Once a long time ago my
friend Biggles and I organized a weekend’s film making with super 8 cameras (it
was possible to video things but we wanted to do super 8 just for the fun of
it).
The film making took place on a glorious summer weekend at a
friend’s farm in Hertfordshire. The idea was to do remakes of great classics:
Biggles directed a remake of Gold finger, while I directed and starred in
Casablanca. The weekend was a roaring
success: everyone I knew more or less took part. There were at least four James
Bonds, and as many Pussy Galores (one of them me). The only way one would be
able to recognize Bond or Pussy was
because of the bow-tie and smoking jacket and the sequinned gown which was
handed from one actor to the next.
People were told to arrive with props and costumes and when they
arrived they were directed to the wardrobe department and then the prop
department that were situated on the lawn in front of the main house to deposit
their stuff, then they were given parts to play, according to what was going on
at the time. There was not only these two great classics being filmed: we did
commercials too. For some reason we
decided the rather unassuming London suburb of Penge would feature, and we did
a commercial for the fictitious ‘Penge Tandoori,’ complete with romantic
candlelit dinner and an Indian waiter in turban. There was an ad for the Penge
Health Club which included people lazing around by the swimming pool smoking
and drinking and eating cream cakes. People were
also told to bring props for whatever scene in whatever film they wanted to
star in, and then we shot it: these small snippets became the ‘trailers’ later
when we edited the films (this was done on an antiquated cutting machine and
needed cellotape!)
One girl arrived with several pillows, a motorcycle crash helmet
and a hoover pipe as well as several meters of aluminium foil into which she
had herself wrapped up. She said she
wanted to do the moon landing. So we filmed her as she descended the barn
ladder in slow motion.
Our host, for some unfathomable reason, wanted to do a very
obscure scene from ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’ which involved filming him in the
kitchen cooking at the AGA, then turning around to a young ‘starlet’ and uttering
the following sentence: ‘Do you like Haddock?’ (but pronounced ‘hiddock’, like
in the original).
And I wanted to do my favourite scene of any film: the scene from ‘The
African Queen’ when Rosie and Charlie have been fished out of Lake Victoria and are being cross examined by the German
Captain of the’ Louisa’: ‘How did you get here?’ Rosie replies that they came down the Ulanga river in the ‘African Queen’. The Captain
replies: ‘but that is impossible!’ and Rosie tosses
her lovely head and flashes her eyes and utters her immortal and inspirational :
‘Nevertheless!’
I cannot claim to have ridden down the rapids of the Ulanga but we
have been through a Coup d’Etat; an Islamist occupation of the north and a war.
In my little way here in Djenné I sit at
the beginning of a new year that promises to be if not quite as difficult as
the last two, at least no doddle... But, we are here still: the people are working
in the MaliMali studio; sometimes there are people in the hotel; the library is
continuing with the new project; we are here! Nevertheless....
