Posted by neilmcgfilm ⋅ September 21, 2013
"Shepperton which was the big studio was on land owned by British Lion, it would have been worth much more as land for housing." Asset stripping...
"Someone quickly signed a cheque and that was it. There’s never been easier financing for any picture."
They "had already under Peter Snell’s excellent guidance made a wonderful film called DON’T LOOK NOW."
"Christopher Lee was furious with the way the film had been treated and took the film to Paris and entered into the Les Filmes du Fantastique Festival where it won the Grand Prix (In April of 1974) and probably the best review that I shall ever get from the film trade paper, Variety (in May of 1974)." (Parentheses my info)
"They had to make the film shorter in order to play with DON’T LOOK NOW. So about five scenes had to be cut out."
You were locked out of the editing room?
"Yes we were locked out of the cutting room, but we had already finished the film and the prints had gone out to distributors in the United States and that was how we were first able to restore the film in the United States based on the print that Roger Corman held."
"When we made that film, Tony was working with Hitchcock on FRENZY and had to go to New York to work with him, so he was only with us for the first week then after that Peter Schaffer really took over from him…..If I had problems with the script then I went to Peter or sometimes I spoke on the telephone to Tony in New York."
"We did have, surprising to me anyway, a sojourn in the south and the young students*, who were our guides through the distribution of the film, had a greater feeling, probably because they came from all over the United States, of what kind of reception we would have where, and how we would handle the PR and all that. They felt that we should literally take the bull by the horns with the priests and ministers in the south, so they arranged prayer breakfasts which are usually to talk about politics and not about films. They consulted with us after they had seen the film and we got them really interested. They loved the scenes on the beach and on the cliffs and Edward’s performance. They also loved his speech inside the Wicker Man, which you might be interested to know was the actual speech that Sir Walter Raleigh made before he went to the block (to be beheaded). Tony Schaffer suddenly found it almost hours before we actually shot the scene because we weren’t very happy with the dialogue which we had at that point and insisted it be used. It was a very good decision."
"These students were marvelous, it was like a university project. Even when it came to raising the money, they all went to various areas of the east cost of the United States where they lived and persuaded doctors and dentists to help finance the restoration."
*Does he mean John Alan Simon and Ronald Weinberg or Ron and Micheline? (None were students but all were recent college graduates...)
"There was a sequence that Christopher misses and I understand why. Tony Schaffer and I went and studied apples at East Grinstead where there are these orchards that contain every single type of apple….When we got to the cutting room we thought, perhaps this is a little too much."
What happened to the original footage?
"I think it was just put somewhere where it was out of harm’s way and they just kept telling me that they hadn’t got it."
