As the excellent, groundbreaking and – to an entire generation – highly affecting British animated feature Watership Down is re-released yet again, this time to the prestigious Criterion Collection on Blu-ray, we present an extended version of an interview piece originally conducted to celebrate both the film’s 35th anniversary and the career of its editor Terry Rawlings. Watership Down marked his start as a picture cutter and this interview comes full circle, arriving at a time when he now enjoys a well-earned retirement. This is the life, in films, of Terry Rawlings…
Being a freelance talent in the movie business is nomadic experience that can lead down many paths. A man who seems to have travelled most of them is prolific editor Terry Rawlings, who as a sound or picture cutter, has been involved in everything from frothy classic comedies, rock musicals and animation to dramatic epics, groundbreaking science fiction – even a James Bond film – and, naturally, a visit to the Academy Awards to enjoy Oscar nominated glory.
Along the way, he’s worked with a host of significant filmmakers, from the avant garde (Ken Russell, Michael Winner) and Hollywood legends (Stanley Donen, Ridley Scott) to the mainstream (Jon Amiel, Joel Schumacher), collaborating on a hugely impressive roster of credits including such landmark films and entertainments as The L-Shaped Room, Bedazzled, Women In Love, Scorpio, Tommy, Alien, Chariots Of Fire, Blade Runner, The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne, GoldenEye, US Marshals, Entrapment and The Phantom Of The Opera.
The 35th anniversary of Watership Down, director Martin Rosen’s 1978 animated adaptation of Richard Adams’ novel that marked Terry’s switch from sound to picture editor, provided good reason for me to sit with the man himself and discuss the film. As a friend of my Dad’s from back in the day (Terry assisted in setting up our first VHS recorder!) and now as an editor myself, the discussion quickly lost its interview angle and became much more of an affable, nostalgic conversation about film in general that also offered the chance to reflect on Terry’s considerable career.
We meet in Terry’s luxuriously kitted out home theater – where we joke that his LaserDisc, DVD and Blu-ray collection looks like my own one rearranged – not too far from Elstree Studios, just outside London, where Terry made his mark early and which later played host to some of the biggest movies of all time (including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Kick-Ass and World War Z).
After much transcribing of the recordings, coupled with – ironically – a prolonged editing and picture research period, Animated Views is proud to finally present what I hope you will find an engrossing look behind the scenes with not only one of the medium’s most creative practitioners, but a downright lovely human being as well.
– Ben Simon, AnimatedViews.com
Working With Michael Winner, Ken Russell And “Tommy”:
Early Days At Elstree Studios’ Sound Department
Animated Views: Terry, we’re primarily going to talk about Watership Down, but you’ve had such an amazing career that I couldn’t start without speaking to you about some of the other work you’ve been involved in. I was catching up on some of the DVD supplements you’ve recently been contributing to and it really is staggering, the amount of varied work, that you’re now talking about in extras for such films as Alien, Blade Runner and, of course, the previous Deluxe DVD editions of Watership Down…
Terry Rawlings: Well that was a dramatic day going to do that interview. I was working at the time, I think it was Phantom Of The Opera I was on, and I went over to where we were going to hold the interview. I can’t remember exactly where it was, but it was in a studio, and I drove to this place, went into this stacked car park, I came down the stairs, and I’m walking down this slope, just to walk across the road to where this building was, and I don’t know what I tripped over on, but I went flat on to my face down on to this concrete! I went to hold myself up, and bashed my head, cut my eye, and I just laid there.
This bloke came running over, said, “we thought you’d died!”, and all I was concerned about is “have I got blood on my shirt!?” – I’m going for this video interview, and that was concerning me more than anything! I was obviously shook up and I went up to this place, they gave me a drink of water and if you look at it, I’m always sitting like this, because of this cut on my eye! God, that was a real shock, though, because I don’t know what I tripped on; I might have just caught my own feet or something, but I just felt myself going… Horrible.
AV: You wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s always funny, the little stories behind things like that – whoever would have thought that was all going on beforehand! But you made it to the interview and that discussion, between you and Watership Down’s director Martin Rosen, has now been included on a couple of discs, even if it hasn’t made the cut for the Criterion edition for some reason. However, before that film you’d already had quite a career on the sound side of filmmaking, doing a lot of your early work at Elstree Studios on frothy films such as The Lady Is A Square, with Frankie Vaughn, Janette Scott and Wilfrid Hyde White among other names, and the music for that film was composed by the famous British band leader Wally Stott, who you would later work with on Watership Down. How and why did you want to get into the business and how did you end up working in sound?
TR: I didn’t exactly start at Elstree, because I got into the film business while I was going with a girl at the time, whose sister’s boyfriend was Gerry Paulson. Gerry Paulson was an editor of commercials at that time, or “filmlets” as they were called then, for Rank Screen Services. So one weekend when we were all together he said, “There’s a job going in the library”, so I said, “Cor, alright…how much are they paying?”, you know, because I think I was earning six pounds a week or something, or three-fifty. He said they’re paying six or nine pounds, or whatever it was, so I though well that’s worth doing. Anyway, I went there and I worked in the library, and then there was a woman, a real staunch union woman who worked in this place, and she sort of said “He can’t work in here because he’s not a union member”, and they put me in an office which I’d been trying to get away from forever! But I liked it, and worked and got myself a union card.
Then I worked in Film House, in Wardour Street, for the same company, dealing with the artwork that came down to the rostrum cameras to be shot for these filmlets – they were the films that you’d have in your local cinema saying “Bert Bloggs, Butchers”, and all those sorts of things that I used to make. So I was the co-ordinator between these and the camera, and then checking the stuff when it came back. I was there for a certain amount of time, and then I moved to their place in Pinewood, where they had a cutting room, which assembled all these things.
So I got into the cutting rooms, but I fell out with the bloke who ran the department because…I can’t remember the actual figures…but say at the time the rate for the job was twelve pounds a week, and they were paying me ten-fifty or something, or ten pound ten, whatever it was. And I said “I want the money, I want what I’m due…I mean this is what I’m doing, this is the job, I’m in the union”…
They wouldn’t pay it to start with, and there was an amazing woman with the union in those days called Bessie Bond, this Scottish woman, who fought the causes for all the people who were in it, and she came down and she was a real dragon, and of course she got me the money. They had to pay it because it was a legal requirement, but he said “Fine, alright, I’ll pay you the money. You can now go down into the library and clean all the 16mm films that we have”. There were miles of ’em! I thought I’m not gonna stick this, but I loved the idea of working in the cutting rooms, so I said “Well, I’m leaving”, and I went to the union: “Any jobs going?”, and they sent me down to Shepperton Studios and that’s where I worked on the very first feature film I ever worked on.
I worked as the assistant to the sound editor, and it was called Town On Trial, a John Mills film, and then of course it was only for three or four months because it was the dubbing side of it, and it was all coming to a close. So, I’m now dumped out on the street again and, being very green, not knowing really where to go now. So I went back to the union, and I said I’d finished this job; they said “Well, there’s a trainee’s job going down at ABPC [Associated British Pictures Corporation, now Elstree Studios] in Borehamwood, if you’d like to go down and see them”.
So I did, I went and met these people and they took me up to the cutting rooms, which were run by Charlie Crafford, and put me with this lady called Eva Catchpole, who worked there forever, and then I was there for…I forget how many years I was there…but I got better at what I was doing, I was the assistant on the sound side, then the picture side and so forth, backwards and forwards. And then I had this producer, who I’d worked on a couple of his films…Gordon LT Scott…he was going to produce a film called The Pot Carriers, and I kept saying “Why don’t you give me the job to do the sound? I know what I’m doing now”, and I used to badger him every week! And in the end he said “Alright, alright. But you let me down and you’ll never work in this place again!”, one of those things, and that was my first film with my own credit on it, The Pot Carriers.
AV: In 1962?
TR: Yeah.
AV: So, before that though, Indiscreet, with Cary Grant, and Lady Is A Square were ’58 and ’59?
TR: Oh yeah…that’s when I was doing this “assistant” from one thing to another, so I must have been there about four or five years, working my way around the cutting rooms and learning the job properly. It must have been about five years.
AV: Right.
TR: So I must have been in the cutting rooms at Elstree, well Associated British Pictures, between five and six years, and then I got the break, did The Pot Carriers, and then The Dock Brief.
AV: Yes, although The Dock Brief I have seen listed as Trial And Error.
TR: Yeah, that’s what it was in America.
AV: And then The L-Shaped Room and Rattle Of A Simple Man?
TR: Rattle Of A Simple Man, that’s a film I like.
AV: Yeah, it’s a very heavy performance piece. Do you know, I’ve located a copy of it for you…
TR: Have you really!? Oh, terrific!
AV: When I was researching my Elstree book on the Studios, I saw it on the shelf in the archive. I know you kept asking for it to play at our Film Festival events, so I pulled that and I got you Lady Is A Square, but you’ve found Lady Is A Square now?
TR: Yeah, I found Lady Is A Square with the Anna Neagle box set!
AV: Right. Rattle Of A Simple Man has a timecode in the corner, but you know…
TR: Oh, that’s alright…lovely. Now what was the other one? There was another film I worked on as an assistant which I liked, it was called She Didn’t Say No!, and I’ve never heard of it since, it was about a woman who had seven children, not married.
AV: It’s not even in your credits.
TR: No, that was when I was an assistant, so I never get the credit on what I was an assistant on usually.
AV: So there are probably many more early titles that have your hands on them.
TR: Yeah, and then really I started, and got credit. I did those films, The Bargee, Crooks In Cloisters and one thing and another. Then I got a call, because years before I’d worked with Ann Chegwidden before we’d done feature films…I think she’d done Crooks In Cloisters…and we worked for Tim Hewat for Granada Television, and did things like The Pill and ¡Cuba Sí! I mean they were really exciting times doing those films for him because he was one of the great producers I think, and I got a call from him to say, “I’m just going to start World In Action and I would love you to be involved in this. Come and do the complete soundtrack, the music, everything else, and it’s going to be run like a newspaper, so you most probably won’t get the film until Friday afternoon and we’re going to show it Monday evening”. That sort of stuff. It was fantastic, and I thought “Shall I do it?” because I was now getting going, you know, I was doing all these films now. And I thought, “Well, would it be alright if I just do the first series?”, which was six months. So he says “Fine, and then if you want to stay on, fine”.
So I did six months, and it was really one of the best things I ever did because it taught you to keep you standards high and work fast! You know, know how to cut corners but not degrade the quality. So that was a wonderful working experience.
AV: I did the same kind of thing…I’d just broken into music videos and doing commercials and doing that kind of thing, and then I was offered a long-term contract on a daytime TV show which, it was a studio-based thing but they were looking to put some general interest inserts into it, and they sent a small crew off and it was the same thing. We’d get the footage on a Tuesday morning and they’d say, “Right, Thursday afternoon we want ten or fifteen minutes” and, you know, with me being a stickler as well, I’d make sure all the sound was ramped on all the shots so that nothing jarred and everything, and they really wanted a lot of stuff very quickly, but like you say, you keep you standards up.
TR: And it teaches you to get fast! It really does.
AV: Oh yeah, absolutely, and it was a fantastic time and experience, but I probably stayed longer than I should have. I was at the company, Thames Television, four and a half years, mainly because we’d built up such a family atmosphere on that show, although I did jump around on different shows. But within Thames I got known as being, “Oh, you need that in two days, get Ben in”, and that was good for me because it helped me, obviously, get more jobs and things like that. But I stayed too long there because I was comfortable. I probably should have tried to break out earlier, because I ultimately wanted to get into features at some point.
TR: You’ve picked such a time to try… I mean I talk to the people I’ve worked with for years, and now I’m retired…I mean it’s quite nice being retired, I’ll tell you. It’s not for you yet, of course, but it is nice to think I had one of the best periods in the film business, really, those great years of wonderful films being made. I went through a period for about five or six years with Michael Winner, Karel Reisz, Ken Russell and Jack Clayton, of course. I did these things, and as he was finishing, one of the other ones was starting. It was a fantastic period.
AV: Whenever anyone asks me what kind of period would you want to go back to, it would either be America in the mid/late 1930s, where there was an explosion in Hollywood with all the creativity and creative use of the technology of the time that was coming out, and all the great stuff that was being made there just before the war, or it would be the mid-1970s, probably in England, where just a lot of the stuff I grew up with was being made, there were some fresh and exciting projects, and I think there was a real kind of time of change in filmmaking.
TR: Yeah, I think the ’60s to the mid-80s, it really was a good period, there were some really good films being made.
AV: There was a lot of edge to most things, you had “art house” stuff, but that still worked in the mainstream, which you don’t get as much now; it’s all been pushed away as being “Oh that’s too niche” and it gets labelled “independent”, and now almost everything’s got to be mainstream blockbusters. But during your time, there was stuff like The L-Shaped Room…that was earlier obviously…or the kinds of things Ken Russell was doing, and Michael Winner, and although that was kind of “niche”, that you’d call niche now, it all still tapped into the mainstream, which is quite amazing. You know, there was so much variety at that time.
TR: That’s right.
AV: I think also it’s because I was growing up as well, seeing all that stuff come out; I was just a little too young for most of it, but seeing a lot and hearing about it through my Dad, or visiting him down at the Studio, just got me tuned into it…you know, I like this, I want to be a part of that! It must have been exciting for you, being in the sound department, where the limited time on each project meant you worked on so many different films in a short space of time.
TR: Yeah, I was mostly in the sound department when I got started, because down there is where I did the mix, the dubbing. I was the dubbing editor.
AV: What led you into sound specifically?
TR: Well I love sound, I always have loved sound. I mean music has been one of my great loves all my life and it was funny because when I first started to picture edit it was really Watership Down that was the first, practically the first thing I did, and then I went from Watership Down to Alien, and the thing is, I remember thinking to myself that I can do what these so-called “editors” are doing, but better. I really felt I would do it better because none of them really thought of it – not “none” of them because there were some great editors at that time – but what they never seemed to consider was the sound. They cut it, and hoped you were going to make the sound sort of work.
I remember one famous editor…I won’t say who he was…I remember I said to him, when I was Chairman of the Film Editor’s Guild for two years and we used to have these discussions about sound editors and film editors, and I said it’s really an unfair balance because a film is really fifty-fifty. You know, the thing is the sound could be cut out, the film could go out silent, look great, but really it wouldn’t be the same as it is with a great soundtrack on it. He said, “We are the artists, and you embellish our art”, or however how he put it. In fact, “You as the sound editors just make our work look better”. And I said, “Fine, you’ve answered my question completely”, you know, that’s your attitude, and that’s why I thought to myself, I can edit these films, and the thing is, at the same time, I will have sound in my mind. But you don’t do things because of it, you do it subconsciously. It’s like anything; you talk to someone about editing, I kept saying I can’t tell you how to edit a film. There’s got to be a natural feel for it, but I can’t say “I cut there because of…” this. Now you can if it’s an action sequence, I cut there because the gun went off, or whatever, but in cutting it’s got to be instinctive. You’ve got to feel the scene.
AV: I always find that if it’s well shot and the movement or performances are doing the right thing, it finds its own way, and you’re just there saying “Oh well it needs to have a cut here”, instinctively as you say.
TR: Well you know when you’re looking at a scene and the thing is the dialogue’s going on, and you see there’s a group of, say three or four people in this scene, and somebody says something, and you know one of them’s going to react to that. You know you’re really going to want to see how it affects the people there. That’s how you cut, really, you’ve got to cut it with how you think people are going to react, who are in the scene. Or put yourself in the scene and be one of the characters, if you want to. Then you know how to edit it.
AV: Absolutely. Going back to your sound days, the 1960s was a busy period at Elstree; they had Tony Hancock there, Cliff Richard, Stanley Kubrick and Lolita, Hammer Films moved from Bray to make their base there. Were you involved in any of those films?
TR: No, I wasn’t really. Funnily enough, the first film that I was put on when I arrived at Elstree Studios was a film with Sidney Poitier, Eartha Kitt and John McIntire, and it was about the Mau Mau uprising in Africa. I’ve got the tape of it…I found it in America in some junk shop, and it’s in slow speed and it’s the worst quality you’ve ever seen, but I’ve got it somewhere, and that was the very first thing I worked on down there. I think they called it The Mark Of The Hawk over in America, and it was being made for the Presbyterian Church of America. Yeah, that was one of the first things I worked on.
AV: And then, among your other early credits are such landmark films as Bryan Forbes’ The L-Shaped Room and now classic comedies as The Bargee and Crooks In Cloisters. Any memories of those?
TR: Well I was so thrilled to be working on those things. I loved The Bargee because the thing is we spent a lot of time up and down the canals with these barges recording all the sound, I did it with Bill Rowe. Bill and I went up and down there recording all this stuff and then Bill mixed it. Yeah, it was good, those were good days. There were a lot of little films that I worked on as an assistant earlier, like The Small Hotel, with Gordon Harker, and there was a film called Run With The Wind. Can’t tell you who was in that one, but it was a group of little films that they made.
AV: All overlapping?
TR: Yeah, they made these little films and you were just put on to them, which was good. I worked with an editor called Seymour Logie on those three; he came in to do the set, whatever they were.
AV: A film I didn’t recognise in your resume is something called Licensed To Kill, which sounds like it could be a forgotten James Bond spoof?
TR: Oh yeah, that was one of them! Yeah, it was! It was a terrible, terrible film! I’ve got that somewhere as well. What was it called in America?
AV: The Second Best Secret Agent In The Whole Wide World.
TR: That’s right! That’s right! It was dreadful!
AV: It was that bad?
TR: I’ll find it and loan it to you.
AV: It sounds absolutely bonkers. Apparently there was a sequel called Where The Bullets Fly?
TR: Oh yeah, I did that one too!
AV: Any thoughts about them?
TR: No, they were just terrible! They were terrible! They really were.
AV: Quickies.
TR: I’ll try and find them, but I’m in such a mess at the moment with my old stuff, and I need a new handle on the door, or we’ll be stuck in here! Well, it’s a nice place to be stuck! I can phone out, send for food.
AV: Yeah, exactly. I remember when I was first making a bit of money as a teenager, doing corporate videos and stuff, and I said to my Mother, “Can I covert the attic and put a big screen up there?” – you know, I’ve always had a yearning from my Super 8 days of having a nice home theater, which is finally happening now. And she said “No, you want to go out and get a car”, you know, put my money on my first car and be independent. She said “You don’t want to be stuck at home all the time”, and I replied, “No, but I’d have a lot of fun if I was!”
One of my favorite films, although I suppose it’s a bit of an oddball picture really, is Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, the original with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – “Julie Andrews!” I didn’t know you had been on that; it was on television a little while back, and I noticed your name on there.
TR: Oh yeah, I worked on that. That was good fun. I liked working on that, because it was nice; I worked quite closely with Dudley Moore, because he did the music. And so I had to do the notes and all the rest of it, and we worked together on it and I laid the music up. Yeah, it was good. He was a nice character.
AV: He always seemed to me to be the “nicer” of the two, especially with all the stuff that’s come out after both their deaths.
TR: Yeah, I never really met Cook much. I mean obviously to say hello, but that was about it.
AV: And what was Stanley Donen like? Because obviously he’s a legend.
TR: Well my wife Louise knew him because we did Indiscreet, which he directed, and she worked for his office, she was in the accounts section. That’s where we met and did our courting, in his office up at Wigmore Street. He was good.
AV: That’s quite a story! And then you forged your way onto films directed by a couple of famous British directors throughout the 1970s, Michael Winner (I’ll Never Forget What’s ’Isname, The Games, Lawman, The Nightcomers, Chato’s Land, The Mechanic, Scorpio and The Stone Killer) and Ken Russell (Women In Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils and The Who’s Tommy).
TR: Oh the Michael Winner one, The Sentinel, that was the first one I got a credit on, with Bernard Gribble, because Bernard Gribble was on that film and I was doing the sound. We’d done a few Winner films together but he had to leave, or he was going to go and live in America or something. So he left, so I did the second half of the film, editing wise, so that’s how I got a joint credit and that was my first editing credit. I still did the sound. Then there was Ken Russell, Our Mother’s House was in there somewhere, Isadora…
AV: With Winner and Russell, was that intentional to keep working alternatively on their films, or was it just because you were in the department, or a stroke of luck, or did they ask for you?
TR: No, I was freelance, and the thing is they would phone up and say they’re going to do a film and would I be available, and it worked out like that. It was just everything all falling into place, it was amazing! I mean it was one of those really sort of “charmed” periods where everybody slotted in.
Every now and again you’d have to miss one or you were offered something else and you missed out because you couldn’t do it, but the amazing thing is, most of the films that I had to say no to never turned out very well! But there were periods where someone would ring up and say “Would you be free to do so and so?” and you’d try and work it out and if you couldn’t do it, you’d have to say no, and then you find that the film really wasn’t very good! So it was good, a great period, really.
AV: What was that like, working with those two characters?
TR: Oh it was extremes, you see, it was different. I mean Michael Winner really isn’t a good filmmaker, though he did make some good films in his early days, I think. I’ll Never Forget What’s ’Isname, The Jokers; Scorpio was good, The Mechanic was good, you know, I loved those two, I think they were excellent. The Nightcomers was pretty good.
AV: Lawman I always thought too, and The Games as well.
TR: Well The Games, I think, was really ruined by him.
AV: Oh really?
TR: Yeah, because the thing is, he shoots a lot of stuff, but he liked to cut his own films. So doing the sound was fine, you never got bothered by him because he had no patience to do any sound. But he would go, “Er…that’s long enough for that cut”. I mean, he was dreadful, and Bernard Gribble on The Games, particularly with the marathon, which it ends with, we had thousands and thousands of feet of this stuff. Bernard had run through every frame and made notes of every single thing where somebody tripped, somebody did so and so, and so on, and you could have just gone in there and cut it on his notes, and got it good. Winner said “Leave the marathon to me”. And he’d go, “That’s enough of him running”, I mean it was terrible. I mean the film could have been good!
It’s like Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood could have been a very funny film, but he cut it to bits. You know, “Let’s make do, get rid of that, and do this”. It was sad that he took it away from Bernard, and Freddie Wilson was another one who worked on his films. But, on the other hand, Ken had Mike Bradsell. Now Mike Bradsell was one of the best editors ever, I think, though he never really, unfortunately, got the big breaks, but you see his work; see Women In Love and The Music Lovers and The Devils. I was with Mike the other day and he said he reckons Savage Messiah was his favorite film that he cut with Ken. And he still worked with Ken up to the end, on his “stable films” or something he calls them, or his “garage films”. Yeah.
AV: You were on the sound for Tommy, and I’ve read some of the EMI reports where, it’s either Pete Townsend or Robert Stigwood, one of them was having a good complaint about the surround mix, or something like that?
TR: Well what we did, it was the only film ever made in Quintophonic sound. They never used it again and it was all done with the Sansui decoder. We made so much noise, I mean it was the loudest thing ever! And we were told to mix at night because the people in the other theater couldn’t listen to what they were doing, we were making so much noise.
I think they all sort of just argued about getting the levels, they really had to be so big. We moved in all these Dolby machines, we had two desks in there instead of one, with Pete Townsend and so and so, then Bill Rowe and Ray Merrin at the back guiding things around. That was really exciting.
I don’t know about the arguments, but I know they spent a lot of time getting that sound right. And then of course it was run in one theater, up in town, and you had to make normal stereo prints to go to so and so, where it lost a lot of its bite, of course. And because they were magnetic, these prints, the five tracks had to be run so tight on the heads, they were wearing the heads out – every few days they’d need a new head on their projector because it had flattened it off! So it was really not a very good format.
But what we did, we experimented by putting it through a Dolby box encoder, then putting it back through the Sansui, and we could do the five channels optically, because I worked on the very first Dolby Stereo feature film ever, that was Lisztomania. They’d done some television beforehand, they did that detective…what was his name?
AV: Yeah…it was around ’72, or something; Callum.
TR: Callum! That’s it, yeah. Yeah, they experimented on that, but that was Dolby Mono, and then we did the first feature thing with Dolby Stereo, because we worked in the development stage. I would help out occasionally, by supplying some bits and pieces, and we worked with Dr Dolby, who did his experiments down at Elstree Studios.
AV: Ahh…right!
TR: And he used the dubbing theater for all his experiments.
AV: Before he set up in San Francisco?
TR: Yeah, well that was the money.
AV: So, as a result of working with those directors, there were more than a few famous names that featured in those films, apart from Oliver Reed, who seems to have turned up in pretty much most of them! There’s quite a cast here: Orson Welles, Glenda Jackson, Michael Crawford, Ryan O’Neal, Richard Chamberlain, Burt Lancaster, Robert Duvall, Vanessa Redgrave, Marlon Brando, Charles Bronson, Jack Palance, Keenan Wynn… Did you ever get a chance to work directly with them?
TR: I never met Marlon Brando, funny enough, but I’ll always remember Orson Welles. I had to do looping with Orson Welles. We had this session booked with him, he said, “I want to do it on a Saturday, I want to do it in town”, or so and so, so we rush around and get this theater booked, and he’s supposed to be there at nine o’clock in the morning; he turns up at eleven.
He comes in this big black coat, cloak and a hat, and we start recording this stuff and he keeps looking away, and it’s all going out of sync. So I said, “Excuse me Orson but I really think you should go again because it’s not…” He says “It’s Mister Welles to you, young man”, and he said “I’m too tired to do this crap”, or whatever he said, and he turned to Winner and said “I want you to fix this theater for tomorrow”, which is Sunday, “And I will come back in and I will be dust beneath your chariot wheels”. And he stormed out! He went!
So Winner’s suddenly, “Got to get the theater! Got to get the theater!”, and we get this place organised, everybody’s got to come in on a Sunday to do this stuff, but we get there and we’re waiting again, and there’s a phone call. They used to have a woman in London, this older lady who was like his European secretary…she’d handle his affairs and things…and she phoned up and said, “He won’t be coming in, he’s on a plane to Bulgaria”.
He eventually came back, about…I don’t know, let’s say a month later, so many weeks later, and he came in and came up to me. He said, “Now, I am very sorry the way I treated you last time, I was having a terrible problem with…” – because he was always doing films everywhere, running out of money, doing a bit of this and that – he said “I had a big problem in Bulgaria, I had to go and sort it out. Now”, he said, “I’m very sorry how I treated you last time…what would you like me to do?” And he was brilliant, of course, he just did it all like that! Wonderful.
Though the best was a film I worked on as an assistant, The Story Of David, which doesn’t exist anywhere now. Apparently this film, nobody knows what happened to it, but it was with Jeff Chandler, who died shortly after that, and he was the best looper I’ve ever worked with. He’d come in with a baseball cap, and sat…he loved the sports, he’d have all the papers, reading the papers…and the loop would go up, and he’d be reading the thing and he’d say his line…and it was perfect sync. And perfect performance. He’s obviously listening, reading, and just doing it!
AV: Brilliant. The L-Shaped Room was directed by Bryan Forbes, who also made the Cinderella romance The Slipper And The Rose, with music by the Sherman Brothers and Angela Morley, who later composed Watership Down. I’ve heard you mention the film a few times.
TR: I love that, but I wasn’t part of it.
AV: You weren’t a part of that?
TR: No, I just love the film, though.
AV: So then you went from being a dubbing editor to a sound editor, at least credit wise, on Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby, written by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. What’s the difference in titles?
TR: Nothing, they’re the same job. It’s exactly the same job. Sound editors they call them now, they used to call them dubbing editors in the past. I got a credit on that film as sound editor and technical advisor, and the reason I got that is because I handled all the music, from before Nelson Riddle came on to do it, and that was great working with him.
AV: Nelson Riddle, another legend.
TR: It was my idea to have What’ll I Do? on the front of the film; I suggested these things to Jack, and then I found a man, Brian Rust, who was quite famous as an absolute expert in dance band music and stuff of the 20s. I used to go and see him and say “Now if we were in 1921, what would be the top ten? Give me like the Top Of The Pops for today”, you know. And he’d go through his books and things and he’d tell me exactly what they would be listening to at the time.
So I sought out all these things and I placed them in the film as they needed them. We obviously couldn’t use them because it would have cost too much money to buy the rights, so then Nelson Riddle came and wrote his own stuff, and he also reworked all these songs in the style of the time, but they were his arrangements.
AV: Clever.
TR: And it was very nice working with him, he was a charming man. I’ve lost it now, this quarter inch tape I had, but because I did the music, I was the music editor as well. So we went to him in the States and we were at the music sessions, which I’ve still got on tape. All the time we were doing this, in the breaks and lunch time and stuff, I’d be tinkling about on the piano, and I just play by ear, so to speak, but I taught myself the chords of What’ll I Do?. So I could play this What’ll I Do?, his arrangement that he made, and at the very end of the session he came in with his trombone, because he used to play trombone with Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra, and we did a duet…
AV: Oh wow!
TR: They gave me the tape, and I can not find it anywhere in the house; I mean it was many years ago, it was like 45 years ago or something…but I can’t find it. It must be somewhere, but I don’t know where. And that was great; it’s a pity I haven’t got that.
AV: That’s magic.
TR: It would have been a special thing, yeah.
AV: Jack Clayton directed that, and he also did Disney’s Ray Bradbury adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes – I know you weren’t a part of that, but he had a rough time there…
TR: Oh yeah. I think it was because they took it away and edited it themselves and didn’t give him a chance to do what he wanted to do with it. I did The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne with him after he’d gone through that. He was a real charming man, and I’ve never seen anybody so hurt, and when we did Great Gatsby it was the same, because that wasn’t accepted very well either. I think the trouble is Gatsby was a film out of its time. We’d just got to that stage where the films were snappy, you know, cut like this and swinging this, swinging that…and this was slow and lyrical and all the rest, beautiful to look at.
AV: Yes, it’s a very cinematic film.
TR: Yes it is. And I really like the film, still. Anyway, we went to the premiere in New York, and just as it started the thing broke down! And they said “we’re going to carry on from where we are”, for all the rest of it. I said “no you’re not!” I’m arguing with the people in this cinema telling them they’re going to go back to the beginning and going to start the film again, because this is the first reel anyway. In the end they did, but it wasn’t well received. We had the most amazing night at the Waldorf-Astoria, where we had something like five hundred thousand white roses sent in especially, and they had…what’s his name…
AV: Redford?
TR: Yeah, but apart from the people that were there they had this orchestra wandering around playing all the themes of the film around you, and a famous dance band playing all night, I mean we were the last to leave! So we all got drunk, just thought to heck with it, we’ll all get drunk and have a great time.
AV: You at least had a great night out of it then!
TR: Yeah!
AV: Amongst all that, you spent an interesting couple of years working with Ken Russell on Tommy and Listzomania, which we have already spoken about, and then you were back for your next Michael Winner project, an odd attempt at a family film, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood. I spoke to you about this the other day after recently running the DVD release, and wanted to ask you about it here. So what can you tell us about Won Ton Ton? I remember you mentioned your amazing autograph book…
TR: Oh yeah, I was lucky enough to have to record, loop and re-do all the dialogue with all these famous people! It was like, “You’re going to America next week and you’re going to get a list of these…” – I got this list! – Alice Faye, Yvonne De Carlo…who else?
AV: Phil Silvers, Sterling Holloway, The Ritz Brothers, …
TR: The Ritz Brothers, Dennis Morgan, Walter Pidgeon…you know, all the names, William Demarest, all these people…and so I had this great list. They would arrive, and because they only had about three lines to do, in they came – Yvonne De Carlo came in at 10:15, I asked “Would you sign this? Sign here, sign this” – and she left at 11:15. So, somewhere I have that, I can’t tell you were that is at the moment but I’ve got that. I’ve got all these things but they’re all who knows where!
AV: So your association with Michael Winner got you on that film?
TR: Yeah, it always was the same. Michael would phone up and say “I’m doing a film”. Now what he would do…let’s say in those early days you would be earning, say, £25 a week, something like that, and you thought “the next film I do I’m going to get him to give me at least £28, or something like that”. So, he’d phone up and say “Terrence!” – always like that – “Terrence! I’m starting this film called The Mechanic and I want you to be available on the so and so” – and he’d talk very slowly – “It’s about things, so and so and so on”, and he’d say, “The same price as last time”…whack…putting the phone down!
AV: That was how he kept his costs down!
TR: Yeah, but he was fun to work with, I thought. He was so rude to everybody, I suppose, but I always got on with him, and he never gave me a bad time ever, though he did give people a bad time.
AV: With Won Ton Ton, it’s a bit of an odd film. Was it intended as a family picture? Because he wasn’t well known, obviously, for making those kinds of films.
TR: Yeah I think it was. It was basically Rin Tin Tin.
AV: Right.
TR: That’s what it was, and I just think it’s like all his stuff at that time…it was cut to pieces; he’d got some good material and funny sequences, but then he gets bored and then says “We’ve got to trim it all up, it’s got to be faster”, and they’ve always got to be in ten reels, it’s always got to be 90 minutes, or whatever. It’s got to be that, and that’s how he did it. The worst one ever with him, the only film I ever started to cut for him, was Bullseye, and in the end I had nothing to do with it. And it was terrible that film.
AV: Yeah. Which again, like Won Ton Ton it could have been quite good.
TR: It could have been funny, yeah.
AV: Maybe intentional comedy just isn’t his thing! It seemed with Won Ton Ton in particular that I was watching a family film, but then you’ve got a bit of questionable language in it, and then there’s a couple of scenes where it all goes off into inappropriate places.
TR: Was there swearing in it? I don’t remember.
AV: There’s a couple of examples, yes, and that surprised me, actually, because I was watching it as a family film and thought, “Oh, that’s bit of a shock”, and then there’s this subplot where it’s suggested the leading lady has become a lady of the night for five minutes, or something like that, and it just seemed totally out of place in that kind of, what should have been a quite jaunty kind of comedy. What did you think of the whole final result?
TR: Well I think it was over cut; I think it had lost all its charm, because it was funny, when you saw the early rushes and things they were good. And I just think it was cut to bits, that’s why.
AV: It wasn’t fun enough for kids, and it wasn’t adult enough for adults…
TR: No, I think it just fell between all the stools, you know. The same as The Games. The Games could have been good. I didn’t think that worked either.
AV: Which brings us to 1977, a big career year for you, it seems, as you worked on The Duellists, meeting Ridley Scott, and you became a picture editor on Winner’s The Sentinel.
TR: Yep, The Duellists was my last film as a sound editor. We had two picture editors: Pam Power, who was doing it first, and then Mike Bradsell joined her I think.
AV: What was that like, jumping from sound – you were already doing the sound on The Sentinel – and then carrying on over to the picture? How did you find the changes in disciplines?
TR: Well I didn’t find it any problem. I never did. I mean I just felt that, even if I say it myself, I felt that I was a natural to it, I felt I could do this. I had the right feeling for the rhythm of the film, and it was never a problem. I never had a bad time editing; I’ve never really been in a state where I thought I don’t know what to do now.
AV: I must say it’s really interesting hearing you speak, as someone who wants to do delve further into this as well, because everything you’re saying is how I feel. I also have a bit of a musical background, and editing is rhythmic; it’s all about the rhythm of the picture.
TR: Of course it is, yes.
AV: When you say you can’t explain why you make a cut here or there…there are many times when somebody has asked me, “Oh, you know, why did you edit this that way”, and you can’t explain it, it just happens, especially if you come from a musical background, or from sound, because I also did a few years of sound mixing in my early twenties before I started picture editing, in London. It’s the same thing, it should just come naturally, really, in a sense. Sorry to break in, but it’s just interesting and inspiring, what you say.
TR: No, that’s alright. No, you can’t explain it.
AV: So you got a co-credit, or a half a credit, on The Sentinel, bringing us then to Watership Down, on which you would become a fully paid up picture editor…
Bright Eyes And Animated Bunnies:
Editing “Watership Down”
AV: Even at an early age I had a great appetite for animated films – I remember having Peter Pan on a loop after you helped us set up the VHS at home – but Watership Down was a film I especially remember being eager to see ever since my Dad brought me down to Elstree Studios all those years ago, when I was knee-high to a rabbit, as it were, and I first met you when you were, I think, mixing the film. Since animation has quite a lengthy production time, you must have been involved quite early in the process?
TR: Yes, but it didn’t start that way for me as an editor. I got a call from Martin Rosen because he was the producer of Women In Love.
AV: Ahh, of course he was.
TR: And he said, “I’d love you to do the sound on this animation film I’m going to do”. He said it was going to be “quite interesting…how you devise to do it I don’t know but it’s going to be a challenge”. So I thought oh that’ll be interesting, but you really had to do something else in between because it was two years as they would do all the line tests, and they you go away and they do some other stuff and all the rest of it.
So it went on like that and Ron…somebody…was going to edit it. I’d never heard of him before, nice chap. He was absolutely into steam engines, steam power…he loved all that stuff. And he was somewhere, swimming, and was taken bad and drowned. So Martin asked me if I would take over. It was still the early stages, so the thing wasn’t as if he had really done a lot of it, but he’d done a lot of preparation.
So I took over, and they draw…you must know because you know all about animation…they do all the line testing, do the whole film in line test, so then you can cut all these line tests together, look at the sequences and say whether it would be better if this one moved quicker or, you know, it takes too long to get round this tree.
So they say “Where do you want me to put the tree?” – I used to love all that – they’d say “Where do you want the tree? You can have it the other side of the house or around the back”. So while we go all through that I think I left them to do The Awakening, and then came back to Watership Down.
AV: The Awakening is listed as 1980, which is even after Alien, so I don’t know if that got cut and then left on a shelf?
TR: No it couldn’t have been that then, but the funny, interesting thing about Watership Down is they bought an old tanning factory to do it in, for the whole setup.
It had the animators at the top, and then the sort of the inbetween artists, ink and paint, and all that sort of business, all the way down. It was about five floors, and the cutting room was in the basement of course! We were in the basement, and it was situated in…Warren Street! I thought that was great, for Watership Down – Warren Street!
AV: Yes, I love that. So it must have been the sound you were working on when I saw some footage at Elstree?
TR: Yeah, we were down here doing the sound.
AV: Right, because I just remember a vivid memory of seeing a bit with a stream in there, and I remember that shot being in the film, from the main titles.
TR: That’s the front, which is so beautiful to look at.
AV: It looked great, and I remember really wanting to see this film, I thought I must see this film when it comes out, though I eventually saw it on VHS, I think first. Those titles really show off the watercolor backgrounds to great effect, nicely beginning at Watership Down itself and pulling back and back to where the rabbits are at the start of the film, essentially showing the journey that they are about to embark upon in reverse. And then, before that, there’s that completely alternative, sharply styled prologue that establishes the differences in animation even more.
TR: Yes, it starts with that sort of Pagan ritual, and that was an interesting thing because the man who did that…
AV: John Hubley?
TR: John Hubley was fired.
AV: And then he died [in 1977, Hubley having art directed Disney’s earliest features before the studio strike of 1942], which was quite unfortunate.
TR: I know…it was very sad. I remember going to his apartment flat right at the beginning when we were going to do this film together…
AV: So you were on it as far back as that abandoned version?
TR: I was on it from the beginning. And we went to the house where Dizzy Gillespie came, because he was going to do some music for it, and there was a bloke called Bill Russo, because I’m a great Stan Kenton fan; Bill Russo was an arranger and a trombone player with the Kenton orchestra, I used to meet all these people, and Dizzy – Louise spent ages speaking with Dizzy Gillespie – and they were all there! At John Hubley’s. And then, of course he did the opening sequence, but then his ideas began to clash with Martin Rosen, and Martin said “It’s not going to be what my dream is”. So he’s got to go, and he took over himself as producer-director.
AV: I also understand that Hubley worked on it for a year and then only turned in about five minutes or so.
TR: Well yeah, that was the thing, we were never going to finish it. It was one of those things that was never going to be finished.
AV: As you say, after that version got abandoned, Martin Rosen was not only the producer but then he stepped in as director as well. What was that period like, watching things from the sidelines and seeing all that upheaval?
TR: Well we didn’t really…I mean, you really don’t see that, you know, it’s not always in the open. That’s the stuff that takes place in the office…”if this isn’t speeded up or if this isn’t done it’s pointless us working together”. All that sort of dialogue would have gone on away from us, because they were tinkering along on doing bits and pieces. But then it came down that we were going to stand down for a while, and Martin was going to take over and it was going to be his concept. Which I think works very well. And they kept the Hubley piece on the front.
AV: The opening, which is brilliant; it works fantastically.
TR: Yes it is. But you couldn’t have the film like that. People couldn’t take all of that.
AV: No, not ninety minutes of that highly stylised approach…because it’s quite Aboriginal and intentionally primitive.
TR: That’s right, I think Aboriginal’s right, like the cave paintings and stuff.
AV: Yeah. So after Hubley, you were editing the picture by then and having to deal with the animation side of things, which is naturally very different to live-action because you’re dealing with either line tests or completed shots as opposed to having the coverage to play with. What did you find the main difference between cutting live-action and animation was, and how did you approach this?
TR: Well you do the line tests and edit all the line tests together, so you’ve got a film now that’s just like all pencil drawings. And you can see whether it plays, you can see whether this sequence is too slow, and you can discuss it with the animating director and you say, like I just said about “I can’t get this to work because the background’s too complicated”.
So they say “We can adjust anything you like; we can move the trees, we can do the sun, the building needn’t be there it can be over there”, which I thought was amazing, like that, where they virtually do that now with digital, and everything else in CGI. Anyway, so then you do that and then they go away and start drawing them for real, and you then match things up to how you did it in the first place, but you find that you get this shot that is shorter than the line test was, or a shot which is quicker, so you then adjust it as you go along.
AV: I have two versions of the Watership Down soundtrack: an official release and…a not so official release that contains some extra material. I probably shouldn’t have told you that since you actually produced the soundtrack album, as noted on the cover. What was involved with that side of things and how on Earth did you end up becoming a record producer!?
TR: Well, Martin came to me all thrilled and said “I’ve decided to use Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music, to do the score for the film”, and I thought “Well, I don’t know if that’s going to work”. Personally, I didn’t think it would, but it was his choice. I said to him at the time, “Oh, you’re taking a risk”. He said, “No it’ll be great; great for the film”, you know, Master of the Queen’s Music and all that stuff. And we had a Royal Command Performance with the film as well, where we met Prince Charles, I think.
Anyway, dissolve forward…the music session is taking place on the Monday; we’ve hired virtually the whole of the London Symphony Orchestra for a week, and Marcus Dodds is going to conduct. And I’m now going over to CTS to meet John Richards, who I know, to just make sure that everything is organised for the Monday. So I go over there, and I’m meeting with John and saying we’re going to be here and doing so and so, and it’s all going smoothly when the phone rings, and it’s Martin on the phone. He says, “Are you sitting down?” He said, “Malcolm Williamson has written one piece”.
AV: I can imagine the shock, because he was on it for about a year as well wasn’t he?
TR: And he’d only sketched out one other thing. He had a virtual nervous breakdown and left the country. A bit like Orson Welles! He left the country…what are we going to do? What are we going to do!? I thought I’d say “I told you so!” – no I didn’t say that, I thought I could say that! Angela Morley had been attached to do arrangements, and I was a great fan of Angela Morley anyway, and as Wally Stott, you know [previously known as band leader on the 1950s Peter Sellers Goon Shows, Stott swapped to become Morley in the 1970s and continued as an arranger of choice for John Williams, among others, on many of his “golden period” soundtracks].
AV: Who, I was going to say, started on Lady Is A Square.
TR: I just think she was amazing. So I said “I tell you what I’d like to suggest to you…that you give the score to Angela Morley to do. She knows the music, what he’s been trying to achieve, and he hasn’t done it, and I think it would be great if she does it”. He said, “Oh, I don’t know about that, you know”, but Marcus Dodds agreed with me, and so they got Angela to do it. Now they’ve got to get rid of the London Symphony Orchestra that’s been booked for a week at all that cost! Well Marcus Dodds knew someone who was looking for an orchestra, so it all fell into place and they managed to sell of the orchestra…
AV: And that was Jeff Wayne, doing his War Of The Worlds!
TR: Yeah, they booked off the orchestra to him, and we re-conformed in, I think, a couple of months later or something, and in a month or less, Angela wrote the whole score, which I think is wonderful.
AV: Yes, it’s a beautiful and haunting score. Absolutely terrific.
TR: And because I was so closely involved with her, Martin gave me the job to produce the album on his behalf, which was really wonderful.
So we produced that…you write little extra tops and tails for the pieces and one thing and another…and I said to CBS, who was releasing, “We should release Bright Eyes as a single”. And they wouldn’t do it, they said it’s not really commercial enough, not like the performance in the film, because it was a different kind of arrangement.
So then they got Mike Batt to do this arrangement of Bright Eyes, which they then agreed to release, and they put Keehar’s Theme, which I produced, on the back. Which was wonderful – it bought my car! It was great! That was great.
AV: I was going to ask about that – Watership Down is celebrated for the Bright Eyes song, which I think is wonderful and really, before the big Disney ballads in the 1980s and ’90s, pioneered this idea of using a signature theme from an animated film to promote the picture. Did you work closely with Mike Batt on t