Part two can be read here.
What are your earliest memories of watching movies?
I grew up in a little place called Ewell, near Epsom Downs
in Surrey. There was a cinema across the street called The Rembrandt.
I practically lived in there. My life growing up was a bit like
CINEMA PARADISO (1988). They used to throw out all the little frames
that they'd cut out of the 35mm prints, and I would raid the
wastepaper basket. I had a huge collection. From 1964 to 1971 I saw
everything in that theatre, from ZULU (1964) to the CARRY On films to
DR. WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965) to Spaghetti Westerns to THE DIRTY
DOZEN (1967) and THE WILD BUNCH (1969).
Obviously THE WILD BUNCH was
huge for me, and also films like THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) and ZULU,
which still remains one of my favourite films of all time. I just saw
so many films, and it was a great period for movies. I mean, there
was THE DOUBLE MAN (1967) with Yul Brynner, BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN
(1967), WOMEN IN LOVE (1969), THE MUSIC LOVERS (1970), and THE
GO-BETWEEN (1971), which is absolutely one of my favourite films. I
just connect all these films with that one cinema because I saw
everything in there.
The first
film that I saw was actually not in that cinema. It was a film called
THE MAGNIFICENT SHOWMAN (1964). It's known in America as CIRCUS
WORLD. It's a Samuel Bronston picture, and has John Wayne as a circus
owner, and Claudia Cardinale.
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I used to
look outside my bedroom window and every Saturday I'd see a guy
changing the movie posters in the cinema. The posters were large, and
he'd get a ladder, take the old one down, and put up the new one with
long rollers on a long broom-handle stick. It was like a new piece of
art I would get to see every week and I used to be completely
mesmerised by it. Some people went to church, and I went to the
cinema across the street. I wasn't able to go when I was very young
because my mother told me that I would get whooping cough in there,
but I started going when I was 8 or 9 and I never gave it up.
Ironically, I DID get whooping cough, although not in the cinema!
When did you become aware of the soundtracks to
films?
That would have been ZULU. I remember being about nine or ten years
old and sitting in the garden, trying to recall the whole film in my
mind and remembering that incredible John Barry theme. That's when I
knew the music was an integral part of the film-going process. You
couldn't separate one from the other.
It was probably when
I was something like eleven or twelve, but I didn't have much cash,
and LPs were expensive. So I had to save up, and it was always ''Do I
get Led Zeppelin this week, or something by Jerry Goldsmith or Ennio
Morricone?'' Nevertheless, I gradually built up a collection of LPs.
I remember even until my early twenties, when I was a bit hard up, I
would go to 58 Dean Street (a celebrated London record shop), even
though I couldn't afford much of the stuff. I didn't have a huge
collection of film soundtracks, but I always used to enjoy the
experience of listening to the music. Ironically, a lot of the films
that I grew up loving, particularly in the 70s, were very sparsely
scored and were never wall to wall with music. It wasn't until the
advent of STAR WARS (1977) that the big, big soundtrack came back.
When I think of all my favourite films from the 70s – DIRTY HARRY
(1971), THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), CHINATOWN (1974) and particularly
PAPILLON (1973), which remains my favourite Jerry Goldsmith score –
they were all films that were very lightly scored, and the albums
were very short. Films like DIRTY HARRY never even had an album.
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I went to drama school, and I was an actor for a while, doing small
roles on TV. I gradually decided that I didn't want to pursue a
career as an actor and I got on to the other side of the camera. I
started working for producers in the late 70s, as an assistant. Then
I got involved with the BBC, doing documentaries. By the time I got
to America, which was in the mid-80s, I had some projects that I
brought with me and I started to try and make documentaries here.
How did you begin working with 20th Century Fox
on soundtrack albums?
When I first
moved to America, I didn't know anybody. It was like starting over
again. I hadn't had much of a career in the UK. One of the projects I
was trying to get off the ground with the BBC was a documentary on
film music. In those days, nothing substantive had ever been done
about film music or the history of film music. I tried shopping it
around here and some of the first people I called were at the record
label Varese Sarabande. At that time, Richard Kraft, who is now a
well-known composer's agent, was working there producing film
soundtracks, and he said, ''You need to talk to my brother, David.''
David was a director for Channel 5 News and was the world's biggest
authority on film music. He and I got chatting with a view to trying
to put this documentary project together. Nobody really seemed
interested in backing it, so the Kraft brothers said ''Forget the
documentary. Why don't you do something more constructive?'' A friend
of mine was starting a record label, Bay Cities, and he asked me to
try and get the licenses to some soundtracks from the studios. I
started doing that, and after a few years, I got headhunted by Fox
because Richard Kraft, who by now was an agent, found out that Fox
was looking for someone to go in and excavate the vaults and put
together a comprehensive film program. It took several months, but I
eventually got the job.
Did you realise soon that you had a love for
archiving and unearthing soundtrack music?
I guess I
subconsciously had a love for it because I really enjoyed the
responsibility that I had at Fox. I still have that love because I am
still doing the job 22 years later. I remain a consultant for Fox,
and the ad-hoc person to go to if there is any issue regarding their
classic film library. When I joined Fox, the head of music, a guy
called Elliot Lurie, said to me ''No one here knows how to do the job
that we are asking you to do. Don't come to us with any questions.''
I thought he was joking at first, but he kind of wasn't. I got the
brief that I had to wander all over the lot, trying to create friends
and trying to create lists and create new divisions into a move
towards preserving music. I found a guy called Skip Rusk, who was the
head of post-production, who was incredibly supportive. He gave me an
office and connected me with all the people. Gradually over the
course of a year or two, we devised a system as to how the vaults
could be raided and the music recovered. Nothing had been recorded
onto tape. It had all been recorded onto 35mm film. All of that film
had to be restored before you could get the music. It became an
unwieldy, big, and costly job to do. Here we are 22 years later, and
the job is still being done. Not every title has come out as a
soundtrack album. There are still quite a few films left to go!
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The ones
that we thought were impossible are my proudest achievements.
Something like CLEOPATRA (1963), which was a very big job. The music
stems were very deteriorated. I remember telling Alex North's widow
that we would get it done by hook or by crook. She has passed away
now, but before she did, we were able to complete that job. It took
years and years to do. Restoring some of the great Rodgers and
Hammerstein classics, particularly THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) for the
thirtieth anniversary in the mid-90s, was a big one. Some of the
classic old musicals like THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
(1954) and science fiction films like THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
(1951) and obviously the STAR WARS trilogy (1977-83), which we worked
very hard on over the years. First we did a four-disc set for Arista,
and then when the twentieth anniversary rolled round, Lucasfilm
wanted to go release special editions of the movies, and we went back
to the music and redid the whole thing from scratch. For me,
discovering Alfred Newman was a highlight. I knew that he was one of
the absolute greats, but when you get to work in the room that he
worked in and listen to so many of his scores you realise what an
incredible genius he was. Not only was he a genius composer but he
was also head of music so he supervised everybody else, as well. I
often talk to his son, David Newman, about his father. His legacy is
so large and so vast at Fox that it is impossible to think about
Twentieth Century Fox without him.
What was the genesis of your documentary, THE
WILD BUNCH: AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE (1996)?
THE WILD BUNCH has always been one
of my favourite films, and one of the first things that I did when I
came out here to L.A. was to look up some of the people who were
important in Sam Peckinpah's world. Even though he had passed, a lot
of his relatives were still around and also the people who had
written books about him that I was very keen on meeting – people
like Paul Seydor and Garner Simmons. At this time, David Weddle had
not yet written his biography. I got to meet all these guys and
become friendly with them. My deal with Fox was that I was not an
employee, I was a consultant, and I had a non-exclusive contract. I
was not precluded from going and doing other work at other studios if
that work came up. So in the mid-90s, I had been asked by an
executive at Warner Brothers called Brian Jamieson to restore the
music to THE WILD BUNCH. I said that I would love to, and they gave
me full access to all of the original multi-tracks and we remixed the
whole thing from start to finish. It was really terrific. While I was
doing that job, Brian called me and said that there had been a
discovery. While they were clearing out one of the vaults, somebody
had found a couple of cans that said 'Wild Bunch 16mm' on them. They
didn't really know what they were, but it looked like black and white
footage of Peckinpah directing the film. He asked me if there was any
value in keeping it. I said I was sure we could find something to do
with it. So Brian made it his cause to make sure that all of the
stuff that was WILD BUNCH-related in the vault was kept. When we
found out what it was, Brian asked me if I would be interested in
doing a small documentary to accompany the film's laserdisc release.
I called Paul Seydor, who by that time was a very good friend of mine
and of course not only a great academic but also an A-list film
editor. He was editing all the films that Ron Shelton was doing, and
at that time hewas editing TIN CUP. (1996). Ron Shelton is also a big
Peckinpah fan. I told Paul, ''You will never guess what has fallen
into our lap. All this black and white footage that's silent. It's
never-before-seen stuff of Sam directing the film.'' I asked Paul to
join me on it, and Ron Shelton very generously let us use all of the
TIN CUP post-production facilities so Paul could put together the
documentary. He was editing AN ALBUM IN MONTAGE at the same time he
was editing TIN CUP. We were able to reduce the budget of what it
would have cost to make this little documentary because it got buried
in the TIN CUP budget. Consequently, we ended up with a much better
product than we otherwise would have, and also because Brian Jamieson
green-lit the project and was such a mensch. Once we had made the
film, he thought it was so good that he had it transferred to 35mm.
These 35mm prints started doing the rounds at film festivals and that
allowed us to have it qualified for Academy Award consideration. And
then of course it went all the way to the Oscars and we got
nominated. Unfortunately, we didn't win, but that little documentary
that started on the back of a postage stamp became an Oscar-nominated
film.
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I
couldn't quite believe it, because when we started making the film,
an Oscar nomination was the furthest thing from our minds. We were
effectively making a little documentary to go on the laserdisc
release of the film. That was its original concept. It had no life
beyond that. When the documentary had been completed and Brian was so
supportive of it, and had sent it to film festivals in 35mm, it got
traction as they say. It got reviews in Variety and The Hollywood
Reporter, and I started to realise that this little film was like The
Little Engine That Could. It could go the distance. Then when the
Oscar nominations were announced at dawn, as always about 5 am, I got
a call from a friend of mine who said ''Guess what? You're now an
Oscar nominee.'' So we went to the Oscars, and it was a great
experience. Entertainment Weekly had written that they thought we
would win, and I was worried that we were being tagged as the
favourite. The winner was a film called BREATHING LESSONS, directed
by a young woman called Jessica Yu. She made a film about a poet in
an iron lung. As you know, the Oscars are incredibly sentimental
about anyone who is an invalid. As soon as we knew our competition
was a film about a guy in an iron lung we thought, ''We're dead.''
And we were.
What were your initial hopes for the documentary?
Were you hoping it would revive interest in Peckinpah?
I think so,
yes. Ever since I had become friends with Paul, which was back in
1990, we had been getting together with the surviving cast and crew
members of Peckinpah's films, and members of his family. At that time
Peckinpah had not been dead long and he was not the venerated giant
that he appears to be now. I think it was because his end had been a
horrible decline. By the time he passed away, he had drifted into the
ether. I think it was in our minds in the 1990s that we would try to
redress the balance. David Weddle's incredible biography of Peckinpah
came out in 1994, right before we made the documentary. So there was
already a move towards redressing the balance. When our documentary
got an Oscar nomination, we felt that this was partly a validation
for Peckinpah and a reward for all the times that he had been stiffed
at the Oscars. We were proud that we could do a little something.
Since then, we have continued to do various projects that are
Peckinpah-related, and now nearly twenty years later he occupies the
venerated spot that he should have all along.
Do you feel that your documentary helped it
happen?
I do. It spawned a lot of books. Before our documentary was
made, there were maybe four or five books on Peckinpah. Now there are
something like 45 books, and you can trace the renaissance from the
late 90s, so there's no question about that.
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I had made a number of film-related documentaries over the years I had been here in L.A. Ironically they had all been for Warner Brothers. I had not done any for Fox, and yet by the time we did the John Ford documentary I had been involved at Fox for fourteen years, doing the soundtracks. There was an executive in the Home Entertainment Division at Fox called Richard Ashton, who was a Brit. Fox proposed a box set of 24 John Ford films all in one box. Richard liked a particular producer, a young woman named Jamie Willett, who had done a tremendous amount of special features and bonus materials for Fox DVDs. I had worked with her on a couple of occasions and we split the duties. Jamie would effectively produce the documentary and I would direct it. Julie Kirgo would write it. This was in the spring of 2007 and we had to make it very quickly because the box was going to be released in December. Effectively the film had to be completed by August. Brian Jamieson was segueing out of Warner Brothers and was consulting with them and other companies at that time. He had mentioned our film to the Venice Film Festival and they said they would take a documentary on John Ford, providing it was good enough, and premiere it. The bad news was that in order for it to premiere at Venice, it had to be completed a month earlier, in July. We were really under the gun. I tried to make it easier for ourselves by creating this conceit that everyone we interviewed was watching a John Ford movie in a screening room. We could interview everybody on that set and not go anywhere else. We lost a bunch of people I would have loved to have had because they couldn't come the week we had that set up. The theatre we used is the very theatre that Ford and Zanuck sat in, viewing dailies. Using that theatre had verisimilitude so I wasn't going to give that up for anything.
What is it that you love the most about John Ford
as a director?
As with Sam Peckinpah, John Ford is not a guy you would want to sit
around with and chew the fat. Where is it written that these guys
should be nice guys? Because they're not. They're real rough birds.
You have to separate the personal behaviour of these guys from the
work. Ford's movies are like the paintings of the Old West that you
somehow saw etched in your mind when you were a child. There were
British kids like me growing up in the 60s who loved the idea of
America and kids who hated the idea of America. The general attitude
of the time in England was anti-American. I would be in my History
class at school talking about how I always wanted to go to America
and the teacher would ask me why the hell I would want to go to that
god-awful place. My images of America as a kid were half formed by
images of the mountain ranges, the deserts, the Old West, the western
expansion, something about the idea of getting in a covered wagon and
going from a so-called civilisation to a barbaric wasteland that
would have to be settled and a whole new world would be born. Those
were inescapable fantasies to me that I learned from watching the
movies of John Ford. It worked on you subconsciously. You didn't know
what you were watching when you were young. All you knew was that
there were these black and white images on your television that spoke
to you like paintings that came alive. When you get older, and you
try to research what it was that you saw, you find out that they're
all John Ford movies. These things are like DNA, pieces of yourself
that you can't separate yourself from. That's really what the film
BECOMING JOHN FORD was about. It was about how you and the celluloid
became one. You get to a point where you cannot separate the dream
from reality. All you know is that you feel alive when you're
watching the film in the theatre and that is what we tried to
replicate in that film. It took me back to being an eight-year-old
taking filmstrips out of that bin. It was tactile. You were touching
a piece of the film. It was alive, a tangible thing. We got a lot of
interesting people to talk in the documentary. It was really about a
love of America. That is what comes through more than anything.
I spoke to Nick by telephone on 18th November 2014, and would like to thank him for his time.
Picture credits:
(1) Nick interviewing Tom Hanks for SAVING MR. BANKS (2013).
(2) Nick interviewing Ralph Fiennes.
(3) Nick on the Alfred Newman Recording Stage at Fox Studios.
(4) In Parras, Mexico: Jesse Graham, Nick, Jonathan Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, David Weddle and Lupita Peckinpah.
(5) Nick with Peter Fonda and screenwriter Lem Dobbs whilst shooting BECOMING JOHN FORD.
All photos are (c) Nick Redman and cannot be reproduced without his permission.
(c) Paul Rowlands
I spoke to Nick by telephone on 18th November 2014, and would like to thank him for his time.
Picture credits:
(1) Nick interviewing Tom Hanks for SAVING MR. BANKS (2013).
(2) Nick interviewing Ralph Fiennes.
(3) Nick on the Alfred Newman Recording Stage at Fox Studios.
(4) In Parras, Mexico: Jesse Graham, Nick, Jonathan Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, David Weddle and Lupita Peckinpah.
(5) Nick with Peter Fonda and screenwriter Lem Dobbs whilst shooting BECOMING JOHN FORD.
All photos are (c) Nick Redman and cannot be reproduced without his permission.
(c) Paul Rowlands
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