It’s easy to forget when watching a movie that what you’re actually looking at, the physical environment that the cast is working within, has either been designed or adapted to look how it does by the production designer, or art director as they’re otherwise known. A production designer works closely with a movie’s director to ensure that the visual look and style of a movie suits the material and communicates, where necessary, a mood or tone. It’s a challenging job, and Terence Marsh was one of the best in his particular corner of the movie industry.
Marsh began his career as a draughtsman at Pinewood Studios, where he worked uncredited on a number of movies including A Town Like Alice (1956) and The League of Gentlemen (1960). In the early Sixties he began to work as an assistant art director, and he gained his first on-screen credit for Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Three years later he had become a fully-fledged art director and won the first of two Academy Awards for his work on Doctor Zhivago (1965) (Marsh must have really impressed David Lean with his work). His second Academy Award came three years later with Oliver! (1968). For this, he oversaw the building of a London street that was carried out by around three hundred and fifty men and which included the laying of around ten thousand cobblestone slabs.
Marsh worked continuously from the Sixties onwards, and in a variety of genres, bringing his attention to detail and visual acuity to a number of movies that were improved just by his work on them. During his career he collaborated with the likes of Richard Attenborough, Sydney Pollack, Frank Darabont, Carol Reed, Gene Wilder, John McTiernan, Paul Verhoeven and Mel Brooks, and always did his best to match his vision of a movie to theirs. He remained at the top of his game even in the Nineties, whether it was through riding out in a Trident-class nuclear submarine for The Hunt for Red October (1990), or designing “Old Sparky” the electric chair for The Green Mile (1999). For his expertise and his apparently infallible skill in picking the right environment to suit the tone or the mood of a movie, or even just an individual scene, Marsh will be sorely missed.
1 – Doctor Zhivago (1965)
2 – Oliver! (1968)
3 – Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
4 – A Touch of Class (1973)
5 – The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975)
Yesterday was Danny Boyle’s birthday. The director is 59 years old, and over the course of his career has been quoted on a variety of matters to do with movie making, both in general and specifically. He once said: “I learned that what I’m better at is making stuff lower down the radar. Actually, ideally not on the radar at all.” It’s a great quote and one that shows the man doesn’t take himself too seriously. Here then are ten more great quotes by ten more directors, all of whom don’t take themselves – or the industry – too seriously either.
David Lean – “I wouldn’t take the advice of a lot of so-called critics on how to shoot a close-up of a teapot.”
William Wyler – “It’s a miserable life in Hollywood. You’re up at five or six o’clock in the morning to be ready to start shooting at nine. The working hours aren’t arranged to suit the artists and the directors; they’re for the convenience of the technicians. If you go to a party at night, you’ll never find anyone there who’s shooting a picture; they’re all home in bed.”
David Fincher – “People always ask why I don’t make independent movies. I do make independent movies – I just make them at Sony and Paramount.”
Clint Eastwood – “When I was doing The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I said to myself, “This romantic stuff is really tough. I can’t wait to get back to shooting and killing.”
Milos Forman – “It all begins in the script. If what’s happening is interesting, it doesn’t matter where you shoot from, people will be interested to watch. If you write something boring, you can film from mosquitoes’ underpants and it will still be boring.”
Steven Soderbergh – (on his retirement) “Cinema, as I define it and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.”
Woody Allen – “[The French] think I’m an intellectual because I wear these glasses, and they think I’m an artist because my films lose money.”
Federico Fellini – “Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”
Martin Scorsese – “I’m not a Hollywood director. I’m an in-spite-of-Hollywood director.”
Paul Thomas Anderson – “Well I’d really love to work with Robert De Niro, because he’s still the most talented actor out there. Maybe he makes some bad choices, which can be frustrating. On the one hand, you want to say, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ On the other, you can’t get mad at him for wanting to work, because most actors would be murderers if they weren’t working.”
Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, I.S. Johar
We’re at the halfway stage and so far I think I’ve got some pretty good choices for my Top 5: all are classics, all have stood (and continue to stand) the test of time, and all of them have had a profound effect on me as an individual and not just as a film buff.
I first saw Lawrence of Arabia on TV in the late Eighties. It was one of those movies I’d lifted from my trusty Halliwell’s Film Guide as a must-see, and while I’d seen a few other epics up ’til then – Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and Lean’s own Doctor Zhivago (1965) – what really impressed me as the movie unfolded was the sheer size and scale of everything; even on a tiny portable TV in my bedroom this movie was astonishing in its scope (and it was a panned and scanned version as well – how terrible is that?). There was so much to marvel at: the desert landscapes that seemed to stretch away into infinity, the shot of the attack on Aqaba with the tribesmen hurtling towards the city defences in that long panning shot that took in so much visual information it almost seemed impossible, the sense of mountains so tall and imposing that the characters appeared like ants in relation, and towering over it all, a performance that stands as one of the greatest in cinema history: Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence.
I was familiar with O’Toole, had seen him in a few films, including The Lion in Winter (1968) and The Night of the Generals (1967), and while I’d thought him a good actor, very intense in his approach, I hadn’t marked him out as an actor to follow (unlike his co-stars Alec Guinness and Claude Rains). Seeing him as Lawrence I began to realise I was watching something special, something beyond normal screen acting; here was a performance that not only made you forget there was an actor in front of you, but – and I know this is supremely silly – gave the impression that they’d somehow found the real Lawrence and plonked him down in the movie and asked him to recreate those scenes from his life being filmed. O’Toole wasn’t just astonishing, he was breathtaking. When he was on screen he was hypnotic, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. If the camera cut away to another character, I wanted it to come back to Lawrence as quickly as possible. If he wasn’t in a scene at all, I wanted that scene to end as quickly as possible so I could see him again. (It sounds a bit creepy, I know, but this was a revelation to me, that an actor could be this good; I’m not even sure I’ve seen another performance as good since.)
As with Stanley Kubrick and Abel Gance and Marcel Carné (sorry, Terry Jones!), here also was a director with complete mastery and control over the material. Lean did things in terms of composition and lighting I’d never seen before, things I’d never even considered could be done. His use of natural light alone was impressive. Watching Lawrence of Arabia now, over fifty years on from its release, there are shots that have never been replicated by other directors and/or cinematographers. Lean was truly a cinematic painter, an artist concerned as much with light and shade as character and emotion and motivation; he could fuse these elements together to make an organic, complete representation of the subject at hand, and their environment. In Lawrence of Arabia this makes for filmmaking of breathtaking beauty and accomplishment.
When I first saw the movie, and as I usually did, I raved about it to friends, even though I knew the subject matter and the movie’s length would put them off. But one friend did see it (though some time later), and reported that they’d really enjoyed it but was surprised that the movie ended with the attack on Aqaba; he’d really wanted to find out what happened next. I tried to keep my laughter to a minimum as I explained he’d only seen the first part of the movie.
I’ve seen the movie now around a dozen times, and each time it captivates me and mesmerises me in equal measure. The last time I saw it was at the London Film Festival in 2012. It was the first time the recent 4k restoration of the movie had been screened in the UK, and as a surprise, the festival organisers had arranged for two people connected with the movie to say a few words before the showing started. Those two people turned out to be Anne V. Coates, the movie’s editor, and none other than Omar Sharif. From where I was sitting I was only about six feet away from them both, and while Sharif spoke about his experiences making the film, several times he looked directly at me as he spoke. (To say I walked out of that screening on cloud nine would be an understatement.) And the movie looked tremendous, ravishing and beautiful in a way I’d never seen before, having never seen it at the cinema, only on home video or DVD. It took me back to that first showing on TV, as I saw a movie I thought I was familiar with, but realised I hadn’t seen really properly in all this time.
For me, Lawrence of Arabia is the epic to end all epics, the grandest piece of filmmaking ever committed to celluloid. Like the other movies I’ve discussed so far, it opened my eyes to what was possible in cinema, and its lustre hasn’t dimmed after all these years. It’s also the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen.
Rating: 9/10 – a movie that mixes the epic with quieter, more intimate moments, and with skill and considerable brio; Lean’s masterpiece and O’Toole’s finest hour.
