2025 01 Spring with bleed - Flipbook - Page 10
Archard as the Colonel on the horse.
He'd come to inspect something, and
he had to cross this pontoon bridge
and the story of the shot was that in
their incompetence when he's on his
horse on the pontoon bridge, it drifts
away down the river. So there was
myself, maybe a rigger, and I don9t
know who else, we were in the
bottom of the pontoon. Bernard Archard is up on his horse and being
asked to drift down the river and we were there…. Really, I don't know
what we could have done if the horse had got spooked on bridge, but
we were there just in case. Anyway, it's slowly drifting down the river.
And the horse decides to have a piss. We're below it and we got
absolutely bloody drowned.** That's the wonders olmmaking, really
Some of the set painters were magic. What they could do with
perspective. You9re talking about painting a vast area and they will be
up a scaffold tower with an air gun and right on top of it, but when
you looked from our perspective it looked fantastic. They were really,
really clever. I can remember one instance, I think it was on Cromwell,
where they bought a guy over from Italy to do this fresco. It was down
the end of this grand hall. And he did this absolutely brilliant, almost
biblical fresco in wet plaster and all the traditional methods. He took
several weeks doing it, and then they came to the day, they did the
shot. I should think the fresco9s screen time was pretty neeting! And
then the art director said `right, now smash it.9 Because all the big
studios had what's called a scene dock, and in the scene dock you will
have multitudes of doors, windows, shop fronts, you name it. Stuff that
on a smaller budget picture the art director could go in there and say
`I'll have this and this and that9 for his sets. But what you didn9t want
was for something that you had spent a fortune on to end up in
someone else9s olm! So he said we should smash it up. And we put
hammers through this thing!
As to why I onally left - I left because I got engaged to Angie. And I
began to think about the job. It was very transient. You never knew
where you were, when you were gonna be home. Not the sort of thing
that seriously you would have faced married life on. And although we
were well paid, I think when I left the studios, in spite of all I think I had
about £600 in the bank. So I thought, well, I've really gotta pull my
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