I first joined Monitor in 1959.
It had just be on a year.
The only arts program I know of in the world that was fortnightly.
There were odd ones here and there, but this was a continuing process.
And it became very prestigious quite early on,
because Huw Weldon, who was the editor of the program,
erm... was a very special man,
and I think became the guru for everyone who worked on the program.
There was something magical about him and he brought out the best in everyone.
I think the program had been running a year when John Schlesinger, famous director,
was cutting his teeth on documentaries,
and had a chance to make a feature film.
So he left and they were...
everyone was looking for a new man to take his place.
They had other producers who were very good on novels and maybe sculpture,
stuff like that, specialized in that,
but they didn't have a sort of film director as such.
I'd just made three amateur movies,
so I, erm...
I got in touch with the assistant head of films and he said, "Well, Monitor's looking for a..."
Because I wanted a job in BBC.
"Monitor's looking for a new director. Have you got anything to show them?"
"Yeah, I made three films, three amateur movies."
And he said, "Can I see them?"
I showed them and he selected one.
And he said, "I think you should show this to Huw Weldon."
Now, a lot of people were showing their films to Huw Weldon,
and mostly they were documentary films about, erm...
the Lambeth boys,
the barrow boys at the Elephant and Castle.
Well, my film was...
I'd just become a Catholic,
and my film was about a little Catholic girl
who naughtily takes her angel wings home,
they're going to do a little nativity play the next day,
she shouldn't have and her brother gets hold of them and accidentally breaks them.
So she has, erm...
a day to find another pair of angel's wings in London.
I think this was just so bizarrely different,
and there were too many, you know,
he got a glut of movies about untidy youths, you know, pushing barrows,
that he gave me the job, gave me a trial.
And that was the beginning of my ten years working on Monitor
and Omnibus as it came to be called when he left.
Can you come... You know where I told you to stop?
Well, use that as a stop,
but start further back down there and gradually walk up this way.
What we had to do was...
take the subject, whether it was a painter or a composer,
or whoever,
and approach it in a sort of inviting way,
that would invite the audience to participate,
er, but not go above their heads.
Sort of make it accessible, but at the same time entertaining.
Erm... So my first major film was on Prokofiev.
And, erm...
There were no films of Prokofiev.
A few old photographs.
And, erm, Huw...
I asked him if I could film an actor as Prokofiev and he was horrified.
And he said, "No, if you can't do...
"We can't... People will stop believing us if we're making things up and getting actors."
And, erm, I said I wanted to show him in a nostalgic mood,
in a wood,
away from home, wishing he was back in Russia.
And, erm...
And I would just give an impression of the nostalgia he's feeling.
And so...
"Maybe I could just show a reflection of him in a pond?"
And he said, "Well, it is autumn,
"there will be lots of leaves on the pond, I understand. Is it a muddy pond?"
I said, "Well, I don't know."
He said, "Well, as long as you stir up the mud and the leaves, yeah, I can allow that."
And, erm, as we went on,
I gradually pushed the barriers further,
until with the Debussy film,
I, erm, actually had actors involwed.
But that had been quite a long process.
From Prokofiev's reflection on a pond,
we went onto, erm...
Elgar on the Malwern Hills shot in long shot.
You know, he was a figure on a landscape.
Huw understood that and he didn't mind him in long shot.
Elgar never talks in the film,
so he just was a sort of image
you could identify with as he walked the hills,
you know, and you heard his hillish music.
When Elgar was a boy, he spent hours on his own,
riding on his father's pony along the ridges of the Malvern Hills.
We were encouraged on the program to be involwed with subjects
that we were really keen on ourselwes.
And music had been a hobby of mine for years.
I...
I can't read a note of music, never could, never can,
but I certainly played a lot.
I was a collector of records
and I started off with Tchaikovsky and went on to Stravinsky,
and as my...
horizons widened, erm...
I took in all sorts of classical music from ancient to modern.
And, erm...
That's exactly what Huw was keen on.
He said, you know, "The composers you're very fond of, you're mad about,
"that's good, you know, that's an example I want.
"You make films on them.
"And if you really love them, I'm sure you'll do well."
And that's what I did.
Debussy was always a bit of a mystery to me.
His music, erm, seemed to me so...
I don't know, I just identified with it,
particularly La Mer.
I had been an old salt, I was in the Merchant Navy for a while.
And that man really understood the sea and all its moods,
and so I was in love with his music, with especially La Mer.
And, erm...
So I dreamed of doing a film about him when I learned a bit about his life, his marriages.
And, erm... apart from that,
the whole era just...
the Art Nouveau era, you know,
was one of my favorites,
I was mad on that.
So, er, it was a good combination.
The problem was, erm, how do you do a film on him when, you know, you can't afford...
Well, it's not a question of affording to go to Paris,
er, but Paris modern-day is vastly changed from what it was in, you know, 1910-ish.
So, erm, I - I hit upon the idea with Melwyn Bragg,
who was also on Monitor as a producer,
of, erm, doing a film on him.
And a film...
Well, not a film on him as such,
but a film company making a film about him.
I could have a director and a cameraman,
and actors playing the characters,
and the director could talk to the actors
about their motivation and how they behaved,
and, in fact, the whole atmosphere.
Goes to exotic Eastbourne and then he sits on the beach and listens to the sea. It won't work.
- You mean it's all wrong. - It's wrong.
- No, it isn't. - Why?
Because she would understand.
She wasn't like Lily or Gaby,
she was like Madame Vasnier or Camille Claudel.
She was very intelligent.
- She was an artist herself. - And she was rich.
Exactly. For the first time in your life,
you have no money worries and you could concentrate on your music.
The obvious place to do it was, erm...
Beachy Head in Eastbourne
because he went to Eastbourne for his honeymoon.
And that's where he started writing La Mer.
So, erm, that was the basis of the story.
La Mer proved him.
From now on he was regarded as a great composer,
the listless drifting of garret life was over.
(Russell) So I didn't have to go to Paris, I didn't have to have the Eiffel Tower.
I had to have... I just had Eastbourne and a swimming pool
and the same hotel he actually stayed in,
so things were on my side.
I cast Oliver Reed as Debussy because I thought he looked like him.
I mean, Debussy was a strange-looking man.
Erm... His...
I don't know, his - his face...
his - his personality seemed to change
almost like a chameleon,
and Oliver, to me at that time,
had the same sort of, erm... personality.
And, er, so he seemed an obvious choice.
And I'd - I'd...
He doesn't speak much in the film and he is an actor playing Debussy.
So he listens to what the director has to say and really he...
The image of Oliver Reed playing Debussy...
with the music of the composer, sort of they become one.
And by personifying the music
in - in the supposed composer himself,
erm, it really enhances the whole process
and you begin to feel you know the music of Debussy.
While I worked on Monitor,
we weren't supposed to even...
When I used "actors", inverted commas, they weren't generally professional,
they were friends of mine who were artists, erm...
of one kind or another.
I like films, whatever they are,
feature films or whatever,
to be sort of family affairs and I think if you, you know, get a whole team around you,
that, erm...
of friends,
it makes it a lot more fun.
And I still do that to this very day.
We never had a large film crew,
so it was sort of going on a walk,
and going on a picnic and then making a movie.
Erm...
I usually had one production assistant,
one cameraman, he would have an assistant,
and sometimes a sound man,
and maybe one prop man and one makeup,
and that was the entire unit.
And so we all mucked in and just had a good time.
And so some of that flavor...
of not being too set in our ways paid off, I think.
I suppose most of the films I make for the BBC
could be described in some form or other as documentary,
and I found it pays off to use faces that the general public aren't used to,
so they don't associate an actor with Dixon Of Dock Green or whatever.
So if I'm making a film on a poet, I try and find a poet who can act.
If I'm making a film on a primitive painter,
I try and find a primitive painter who can act.
Nine. Take two.
Stand by, everyone. And action!
When I joined Monitor I did several films on artists,
including MacBryde and the Colquhoun,
a couple of Scottish painters I'd met at the gallery and exhibited their work there.
And so I got into that.
And I also began to love primitive painting.
And there was a primitive artist someone drew my attention to called James Lloyd.
And he had a strange technique.
He called it dotting.
He was a... He was a primitive pointillist, in fact.
I also loved primitive art in general,
and Rousseau in particular, I thought he was extraordinary.
And so, erm, I convinced Huw that I should do a film on Douanier Rousseau,
self-taught Sunday painter.
When I came to cast it, I suddenly thought why not have a pointillist painter,
a primitive painter playing a primitive painter?
So I went up to James Lloyd,
who lived in Yorkshire, and I said, "Would you like to play Rousseau?"
He said, "Aye, I like old Rousseau."
He said, er...
"Yeah, I love his paintings.
"I'd love to have a go."
And, erm, so I thought, "That's good enough for me."
And, erm...
I dressed him à la Rousseau,
and, erm, he studied Rousseau's paintings,
devised a way he thought he would actually apply the paint to canvas...
(Coughs)
...and, erm, sort of took over the character right away
just as naturally as you could.
And I just wanted a natural, easygoing,
no fuss performance.
And he was superb.
I loved Isadora's story.
She was a gutsy lady, who, you know, against all odds, made it.
I mean, she was overweight, that was the first thing,
but that, erm, appealed to me,
I thought, well, anyone who can, you know, get over being a bit obese
and sort of entertain thousands and be fêted all over the world must have something.
And an ex-dancer who was also an actress
from the Ballet Rambert,
I knew as a personal friend,
and I thought, "She's just right."
And at the same time I understood
that a professional feature film was being made on Isadora,
with, erm...
with Vanessa Redgrave who's as thin as a rake.
Now, so that wasn't real for me,
that was cheating.
She... She danced well, I admit,
but that wasn't Isadora Duncan.
The idea is, by the way, the idea is that Isadora Duncan's being told by Commissar Budovsky,
that she's going to meet some of the chief communist leaders.
And as she comes in rather austere sort of communist gear,
expecting to find everyone sitting around a plank table, you know,
talking about plans of Russia's future, and instead she finds...
We consulted, erm, somebody who actually knew Isadora,
and advised us, you know, on a lot of the technical.
Sewell Stokes who wrote a book on...
on Isadora.
You know, on her days mostly in Nice,
where he knew her as a personal friend.
I suppose Isadora led the most sensational life
of any woman who's lived in this century.
I only knew her during the last year of her life,
and to the young man that I was then,
she still had tremendous glamour.
She was warm-hearted,
she was lovable,
she was exasperating.
Huw Weldon liked the film,
and he also knew of Karel Reisz's film.
And, erm, there was a bit of pressure from somewhere, I don't know where,
to let his film have its premiere before ours.
And, er, so we were put...
put back a couple of weeks.
And then my wife of the time who was a great fan of the film,
she - she did the costume,
erm...
caught Huw Weldon one day,
erm, when he was just going to his office first thing in the morning.
She was hiding behind a palm tree
on the fifth floor of the White City...
studios.
And, erm, he quite liked her,
I think he rather fancied her in a way.
And, er...
she said, "I must talk to you."
And he said, "Well, yes, Shirley, come in."
And she said, "You can't do this, you know.
"We - we... Our film was finished first,
"it was thought of first, you know, we've done it,
"it's a good film, it would look like second best."
Anyway, she convinced him.
So our film did come out first.
And, er, I was...
But I was nevertheless invited to Karel Reisz's premiere,
and bumped into him as I went in.
He said, "All right, don't tell me. I know."
(Laughs)
I don't know what that meant exactly.
(Screams)
(Shouting)
The Pre-Raphaelites always have been, you know, as long as I've been interested in art,
some of my favorites.
When I read about Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
I knew quite a bit about the movement, anyway,
but his particular story absolutely intrigued me.
And, erm, from the moment I learned that he buried his poems,
his best poems,
with his wife's body in the same coffin,
and then years later his literary agent said,
"Hey, we could publish those and make a pile. We'll get her dug up."
So, erm, she was.
You know, they dug up and raided the... the grave, in fact.
And took the... And did take the moldering poems out from the clutches of the dead.
And, erm, did publish them, but somehow it affected, that affected Rossetti,
and never gave him any peace.
He was a haunted man.
And, erm...
just showing how he was haunted and how he dealt with it,
and also his influence and relationships with all the other Pre-Raphaelites
is a fantastic story.
How did it go?
Smoothly.
I took them out myself.
It's a ghastly business.
- I should never have let you persuade me. - You wanted them.
I need them.
Then...
take them.
They'll sell like hot cakes.
They're poems!
Not pastries.
I suppose you'll...
- you'll blab to all and sundry. - Me?
(Laughs)
I'm as discreet as the grave.
No.
I've changed my mind.
(Fenby) I've always loved making up music.
Silent films gave me an opportunity to develop this gift
and also earn a living.
I was brought up in Scarborough on the east coast of Yorkshire.
There are no musical conservatoires there and I was largely self-taught.
My love of the moors helped me in this,
up there I could test my ear on the natural sounds around me,
and Jot down the notes in a little book.
(Bleating)
(Russell) Well, I'd wanted to make a film on Delius for a long time, and I...
I'd written various scenarios that I wasn't happy with.
(Fenby) It was because of this wonderful inner ear
that I was about to give up my life at Scarborough and leave home.
Tomorrow I would be leaving for France.
I was about to embark on a great adventure which was to change my entire life.
(Russell) Although I love the music, I thought I can't do him justice,
until I read Delius As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby,
who went out when he heard that Delius was blind and paralyzed,
but locked in his mind were several compositions
he just physically couldn't put on paper.
He volunteered, he was a jobbing composer himself,
out of the blue, didn't know Delius,
wrote to him offering his services,
if he could be of any use in helping him compose again.
And, erm... It was a... He bit off more than he could chew in several respects.
I think it probably ruined his life for a start.
He gave up. He barely got to compose at all.
Cos he was a budding composer.
And Delius was so hard on him,
that, erm, it almost broke his spirit,
but he soldiered on up until the moment Delius died,
when, erm, he was at his side, he was at his deathbed,
so he wrote a book on it.
And he even would go around giving recitals
where he'd demonstrate to the public
how he and Delius managed to work together.
And so he would be almost...
give a schizophrenic sort of performance
whereby he'd play both parts,
he'd play himself and he'd play this old, crotchety, paralyzed martinet.
Now, then, Fenby, let's have that little tune that you liked,
the bit you picked out before.
It's immediately after that it seems to me that the real trouble lies.
Now begin where it starts on the strings.
And so he'd, erm... He'd sit at the piano,
and he'd say, "Right, what are we going to do today, Fenby?"
"Well, erm, there was that Song Of Summer piece,
"it had a very good start but I don't like the way..."
"I know what you mean."
Yes, yes, yes, I remember.
Now, it's there.
I'm not happy about it from here onwards.
No, we'd better have...
(Hums)
Start then on a quarter note.
- No, a quarter note, quarter note, I said. - That is a quarter note.
So they progressed on... Take it or leave it.
They'd argue, they'd agree.
He'd play it, Delius would change his mind again.
He'd replay it and so on.
And, erm...
So when we came to film it,
erm, since it was so precise,
we actually wrote on the score which was on the piano,
what they said and when they said it,
and Fenby who...
Christopher Gable, who played Fenby, could play the piano well, thankfully.
And, erm...
So they were basically singing a mini opera on composition.
And, erm... I said to Fenby, erm... "You must come along to the filming."
He said, "No, I'd put off Christopher Gable who's playing me, there wouldn't be any..."
I said, "Well, just drop in the studio sometime, any time.
"You know, don't tell us, just feel free."
So he said, "I might."
And then one day we were filming,
we were filming the arrival of Fenby into the Delius household.
There was Delius in his chair and Fenby rather humble,
and, erm, they have a conversation and, er...
Delius says, "Do they still have that German band on the promenade, Fenby?"
And Fenby says, "Oh, no, sir, they have English music now, it's quite..."
"English music? I've never heard English music."
So he didn't get off to a good start. (Laughs)
And then I said "Cut" at the end of it,
and then I heard sobbing.
And I looked in the corner and there was the old Fenby himself,
who crept in to see the scene and he was so moved by it
that he burst into tears and he said, "That took me back 50 years."
He said, "That's exactly how it was."
Which was the most gratifying thing I ever heard.
Song Of Summer was less fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than some of my work.
Erm, but then the book was a straightforward story,
you know, had a beginning, a middle and an end,
there didn't seem any point in jazzing it up.
I want to give you a memento that you will always keep
in memory of these years here with me.
Take this and wear it for me.
You have given me a new lease of life.
(Ticking)
Thank you, sir.
(Russell) I - I thought I was a bit of a sort of preacher... preacher man.
Erm...
I thought, "Well, I love these composers so much, you know, this, erm...
"I wonder if there's a lot of people who don't know about them and would also like them."
And I've been stopped in the street ever since on a regular basis by people saying,
"You've changed my life, you introduced me to Prokofiev." And things like that.
So, yes, I'm a bit of a traveling preacher. �