the same, so i kind of had a very broad sense of society, i suppose, of community and character, but character is what it has been all about from the word go, just observing people. so it s a sort of cultured upbringing, to a certain extent, was your creativity encouraged by your parents? well, that s a very interesting question. i mean, it would be very difficult not to say that in many respects my folks were not philistines, because they kind of were. there s culture, and there s culture. i mean they actually at times went to stratford, and they went to the halle, so you could say there were cultural, but on the other hand, anything that was in inverted commas arty of what we would identify as avant garde, they were horrified by, but apart from anything else, from an early age, i was drawing people, and, on the whole, you could describe what i was
drawing class that, you know, absolutely resonated with notions that i had on the go, in a primitive form, at that point in time, that somehow you could create. ..theatre, you could create films, in an organic way by collaborating in a way, and using rehearsal as more thanjust a mechanical way of interpreting what somebody had already put down on paper. and so, from what i understand, you gather a cast of actors. you have a subject, in a very broad sense. you never give a title to the film. they re usually untitled, and then the year in which you re making the film, and then you ask each of those actors to create their own character. well, i collaborate with each actor to create a character. and what i do to start with is to get each actor to really make lists of real people they know. and i then, and this involves long discussions, one on one, with nobody else there, with each actor,
in the post war years. how did you discover searle? when i was six, somebody gave me a copy of hurrah for st trinian s, a collection of cartoons by ronald searle, for my birthday. that was it. the great thing about searle is that he was apart from being a great draughtsman he was a fantastic observer, and his style of drawing influenced my style. my handwriting to this day is influenced by ronald searle s style of handwriting. and what was he doing? i mean, just to evoke a sense of his style? well, there are two things, really. one is his observation of character, and his expression of character. but the other is his line. you know, he had a great. ..he had a range of different kinds of line, but he had a great facility to allow the pen marks to be themselves. you think about the characterisation that ronald searle comes up with in those drawings, those kind of quite
are they banned from talking to the other actors about.? absolutely. but it works totally. everybody enters into the spirit of it, and there s never been a case where anybody has, as it were, broken the rules or cheated. actors are highly stimulated by it, because it means each actor feels in possession of something that only he or she has, and apart from anything else, it means that the actors can the actor doesn t have isn t distracted or inhibited, or in any way affected negatively by an overview. he or she, each actor or actress, sees the whole thing from the point of view of the character, but it mostly means that we can explore situations in a completely truthful and organic way and arrive at the dramatic material. and on set, are you ever writing down the lines and putting them on a piece of paper? no, i don t write and give to the actors because we don t need to. it comes out. they know it. one of the things that always amuses me and is, i think, interesting is that every t
and on set, are you ever writing down the lines and putting them you hear an electrician or somebody say, i don t understand it. there s no script, but they know the lines. they never dry up, they never forget their lines. and of course, unlike an ordinary film, particularly films where they don t really rehearse properly, most of the time s taken up with people not being able to remember what to say and stuff, or looking for the character, which obviously in the case of my stuff, we ve long since established who and how the character is. your next big influence is not so much a moment, as a whole era. you want to talk about the 60s. you arrived in london from salford in 1960 at the start of that decade. what are your key cultural memories of that moment when you arrived? well, first of all, talking about movies, all the movies i saw between 1943, when i was born, and 1960, none of them wasn t in english. they were all hollywood or british