A Conversation with Alexander Mackendrick
Theresa FitzGerald
Screen International, 29 September 1990
Quimper, Brittany. It’s a rare event these days for Alexander Mackendrick, who for the past 20 years has made his home in Los Angeles, to pay a visit to Europe. This isn’t because he prefers California – on the contrary, his views on West Coast lifestyle are caustically outspoken – but the emphysema from which he suffers makes air travel difficult, and Europe’s damp climate a hazard.
So it was a considerable coup for Marc Ruscart, the engaging and indefatigable director of the Quimper Film Festival, to persuade Mackendrick to attend this year’s event. The occasion was a complete retrospective of his feature films, which drew a packed and appreciative audience. Mackendrick is something of a cult figure in France, numbering Bertrand Tavernier and Michel Ciment among his admirers.
Mackendrick himself, though enjoying the Festival, takes an ironic attitude to such auteuristic reverence. He deprecates the “utterly unjustified cult of the director,” and tends to be dismissive about his own work. “I’ve always loved going to the cinema, but I don’t think I would have wanted to go see the films of Alexander Mackendrick.” And he is, in any case, skeptical about the whole business of preserving and reviving old movies – whether they be his or anyone else’s.
“What’s hard for younger people today to realise is that the films we made then, at Ealing or wherever, weren’t expected to last. The life of a film was about 18 months, and the idea that it might still be seen 20 or 30 years later was never even considered. Films were like television today, or journalism: they were of their time, and that’s all they were meant to be. And I think that’s healthy.
“There’s a falsification in looking at a film out of its period, except perhaps as an archeological exercise.”
By the same token, Mackendrick is wary of analyzing the motives behind the films he made. “It wasn’t a conscious thing at all. It’s no good asking somebody who was involved in the process of film-making to stand outside that process and look at it. That’s for the critics. The person who’s right in the middle of it all knows least about what’s happening.”
Even so, it’s possible to detect in his films a darkness underlying the comedy, a disruptive impulse constantly threatening to subject the social order. This, Mackendrick concedes, derives not only from his own sardonic temperament – “my perverted and malicious sense of humour” – but also, in the case of the Ealing films, from the mood of the time. “There was an overpowering sense of deprivation. The discipline the country had to go through, the rationing, the bureaucracy – everybody had been quite prepared to suffer these things during the war. But when it continued after the war, there was a terrible longing for anarchy again. And perhaps that’s what those films express.”
Mackendrick also admits the influence of certain film-makers whose work he most enjoyed in his youth; the fluid comedy of René Clair, and Fritz Lang’s German expressionist films: Metropolis, M and Dr. Mabuse. Here again, though, he emphasises that such influences were never deliberately cultivated, still less intended as a conscious homage.
“I think, for a film-maker, there are grave dangers in self-conscious, in self-awareness. Because when you’re aware of yourself, the self that you’re aware of becomes another self. Preserving a degree of unawareness is very important in imaginative creation, because you have to let the unconscious get to work. But I dare say the love I had for, say, Dr. Mabuse does show in The Ladykillers.”
Mackendrick’s films also resemble Lang’s in being notably visual; their ideas expressed in images rather than words. A weakness of much current screenwriting, he believes – and British screenwriting in particular – is that it neglects this visual element, telling rather than showing. It’s a fault he attributes at least partly to the influence of television.
“The crucial difference between television and film isn’t, as a lot of people think, in the actual technology. It’s in the circumstances of their distribution and reception. What happens with a television set is that the sound dominates, filling the room, and the picture becomes something you check back on. It’s a historical development: films started silent, and then had dialogue added, so they were essentially visual, while television started as radio which then became illustrated.”
“But when you’re writing for a visual medium, whatever it is – and this is something I’m always trying to get across in my teaching – you’re not writing words to be illustrated. What the camera photographs is what is not said.”
Not that Mackendrick dismisses television in favour of cinema. For him, some of the best British work of recent years has been in films for TV, such as a Schlesinger-Bennett An Englishman Abroad, or the Duffell-Poliakoff Caught on a Train. “They’re in what I think of as a British tradition: small-scale, unpretentious, solid and true.”
But couldn’t this imply unambitiousness and parochiality, the very faults of which British film-making is so often accused? Mackendrick thinks not, pointing out that films like these have achieved wide international appeal.
It’s the same lesson that was learnt – and subsequently forgotten again – with Whisky Galore!, which triumphed in the US market while big-budget ventures like Caesar and Cleopatra and Anna Karenina, intended to take on the might of Hollywood, failed miserably. “It’s the old irony: the thing that’s most local is the most international. But if you try to be the lower common denominator you’re absolutely nothing.”
A trend Mackendrick deplores – and this applied to US films no less than to British – is the desire among film-makers to become writer/directors, directing only their own material. For the rare, gifted individuals it may work, but all too often the result is a film spoilt because the director fell in love with his or her script.
“I think this is a terrible mistake. Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but though the director should be involved in the writing, right from the beginning, I strongly believe he shouldn’t be the only writer. I’ve been happiest when I’ve written an idea in outline treatment form, then given it to another writer to go away and do the first draft before coming back on it. Alternatively I take someone else’s treatment, do a draft myself and then thrown it back to the original writer. And so on. That way you can stand back from the material, see what works and what doesn’t. And that, for a director, is absolutely essential.”
© Theresa FitzGerald/Screen International
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