Tony Richardson

*

THE
TWO
WORLDS
OF
THE CINEMA

THERE IS NO DOUBT that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning* has been a big financial success. And I believe it has been a notable creative success, too. Ordinary audiences recognized themselves on the screen for the first time, and that they were not going to see some kind of unreal, overly comic or overglamorized world. Instead they were seeing people whom they could recognize on every street corner. This film expressed something that was close to a whole working-class section of England, and therefore people went to see and enjoy it because of this; because the film was no longer remote, but was something that they lived with every day.

I have been asked if I think that British audiences are ready for films in this vein which don’t have any easily recognized dramatic or sensational ingredients. New things can always be done. Antonioni’s L’Avventura was a success. Maybe this kind of film will be done in England some day, exactly when and how I don’t know. It is just that some particular mood and expression captures the public imagination.

Obviously, if you have a strong story and a certain amount of violence and sex this will have a more immediate popular appeal; but on the other hand if there was an English film like either L’Avventura or Moderato Contabile which had a big critical success to launch it, I think it would catch on with a wider audienee. I don’t say that necessarily the success would be on the same scale, any more than the commercial success of a film like Saturday Night could ultimately compare with the commercial success of Ben-Hur. But there could be a big enough audience for the thing to work economically.

What is wrong with the policy of the major studios in America is that they are not content to make films for a small audience; to recognize that certain films only have a limited audience and that once you’ve worked within those terms you can do all sorts of things and have much greater freedom: but if you think of the greatest possible amount all the time, then obviously you are going to sacrifice the minority picture.

Unfortunately, in the business as it is at present the success of films like Saturday Night will lead to copies. Anything that is immediately successful is copied. There may be good copies which are influenced by them which produce something new and interesting, something similar but which generally has its own truth and vitality: but there will also be many bad copies. It is exactly the same situation as we encountered at the Royal Court Theatre after we had a success. We started receiving plays like Look Back in Anger, which dealt with the color problem. Already Warwick has filed the title Every Night and Every Morning, and somebody else is making a film called A Taste of Money.

For myself, in future I would like to do original work. I don’t really think of A Taste of Honey as being from a play I directed, because I prepared the script and conceived the film before I directed the play. In fact when I was first going to do the film I didn’t intend to direct the play and it was only because of problems in setting the production up that I did the play on Broadway. I hope that it is not influenced as much by the theatre as the other films I’ve done. I don’t really want to do another film which uses a play as basic material because the theatre and the film work quite differently. Once you’ve done a thing in the theatre it is terribly difficult to look at it as freshly as one should.

I don’t think back on work I’ve done, and I’m not particularly interested in critically assessing it. I feel that you either achieve or do not achieve things at the time. On the whole I think that I achieved more things in The Entertainer than in anything else I’ve done. Probably from an overall audience viewpoint, and from at any rate what is accepted as a sort of professional and technical standard, Look Back in Anger is a more complete film. I think in this way they reflect the play. The Entertainer, I think, is a much greater play, and a greater conception than Look Back in Anger, which was better shaped dramatically.

I don’t consider that I am going to make films in this neorealistic pattern all the time, and I think that although, again, it is to a certain extent realistic in approach, A Taste of Honey will in itself have a slightly different style than any other film I have made. I shall eventually make films that are not quite in the same mold. I would like to do some historical films, but not Shakespeare. I have an idea for an epic film about India which I want to do in about four years’ time.

Art is not to sell any sort of message; it is to pick a certain experience and a certain pattern of life and show the effect it has on people at a particular time in history. I don’t think an artist has any job to try and preach any kind of social or political doctrine, although he should not deliberately try to avoid these. Obviously as a human being he has certain attitudes to society, politics and to all the big issues of his day. If he is successful, I don’t mean in a commercial sense but in that he is able in the whole of his work to present himself, his attitudes are going to be in what he does; and implicit in it will be all sorts of political and social moralities. But they are not things that are pushed on to the films; they are the very fabric of the guy who is doing it.

I came to do Sanctuary through directing on Broadway. I had also been discussing making a film for Darryl Zanuck for some while. I went to Hollywood for a number of reasons. The difficulties of the production setup in England was one. Another was that I liked the idea of certain things in the script and the avocation of a certain period. I thought at the time that by going to Hollywood I would be much freer and be able to work in a more interesting way than in fact it turned out. Partly I went there, quite frankly, because one is always tempted in every direction ... at least I am.

I’m thrilled I went there because I know that I never want to make a film in Hollywood again. It is impossible to make anything that is interesting or good under the conditions imposed by the major studios in America. It is a totally impossible creative setup: even after the film is made, so much mutilation goes on, and it becomes the product of many different people.

When one enters the Hollywood setup, one is always promised the earth, and you think that you can beat them at their own game and that you can handle these people. But you can’t, because the underlining is not big and dramatic. It is not as though there are great issues in which one refuses in a black and white way not to compromise, it’s in every tiny detail that the whole quality of the picture is eroded away leaving nothing. At no time can you win on a particular issue. Everything slides away, and everyone who works on the film is in that atmosphere. The production starts as a mirage which gradually slips away as the reality takes over.

There are signs of a new movement within America. British films are influencing this. A number of small-budget films, like Shadows and The Connection, have been made in New York, to a large extent financed rather like a theatre production. I’m sure this is the way film production is not merely going to go, but has to go in America. If you can make films cheaply then you can have a certain kind of freedom, and as Broadway is getting more expensive it is becoming in fact cheaper to make a film than to do a Broadway musical, which means that more people will start putting money into films. Once you have one or two really good and successful films made in this way outside the major studio setup, it will encourage a whole new form of production. The major studios are just an anachronism; they are really as extinct as the dodo.

John Cassavetes is now directing a film for Paramount because of the success of Shadows, and the company offered him complete freedom. This is how it all starts. He may succeed in making an interesting and original film, but I’m very skeptical of anything to do with a major studio because they make promises but in the end they really want to fit people into the mold that they have found successful in the past.

I believe the future of American films lies with these small independent companies who are completely independent of finance from major companies, and where the control is in the hands of the people who actually make the film. Films of this type don’t have to be shown in every single cinema in the country. If anyone makes a really successful film and the public takes to it, they’ll have no problem in getting any cinema in the country because cinemas are dying for films that will bring people in.

It was my decision to do A Taste of Honey independent of a studio because I think you get an authenticity that you can never get in a studio, because there you tend to become more conventional in every way: the film looks more conventional, is more conventionally lit, and I think the actors act more conventionally. This suits a certain type of professional star actor, but I’m not terribly interested in them.

In A Taste of Honey I wanted to force a much rougher style on the film, and to force myself to shoot in, I hope, a freer way. I strongly believe actors are much better when they have to work in the conditions of location. If ever I did an interior set for a realistic film in a studio again, I would never allow them to take walls out or anything like that. I would force everyone to work within the limitations of the room because I think anything else is a sort of theatrical viewpoint and that this is the really cinematic way.

I would like to have a theatre company of my own and naturally I would like to use these actors in films as well, almost on the pattern that Ingmar Bergman does. But not exclusively so, because casting films needs more careful decision. It’s not just a matter of having a good actor; you have to have exactly the right actor, and sometimes within a theatre company you haven’t quite the person you want for a particular part. I like working with people who are doing their first film and with people who haven’t been used thousands of times, because I think they are like old worn coins that the public doesn’t respond to freshly and so doesn’t believe in the character they are playing. You cannot obtain from them the total believability that you can from someone the public has never seen before. Newcomers are more spontaneous and fresh, and I don’t think they are necessarily unprofessional. For instance, Rita Tushingham is thoroughly professional and picked up what professional technique you need to know in the first few days.

Working as a producer is something I don’t like because I am really interested in being a director. Producing films absorbs much of one’s energy. Eventually there will, I hope, be a series of other directors, and maybe producers, in Woodfall working on their own films under the general banner of Woodfall.

From Films and Filming, June 1961, pp. 7, 41.

* Directed by Karel Reisz.