The Interview
CHRIS MENGES After starting out on documentaries in the 1950s, the great director of photography made his name working with Ken Loach before going on to collaborate with key British flmmakers – Stephen Frears, Alan Clarke, Billy Forsyth, Ireland’s Neil Jordan – and winning Oscars for his two flms with Roland Joffé. His diverse work shows a rare authenticity and commitment in its attitude to capturing natural light, colour and performances, and in its depiction of political struggle. Interview by Jo Comino Jo Comino: You came into feature flms through documentary. Did you have any formal or academic training? Chris Menges: No. I could plough a feld
when I was 12, but I left school with no qualifcations. When I was 16 I had a job as a fling clerk in London and by pure chance I was introduced to Allan Forbes and became his assistant. Allan was a flmmaker from the US who lived in London and he taught me pretty well everything. He taught me about sound, how to look after the camera, how to photograph scenes and about editing. He taught me that making a flm involves an enormous amount of hard and carefully researched work. He introduced me to [DP] Brian Probyn and many other people, so that when he left Britain in 1959 I had other teachers. We made No Governors [1958], a flm about buskers in the West End, No Place to Hide [1959], which was about the second march to Aldermaston, and The Anonymous [1958], about Padre Borelli in Naples. So he gave me an education in street cinema. Later people like Anna Popper taught me about light and I became Brian Probyn’s assistant, and that’s how I came to work on Poor Cow [which Probyn shot, 1967], and met Ken Loach, which led a year later to me photographing Kes.
JC: You’d worked for ‘World in Action’ too. CM: In 1963 I worked for World in Action and I
was lucky enough to work with Stephen Peet and Alex Valentine. Almost our frst assignment was to go to South Africa where the 90-day law had been enacted when Mandela had been imprisoned. As an 18-year-old with a Bolex camera, looking very much like a tourist, I did my best, with Alex, to photograph what life was like under apartheid. We went to Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, 52 | Sight&Sound | March 2013
where many of the ANC comrades were based for their operations inside South Africa. Also I went with Michael Parkinson to the revolution in Zanzibar, where we got arrested and then evacuated on a navy destroyer. Alex and I made a flm in Angola about the 1963 revolution. We went to the Congo, Tanganyika and Cyprus during the struggle. Through World in Action I worked with many fne investigative journalists. For a kid who had come out of school with no education it was an amazing way to learn about the
COLLEAGUES ON MENGES “Chris was one of my inspirations when I frst left flm school and he has continued to be such ever since. I believe his use of natural light is second to none and the strength of his cinematography lies in its deceptive simplicity and its total commitment to story.” Roger Deakins, quoted in a discussion forum on www.rogerdeakins.com “We [Loach and Menges] wanted to light the space so that the light fell democratically but unostentatiously on everyone. Not only is it more pleasing that way, but the lighting isn’t then saying, ‘This is the leading actor in the scene or the flm and these other actors aren’t so important’. This is what we did on ‘Kes’, and it became a central tenet of how we worked.” Ken Loach (quoted in‘Loach on Loach’, Graham Fuller Ed., Faber & Faber, 1998)
world. Then Adrian Cowell took me to Tibet where we made a flm with the Khamba guerrillas fghting the Chinese. We spent a long time in Shan State, making a flm about the Shans’ aspiration for independence from the Burmese central government. JC: At that point in your career you were crossing back and forwards between documentary and feature flm. CM: In 1967 I came back to London and the
very next day I went to Cheltenham to be the operator on If… for Lindsay Anderson. The cinematographer was Miroslav Ondricek, who shot those early Milos Forman flms Peter and Pavla [1963] and A Blonde in Love [1965]. There was a real respect for the people in those flms. I learned a lot from Ondricek. The big infuences of those times were Forman, Truffaut, Godard, the New Wave. [Raoul] Coutard was doing things that we all learned. I shot a lot of [TV] plays in the early 70s with Stephen Frears and one of the things we used to do was use a [Citroën] 2CV as a trackingshot vehicle – and of course Coutard did that. So we learned that you could be free of all the lights and paraphernalia of flmmaking. You only had to have a belief in the story. JC: When you come across a script, do you instantly start to visualise it? CM: I have worked on two or three flms
where I haven’t been moved or propelled by the story – it’s like helping out a friend. But most of the work I’ve done has been on stories that you want to learn from. A well-written screenplay like, say, Kes is very insightful about Billy Casper, the life that he lived as a child. It’s driven by a learning curve. JC: What was it about the Milos Forman flms that really appealed to you? CM: A Blonde in Love and Peter and
Pavla are very respectful, humorous