For reasons unknown, I had failed to notice that the hotel was directly under the flight path for the final approach into one of the main runways of Dallas Fort Worth Airport. Perhaps the wind had prevailed in another direction for the previous week, bringing other runways into use and leaving this one out. Perhaps the hotel itself had soundproofing to match its air-conditioning, which maintained the guests at such a delicately judged temperature that it was the outside air, when you emerged into it, that seemed to have been produced by a machine, possibly a blast furnace. Anyway, the swimming pool was out there under the sky. The daughter, looking very fetching in one of Jil Sander’s first brushed-cotton trouser suits, sat neatly relaxed in a cane chair, showing the kind of confidence that comes to you when, having been born into a family of enormous financial power, you are encouraged to prove yourself by managing every hotel the family owns, up to and including the Mansion on Cobra Swamp in Kandahar, and, having successfully managed them, you are given them for your birthday.
She also showed patience, which was very good of her, because the planes, with all their flaps out and howling in low gear, were going over every couple of minutes. ‘So when did you realize that your family was . . .’ Pause for whine of approaching jet, howl of jet going over, whistle of jet sinking very gradually into the distance. ‘Well, I guess it was when my father bought the Dallas Cowboys and . . .’ Pause for whine of another approaching jet, etc. If we had been filming with two cameras the noise would have mattered less: we could have written it into the story or even made a joke of it. But when you have only one camera, you have to shoot the reverses on to the interviewer afterwards, and unless the background noise of the questions matches the background noise on the answers, you can’t edit the results. Hence the advisability of finding somewhere soundproof for the shoot if you can’t get into a studio. It was a lesson that I was pleased to learn, but learning it was expensive. A few more stuff-ups like that and we would have lost the movie.
We made just such another snafu when we interviewed Nancy Brinker chez elle. She lived in the size of house that you would expect the wife of the founder of Brinker International to own, but you wouldn’t have expected the standard of interior decoration to be quite so high. Were there any Gobelins tapestries left in France? There were also cases full of real books, an item of property often absent from the decor of the American rich. The only tip-off was that it was all too clean. As for the chatelaine, she was a dream come true: cultivated, articulate, poised, funny. Donovan was so enchanted he had the idea of linking together the shots of her with suitably ethereal fades and mixes, leaving out the predictable reverses on me. We were short of time so I went along with it.
By the time we got back to London, Richard had already discovered that there was something strange about the Nancy Brinker interview. A beautiful woman was being interviewed by a ghost. On the other hand, the daughter of the richest woman on earth was being interviewed in the middle of an air-raid. But what had really wound him up was the society party where Sophia Loren was present but I had somehow failed to get myself into the same shot. About that he was, in his quiet way, apoplectic. To repair all this damage, we had to park the film for a year until the weather was right and then go back to Dallas, with Donovan conspicuously not in our company. With the same sunlight, and with me wearing the same infinitely valuable cheap blue suit, we got all those tedious but necessary covering shots – arriving at the hotel, leaving the hotel, arriving at the Chili’s franchise, leaving the Chili’s franchise – which Donovan had so sedulously dodged. We also went back to the Brinker palace, where we discovered that Nancy’s pet decorator had repapered the walls of the room where we had interviewed her, so that when we shot the reverses that we needed, the wall behind me would look different from the wall we had already filmed behind her the previous year. It would have been a lot simpler just to ask her to do the interview again, and I’m sure the future United States Chief of Protocol and Ambassador to Hungary would have said yes: gracious diplomacy was among her countless virtues. But she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and was confined to quarters. So we would have to make do with what we had. Doubtless it would cut together somehow: I could always say that she made a point of decorating each end of a room differently.
But what really counted was that we got back into that hospitality room in the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Richard talked a few of the society people from last year’s bunch into dressing up again. Since they rarely dressed down, they found it no trouble to comply. In America, everybody loves being in the movie. They crowded around me while we got a shot of me staring symthetically at exactly the right angle to meet Sophia Loren’s haunted glance as it had been captured the year before in the same room. I did a little smile to match a little smile from her that we already had in the bank. Actually she had been smiling in fear at some crazed woman raving about the beneficial effects of having split ends sealed shut by laser surgery and sprayed with ionized platinum, but the viewers wouldn’t suspect that, especially after I wrote a suitably wistful line about intimate eye contact. If all this ducking and weaving had been taking place today, the tabloids would have loved to have a story about how I faked a close encounter with Sophia Loren, but in fact we weren’t making up the shot, we were just getting the shot we should have got first time around. Much of the final work in a movie shoot always consists of getting the shot you should have got. You have to keep the ethics in mind – rescuing a sequence is one thing, telling a lie is another – but you always have to keep the ethics in mind anyway. To work in any art form requires an ethical decision every five minutes.
When we took the repair kit back to London all the patches fitted and Donovan’s name as a director was saved, but Richard refused to use him again. I agreed, but couldn’t help thinking it was a pity. I loved Donovan. He was so sweet and funny. But he was a star director, and in a presenter-led documentary special the man with his face on the screen had better be the only one with the artistic temperament, otherwise you will all be very soon be sharing an extended stay at the Mansion on Shit Creek.
9. WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
The American cities should have been easy, if only because every American is in show business, so that there is no chance encounter that does not turn immediately into a scene: all you have to do is tone down the volume. But it was a European city that gave us the measure of what the Postcard format could do if it was approached in an orderly manner, instead of as an exercise in what Donovan himself had the grace to call ‘kick, bollock and scramble’. Once again it was Paris, but this time there was no question of concentrating on the catwalks. We were out to do the whole thing. There was a lot of planning before we went, and we were better protected against caprice when we got there, because we had both a producer, Beatrice Ballard, and a director, Laurence Rees. Each would go on to a glittering career, but the important thing to note here was that both of them were naturally thorough and quick-witted – two qualities that often get in each other’s road. They certainly needed the quick wits, because one of the first sequences on the roster starred Françoise Sagan, once a teenage novelist, now the first lady of the French literary world, and always and forever an enfant as terrible as they come.
The Renault company had given her a new car for her personal use, presumably on the understanding that they would benefit from the publicity even if she killed herself in it. When she was young she had insisted on driving her brand-new Aston Martin barefoot, thereby to demonstrate her carefree spirit. ‘I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.’ Bouncing alternately on its nose and its tail, the car, when it finally came to a halt, was in even worse shape than she was, which was saying something, because very few of her bones were left intact. Luckily her clever head survived to dream up more novels. When we met her, she wasn’t so young any more but she still lived hard. Perhaps unwisely, our sequence with her had been planned to take place while she drove. The camera and the sound were in the back seat and I was in
the front beside her, asking her questions while she kept on proving that the only way she knew how to drive was to go flat out. It must have been some kind of muscle disease, or perhaps the consequences of her first crash: her rigid leg jammed the accelerator against the firewall. My questions tended to fragment as we switched with yelping tyres from one boulevard to another, threading our way between cars driven by normal people and taking every red light as a sign to speed up. ‘So when you first met Sartre what AAAGH! did he say?’
Uncannily she responded with coherent answers, possibly because she knew that the imminent crash wasn’t going to happen even though it looked to me as if it had already commenced. It looked the same to the cameraman, who could see the road ahead through his eyepiece and got a lot of footage that trembled all the time even when she was driving on smooth asphalt. ‘He say to me, you are so yong. He say, when you leave a little longer then you will have the droit, the droit, what is it?’
‘You will have the AAAGH! the right.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. Stupid of me. Then you will have the right to your despair. You want me to go more fast?’
‘No, this is AAAGH! fine like this.’
The man we hit was carrying a briefcase. He was crossing the road, we heard a thump and suddenly there he was behind us, spinning like a weathervane in a storm. We must have hit the briefcase. ‘We heat someone?’ she asked me. The camera missed the spinning guy but it caught her face asking the question, and I knew that I would be able to put a narrative on it that would be funnier than seeing the bloke spinning on the spot. It was a wonderfully surreal sequence, all the mad speed made even funnier by the sudden stops every few blocks so that the great lady of French literature could scoot into a bar and powder her nose. Her powder of choice was an open secret. Everybody knew, including her friend François Mitterrand, then President of France. She knew all his secrets too. The Parisian elite were a tight crew, somehow made more so because they spoke their own language.
It was a language that I had been learning for years and am still learning now. My assistant Cecile Menon politely puts me though my pronunciation drills but I will never get to speak French well. I love to read it, though, and when we were filming Postcard from Paris I spent all my downtime trawling for books in the green boxes of the second-hand booksellers along the Seine. On a rest day for our crew I was bent over the treasure trove of a bouquiniste when a stocky figure in a well-cut dark blue suit showed up beside me. The discreet presence in the background of a couple of young men with earpieces tipped me off. It was Mitterrand. Instantly I remembered a river full of elephants, but I remembered also how I had not mentioned them, so that the crew would never know what they missed. We wouldn’t have been able to sneak a shot of Mitterrand anyway. The gendarmes (the real gendarmes, not the ordinary flics) would have moved in and thrown us all into a van. Besides, I liked being alone with the books. When waiting in the car with my driver, I would read to him from Simenon or Maupassant while he winced at every second word before making me read the sentence again. A glutton for punishment, that boy. He taught me the French translation of a short speech that I dictated to him in English. ‘The day when I am able to converse freely in French I will be very happy. Unfortunately, that day is still distant.’ When I at last managed to memorize the French version in roughly the right accent it was highly effective in convincing any English-speaking people present that I was quite good at French: as long, of course, as they themselves were not.
In the future I was to make a point of learning an equivalent construction in any other language we ran into. Your friends are impressed and the locals applaud you for your eagerness. That, however, is as generous in the matter as the French commonly get. In Paris especially, they don’t like to hear their beautiful language spoken in any way except to perfection. Beatrice, being a properly brought-up English girl, had French among her attainments. It came in handy when we were snatching a scene outside the cafe Deux Magots in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, because to turn the passing pedestrians into walk-on players took a bit of explaining. It took little persuasion: even more so than the Americans, the people of Paris want to be in the movie, because they think they might be helping the next François Truffaut, a national treasure, or Jean-Luc Godard, a national idiot but they love him.
But it wasn’t enough to talk them into participating. We had to say what we wanted done. I liked the way Laurence Rees attacked himself when he couldn’t make himself clear. He would dance on the spot, beat his breast, forget how to breathe. These were good signs, betokening an urge towards self-improvement. Beatrice was summoned from her hotel room full of paperwork, told what I was after, and set about roping in the punters. We were filming the passing parade for a sequence in which I would say that the women of Paris – not just the grandes dames but the office workers, the sales girls, everybody – gave a lot of time and thought to looking chic. Half an hour of filming had revealed that a general shot of the passing pedestrian traffic wouldn’t do the job, because somewhere in the frame among the scores of glowing visions there was always at least one woman who looked like the captain of a tugboat. The only solution was to get upstream and do a bit of casting. Beatrice came with me while I singled out half a dozen impeccably qualified knockouts. On my behalf, she explained to them that they should each walk towards the camera at a given signal. See the camera along there at the cafe? Don’t look at it while you walk. Just let it look at you. I would have sounded very foolish trying to explain all that and might well have been arrested by the car full of flics who were taking a close interest, even though Beatrice was armed with all the appropriate permissions. She was very good looking, so they wanted to check her papers.
While they did so, I went back to the cafe, sat down in the right spot, gave the signal and the first woman came swaying along as if she had been making movies all her life. All the others were equally good. In this way we secured a series of clean shots for which I could write a narrative at the rate of one line per shot. It was a lesson learned. If the scene has to make a particular point, assemble it out of particular shots: a general shot won’t do the job. What made this sequence a breakthrough for me, however, was that I had spotted the problem beforehand and not afterwards, and had managed to convince the people working with me. There was a hidden requirement in that: they had to be smart enough to see the point. These two were, so we were in business. There were no prizes for spotting that young Beatrice was a class act but with Laurence it took a bit of imagination, because he carried on as talented young men often do, reminding himself of what he had to do next by sticking Post-it notes on everything including people, referring to himself loudly in the third person, dashing his ginger head against the nearest brick wall when he made a mistake. He would have been unbearable if he were not so clearly demonstrating an eternal truth about the arts: talent rarely looks poised early on. The naturally cool customer is seldom going anywhere. As it happened, Laurence Rees was going on to become one of the most significant writer-producers of factual television series in recent times. But he would not have been so effective in that valuable role if he had not known a lot about how to direct, because it meant that directors couldn’t fool him. Television is a producer’s medium, but the best producers know everything about direction, and a lot of what Laurence Rees knows about it he learned on Postcard from Paris, so I feel quite proud.
Laurence’s speed on the uptake proved vital when we filmed an interview with Inés de la Fressange at the madly fashionable Café Costes. Inés, newly retired as a model for the couture salons but still the official face of Chanel, was so famous that her mere presence could reduce a whole city block to silence, as if she had just stepped out of a spaceship. (The French don’t mob their celebrities but they have a way of revering them from a distance that can stop the traffic anyway.) The Café Costes was the latest creation of the designer Philippe Starck, always in the feature pages for his ability to take some everyday object and reinterpret it, or deconstruct it, or gene
rally futz about with it in ways possible only to genius. Now he had done this to a whole cafe. The conjunction of the celestial gloss of Inés de la Fressange and the cutting-edge modernity of the Café Costes was a sure-fire prospect. All we had to do was bring them together. When it transpired that the conjunction could not be brought about until after lunch, we spent the morning filming in the cafe’s downstairs toilet pour les hommes. What the toilet pour les dames was like I don’t care to imagine, but you can take it for granted that the men’s room had been reinterpreted to within an inch of its life. Locks on the cubicle doors either didn’t lock at all or locked you in forever, thus reinterpreting the function of a lock. Concealed in chromium fairings that echoed each other’s formal properties with a conscious play of irony, the reinterpreted soap dispenser dried your hands while the reinterpreted hand-dryer dispensed soap.
But above all, Starck had reinterpreted the relationship between the urinal and the hand basin. He had played with daring semi-otic irreverence upon their essential similarity. Those of us who believed in their essential difference were in for a shock, as we found ourselves washing our hands in the urinal after taking a piss in the sink. It was at this point that I decided Philippe Starck was un ouanqueur – a French word of my own invention which has somehow never caught on in France – but I was also grateful, as if all my Noëls had come at once. You couldn’t dream this stuff up. You had to get some fantasist like him to dream it up for you. Laurence was already exhausted after the two hours of hard work it had taken to light the place – it is always much harder to film anything when there are reflective surfaces around – so I had no trouble convincing him that we wouldn’t need to stage any action. All he had to do was get clean shots of all the naff gear and I could do the whole story with the commentary. Even with the hand basin and urinal combo, we wouldn’t need any shots of me pretending to use them. I could just look at them, visibly abandon any intention of using either and walk out looking puzzled. Laurence’s vital contribution was to make sure that I didn’t overdo the looking puzzled. That much you can learn from your cameramen and directors, if you aren’t afraid to ask. Most presenters overdo the facial expression because they haven’t been often enough told that the camera can see what you think, so you don’t have to act it out. When the adrenalin’s pumping, however, hamming it up is difficult to avoid.