b&w before.
I didn't have trouble with it. When I started to light, I went straight into colour and side stepped black and white. But I knew black and white lighting was virtually the same but the contrast was different. I didn’t tell anybody that I hadn’t photographed anything in black and white. But nevertheless when we shot the sequences in heaven, we used black and white cameras and black and white film. The penultimate shot was done with a TechniColour camera that we had to sort of merge into colour as we went on. There was no great difficulty, but it was a great, great break. That was my first feature film.