Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff Page #3

and then I talked about Pieter de Hooch

and his interiors

and the camera obscura and that stuff,

and the next day I learnt

that I had been chosen.

Light comes through the front,

obviously, through the lens,

and there's a prism here, which is

the soul of the Technicolor camera.

Twenty-five per cent of the light

comes straight through the prism

on to the one film in this gate here.

That's the green record.

And then the other...rest of the light,

comes through

and is reflected on to a bipack.

This is a bipack of the blue

and the red records.

And, of course,

the magazine holds three films.

Of course, these things free the

sprockets. They do nothing except that.

But I used to put on this big act and say,

"I think I'll put a bit more green here,

"a little less blue there,"

and they believed it, they thought

I was creating colour with the camera.

The whole camera department

were American

and Jack was the only one

on the camera crew who was English.

And he was the camera operator

on it at Denham.

Here they come.

Donnerhill still in rather a pocket

on Wings Of The Morning.

It was a fascinating new world,

because I was into

the Impressionists at that time,

and I was mad

about the Impressionist painters,

and I thought, "Well, this is it."

The surface of anything

you look at is absorbing some colour rays

and is reflecting the rest.

What it reflects strikes the eye and that's

how we get our impression of colour.

Colour is light and light is colour.

He always liked to experiment.

He liked to apply certain things

which he felt he'd learnt from painting

to cinematography.

As you see, I've always collected a lot

of interesting paintings and drawings.

I learnt a lot about painting...

Well, I'm still learning, let's face it.

And the main idea is I copied

some painters, like I liked that Boucher.

I couldn't afford to buy the real one

and so I copied it,

and that's the way to learn.

A lot of real painters copy

other painters, you know,

because this way they learn from each

other, in a way, it's an interesting thing.

Some people say it's a copy.

Yes, it's a copy.

But it takes a long time to analyse

the painting, to make the copy.

Then I had a big break, because

a German came in to Technicolor,

who was a count, Count von Keller.

He was a great traveller.

He was a sort of...I don't know,

you know, sort of buccaneer, almost.

He was a wonderful character.

Somebody suggested to him,

"When you're on these travels,

why don't you make films?

"Why don't you take along

a Technicolor camera and crew

"and make travel films? "

The work and spirit of

the immortal Lawrence lives to this day,

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