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Interview
Tony Klinger
Interview with Tony Klinger by Anthony McKenna and Andrew Spicer
6th September, 2010

Interview conducted in person
duration : 1:39:26

Interview with Tony Klinger 6/9/2010.
Andrew Spicer and Anthony McKenna

AS We’re going to look at Rachel’s Man first. And, I was wondering if the original idea was Moshe Mizrahi’s and did he approach Michael at Cannes with a view to producing a made-in-Israel film?

TK Yes, it was, I am fairly confident in saying that it was Moshe who approached Michael with the idea of making a film. I don’t think it was actually that film. It was a film. Michael told him he was very interested in doing something from the Bible. I don’t know what truly motivated that, other than the fact that he wanted to make a film in Israel and he thought that the two things were contiguous, Bible film - Israel that would be a natural kind of thing for him to do. And a third element that fell into place later, and that we’ll talk about later, was that there was at that time, a special dispensation of some nature for being able to invest money made in South Africa in Israel. They were very close politically at the time. And there was this special dispensation so that people who had money in South Africa, the only place they could export it to was Israel, for things that were acceptable or, you know, had been acceptable to their government. And this therefore passed that test and therefore made that film possible. But very quickly, I remember later, in the verbal context, that Moshe’s a very charming, affable fellow who fitted the kind of café-society thinking that my Dad was quite fond of. And he just wanted to make a film with him, after the initial to-ing and fro-ing he thought he’d be a very good choice, that his most recent work he liked, which I think was I Love You or Madame Rosa.

AS I Love You, Rosa.

TK A film I’ve only seen once. [inaudible] that got nominated for an Oscar, I think, for Best Foreign Film. And so it all came together, seemingly beautifully. But, as with most of those things which come together very nicely, it was not to be such a pleasant experience.

AS Yes, so, I suppose this is part of a bigger question in a way, or generates other questions. The original budget was fairly modest - about £72,000, $175,000 - it turns out that, in the end, it was closer to $640,000, so...

TK Which was at the time, quite a lot of money...

AS Yes, so I suppose there’s two parts to this question. One was why that happened and the second was in the process of that happening, did the film transform into something that wasn’t its original intention?

TK It was the illegitimate child of muddled thinking on everybody’s part. What happened was Moshe said the number - the figure - and we were working towards the figure he said he could make a film in Israel for, based on something he had done, as I was given to understand. And we questioned that a lot. We were not thinking that that was possible. And particularly, I suppose, I was the biggest cynic because I said, ‘Well, how did you arrive at this figure?’ you know. And Michael, and I suppose this is the truth of the matter, and to a lesser degree myself, was so in love with the idea of making a film that would be a gesture towards Israel and making a nice thing and doing the right thing as a Jewish man that he put aside his normal professional thinking of, ‘Show me the script, show me the schedule, then show me the breakdown, then I’ll show you the budget,’ that it all got turned and inverted the pyramid. So it was, ‘I’ll come up with a number, I’ll come up with the thing, then I’ll come…,’ and it was completely backwards.

You know, ‘If we’re doing a film for that money we can do it for four weeks if we shoot every day,’ or whatever the number was, some silly number. ‘And then we’ll make the breakdown and then we’ll need a script, but we all know the story because it’s in the Bible,’ kind of thinking. And it was complete nonsense-thinking, it was Alice in Wonderland thinking. And one of the reasons which comes up later, but I’ll put it in now because it contextualises it, I was personally so nervous, was because I never saw any evidence to substantiate any of the numbers. And that’s the reason I left Africa early, from that film, to go over there, because I was so worried about it. The reason I’d tried to cancel the film. There’s a pretty famous conversation where I phoned him up, when I arrived there, within one day, managed to get a call to him to where he was in Africa, which was not an easy thing to do from Israel, and said, ‘How much are you into this film for?’ and he said, What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Cancel it?’ And everybody was pretty stunned. I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Just take the loss. A loss now will be the cheapest loss we take.’ And he said, ‘What was wrong?’ and I said, ‘Everything. There’s nothing right, it’s a complete mess.’ And he said, ‘Well, put it right,’ you know, ‘that’s your job’. Which is what I tried to do, but when you start from that foundation it’s like building a house on quicksand and you’ve got a problem. And I think, like in a lot films, this not just being one of them, and we weren’t guilty of this much, but we were guilty this time, it starts off as wishful thinking, the numbers thing. ‘Yeah, we can do this, der, der, der, der!’ It’s like, ‘Go and build a barn and we’ll have a musical’, kind of thing. And, unfortunately, the truth is, you have to do it the proper ... there is only a professional way of doing it, there is no other way. And as a consequence of the wishful thinking, you then in effect get, become almost an inert and culpable party to self-delusion and fraud, I mean, in a moral sense. Because you know that that can’t be done for that price and you see it ratchet up a bit, ratchet up a bit, ratchet up a bit and as a consequence, because you’re not seeing it happen, it’s like when you take a rectangle and shave off a bit, shave off a bit, until, in the end, you end up with a sphere.

There is a point at which you say, ‘Right, this is no longer a rectangle, it’s not going to stay upright as a rectangle, it’s going to roll away’. That was what was happening. And so there was not one moment that I remember when that happened, when ... Yes, I said, many times, ‘This thing’s a runway production’. And, believe me, my father was every bit as shrewd as me, and, more so and that he didn’t realise it. But he wanted not to realise it. He wanted it to go ahead. And I think the same was true of the funding people who were Jewish in South Africa. They wanted it to happen, they wanted to do the right thing. It’s kind of like, almost like a donation, rather than a production. Everybody was trying to be nice. And, actually, it would have been better had we pulled out. I’m not talking in film-making terms, which is a different argument, but in financial terms it was insanity. And, as a professional film maker, that’s what I was anxious and angry about. Not that we should or shouldn’t do it, because that’s a different question. If you want to write out a cheque for a donation, write out a cheque for a donation. But if you want to kill yourself in the process of trying to fit a gallon into pint pot, that’s what we did.

AS So, that’s perhaps pre-empting something slightly, but did that create some of the major problems with marketing and distributing the film? That it was no longer a kind of art house film, a chamber piece?

TK Yes, it should, that was its original aim. We originally were thinking - we had lots of discussions about it in the quieter moments of the previous films that we were making. We were originally thinking, ‘This is a change of pace for us rather than the big action adventure thing, let’s do something more true to ourselves as people’. And this is more going to be like, not the same dramatist’s background, but in terms of scale and of reach and thought processes, more like a Polanski or a Hodges, or, you know, we can really do something that’s cerebral and clever and interesting and arty - you know, something we could be really proud of. And we allowed that, actually, to cloud our judgement. Because what we were thinking of was one sort of thing. The other point to your question that, actually, is very relevant, was because the original thinking and arrangements were based on a budget that was completely historic by that point, we were still doing arrangements and had got bound to those arrangements, on a very much smaller scale production. So the reach of the marketing and promotion and everything was for a film which was going to cost one quarter of what it was costing. So now you can’t go back to somebody you’ve been making an arrangement with, even if its only on a handshake. You can’t really go back in the business and say, ‘So now we need four times more money, it’s four times more expensive’, as they’d say, ‘Fuck, you need four times more money? Why are you doing that? It’s not worth that.’ So, in the end, we were making something which was costing four times more than it was worth, in every respect. Even at one quarter of the price, though, I suspect the biggest issue was one in which Moshe, who is, I think, actually a very much better film maker than that film evidences, actually was not really a capable writer in the English language. We should have given him more help and taken more control of that aspect as producers. But he, from his previous work, we thought he was very good at that. But I suppose our French wasn’t so good and his English wasn’t so good. Because, when my French was a bit better and I saw his film again I realised he had some of the same fault lines in the script process. He wasn’t a good…, well, when I say a good writer, he wasn’t up to writing that script. A very difficult script to write, actually, and he went for the lyrical. And the lyrical, at that time, particularly in England and America, wasn’t going to do great. And when you went that lyrical you were kind of putting yourself up to be shot down as a joke. And it just didn’t work.

AS That’s interesting as that was one of the supplementary questions that, in a sense, you’ve answered, because there’s no real evidence of a kind of to-ing and fro-ing about the script.

TK No, it was very, very unusual. One was, as I remember it, that Moshé was very resistant to any to-ing and fro-ing. He wasn’t, he was unfriendly in that sense. Very unusual, because some of the toughest directors, I thought Michael worked with, actually liked that process whether they said so or not. Mike Hodges was quite resistant but, actually, when it came to it, wanted your feedback as long as it was constructive. Whereas Moshé, I don’t think, wanted very much feedback. Now, I think there was more than was evidenced in the paper trail, because I think there is stuff missing. And I do remember there was a little bit. But I remember trying to have toing and froing with Moshe and it was one of those kind of conversations where, ‘Weeelll, it’s beautiful, it’ll be fantastic. You don’t understand, I’m going to do this. She’ll have paint on her face and she’ll be in a cave.’ And it was so surreal that it was kind of like, ‘These guys are on a trip’. I’m not saying they were, but it was what it felt like, kind of like certain aspects of the Who film where I was having trouble communicating. Like, I’ll speak in English and I’m not hearing English back. It was very, very hard to deal with. That’s really hard to deal with particularly. I was probably a little bit better with that than my old man. But my Dad was just like, ‘Oh, fuck off! I’m busy here, I’m spending millions of dollars on a film. You straighten it out. You sort it out. Tell him he’s got to do this.’ And I think we were remiss. I think also that would have helped had we allowed a gap, which would probably have adversely affected funding, but had we ever allowed a gap or pause, or say, stop, sort ourselves out and then start again, which I suppose was another possibility, it would have helped enormously. But with starting off so, budgetary limits were off, everything was off. And I don’t know what was in his head. I, do you know, genuinely, I worked with him very closely, with Moshe, I could hardly have a conversation with him about the serious aspects of the film. He would get hung up on minutiae.

I’ll give you an example. Only - we’d got this location. I think we were - I think I’ve told you this story - on the Golan Heights - which is a great idea after the ’73 war! [laughs]. We were one kilometre from Fatah, from the Fatah thing, with bombs and planes and things every day. So, I didn’t think that was a good idea, and then we were doing this, he stopped shooting. And we were doing the big love scene and so on. And I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, my god!’ He was getting excited and I said, ‘What is it, Moshé?’ ‘Oh, do you not see it?’ I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘There!’ He said, ‘Come with me, I’ll show you’. and took me down and there’s a tree. I can’t remember the name of the tree but it was a tree that only came to the Middle East with the British forces from Australia. They brought it. What was the Australian tree, the mulberry tree or something? Maple? It was a tree that only comes from Australia and had not been there 2,000 - 3,000 years before. I said, ‘Do you really think anyone’s going to be watching that?’ And he said, ‘Well, look at it, it’s in the way. It’s the wrong thing. I can’t fit on this one.’ And I said, ‘If they are looking at that we are in desperate trouble’. And, the truth is, we were in desperate trouble. He was just, he was prioritising all the wrong things. I don’t want to sound like I think he’s a crackpot, because he’s not. But it was so in bits. And I think he was excited by the possibility of shooting an English language film and lacked colloquial English as a thing, as a means of communication. So that was a terribly difficult problem.

I’ll give you an example of that. This is the scripting problems. There’s a scene where she, the part Michal Bat-Adam was playing, is leaning over Leonard Whiting who is choking and she’s bringing him back to consciousness and he’s lying there, he’s out. And she sings, I won’t try to sing, ‘You will not come again,’ and I said, ‘You’ve got to stop. You can’t have that. I’ve told you, you cannot have that script, you’ve got to change it.’ He said, ‘What?’ ‘You have that in a cinema in Kilburn with all the kids in and the woman’s singing, “You will not come again,” they’re going to take it the wrong way, boys. You’ve got to change these words or you can’t use it. You’ll be a laughing stock at that point, the film will stop at that point, you’ll be finished, dead.’ And he really didn’t understand it. And I said, ‘You don’t understand what that means?’ He said, ‘No’. ‘You’re supposed to speak English, that’s English.’ He didn’t have any grasp of colloquialisms and you can’t write, I don’t think, in English, a first-class screenplay if you don’t, because you’re going to come unstuck like that. And there was lots of leaden dialogue scenes. And so, as a consequence, and I think that was a fault of the casting. We had some very fine actors but he had not ever dealt with anybody like a Mickey Rooney who you’ve got to try and bring down. You’ve got Leonard Whiting who you’ve got to try and bring up and you’ve got Rita Tushingham and so on and you’ve got to do this all at the same time. And you have this problem with communicating. A eucalyptus tree, that was the problem. And so -it just was kind of an accident waiting to happen that we could not stop. Watching an accident in motion and especially aggravating when you know that you’re going to piss off a lot of financial people who actually are really nice people who would want to invest with you again - but you know you’re heading for a fall.

AS That’s the Ellerines, is it, Neville Meyer?

TK Yes, no, it’s principally the Ellerines who were, Eric Ellerine is the principal of the brothers [inaudible] … but they were very nice men. And, yes, they could afford it, they had a lot of money, but I think it was a great pity. I always think that if someone works hard enough to create enough money for you to make a film, you’ve got to treat them like they’re gold dust. Not because of their money, but because they’re the most important resource that anyone in the creative industry can have and you want them to be around and do it again, if not for you, then for somebody else. And if you piss them off, because of inadequacy and incompetence, or… It’s bad enough if it’s bad luck, but if it’s something you could have done something about, it feels bad. And I thought that that was a film we could have done something about.
AS Well, we could move on to casting now, really, because I want to ask you specifically about Rooney’s performance in a second, but Topol features quite, in a quite important way in the early correspondence, and then that seems to disappear.

TK We wanted him - all of us wanted him to play the Mickey Rooney part. He was the perfect, it was actually supposedly written for him. And all of us agreed that he would be perfect and actually were - I can’t remember what it was, he had some other sort of engagement, and he apparently was interested, going by what Moshé said. It… and then it didn’t happen. And I think they actually did get together for a tea or a lunch or something in Israel. I think it went that far, I don’t know how much credibility to give that. And then he wouldn’t do it and I don’t know what it was that caused that and he wasn’t available to do it, I don’t know what the real story was. Mickey Rooney, as you’ve seen from his other films, is capable in that kind of role of giving a great performance. There’s no problem with what he can do, but he needs a very, very tough director. Because he comes with so much business and shtick, as they say in show biz, that you have to control it or you’re screwed. And he was on full shtick mode during the making of that film. Which is OK if it was a film about a New York cabbie or something. But not particularly a great idea for a biblical figure. Because I don’t think there are many New York cabbies in the Bible. So that’s, kind of, you got the New York cabbie kind of performance. And, I don’t blame him because he could give you anything. And he’s great at nuance. I mean, some of his films are wonderful, wonderfully nuanced performances. But you have to work with him on it. And it wasn’t happening. He was, he was just phoning it in, as they say, and as the central core character was phoning it in and there was little oomph from elsewhere, let’s say, it was, that was the dominant thing at this stage of mind. So it almost became comedic, unintentionally, because it wasn’t, it wasn’t balanced. I think it goes back to the root of the first question or second question you asked about the money increase.

Part of the problem we had and why he was there, was because we, and I join in on that, well, that we said, ‘Well, if it’s costing us this much more money, we have to put in some half-arsed names, we can’t just have art house names. We have to have something to sell. And it aint going to be the script. Moshé Mizrahi’s quite a saleable element, but not on his own. We are quite a saleable element, but not on our own. But if we combine those two things, plus some good acting names, we’ve got something we can market.’ And that was the thinking behind him once we realised we couldn’t get Topol. There wasn’t a whole lot of people that fit that bill. And he trusted us, not Moshé, so he came because we said it would be OK. Because I remember him saying, ‘Fucking script’, you know, ‘the fucking thing!’ And we said, ‘No, no, no, it’s all going to be great’. And, you know, it’s one of those things that you’ve got a director who was thought of at the time as an actors’ director, Moshe. The word they used was simpatico and I kind of think that’s true. The core issue was you had the money go up to such a level that you had to cast to that level. And we’d also had the problem with the script. I can’t, I don’t ascribe blame to Mickey. Mickey, you know, it’s like looking at a great footballer, you’ve got to put him in a formation that works. It’s like Wayne Rooney right now, you put him in like he was at the World Cup and he couldn’t perform. You put him in like he was against Bulgaria last Monday or whatever it was and he looked great, as he was playing where he should play. And that’s kind of what happened there, I think, with Mickey Rooney.

AS Yeah, I’ve seen three of Moshé’s other films and they’re, they’re quite interesting films and he’s clearly working with a group, the same group of actors.

TK Yeah.

AS The two or three male leads are the same throughout the films. And he’s clearly very good at working with children.

TK Yes, very good.

AS But there’s nothing, there’s no Rooneyesque elements in those.TK Yes, I think that’s…but if we would have made it, if we could rewind history and had made it for $150, 000 and used his cast, if they could speak English, it would work, or in that context it would work. But once you get to $200,000, which would be equivalent today to, how long ago was that thirty or forty years, it would be equivalent today to making a film that cost six million, easily ten times the money. For six million you need some elements if you’re going to try and get it back. You can’t say to your investor, ‘Well, don’t worry, I’ve got this guy, you know, who’s in Paris,’ because they’d tell you to fuck off, so we had to try. I think, it’s very hard, you know, it…the same kind of thing happened, the only other time it happened to Michael and me really was the same kind of issue, in a different way, miscasting the director, which we did with Ross Kramer on Riding High. The same kind of thing. Because we were looking for a person like an Alan Parker and Alan Parker recommended Ross Kramer. And we looked at his work which were commercials - and had won every award for commercials - he’d won more awards I think than Parker. It’s like, you know, festooned with awards, it would be originally put down, I don’t know if you realise this, it was Saatchi, Kramer and Saatchi. He was the third partner. He was like this genius commercials guy. And if our film had of been thirty seconds long we’d have had a masterpiece. But, unfortunately, it was like ninety minutes plus and he couldn’t sustain a narrative. Just couldn’t, didn’t have a clue, And we made that mistake, Because we sort of got carried away with it. You can’t beat it, you know, Alan Parker’s recommending him. David Puttman’s recommending him. He’s been part of Saatchi and Saatchi. He’s won more wards than god and they’re all comedic and we’re making a film that’s a comedy kind of film. How can it go wrong? Well, that’s how it goes wrong. And we hadn’t really thought it through. And it was also because the deal was so good. You know, same kind of thing, when the money comes first, and it more or less did with Rachel’s Man, when it comes kind of easily, you tend to follow. ‘Well, this is all good. This is fine, this is OK. We’ll make that work. We’ve got this talent with them. We’re talented, this person’s talented, Mickey Rooney’s talented and that guy. Put them all together, how can we fail?’ And that’s exactly how you fail. Because it’s not motivated by a great script that you are passionate about. You know, you’re making - ‘I’ll fix that later’. And that’s like tragedy waiting to happen.

AS I’ll come back, if I may, to the circumstances of production, but I’ll sort of leap, leap forward to post-production. So, the line from Michael was, ‘I was always concerned that is should be handled delicately and well’. He writes that to Peter Strauss and Allied Artists. And he seems to have been disappointed by them and by Hemdale, in a way, they…
TK Yes, in a way.

AS But was that not … I’m not trying to exculpate them, but was that not a consequence of it being neither art house nor mainstream.
TK Yes. I think Michael’s thought process, which I think I shared at the time, and I’m trying to think as if contemporaneously because I think it’s too easy to criticise from here. But I think at the time we had arrived at the conclusion that whatever our thoughts about what it should have been and what it could have been, we had arrived with an art house movie, be it a very expensive art house movie. And not as good as we would hope, but still not, still screenable and reasonable and marketable to its level. And they totally didn’t know how to handle it, either of those guys. I mean, they really did not. And Michael, who had, don’t forget, been a distributor himself of that type of film, amongst others, knew exactly how to handle it, he really did, and was trying to talk to them. But they didn’t want to listen. They thought, ‘Well, this has got zero to limited potential. Let’s get it out and bury it as quick as we can. That’s what’s really going on, I think. And he was upset about it, because he wanted it to do as well as it could. Now, he full well knew that it wasn’t going to do a burster, but he also thought it could do OK. And it had been given, effectively, virtually no chance because of the way it had been realised. You know that always is a disappointment for every producer any time it happens to a film. It’s like, you know, when Get Carter was put out in America as a second bill for Dirty Dingus McGee, that was, like, upsetting. Because who remembers Dirty Dingus McGee, a mistake of Frank Sinatra and you can’t - there is nothing you can do about it, other than complain. Peter Strauss was not the most simpatico of fellows and neither was Daly at Hemdale and they, I suppose their reaction was, ‘Well, he’s got these other, bigger films that he’s doing or done and there’ll be more of those along down the pike. So we’ll humour him to the max. we can, but we aint going to spend any more money on it.’ I think that’s the truth, you know.

AS Right. [interruption] Again, I think this is a question you’ve partly answered and it’s the question around the non-commercial nature, as it were, of the film and this comment that your father makes about the film being a labour of love. So, its status then is quite different within the Michael Klinger oeuvre as that it is something for the sake of Israel to raise…

TK It really was a one-off, yes. We weren’t going to do that again. It was a nightmare. Yes, carry on, is that the question?

AS Yes, that’s the question. And whether your father saw it as a possible long-term partnership that went beyond one film.

TK Who, with Moshé?

AS Or with being part of the Israeli film industry.

TK No, by the time we were into the film very, very quickly, we were thinking of how could we cut our losses. I mean, we realised we were going to take a hit and, but, you know, it’s like being in a battle. You’re in a battle. You take your wounds and you say, ‘How can I dress them up and keep going?’ It was something that was discussed, but it was a practical impossibility because of the limitations of the situation as it was. We were offered more money to go with another film or two via the South African route of a different type, we just didn’t want to do it. And in terms of, I think, you know, you could say there were other things that Michael made which were labours of love, but not in the same context. There was a definite different attitude to that film that kind of excused all of its faults. But the angst in the making of it was so profound and so deep and so traumatic, I mean, it really was a traumatic film to produce that I think had Michael been there as much as I was, he would have, I just think he would have maybe even closed the film down. But because it was me, he let me get on with it. And I was the one, I guess, dealing most of it most of the time. And you have to remember that it was at that kind of period that Michael had just been ill in South Africa. And so, I felt very protective to him and what made it slightly worse was he couldn’t tell anyone else. Because, you know, that would have affected insurance, it would have affected his dealing with things. And I guess that it was very difficult, I think it was. I was twenty-three, twenty-four and I’m trying to not let on that my Dad is not quite up to speed. I’m trying to deal with a recalcitrant director who’s not really listening about the script and I’m watching him screw up with the actors, but on the other hand, I wasn’t really in a position to tell him as I’m not really the producer. I’m just the associate producer which is like a line producer. And so you were in a … you were very conflicted and you had a mad crew, it was, so the only thing which was kind of right was the attitude.

We had a great attitude to try and do it and I suppose that’s why it got us to the finishing line. And for me, if you’re talking about a film school, it’s probably the best film school I would ever be in. Because if you can get through that, you can get through anything. But it was horrendously difficult and I think, I think, you know, when you make something for a good motive, but wrong reason, which I think is what we did. I think we should have just written our cheque out and given it to whoever the charities are we give to and that would have been a better solution. But, on the other hand, sometimes you do the right thing for the wrong reason. And I guess we were. I think it was the right thing to try and I suppose it would have been worse if we’d gone back. I mean, when I went back years later and was working and though it didn’t happen, the film, one of the reasons it didn’t happen, was because I had the strength in me when…[inaudible] to say, ‘No, let’s cancel before the we start, I can tell you what’s going to happen’. I wish I could have had the same power and self-confidence a bit earlier because I would have said it then. You know, I did say it, I did stay it, I would have forced it. [inaudible] I forced it, I said, ‘This is insanity. You’re just going to piss away all your money’. Which maybe…you’ve got to understand, in a film production sense, in its true sense, the crew who will probably lose out if it went ahead, actually don’t like it when you stop it. They don’t say thank you. They go, ‘You bastard, you stopped this thing. You terrible man.’ And you try and explain. You say, ‘Well, at least you got, you know, your pre-production money, whatever it is you got, and you didn’t lose out’. But they actually will, 99 times out of a 100, prefer to try and see it through because it probably will be OK. And you…[inaudible] But I think there’s a degree of professionalism and it escaped us on that one.

AS I think this is a related question, though jumping slightly to, what was your father’s sense of the finished film? Was he disappointed with it?

TK Yeah, bitterly. It was one of the few films, that, Secrets of a Windmill Girl was certainly another one, The Brute Syndrome which we got involved in and one we thought would be something different and there was another one I can’t remember the name of it. Where you, you know, if you’re making something like Primitive London or something and you know it’s going to be this and it comes out like that, or a little bit better or a little bit worse, but you go, ‘OK, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. We’re not letting anyone down. When you know what you can do and what the people around you can do and it’s absolutely nowhere near it, you go, ‘It’s very upsetting’. Art, by definition, any creative art is by definition imperfectible, but you want it to look like you’ve tried your best. And it looked like we’d done it with one eye closed and a bandage round our face. Ah, dear, I suppose, I suppose if you were high it’s kind of lyrical. But it’s not that for me. No - I’ve never seen it again since. I can’t bear to watch it. And I think my Dad was pretty much of the same. I think he was less tarnished by the…than me. I really couldn’t bear to think about it afterwards. You know, when you try to stop it and, you know, I should have tried harder. I should have pushed and made it tougher. I think I could have stopped it and it should have been stopped or delayed and I think Michael was … You know, it’s the same kind of thing as Shout At the Devil in a funny kind of way. When you think, ‘You know what, if we really did this right, it has the ingredients to be a really great film’. And what it is, is an OK film. Whereas Rachel’s Man has the ingredients to be a nice art house movie and ended up being a piece of crap, in my opinion. And when you know that there’s people involved in it who have the talent to make something terrific. It’s very, very disappointing. Yeah, I think he felt the same way.

AS This is a bitty question, I’m afraid, this one. But there are people that occur in the correspondence who I’d appreciate you contextualising. They’re in no particular order. Peter Beale?

TK Peter Beale, who went on to become the Head of Showscan in America, was Head of Fox or something, one of the Heads of Fox in the UK, who then made, not Star Wars, one of those kinds of films - Alien, I think, Alien - one of those, anyway and he got a big, you know, if you were an executive with an American company and it happened to do something good in England at the time and you’re there, visiting the set, ‘You now are our hero’. And he got transported to America on the hero bandwagon [inaudible].
AS The next one on my hit list is John Scarborough.

TK John Scarborough was the - I think he was the Head of Sales for us. I mean very much under the auspices of my Dad. And then he was succeeded by a woman called Diane something. And he was a very nice chap. And he went on to be, I think, not Head of Harlequin Books but something with Harlequin books or some romantic book publisher. He got quite a senior job.

AS And Derek Dawson at Hemdale, particularly because at one point your father says something at the end of a letter to Derek Dawson, ‘I love you, but this is no way to conduct a business’, something like that. So it seems like they had quite a close relationship.

TK Yeah, Derek was, in effect, the number two man to John Daly. And he was like his, not his consigliere, but the business, his, the guy who got things done. You know the … the, not deal maker, but the, if whatisname, if Daly was the generalist, he was the specifist.

AS But did your father, sort of…

TK He never really loved Dawson at all. He thought he was a bit of a twat, but a clever twat, if you know what I mean. It was like, he was - he was a functionary that was necessary for their company. And he never thought that he was…but, I’ll say this off the record, as it were, he didn’t think he was…er…honesty and him might have been called strangers.

AS Alain Katz, who seems to be a European distributor?

TK Yes, no, I think he was a European sales agent who worked out of Paris. And he was, at one stage, because of the Moshe Mizrahi French link, was thought to be one of the people useful for that kind of film. I don’t remember him really doing very much, but I think he was supposed to.
AS Yes, I’m not sure whether he worked with, did your father just work with him on Rachel’s Man?

TK I think he, I think he may have done something else, but I don’t remember him being a major party. Other than Paul Kijzer who did some work and actually turned out probably to be more trouble than he was worth. Most of the big sales that Michael ever did with his films, Michael did. And so after, and that came after a period initiated by a man called Marshall Shanka - Shaka - in New York, All I remember was that he was about 6ft 9 and he was, I know, I know how that blew up, I was there, I was a kid. He was walking around New York, I can’t remember what the deal was, but it was for Repulsion, no, it was Cul De Sac, Repulsion or Cul De Sac, I can’t remember which one - one of those two. And he said, ‘We’ve got such and such a deal and that’s great, Michael, and you’ve got to do it’. And he did the deal. Because he convinced him that that was the right deal and it was impossible to get any more money. And then we were walking along, and it’s about three months later, in New York again. And he says, ‘You know, I saw that film. And my Dad said, ‘You what? I thought you saw it months ago.’ He said, ‘No, I just saw it last night. It’s a really good film.’ And he said, ‘You fucking sold the film and you hadn’t looked at it?’ He hadn’t looked at it and that was the last time that Michael ever used a sales agent like that. He said, ‘I could do better than that’. It destroyed his faith in that kind of person.

AS Talking of Paul Kijzer, there seems to be a difference between him and your father over Rachel’s Man. Your father was thinking of submitting it for the Berlin Festival and Paul Kijzer said, ‘No, that’s the kiss of death’.

TK Yeah, we had big disagreements and it all started around that period. Again, this is like, it’s not hearsay, I was there. We were starting to get reports of, you can’t put this down somewhere, he had done some backhander deals on some of our films. You can’t prove that, it’s like the Pakistani ball-tampering accusations. Like, you know something is going on, but you are not quite sure what. And we had a kind of zero tolerance to that kind of thing. You know, it just isn’t the way to do it. And Paul we regarded actually as a family friend as well so it was especially hurtful. And then we found he’d been doing all kinds of funny silly things with, I mean, very petty things. He’d go from one side of London to the other to use our phones and things like that and it was all getting a bit silly. So everything he said we thought was wrong and I guess he was doing the same. And we had had the experience, prior to that, obviously, my Dad had, of winning some Bears in Berlin, they’re upstairs. And Paul was of the view that that would be expensive and time-consuming and a waste of energy. Not particularly because he thought it wouldn’t win, whether he was right or wrong I don’t know, but because he just didn’t see the value in it. He was a numbers guy and he didn’t see it like that. And it wasn’t the kind of film he wanted Michael to be making. And it kind of would be actually to his benefit if he didn’t do that and made more of the Golds and Shout At the Devils. So it was a kind of a real clash and that was part of the clash. You know, that’s one small skirmish in a big battlefield, that’s what that was. I must admit, I was one of those people attacking Paul pretty relentlessly. I didn’t trust him at all. And I’m never convinced about the value internationally, I mean, in its true value, of the bigger film of winning a festival. Because, if you go in and you lose to the film with the boy with the donkey you’re screwed. You know, like, your big film got beaten by a film with a boy and donkey in Brazilian. But if actually we were the film with the donkey, my argument was actually, ‘We’re the film with the donkey, of course we should be in the festival’. Because we were in a no-lose situation. But he was blocking it. I’ve always believed in festivals and things, because I think, although my old man said it don’t pay the rent, actually it can and help you particularly in a European context. Not hugely and depending on which ones, but, you know, certainly Berlin is one of those which can help you sell in Germany and certain other territories. And why not do it if you can? And Paul’s attitude was, his ambivalence, I’m sure, born out of other agendas, not that.

AS Henry Ohana, who seems to have been connected with the production in Israel - who that is.

TK I vaguely remember somebody with a name like that, but I don’t know who or what.

AS Ok, I don’t think it’s that important. And Neville Meyer, who seems to be another South African Jewish businessman?

TK Yes, he was, and another bête noire. He was a - I don’t know how he was connected to this film, did he actually put any money into it?
AS Yes.

TK He did?

AS Not a huge amount. He seems to be most vociferous about…
TK He always was. I know I didn’t want his money. I didn’t know he had actually invested, because I’d thrown him out of my car in London, literally stopped my car in Trafalgar Square and told him to get the fuck out of my car. Well, no, because he’d, we…he had…he’s the guy after Shout At the Devil, where he put in auditors into us for eight weeks, seven weeks, something like that, where at the end of which they sat us down and said, [in a South African accent] ‘There’s a question here of 35 rand’. I said, ‘What 35,000?’ They said, ‘No, 35 rand’, which is like a fiver [laughs]. And me and my Dad both at the same time got fifty quid notes out of our pockets, put it on the table and said, ‘Take the money and fuck off!’ Two months of our time, you know, which was put on our budget and they said, ‘We found that you gave a handkerchief to your wife,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I paid for it. This is the money back. You’ve seen the money for it.’ And then they said, ‘Paints and cigars for Mr. Moore?’ I said, ‘Yes, he wanted some paint and cigars. Do you want him to get a headache?’ I said, ‘Do you know how much a headache would cost if he didn’t get his paints and cigars for a day?’ ‘Well, I’m not sure it’s allowed under his contract.’ So we were like, we had a hard time. And as we were driving around this Neville Meyer said to me, he said, ‘Well, I notice you’ve got a nice new car here, a Jaguar’. And I said, ‘I had a nice new car before I ever met you’. I said, ‘You - I don’t want you in my car, fuck off!’ [Laughs]. So I kicked him out. So how he was still involved in that film was a mystery to me to me. Er…but that was obviously a deal my Dad had done. You know, he was always a pain in the arse. He was the one on Gold, he was also involved with that, on Gold where, if you remember the film, do you remember Gold, where there was a scene with the miners and there was a big eating thing where they were having the presentation with the gold hats and things.

AS Yes.

TK We thought, in our innocence, wouldn’t it be a good idea that the crew and the people in the film actually ate that as their lunch as well? You know, because it’s a set and it’s a unit thing and it’s eating - it’s like a triple usage, we thought, a very economic and clever thing [inaudible]. Everyone was thrilled. There was a type of crayfish, everybody was very happy. They came later with their families, Neville Meyer and others [inaudible] and said, [adopts a South African accent] ‘Where’s the crayfish?’ ‘Well, we’ve eaten it.’ And they said, ‘That’s for us, for our braie,’ - barbecue. And we said, ‘No it wasn’t, it was for the film’. And they said, ‘We put the money in the film, the crayfish is ours’. Unfortunately, I did use my expression again, ‘Oh, fuck off!’ [Laughs] And they hated me for that. And what I think was stupid, he really, and the crayfish, you know, like the scene with The Caine Mutiny, you know, with the marbles, ‘Who’s got the crayfish?’ ‘I’ve got the crayfish.’ ‘Where’s the crayfish? You’ve eaten the crayfish!’ Then what really pissed me off was, ‘What? You gave the crayfish to the blacks?’ [Laughs] And I went, ‘Yes, they enjoyed it too!’ And I said, ‘They don’t know whose the fucking crayfish is, some would argue the crayfish is their crayfish’. And it was like, oh, it was a nightmare, man. Eventually he went to live, I believe, in San Francisco. And I am very happy to say I have never seen him since [laughs].

AS Now this is probably not particularly a key question this, but he never, you father never approaches Rank at any stage about Rachel’s Man?

TK Yeah, we didn’t think they’d be very receptive. [Laughs] I think we thought, ‘Let’s not waste our time’. Yes, I think that was the rationale. I don’t think it was particularly intelligent. I can’t remember what it was now, about ’74 or ’75? And I think, you are talking about a period where they just wouldn’t have been coherent to talk about on something like that. We, I share the view, we had pretty much given up on British film production or distribution by that time. We just thought, ‘This is a complete waste of time’. But we occasionally would get on the white charger and go crusading Don Quixoteish and try to do it again. And would get that close and screwed and find it was easier in America or South Africa or somewhere. We just didn’t, I think it’s been said by other people, I think it was in one of your emails or one of yours, I guess, you know, we were actually in our thinking more American than British and that may not have been a plus in some of those instances because you kind of … it’s like, people would say in the American companies, ‘Well, why didn’t you speak to me, you know, in London?’ And we’d go, ‘Because you can only, actually, say no. Why would I speak to you, you can’t actually say yes?’ And Rank at that point were in the kind of same context. There was no one to say yes here.

AS So, the final question about Rachel’s Man is the difficulties of the film production, which…er…you know, you’ve just done already.

TK Yeah, they’re legion. Suffice it to say, I can’t think of any pluses. It was just a nightmare, everything, everything. The transport, you know, normally you’d do a transport deal for your transport and you don’t even actually - a producer, Michael - think about it, It’s like, I’ve got 25 trucks, I’ve got 10 [inaudible], 8 cars. And you do an overall deal. It’s this much a car per day, with driver and finish. Every single person tried to renege on their deal and do a different deal. [Adopts an Israeli accent] ‘Over, over… I’m going over this road here. I have to go to the right a lot. This is going to affect all my suspension. I need another deal for my suspension. You’d go, like, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, shut up! Here’s an extra fiver. OK, we’ve got a deal for the suspension.’ ‘But my brakes, it’s going to affect my brakes on this road, this wadi.’ So every single vehicle had seven different deals. And every, it was like that with everybody. Nobody - and nobody stuck to them. And there’s a quote, ‘And everybody thinks they are only in that position because they are in Israel. If they were In England they would be a multi-millionaire.’ Because everyone else is stupid and they are brilliant, they think. So everything is a different deal. So you have, literally, we had, we were filming and the spark, the chief spark called a cut in the middle of a take. And I’ve never seen that happen before in my life. I said, ‘What just happened?’ And he said, ‘I think the lighting here is not right. I’d prefer it if he was standing here.’ I said, ‘Did you just call cut?’ and the director’s just standing there. ‘OK, where is the fucker?’ I literally wanted to kill him, I really did, And he said, ‘Why are you getting so upset? What’s the problem?’ And I mean that kind of thing happened all the time. Literally fights in the hotel, the Hotel [inaudible]. And I’m standing, sitting there, having a coffee, because I tried to stay where the crew was. And we had one of the crew, certainly a lot of the crew, I mean, don’t forget, I suppose, to put it in to context, to be fair, they’d just come back from war. And they were very, very hyper and they were very fit, very tough. And so one guy says to the other, ‘Oh, Moshe’, he says, ‘How is my Communist friend?’ He says, ‘Did you call me a Communist? I am not a Communist, I am a Menshevik!’ And it went from there. And there were riots, literally tore the hotel apart, which started like that. One called him a Communist even though he was a Menshevik and the other something else. And they all took sides. And the sparks who had never done a good day’s work literally picked me up - seriously, they were tearing this hotel apart - they were like wrecking it. Suddenly I got picked up by four big guys who take me and put me in a room and lock the door so I shouldn’t get hurt. It’s the one good thing they ever did because I was about to get killed by some Menshevik or Communist. Not that I was involved, it was just, like, total insanity.

Everything was insane. Everything we did was hard. There was not one redeeming thing. Like, the water, you didn’t get hot water in the hotel because for some reason someone turned it off and the bloke argued that you should pay extra to shower with hot water. They cut - they burnt down a set because, well, I don’t know for what reason, I have no knowledge of what was going on in their head. But that was everything that could go wrong, went wrong. To the extent like we hired … quite rightly, Leonard Whiting, who was a very nervous man, was worried about security when he landed at Tel Aviv. And, as I’ve told you, he didn’t know that we were filming on the Golan Heights, which was a very traumatic place to be filming, recent battleground, like, a month before, I mean, very recent. A couple of months before they were blowing up Quneitra as they pulled out as we were there. We could hear it, you know, bang and bits falling off. And, I remember vividly sitting in the car, you know, picking him up in a car, like, a minibus, going from the airport, and he’s going, ‘Whereabouts are we filming? Is it very close to Tel Aviv?’ I couldn’t tell him it was the Golan Heights. I said, ‘It’s in the north’. [Laughs] And we were sitting there, surrounded by three guys with machine guns and he’s sitting there going, ‘Is there something wrong?’ And I was going, ‘No, no, we’re perfectly OK’. But I thought, I’ve got to guarantee their safety. So, there was, you could not hire, at that particular moment, Israeli ex-commandoes, they were all busy doing what was necessary for their clearing up. So the people who were supposed to be the best border guards were Bedouins. And so, we hired six, I think, people to guard the unit we were filming at night, because we were literally in the middle of nowhere. And we’re filming and they looked very relaxed, these guards. And Leonard Whiting said, ‘Are those guards good?’ And I said, ‘They’re fantastic. They’re not from us. Those are ace, top men, these are people, unbeatable.’ And he said, ‘Well, how do you know that?’ And I said, ‘I will personally test these guards’. [Laughs] This is a true story. I must have been mad. ‘I will go beyond the perimeter here,’ I said, ‘and will try to break in.’ I said, ‘And you’ll see they’ll catch me and I’ll be on the floor in a second and you’ll see how good these guards are’. I go out on the perimeter. The first bloke’s asleep. The second one’s asleep, the third one’s asleep and the fourth one. And I said, ‘I’ll knock it on the head and give up’.

So I realise we might have a problem. And then we go to, stay in this town called Saved which is a beautiful town. And near to this - it’s the nearest big town to there. And as we were staying there we hear the next morning that missiles have been fired, rockets have been fired near the town. So, my Dad and I went and we bought every copy of the newspaper in the town so that our crew shouldn’t see it. We eliminated that news from the town. And so the next - that night, we were filming and literally out of the bushes, I mean, it was like a comedy film, out of the bushes came Israeli commandoes. With like, you know, all painted black and green and things like that, with bandaleroes and grenades, tough, tough men and women. And they sort of came out and they said [in an Israeli accent], ‘Who is in charge here?’ And I said, ‘Me’. And they go, ‘This is not good. What are you doing?’ I said, ‘We are filming’. And they said, ‘You have permission?’ and I said, ‘Yes, we have’. And he said, ‘You not know what happened? They are firing missiles here.’ And I said, ‘But that’s OK, they weren’t firing at us’. And they said, ‘They were firing at you’. [inaudible section] And I said, ‘Awww come off it’. And they said, ‘No, no, no. First night [inaudible] they see lights, second, they aim, third night, they attack.’ I said, ‘What night is this?’ They said, ‘It’s the third night’. I said, ‘Right, lads, everyone on the bus, we’re abandoning this location’. We did, we abandoned the location. [inaudible] And that was indicative of everything. It was so ridiculous it was farcical. And it was non-stop. It was like trying to make a film in a war zone that hasn’t quite finished, that is still going on. And it was also like prima donna kind of actors. Leonard Whiting was scared of everything. Mickey was like, just in a different world. And Rita Tushingham was going, ‘What’s happening?’ And I’ll be going, ‘It’s exercises’. Missiles were going off. Tanks were firing and I was going, ‘No, no, no. There’s nothing there, no.’ And she said - and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This is supposed to be the love story of Rachel and Jacob’. And there’s tracer fire coming across. Seriously. So, yes, it was, problematic would be a brief way of describing it. But it was traumatic as well because it was a big let down for us. We wanted it all to be great and it was - I’ve never been in such a mad place. I don’t know what it’s like now, but it just was very exciting, I thought, in a kind of strange, dubious kind of way. And the people were wild, but too wild. I mean, literally, people were, I wasn’t exaggerating, sixty-three or sixty-seven people of eighty-seven people, something like that, two-thirds or three-quarters of our people were gone after two weeks and, you know, we finished the film with almost an entirely different crew and it was great, it worked fine, because they were, people who if you said you wanted them up at 7 o’clock in the morning and in the blue truck, they’d be in the blue truck and go where you wanted them to go. You know, like, it wasn’t a drama. Everything was a big drama. I suppose that sums it up.

AS Was that partly to do with their sense of it being an international production and therefore…

TK They can rip it off?

AS They can rip it off.

TK I don’t know. I think at that time, and I don’t know what it’s like now, I think at that time a country of that size, it had probably had two or three international level crews at any one time available. And if you were the fourth film you had a problem, because they weren’t up to that level. And I think we were the fourth or fifth film. I think there were two or three American productions and big television productions around and I think, you know, we got, we got people who weren’t up to much. You know, I don’t think they meant to be, I think they were trying, but you know when someone doesn’t know what they don’t know. That’s kind of what we were getting. You know, you’d say to them, ‘Well, haven’t you done the so and so?’ And they’d go, well, just a blank look like, ‘What do you mean?’ And that’s really tough. Because it’s, you can’t, I mean, I don’t want to sound like we were an innocent abroad and we, you know, we realised very quickly what was the problem and how to fix it. The only thing I could do was fly in a few people from England and America, but by then we already knew we were going way over budget. So everything I did was adding to that problem. It fixed it in one way. And all I did was, I said to my old man, ‘All I can do is guarantee I will get this done on the scheduled budget. I will have us out of here by that time. But how could it not be problematic when you haven’t got a script?

AS Great. I wonder the wider questions about your father’s Jewishness, perhaps we could postpone those because it’s about quarter to four now and we don’t want to take too much of your time up and I know Anthony McKenna’s keen to move on to Butterfly Ball. Is that OK if we postpone those?

TK That’s fine, yes.

AK OK, these are just short questions really.

TK I’ll try and think of short answers.AK I’ll try to fill in any gaps. No, expand please, if you feel the need to. Why was the film shot on 16 mm?

TK Because of budget.

AK Because of budget?

TK Yes, at those times. Nowadays, you’d have filmed some of those scenes on tape or video. But in those days everything was film of one kind or another. And, bearing in mind the budget got cut on the day we were due to start at the Albert Hall from 60,000-something thousand pounds to 16,000 pounds, any ideas I had of bigger scale were being, going in the opposite direction. And so instead of it getting bigger, it was getting smaller. With, and the only thing I could think of to do, I actually even thought of going onto Ektachrome, I would have, if I could of, because I just wanted to save money. And, although the final cost of, if you ran a 16 mm print against a 35 mm print doesn’t seem like it’s more than 10%, the actual differentiation is in being able to shoot much more material on 16 mm for a lot less money and the edit in that way, and then it will be cheaper because you’ll have saved money on that end of the equation.

AK OK. It’s kind of related, but, in the initial correspondence it can either be a theatrical film, or two 45 minute television spectaculars, why was it, who made the, when was the decision taken to release it in the cinemas and who made the decision? I know, is that related to the 16 mm question?

TK Yes, to the second part of your question, ‘Yes,’ and to the first part of the question, I wanted it to be a television thing, because I thought it was a television subject. And I didn’t think, it was basically going to hold up in the cinema, especially when the budget got reduced and we were going to be using crappy costumes and things like that and all of that dance element had gone out of the window, you know, the stuff that made it open up, I thought we should really be doing one 60 minute television film, not even two 45s. And I was overruled, because the people said, ‘We think we can generate money from having it as a feature film,’ which is true, we did generate some money, ‘and therefore that’s what you should do’. And, you know, what I learnt from that as a much younger man as well as on Rachel’s Man, that you can’t put your excuses on the screen. Once you are hoist with that petard, once you have accepted the money, whatever the money is, you either have to go forward or you have to stop and I went forward. Because my argument was and I suppose it still would be, actually, although I would probably not do it nowadays, was, ‘Well, at the end of the day, I’m twenty-whatever-I-was and I’ll have a finished film and it’ll play in cinemas and how bad is that?’

Looking at it after I said, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have allowed this. I should have insisted we don’t do the thing. The costumes, the costumes are no good, the dance routines are not rehearsed, you know, etcetera, etcetera. But no one remembers that. Funnily enough, I had correspondence with Alan Aldrich two weeks ago, where he berated me in his mind, which is somewhat deranged, that he thought I had kept loads of money and things like that and I put him right in very short shrift. And he apologised. But it’s so easy to make assumptions when you are in that situation. And I don’t want to be an apologist for me or anybody else. I can only apologise for my youth. You know, it was, I was put in a situation with three or four hours to go before we were due to start making the film. Here we are, in the Albert Hall and I’m summoned to a meeting in the Albert Hall, one of the two rooms off to the side there. And there’s a bunch of lawyers and accountants sitting there and they say, ‘Well, we haven’t got the permissions for the poetry,’ which is kind of difficult if you’re doing a poetry film. ‘We are not sure if you can shoot any of the lyrics. You can’t shoot Vincent Price and you can’t shoot any of the poems and you can’t shoot any of the illustrations of Alan Aldrich. Go. Oh, and by the way, we’ve cut your budget by three-quarters.’ And my reaction was, ‘Oh well, look, I’ll just call it a day. We’re going.’ They said, ‘We’ll sue your arse. You’ve signed the contract. You know, you’ve got to direct it.’ And I was just overwhelmed by it. And I guess, nowadays, if I’d been that boy, I would have picked up the phone to my Dad who was the person closest to me and said, ‘What shall I do?’ And he’d have said, ‘Walk’. And I would have walked. But I wasn’t and he wasn’t. And I just thought the right thing is, I’ve got, you know, do what you’ve got to do. And no one says thank you for that kind of thing.

The Deep Purple management are asking me to write articles about that Made In Japan thing with Deep Purple. This week they were asking me to write another one. And I came back, ‘You’ve got a funny grasp of history, that we were all jolly together. Your people completely and utterly screwed me. And everybody else.’ But they don’t see it, they don’t remember it like that. And because I allowed it to happen, I suppose, I can’t be revisionist. I did allow it happen and I tried to make it work, You know, the argument would have been to say, ‘No, stop!’ It’s the same kind of argument with Rachel’s Man. Both times. You’ve interviewed me about the two of them, it’s not fair. Both times I did say stop. I did say it’s wrong. But I wasn’t strong enough to actually insist. And as my own defence is that you, when you’re faced with that situation, is making something better than making nothing? Is hiring this number of people better than not hiring this number of people? And maybe I could make something out of this? So, probably I was right on the first two counts and wrong on the third one. Both films, actually, were huge disappointments to me and Butterfly Ball much more personally, because I knew was in my head, what I could make and funnily enough a lot of that was in The Kids Are Alright…

AK Right, yes.

TK Because I was able to spend some money, although I got stopped in other ways. I was able to do some spectacular light shows and things like that which had been in my mind years before. You know, it’s very frustrating when you, when you, because you can’t explain to other people when they look at it and go, ‘Hey, you made that? Oh.’ And that’s pretty unjustified. And it’s as unjustified as some of the credit you get for things you did when it’s just money.

AK Absolutely, yes.

TK But yes, it was - I’ve never faced a situation quite like that, where somebody literally was that. And, funnily enough, I now find out that it was presented within the Deep Purple organisation as me that wanted to reduce the budget.

AK Right.

TK And I said, ‘Well, why would I do that?’ You know, I’m like, ‘I’m a film maker and I want money’. You know, that’s like, it’s a no brainer. There’s no, never a time when I’m going to say, ‘Let’s cut my budget’, on a day when I’m going to start shooting. But that’s apparently the story that went round.

AK So this was Purple, Purple Records, who cut the budget? Who was that?
TK Yes., well, John Coletta, who was the management of Deep Purple. He had a co-manager called Anthony Edwards, who is still alive, Coletta’s dead. Anthony was a very sick man. He’d been a sick man since he’d had a heart attack then. He’s had a heart attack, cancer and god knows what, and he’s still alive and he was not there. There’d been a war, a turf war, Coletta had won, and Coletta it was who cut the budget. Why, what, how, I don’t really know. To this day I don’t know what really caused that. And he asked me and, funnily enough, this was in the Who book, he asked me to come to Paris to work with him to make the film that would have been Deep Purple’s version of The Kids Are Alright. He asked me to do it. And I started to write that and that became The Kids Are Alright when The Who asked me to do a film with them, I used that material and just slotted them in instead of Deep Purple.

AK Right, because there were a couple of things … Is this a Deep Purple eight-year project?

TK It was, well, no, it wasn’t. It didn’t have a code name, yeah.

AK Because there was California Jam as well which was going to be another thing.

TK Yes, another thing. No, we were effectively going to do The Kids Are Alright, Made in Japan kind of thing. So I did the filming of the Made In Japan concert at the Budokan. And I was supposed to do that as the beginnings of their film. So it wasn’t a personal thing aimed at me because he still was asking me to do stuff. And then he turned on the television in his Paris apartment and they’d taken - and some French people were talking and they were going,‘This is our film and we did this and we did that,’ and it was actually my bloody film and they’d topped and tailed it with their credits. And it was entirely my film. So I wasn’t very happy with him. Not even a credit, not even a, not even nothing. Right as if none of us existed. And he couldn’t see anything wrong with that. He said, ‘But I paid you for it’. But I said, ‘But that doesn’t take, you can’t take the credit off people’. But he was like that. He was, he was a brutalist and kind of thought that was funny, And he, for whatever reason, cut the budget and when he cut the budget, it was never explained or, I suppose the only explanation you could accept, funnily enough, was that he cut the budget to an amount that we actually exceeded in revenue. We actually made money, although that wasn’t they way that was according to them. We actually took more in the first week than the film had cost. I don’t know if you’ve got those returns or I’ve got them, but somewhere we’ve actually got those figures. The first advance was more than they paid, But internally they were told they never had any money and I’ve actually got the returns and cheque stubs and things. It was one of those things, but I suppose you could justify it in that sense. But they were wrong.

AK So who were Coterie Limited?

TK Who?

AK Coterie - were they financial representatives? I’ve got somewhere an incomplete document from them about funding.

TK I don’t know who Coterie is, I don’t? As far as I know it was Deep Purple, Deep Purple Limited and Oyster Films Limited and eventually Oyster Films was the vehicle that they used. I don’t know about Coterie.
AK Ok. So the inserts, was this influenced in any way by pictures in a museum?

TK Yes and some of the Beatles’ stuff in Magical Mystery Tour and everyone around me was doing drugs, I was the only one who wasn’t. And so I thought, ‘Well, OK, out of focus a little bit, the [?] won’t be so bad’. I was kind of thinking I had got away with it. It was a damage limitation exercise.

AK So this was a way to take the film beyond the LP’s fanbase?
TK Yes, yes, yes.

AK There’s also - and was it a way to compensate because the actual concert footage is actually not that cinematic, is it, because there’s so many people in the frame? You know, it’s not like, you know…
TK Well, I was trying to…

AK Is it a way to compensate for…?

TK Well, it was that trying to take you out of the proscenium kind of thing. And I was trying, even in the concert footage, trying to keep the cameras still as much as possible. And rather than do that thing that was at that time, I don’t know,you won’t remember but cinematically, as a historian you will have seen everybody was doing it, zooming in, zooming out, zooming in, I was trying to do the opposite and I was trying to make it, the action move within the screen rather than screen move with the action. And it was very difficult because I was doing that and calling the shots on people that, we had tried, we had originally got very good cameramen and then we had to go down a division because of the budgets and things. Because we were really petrified that we wouldn’t be able to pay anybody, so we had to get rid of a few people during the day. I mean, literally, we were cutting our crew as we were getting ready. And what happened in those days you were filming it literally on different multiple cameras. You had runners, a load of runners who were running round with film and it’s…you said, I don’t know if you’ve still got, you know, on the music cue sheet you see a load of numbers, I had drawn up photographic cue sheets of where every camera should be pointing at every point in a song throughout the whole concert. And these guys didn’t know how to follow it, they couldn’t follow the chart. They didn’t know how, although we did go through it at a meeting and so on. They, when push comes to shove everyone filmed everything in pretty wide-angle close up. And I’d go, and so I’m running around in the Albert Hall with this full concert, trying to run around, it’s not easy. It was pretty nightmarish, but actually we did better than we had any right to do in that circumstance, I think. [inaudible] They’d got most of the shots I told them to get, You know, nowadays it would be so much easier because you could get [?] control. You see the thing, no playback, no nothing, So you’re going, saying, ‘And you’re getting the right shot on Tony Ashton?’ And they’re saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m getting it,’ and you look later and you see the rushes and they’re pointing somewhere else completely. You know, you sort of - I remember phoning up one of the guys , I said, ‘I asked you to get the tight shot,’ ‘Yeah, well I thought it was a better shot.’ So, I’m going, ‘Yes, so I’ve got five shots of that guy and none of him and he’s singing’. That kind of thing happened. But yes, I was trying, I was trying to get maximum bang for the buck.

AK Back to Rank. Initially, it’s with George Pinches in the correspondence, they were very enthusiastic.

TK He was, yes.

AK And then I think Frank Poole is the correspondence after that.
TK Well, George Pinches loved music and music films…

AK OK.

TK And Frank hated them, [laughs] which was kind of difficult. And, you know, however much I tried to dress it up it was a music film. And so, he was only doing what he had to do, I think, on sufferance, whereas Pinches had been, actually, genuinely enthusiastic. And, you know, loved music and things like that. He - the only reason we got a distribution deal on The Festival Game was that it had a jazz score by Ronnie Scott and he loved Ronnie Scott. So, yes, we got a deal, Nothing to do with it as a film I don’t think at all.

AK Right. So this is the way I saw it, which seems to be incorrect, is that Rank’s response seemed to be initially enthusiastic and then cooler. But it was the personalities within Rank…

TK Oh yes, I don’t think it was the film at all. I don’t think either of them would have been bothered by plus or minus on looking at the film because it was totally beyond their ken. You know, they wouldn’t have known about Woodstock or any of the stuff, like, ‘What are you fucking showing me?’ But one loved music-orientated stuff and one hated it. And that was, you’ve got to remember that that kind of thing through the late Sixties to the late Seventies was prevalent throughout the film industry. It’s like, like a division between the Easy Rider kind of people and the Paint Your Wagon kind of people. And it was a real like, you know, people who would go and see Zabriskie Point and people that would throw you out of the house for showing Zabriskie Point… You know, it really was. Frank Poole was very old school.

AK Right. So, this doesn’t reflect, this is just personality, this doesn’t reflect in any way Rank’s declining industry and unsureness of what they are actually representing in the 1970s?

TK I don’t think they had - I don’t think he was self-aware, Frank Poole, like that of their position, or thought strategically. I think George Pinches did that, funnily enough. And I think George was also a bit of a showman link kind of thing and a bit of wide boy in many ways, His girlfriend was Ingrid Pitt and he was interesting - yes, he was an interesting guy. And George, you’ve got to remember that it was such a dysfunctional company, kind of like BT is now again, or was at one time, British Telecom, where he wanted sometimes to play a film and couldn’t overrule his cinemas.

AK Right, yes.

TK And he was head of distribution. And I actually didn’t believe him. And I checked it out. It was true. He didn’t have that authority. If they said they didn’t want to project x in this region and it was below what they had to get, he had to like, put his job on the line to make them. Even on their own films, he couldn’t force through Rank’s own productions into Rank cinemas. That’s one of their problems. No, that really happened. And so, you know, if you’re an outsider, certainly you’d have a problem. If it was a little tiny thing then it went through, but if it was something bigger or not meeting their - don’t forget that the religious factor in their organisation still meant that certain things were not acceptable. You know, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

AK Frank Poole, so, what sort of problems, this seems to have caused a lot of problems, there were a lot of problems with the promotion budget. What problems did this - how did this impact on you yourself and your ability to, to promote and market and distribute the film and …?

TK Well, there was just no support effectively. If you’ve got - it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a fantastic film. I’m not pretending it was a fantastic film. But elements of it were OK for the audience for which it was intended. You know, if it could have been put to that audience. But, if you’ve got no support, I don’t remember there being any support. It was self-generated, or it didn’t happen. You have a problem. So, yes, we had a problem. I don’t remember there being any kind of support.

AK Yes. OK, right.

TK If I’m right, my memory’s, my memory’s…

AK Yes, well, there’s a lot, from the literature I’ve read there’s about a £750 promotional budget - 750 quid, that was it. So, yes, there’s lots of letters flying around.

TK Oh,fucking hell. Yes, it was like, farcical. And it was, it was, you know, it wasn’t a judgement on the product, it was, literally, you know, like they didn’t want it. And they’d been lumbered with it and it had been done and it wasn’t their decision. This is, you know, something we have to do, but we’re not going to pretend we like it.

AK In between the concert, October ’75 and then the release of ’77, punk and disco really changed everything.

TK Yes.

AK Did this make you nervous? Did you think…

TK [Laughing] Yes! Yes, it was basically evident to me, but we had what we had. So I wanted, I remember, at that time to try and position the film, to try and get play dates in France and Belgium and places like that, where I thought that hadn’t happened in the same way, and where the cartoon, the animation bit had been a huge hit, as had some of the music, you know, Number 1.

AK Sacha Distel.

TK Yes. And they - I could not get anybody to help me. It was like a nightmare. I don’t know if that’s in the thing, but I tried, my god, I tried. Well, I knew it could work. You know, with their kind of mentality, the French kind of mentality, that was a film that could have worked. And yes, it might have had to have had a different cut or something. But it was just down their street, you know, and that period it was exactly the right thing. As wrong as it had become for England it was right for Latin Europe and I couldn’t get anyone to play along, no one to do anything. And so, in the end, you’ve just go to say, ‘I’ll have to cut my losses’. You know, if you keep pushing it’s costing you time and money and you’re not getting anywhere. So when I got my next offer of another thing I said, ‘OK, I’ll have to go’.
AK Well, one last question and then a short one. The BFI requested a print of the film in about 1978 which...

TK I didn’t remember that.

AK No?

TK No.

AK It said, ‘For its depiction of a 1975 pop concert for its capturing of an aspect of pop culture’. Have you any thoughts about what that may be, the specific moment in pop culture that it captures?

TK Yes.

AK Because there’s a lot of things coming together in the book and the film.

TK Yes, I thought, I looked again at it not so long ago. It actually sums up better the period preceding, the ten years preceding, than The Kids Are Alright does a couple of years later. Because The Kids Are Alright actually is like a comma and then it’s going to change like this. Whereas that was looking back, one look back, rather than looking forward.

Unintentionally, it wasn’t, let me clear up a thought, that’s how it happened. And I think that’s maybe to do with the beginning. The end of one type of simplistic, ‘Let’s all go make a film, let’s all go and make a concert,’ everything very freewheeling and nice - for good or ill that’s kind of what happened. And whereas The Kids Are Alright is the first of like branding and manipulating and controlling and it was the first film I’d have worked on where they said, ‘Right, no one in here is allowed to write anything about this,’ and I refused and I was the only one who refused. And they went, ‘That means you’re going to write a book’. And I said, ‘It may do, but I’m not signing away my rights. I’m not doing it. And everybody else, it was like, I watched people cave in, who I thought wouldn’t. And it was, yes, two different eras. One was the end of one era and also some, because the era was about, fucking hell, I don’t want to say free love, free expression, wide-ranging tastes in music, fashion and everything. And the other was a completely different era. You know, like where it was manipulated and controlled and Simon Cowellish beginnings were happening. And, you know, I think those were the two, the two bookends. I think actually they summed it up. And I think there are aspects of it that were very interesting. But not out of intent, I have to admit [laughs].

AK So, I want to get more on the branding thing. Because the message of The Butterfly Ball, in contrast to Punk, for example, the messages of Butterfly Ball in terms of the marketing, the imagery and so on, is quite…er…
TK Bizarre, yeah …

AK …coded, but also there’s lots of, there’s layers of meaning in there, there’s lots of nostalgia, ‘A fun music-filled extravaganza’ sounds like it’s coming from the music hall - it’s coming from lots of different …

TK Well, we were taking the piss …

AK …there’s lots of references to lots of cultural things, whereas the Pistols was ‘Never mind the Bollocks’. Looking back, do you think it was a little bit too coded. Because it does…

TK Well, yes! [Laughs], you know.

AK So, thinking about references to the music hall in the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper or The Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, a lot of this was quite complex. But when the Pistols threw all that aside, I suppose everything became very stark.

TK But I thought at the time that, not that I just thought, for a start, I thought The Sex Pistols were just a completely no talent group. I had a lot of time for Malcolm McClaren, I did, I thought he was very clever. But I never thought, and I think most people at the time who were involved in that kind of field thought, it would last more than a year. Because it did involve, I mean, people that were playing guitars who couldn’t play guitars, people who couldn’t sing were singing, you know, and were saying so. I mean, ‘This can’t possibly last’. And so, yes, there was that over here. But I actually had my eye on what was coming from America, not thinking actually that was going to become very important.

So I misread it, I guess. In our own context, our own stuff, I didn’t think they were that relevant to us. I really didn’t. And I thought, ‘We’ve got it wrong probably for England, but I’ll be OK in Europe’. And, of course, that didn’t happen. And I didn’t mind having…er…yes, we were a bit sophisticated in certain respects and I knew some of the things we were doing would go over people’s heads in many ways some of the things we were doing. I had put in stuff from Alice in Wonderland, all kinds of stuff which they didn’t get. And yes, there were lots of people who didn’t get it at all. You know, Benny Green [inaudible] was the view of many. But it wasn’t, I didn’t really worry about that because I thought in that context, probably only in that context I thought we actually succeeded. I think we did pretty much, other than that the dancing wasn’t as good as it should have been, the costumes were crap, I actually thought we made stylistically pretty much the film we were trying to make. And I don’t think I could have made it as a half-referenced issue to the punk. Because it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have combined. You know, we had to do it or not do it. If we had tried somehow to reference that, because it was so - I mean, the people involved were so different. I mean, whatever I thought of some of them, they were very talented musicians etc. and they could do it, they actually could do it. And [inaudible]. But in that context, you’ve got to understand, I think a year, or a year before they made eight million or nine or eleven million net, that Deep Purple Organization. So it was still working pretty good, you know, in those terms. But what made up those behemoths was changing. And the attitude was changing and people were changing.

What I’d like to have done, I wish I could go back there now, and make a film about how it was changing, but we weren’t looking, our eye wasn’t on that ball. And they, you’ve got to remember, they didn’t really want me to do anything more than just a film about a lot of people playing music. You know, it was me pushing to try different things. You know, when I said, ‘We’ll do dancing and things, it was like, unheard of. ‘A ballet, a ballet? What are you talking about?’ So I had to give them reference points so that they could understand it. And to this day I don’t think they do. I don’t. I referenced it to things like The Tales of Beatrix Potter and they were like, ‘What’s this got to do with Beatrix Potter?’ I had to go through the whole thing. And I had one or two very interesting exchanges with Alan Aldrich, who had a totally different view from Roger Glover, who had a totally different view from the band’s management. So I kind of got it through because they were all arguing, to be honest.

AK The last one is what did David M. Niven do in the Klinger organization? What was his job title?

TK He was an, he was an accountant, he was an über accountant.

AK An über accountant?

TK Yes, he was kind of like the internal - I don’t think he was chartered, but he was like a senior accountant for the company. Not, I don’t think he was still around then. Was he, he wasn’t around then, was he?

AK Yes, in the mid Seventies. He is involved in some of the correspondence.

TK Well, he originally had been involved in Compton, I’m pretty sure, in Compton …

AK Oh, right.

TK After Terry Greenwood, they sort of overlapped a bit. And Terry went to work for Stigwood and he came in and he was like the group accountant. And whenever there was something, you know, that needed a big accountancy thing internally, Michael would get him in after. But he was like the Gordon Brown of the organization. Very dour, very Scottish and you know, ‘Woarr, woarr’, and he was like that. And, you know, we weren’t, but a lot of people were scared of him because he ran a tight ship and he didn’t take shit from anywhere.

AK This is David Niven’s son, then?

TK No, no, no. There was a David Niven Jr.

AK Yes, I know there was…

TK But this is a different guy. David Niven Jr. we also knew, but he was the David Niven in America. He was Head of - what’s the studio? He was like one of the team…

AK He was in Paramount, I think.

TK Yes, I think it was.

AK So did you have dealings with David Niven Jr.?

TK We had dealings with him, yes.

AK With regards to The Chilian Club?

TK Yes.

AK I am more confused. So the David Niven I’m talking about here is a different David Niven to the one you’re talking to with The Chilian Club? OK.

TK There’s two different David Nivens. There was a different David Niven. But David Niven Jr, we always referred to him as David Niven Jr. And he was the son of David Niven.

AK OK.

TK And, he was always, as far as I know, lived in America. He’s English, though, but always lived in America. And there at Paramount, I’m pretty sure at Paramount.

AK Right, OK, that’s that cleared up.

TK A very affable guy but a bit of a, bit of a…I don’t think he ever did a decision in his life [laughs]. He was one of those blokes. Wish I could do that. Every day I get asked, ‘Is it yes, or is it no?’ These blokes go through life, mind you, it’s a good life!

AS Sort of float in some strange way.

TK Well, certain people do particularly especially nicely in America by never actually. There was one guy, a guy, the head of - famous guy, it’ll come to me in a minute and he’d say something. You’d go, ‘What was that?’ ‘Er…er…and I want you to know,’ every word was the same and no one knew what he was saying. My Dad used to call him The Epileptic Jew, and he’d go [whispers] ‘Er…er...’ So we’d got him back one day. We were in the room and we’d go, ‘We can’t hear you. What is it you’re saying?’ And he was like, really famous. There were two of them. Barbara Streisand’s hairdresser undoubtedly. But there were people like that who were bosses of studios. ‘But you were her hairdresser! What happened?’

AK I suppose there’s a good living to be made just by being David Niven’s son in Hollywood, isn’t there, just ...?

TK Well, no, they’re tougher on you, to be fair to him. Yes, it gets you in the door, but you’ve got to perform. And the studios…but you can fail upwards, you know [inaudible]. Well, how certain people have that innate ability to connect and you know certain people don’t, or can’t connect on the right way. I’ve seen lots of people do that, whatisname, Peters, Jon Peters, was one of them. Guber, David Guber, he was the other one and these guys, when they sold Sony and things like that, hundreds of millions of dollars they got, each. I mean, literally, 400 million dollars each and they were there six months. And the chairmen were like, ‘Well, we made a little mistake’. Nearly a billion dollars between them. And nobody… How did they do that?

AK Right, well, I think that’s me done with The Butterfly Ball. Thank you very much.

TK My pleasure.

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