Quai began as a novel published in 1952 in France by Pierre Boul. And this book was published in Britain a couple of years later and was picked up by Carl Foreman who was an American had written highoon and was then blacklisted as being a probable communist and was forced out of Hollywood and came to Britain to live as an exile where he worked under a variety of pseudonyms.
And it was then that Spiegel just happened to bump into Foreman and took the project over. I was shooting a picture with David Lean in Venice called Summertime starring Katherine Hepburn and Rosano Bratzy. And while we were shooting we received a book from Sam Spiegel called The Bridge on the River Choir which was an English translation of a French book.
Now David Lean couldn’t read it because he was shooting every day and it was very difficult shooting. So I read it and I said, “Well, it’s a marvelous and original idea.” Later on, when the picture was finished, we contacted Sam Spiegel, who was in London, and he said, “I have the most marvelous script. It’s the best script that’s ever come my way in the whole of my career in motion pictures.
It’s been written by Carl Foreman, who is a well-known writer. He’s in New York at the moment, and he’s just polishing the script. What I’d like to do is first of all David Lean to come to New York and meet with Carl Foreman because I want him to read this script.
David was very broke when he split up with his former wife and Todd and he desperately needed to make some money. So by making pictures out of England that was a tax advantage from his point of view. So that was decided and contracts were exchanged and so on and the deal was made with Spiegel’s company called Horizon Pictures GB and that company had a deal with Colombia pictures as the distributors of the picture and also as the financiers of the picture. Now David Lean went to New York and the next day he called me and he said Norman is it possible for you to come to New York cuz something has got to be done. And I said why? What’s the script like? He said it is so awful. I said, “Have you told Sam?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “What did he say?” He said, “He went quite white.” And he said, “I’ve told him that if he wants me to do this picture, you’ve got to throw this script totally away and we’ve got to start from scratch
all over again. You come out to New York, we’ll sit down and in 3 or 4 weeks, we’ll produce an initial treatment from the book.” Lean himself went off to the location to salon as he used to likely to write where the film was going to be made so he could sort of soak up the atmosphere. So Spiegel then brought out another writer called Caller Willingham who lean took an instant dislike to.
Willingham wrote Paths of Glory which is a famous anti-war movie directed by Stanley Cubri which is often compared to Cho because they came out within months of each other. Anyway, Willingham did not get on with Lean at all and I think he stayed about two weeks and then Spiel brought out this guy called Michael Wilson who like form was also blacklisted. Michael Wilson worked really up to the deadline almost up to the shooting date to finalize the definitive script and I think that was the script that was finally shot.
I guess because of the unamerican activities blacklisting, Carl Foreman nor Michael Wilson received any screen credit at the time. The screenplay was credited to Pierre B, but Pierre Bull had no input onto the screenplay whatsoever. In fact, the book originally was written in French anyway.
And I think that I don’t know if he could have written an English script. But in subsequent prints, the credit situation was cleaned up and the screenplay was credited to Carl Foreman and Mike Wilson, which is about right because certainly Pierre Bull didn’t play a part in it, but that was Speaker’s way of getting out of his blacklisting problem at the time.
When we came to the scene where the prisoners march into the camp, we talked about how we could show them in effect putting two fingers up to the Japanese but subtly. And David remembered this English song which is not known in the rest of the world I don’t think called Colonel Bogey which has sort of rather rude words and we decided we couldn’t use that in 1956 which I think this was there was certain censorship things.
So he said I know let’s have them whistling it because all the old soldiers in the audience and everybody who knows Colonel Bogey will know Jolly well why they’re whistling it. And that was the origin of the whistling scene coming in. When we had the men coming into the camp whistling the Colonel Bogey march, Carl Foreman and Sam Spiegel both said, “But who’s ever heard of this march? It won’t mean anything to the international public and the American public.
Who’s ever heard of Colonel Bogey? It’s just an English march. We think you ought to use a song which was going the rounds in wartime called bless them all. Now we resisted this both David and I because bless them all didn’t mean what Colonel Bogey meant. And David Lean says look leave it to me. I assure you that this will work if I do it the right way.
And that was when Carl Foreman said, “You see, David, you’re a good art house director, but you don’t understand the big international picture scene.” Now, Spiegel didn’t mind this conflict. Spiegel’s always had the philosophy, the good scripts come out of conflict. They don’t come out of agreement. And the more people conflict and argue and dislike each other, the better it’s going to be in the long run for the third party, the script.
Later on when Malcolm Arnold the composer heard this he said what I’m going to do is to write a counter march which will fit in with the whistling because the way the picture was cut as they come into the camp there’s a shot of Nicholson looking proudly at his men and he said I don’t want the whistling to ride over that too much so I’ll swell up the counter march there and the counter march as it’s called became the river march now Colonel Bogey was composed in I think 1916 by an English marine officer called Colonel Olford.
He was dead but his widow was alive. We got permission from her to use it and she was an old lady and I think she benefited a great deal from the subsequent royalties which were marvelous for her. The book concerns itself entirely with the story of Colonel Nicholson and his men and the prisoner of war camp. Colombia pictures were a little worried because they were spending a lot of money on this picture.
I mean, it was 1956 and I think the total budget was $2.8 million, which is a hell of a lot of money then. And they wanted an American star and we all said, “Well, how can we put an American star? It’s such a British picture in many ways.” But David Lean thought up the idea of the shears character, the American who’s in the camp and escapes and then is sent back.
When we were in New York doing this first treatment, Spiegel took us out to have dinner with Carrie Grant because he thought that he could play shears and charming man that he was and a lovely dinner we had, it wasn’t for Carrie Grant. William Holden played it wonderfully and he was wonderful, David told me on the set, always on time, knew his lines and so on.
Holden got a world record fee for the movie of a million dollars. I don’t think anybody got a million dollars for a film until then. I mean, he was a huge huge star in the mid-50s. He also got a percentage of the film, which then was not unheard of because James Stewart, I think, was the first one to get a percentage for, I think, Winchester 73 or something, which is about 5 years earlier.
But because choir was such a big success, it set him up for life. Holden, the money he was getting was so big he I think asked the studio to pay him in sort of installments and he’d get a bit one year and a bit the next year and down the line and it sort of just paid for his wonderful life and he ended up buying huge spreads in Africa and and having wildlife parks and having a great time really.
He was one of the most professional people I’ve come across. He confessed that he thought being an actor was a very unnatural occupation and the more he worked at it, the more it troubled him. And of course, you know, he had a very big hairy chest which had to be perpetually shaved, which was always an embarrassment because he was working most of the time stripped down to the waist.
But he thought that acting was a very unnatural occupation and it bothered him having to get dressed particularly when he doing period parts. He said that’s women’s business because he was a man’s man. No doubt about that. He was very manly and great fun to be with. Great jokester. I couldn’t say an unkind word about Bill.
We cast Sisui Hayekawa who was a famous old silent film star who spoke a little English. I think he was about 68, so he was really a little too old for the part, but he had an extraordinary approach to the script. He read English, of course, but all he did was every time he saw himself on the script page, he would keep that page. All the pages he was not in, he would tear out.
So, he came armed with a very thin script. What he didn’t realize was that there were scenes of Colonel Nicholson doing something or other with Sat’s voice over. He didn’t know that. So, he didn’t learn all his lines. He only learned half of them. and he was absolutely horrified when he realized they had to learn a lot more.
We had a bit of trouble shooting him because his English wasn’t good. He had an extraordinary accent and it was a hodgepodge really. We recorded guide tracks and we shot scenes over and over again and we did clever things in the cutting and dubbing room and so on, but in the end it works in the picture. Jack Hawkins was just one of those very reliable actors.
He was a very steady influence and a very honest and upright and straight and very good actor. I think David was quite happy with him. Colombia Pictures said that they were worried about this film. They were worried that there were no women in the picture. So a short part was put in for a girl in salon. Anne Sears was the sister of Heather Sears who was quite a well-known film star and she was a good actress an but she was always in the shadow of Heather.
I actually recommended her for the part which Sam Spiegel eventually gave her. He made her dye her hair blonde and she was not as pretty as she was it with her real color hair. David said to me, “Is she your girlfriend?” And then I said, “No, but she’s a good actress.” They said, “All right, if she’s a good actress, I’ll take her.
” David Lean rather liked the Burmese girl bearers and rather went to town on it. But that was really a sort of pressure from Colombia pictures. Very understandable pressure that there were no women in the picture. Could we somehow redress that balance? And that’s the way it was done really. And that’s why it was done. Spiegel had said he wanted to get null coward, but of course null coward was not right for the part.
All sorts of people mentioned, even Charles Lorton. In fact, Variety carried a story that Charles Lorton had been approached for the part. Well, he hadn’t. And simply because in terms of common sense, you could not believe that fat Charles Lorton was in a prisoner of war camp living on starvation rations. It just wouldn’t work and wouldn’t look good. All sorts of names went past.
Ralph Richardson, an English actor. Ronald Coleman that David Lean rather liked the idea of but wasn’t that young at that time and almost last came Ale Guinness but Ale Guinness didn’t really want to do the part and Alec Guinness said well just explain to me what sort of character Nicholson is and David seen well he’s a sort of bore of that kind of upper class Englishman and Alin said you mean you want me to play a bore Alin said no I don’t want to do it I’ll pay my fair and go home but somehow how David persuaded him. Now, they had one or two quarrels during the course of the film, but I mean, the rest is history because when Alle Guinness, who’s a very generous and outgoing man, saw the finished picture, he was absolutely unstinting in his praise and said how wrong I was and how right you, David, were. And of course, he got an Oscar for his pains. I went off to Yugoslavia because
Sam reckoned that with a couple of trees put in, we could find jungle somewhere in Europe rather than going to the Far East. And that didn’t work out. Of course, I was married in Salon and I knew the country very well.
My wife’s family had a tear state and I remember this river and the lake and everything. So, I got on a plane and went there and it worked out very well. The art director, Don Ashton, finally found a river and a lovely location for the bridge about 60 mi from Columbbo in Salon. And he found this spot where they could actually build the bridge where the river bed was strong enough to take the weight of the piles.
And I think it was a Danish firm that were employed to build the bridge. At the time I was a young civil engineer working in Salon. I’d spent 6 months in a jungle there in 1954. The film was quite interesting to me because before that I’d been dropped by parachute behind the lines in France and Germany and been hunted a bit and incidents with knives and things like that. So that the background to the film was quite familiar to me.
I worked with a firm of consulting engineers. They set up an office in salon and around 1955 we had a visit from Don Ashton. Sam wanted to be persuaded that uh a full-size bridge would work and he wanted to meet the guy who was going to build it. The bridge was solely designed on appearance purposes. It wasn’t a sensible bridge in any way, but we had to make it work.
It wasn’t like building a permanent bridge with calculations and this sort of thing. Although we had to do some calculations, but it was cutting trees down from the banks of a river and converting those logs into a bridge which was something like the fourth railway bridge with two big cantal levers supporting the tracks from the brace towers.
The site was chosen so you could build these dams up around the back so you could control the rise and fall of the water. And so that the sequence where the cables are revealed and Alex suddenly realizes what’s going on that was achieved by these man-made dams being built upstream. The bulk of the trees that we used in the bridge were growing on the opposite bank of the river to the access road.
We’ built an access road up to the site from the main Columbbo road. So these trees had to be hauled across the river and we used elephants for that. We expected a fairly light structure, but then the Salon Government Railways offered a disused narrow gauge steam train.
And this was an entirely different kettle of fish because it was a 10-ft high locomotive weighing 25 or 30 tons with three or four coaches behind it. This was entirely different. So that’s when we really had to start thinking about how to produce this nicel looking bridge and make it carry a train. And Sam Spiegel was equally concerned because in the first place he didn’t believe the fulls size bridge would work.
But now he was told that he’s got to carry a 25 ton train and he needed a bit more persuasion. So we had another set of sessions with him. He asked me how much I thought it would cost. Well, I’d found out secretly what his budget was for this bridge and so I put about 20 or 30% on that figure.
I had no idea what it was going to cost and uh I don’t think anyone else had. The climate really was one of the worst aspects of the production and it got worse when the rainy season started. It wasn’t the temperature, it wasn’t that hot, but the humidity was always high. So, you were always soaking wet and it did make the crew very aggravated. And we were there a long time, you know.
I think I started in the end of August in 56 and I didn’t leave Columbbo until sometime towards the end of May 57. That’s a long time 9 10 months. There were delays. People got ill. There were accidents on the film. All the unforeseen things that happen on motion picture shooting on difficult locations like jungles and so on. And that was really why the picture took so long.
When you make a film about the British army, one usually in this country gets the cooperation from what’s called the war office. Now the British war office as it was called would not cooperate at all. And the reason was this. The general in charge of Singapore when Singapore was overrun by the Japanese was General Percol.
General Persal, who was a big redtabed officer in the British Army, was also the founder of the Return Prisoner of War Association from Japan. and he heard that this film was being made and he asked to read a script and he thought it was absolutely terrible that Hollywood and the film industry were interfering in the terrible story of the British prisoners of war who were starved and killed by the Japanese and you probably know that subsequently I think it’s even this year or last year the Japanese government has formally apologized for the treatment of the British prisoners of war in Burma when they were building this railway which is called the railway of death and first of all will have nothing to do with it. So we put an advertisement in one of the retired officers clubs in London and we had a reply from a general peron and he was a man who’d been serving
in Burma and knew all about it. So we employed him as our own private army man who controlled and looked at everything and he was wonderful in the picture. So we did without the British war office. He was always on hand to provide any information on how troops would behave, how they would stand, how they would salute.
And the actors that were recruited from amongst a most extraordinary array of civilians, Malaysians, Europeans, Eurasians, anybody that was half white was kind of press ganged into acting as extras in the picture. Our director of photography, Jack Hillyard, was a man we’d worked with on several pictures and he was a very amiable, lovely man. And David Lean is nuts about photography and he takes an immense interest.
So his cameraman has to be somebody who’s sympatico with that. And he and Jack Hillyard got along on all these pictures very very well indeed. We literally built a camera from scratch in Sheperton Studios, a blimp cinemascope camera which had never been made before cuz it was made of composite parts. I went to salon and rented the generator, the power unit for the production.
And it was difficult to photograph because in those days there was no lightweight widescreen equipment. It didn’t exist. Logistically it was difficult. All the lighting was powered by the generator which we bought and then it had to be transported up and down the river from side to side and from location to location. One day we were underneath the bridge pretending to put the dynamite in.
And we used to duck down into the water to cool off and I popped up one day. I came up right in front of David confronted him like that and spontaneously said bloody millionaire stuff. Meaning here we are swimming in a river with the elephants and we’re playing at trains. We’re building a bridge and we’re going to blow it up and millionaires couldn’t afford to do it.
That’s what I meant. And David cotton on to that quote and he’s always that’s the moment when we first clicked as friends. David could be a little bit cruel to actors I think sometimes. On the bridge over the river choir it says you hire color. you know, he’d been a very famous old silent movie actor and he thought he was still playing that part, you know, and he used to walk about set in a silk robe out of uniform and he had a little girl beside him holding his script.
We hadn’t got long into the movie and we were playing the scene where the English colonel Alec Guinness finally wins a psychological battle in Su’s hut. And when he leaves, Su throws himself on the bed sobbing. David couldn’t get him to do it right. He tried and tried. Couldn’t get it. Wasn’t satisfied. Finally said, “All right, print it.
” About a week later, when the stuff came back, he said, “Now, we’re going to have to do all this all over again because of you. All this money and all this time because of you and your bad acting and things like that, you know, we really gave him a hard time.” And finally, when the man threw himself on the bed, he was really crying. Crying. That poor old fellow was crying.
I think that if he was faced with an actor or actress who he didn’t completely feel was right for the part, he would work that extra hard to draw a performance out of him. I can remember that happening on several occasions. He would often start off a picture and feel after the first week that so and so was a bit of a disaster, but in the end they’d probably turn out stealing all the notices. They did the same thing with the doctor.
Alec Guinness is supposed to be inside the oven and it was hot that oven. In fact, I added heat to it to make it shimmer a bit for the cameraman. And David said to me, “You should resist me. You’re supposed to be offering food to Alec, persuading him, please give up. Come out. You’re going to die.
” So, we went on and on and on. Rehearsal, then take. And then finally the actor said to me, “Could I have something to kneel on?” Now it’s all stones. Hot, hot, grally stones. And before I could reply, David said, “No.” Now he was really pleading. He was begging, you know, to be let off the hook.
And he got a wonderful performance. David go until he’s perfect. Another lovely sequence which le I know was particularly keen to pull off was during the long hike from HQ to the bridge with Hawkins and the native bearers. They’re bathing in the waterfall. It’s just an idilic moment. The photography has got a wonderful lushness and light to it. And I know that Lean was based this.
He was really in love, you know, with the South Pacific and spent a lot of years there. And then this mood is shattered when Japanese arrive and they’re shot sort of off camera and it’s sort of an eruption of hell into paradise.
The scene where this Canadian commando sees this young Japanese confronting him and he’s slow to use the knife. And so Jack Hawkins rushes in and kills him with a knife. And as he’s killed, the gun goes off and shoots him in the foot. And as they shot in the foot, all the flying foxes up in the treetops in the canopy of the jungle take off and fly around. Well, we did that in another place.
And I had some men posted around to fire rifles to get them bloody things to come out of the trees. And when they come out, there were thousands of them. It blotted out the sun. It was a phenomenal sight. But they started to piss and it was like hot, stinking rain falling all over us. Don’t see that in the movie.
The end sequence, you could call it the penultimate sequence of the picture, is the evening before the bridge is to be declared over and the first train passes over. Nicholson and Saitto are walking across the bridge talking and they’re reminiscing really about their life in general and it was shot at just before Magic Art, just before sunset. So, there wasn’t much time. The whole sequence is done in one complete shot.
It’s important in as much as even at that point, although the bridge is finished and it will be open the next day, they’re still not on each other’s wavelength. One says to the other, “Oh, isn’t it beautiful?” One thinks he’s referring to the sunset, and the other one thinks, “Oh, no, he’s referring to the bridge.” It’s really very ironic that whole sequence.
It sort of sums up the mood between the two men. They have a sort of rapper and a sort of mutual admiration for each other. Nicholson feels that he’s done his job as a soldier and an officer and he’s done the right thing. He’s kept the men occupied and busy and kept the morale up and built the bridge.
Silto thinks that he’s achieved what he wants. He’s made the British build the bridge and the officer said that they wouldn’t work but they have worked in fact. So they’ve both won but they’re both even at that point they’re talking about different things. He drops his stick into the river and you feel that that is the end of his authority because that’s the sort of symbol of his authority.
Alec Guinness was a little worried when they shot that that they didn’t shoot it on his face. David Lean shot it with him turning away from the camera to the sunset. But again, David’s nearly always right about you. He said, “Alec, wait and see. It’ll work much better. I promise you.” And he was right. At the end of the picture before the bridge is actually blown up on the morning of the first ceremonial train crossing the bridge, the pair of them are walking on the bridge and they look down and see all these cables and obviously they realize something is not correct. So they rush down onto what we used to call the little beach head below and they can see all these cables and bits and pieces which have been showed up because the level of the water has gone down and that’s the terrible tragedy. They say it’s always the unexpected and the unexpected it has happened and Gennis is still bewildered. He sees Bill Holden swimming towards him and says you. At simultaneously at that moment one of the shells that Hawkins has fired comes into the water knocks the sense out of Alec Gillis and
then at that moment he twists round and falls onto the plunger of the detonator and that is of course blows the bridge up. But in the script and on the day of shooting, it was never really decided or never really clearly defined as to the motivation. Did he do it in a moment of repentance or did he just fall on it? And it was never ever really resolved. Never.
We rehearsed it and talked about it. It must have been an hour and a half, maybe two hours after lunch on the day we shot that sequence. And in the end, I think Alec and David Lean sat and talked for another quarter an hour discussing what the motivation was. And it was never really resolved. And David said, “Well, just be stunned by the bomb blast that’s gone off, look towards the heavens, spin around, and then fall on the detonator.” And that way it really doesn’t matter. The motivation can be enigmatic.
One of the aspects when we did the treatment, the basic scenario as it were of the film was the fact that in the book the bridge is never blown up and we decided that it was absolutely essential. It should be first of all it’s a dramatic requirement of the story.
You cannot have all this twoing and throwing and lives being lost and things going on and the bridge somehow just remains there. It had to be the climactic period of the picture, the climactic scene. And so that was the big change that we made. I did meet Pierre Bull once and he was intrigued by the new story that David Lean had added to his original story and he said, “I wish I’d thought of that because I would have written that myself in the book.
” When it came to the blowing up of the bridge, which we had to do well after all the shooting was finished because we couldn’t do any retakes. There’d be no more bridge. It became a rather grand occasion. The plan was that the bridge has an official opening because a Japanese train full of Japanese highranking officers and men is coming over the bridge to visit the camp. David decided to cover the explosion of the bridge with five cameras.
One was the master camera which he was on which was downstream looking back up the river towards the ridge which was the classical full screen long shot. The other shots were pre-positioned and they were built like dugouts with little holes for the cinemascope camera to peep through and there were four of those.
We did think at one time of maybe putting a camera actually on the train but he said well that’s not really from anybody’s point of view. Might be a lovely shot but I don’t know how I could use. So, we discarded that and we’ve just placed the other four cameras around the bridge to get the best possible angles and they were all shot with the cameras slightly speeded up. Now, in order that the shot would go smoothly, the art director Don Ashton devised quite a clever system of lights.
Once the cameras were running at up to speed, each cameraman would switch a switch on in his camera position and that in turn would light a light on a circular board with five lights around it and a lamp in the center. The camera men would switch on their light and run away out of the booth to shelter cuz nobody knew how ferocious the explosion was going to be. When the engine driver jumped off the train just before the bridge, there was another switch which he was to switch on. So that would indicate at the main control center that all five cameras were rolling and the engine driver had safely jumped off the train and it was safe to blow it. We decided that we would use a big international company called ICI which I think stands for Imperial Chemical Industries and they took over the actual blowing up of the bridge. David Lee wanted it to be blown up with one big charge so that the Japanese train would fall as the charge went off under it. But
Spiegel insisted and I think common sense said they had to put two or three charges and when you see the bridge going up there are one or two or perhaps even three explosions. Now the first day we had all sorts of people. Spiegel brought people along. It became a great big thing to watch this blowing up of this great structure. The lights went on. One light didn’t.
But however the train had started. So what happened was we cancelled the instruction to blow up the bridge. The train went across the bridge gathering speed something like 30 mph which is quite fast. The whole train went thundering over the bridge. And the one thing that saved the whole train from destruction was the fact that it plowed into the electrical generator which powered the lights and the camera at the other end of the bridge out of picture.
And that’s what saved the whole train from plunging back into the river again. One of the cameramen had just literally forgotten to switch his light on in his anxiety to get away. He just forgot to switch the switch. And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll get a crane up from Columba and we’ll lift the train back on the track.” So I went back to base to the camp telephone Colbo and spoke to the minister of engineering and he said no.
He said you will never have any of my cranes. I said why? What’s wrong? He said you didn’t invite us to the blowing up of the bridge. So that was a bit of a blow because now we really were stuck because it was the only crane on the island who was strong enough to lift an engine.
But the train engineer was very bright and he rushed down to Columbbo and he found some big jacks and they jacked the train up on these jacks and finally at around 11:00 at night without stopping we got the train back on the tracks and then the whole process was repeated when everything had been reset up again and the train pulled back into position. This time I drove the train.
I set the throttle and put a little nut and bolt through a hole to make sure it stayed there and then got off at the end of the bridge and I had a better view than anybody. Actually, different view anyway. I remember rushing out, putting my light on, then going into this hide. I remember the tremendous roar as it went up and thinking, well, that’s the end of that.
It was very anticlimatic, like something very inevitable, I guess, like an execution, you know, when the rushes arrived and there was the sound and I ran it and I could hear the train approaching, approaching, and then suddenly all I heard was and I thought perhaps the labs had cut it off. So I ran all five takes and there was nothing on it.
Eventually, by looking at the dates on the sheets, I discovered that John Mitchell, the sound recordist, had printed up the abortive one because he didn’t record the actual blowing up of the bridge. So, we were landed without any noise of the bridge blowing up. So I went to the government film unit and they had 193878 HMV effects discs there and there was a train crash on there which went on for a long time and I had that transferred and I fitted that and it fitted perfectly after the bridge had blown initially.
I think we were going to try and get a long shot of the jungle from somewhere or other and then cut to the birds flying around as the picture had opened to show the symbol of peace and tranquility and how nature would prevail in the end and everything would return to as it was before they started to build a bridge.
And David said to me one day, I wonder how we could show this terrible scene of devastation and destruction from the bird’s point of view. I said, well, could we try it with a helicopter? He said, well, do you think it could be shot? I said, well, I’m sure it could be if we can get one. So we got in touch with the Royal Salon Air Force and they very kindly provided a helicopter for one day.
So we had to lay it all on very carefully and Eddie Fley was very helpful to me in this respect because he stayed concealed on the remains of the destroyed train which was still lying there. And I had another assistant director also on the radio phone to cue the stunt double for Clipton to rush onto the foreground.
And so I shot it from the helicopter queueing Eddie when to light the fire to show the burning train. And then a second queue to start the stunt double running on. So when we pull back, you see the whole bridge and and clipped it in the foreground and going on and on and on virtually into infinity.
And that was all in one complete take. I think we did it about six times because we had a lot of trouble with the helicopter and the downdraft with the wind with the helicopter rocking from side to side. And it made more complicated because as it was a cinemas scope picture, there was great difficulty in getting an angle from the helicopter where the tail plane wouldn’t come into the picture.
So the helicopter had to fly crabwise sideways backwards to get the effect of the pull back because there were no zoom lenses in those days. That was another very important thing. So we had to do everything either mechanically on the on the dolly or on or in this case on the helicopter and that was the end of the picture.
Shortly after that, Sam sent Jack Hildyard, the continuity girl, and most of the electricians and the crew back to England. And we did a lot more shooting afterwards with doing the track through the jungle separately to the main crew. And that was, I guess, about the middle of May. David Lean loves the whole business of making a film. He’s wedded to it. It’s like a religion to him.
He finds it very difficult to stop shooting because he’s always got all sorts of ideas of little grace shots that can be done and so on. That was another bone of contention with Spiegel who as producer quite rightly said look we’ve got to come to an end. We’ve got everything is in the bag and David would say yes but I need that shot of the bird. Well, why do you need that? Could we not do without it? No, no, that’s an integral part.
And so David Lean, I think, was left behind with a camera operator and a camera. And even then, when he was in effect hauled back, he was protesting that there was still another shot he wanted to do. David Lee was very broke at this time, and I think in cohorts with Spiegel, it was arranged that his contract would be signed in the Bahamas.
But even so, David Lean couldn’t come back to England for one year or even two years. And it was for that reason that of course the picture was cut in Paris because Spiegel wanted very much and it would have been madness not to have had David Lean present in the cutting. It was a concern all the time in the scripting stage and when the picture was cut that it would be very long.
It’s always a worry with long pictures because exhibitors say if the picture’s too long, we can only get one or maybe two showings a day and it’s going to reflect on the takings and so on. But it was a long picture and we had to trim. And David Lean is very good at trimming.
I mean, although he is self-indulgent in a sense in his shooting, he will put on his other hat as editor and he will cut his picture. But the picture was still on the long side. But we found and I think it has been found by subsequent people who’ve seen it generations even that the epic quality of the film sustained its length. David Le was always worried when he made pictures prior to Quai the way in which the British critics turned up at the special showing called the press show. They’re usually at 9 or 10:00 in the morning.
And he was outraged to find that many famous critics would arrive 10, 15, 20 minutes after the start of the film and then give a review of the film. And he was shocked and outraged to think of the time and trouble and care that’s gone into the opening of the picture and the proposing of the themes and the people to the audience. All this was missed by these critics who became very blas and so on.
So he said, “When we have the press showing of the film, we will tell the critics that the picture starts at 10:00 sharp and at 10:00 sharp, the doors will be shut and you won’t be able to get in.” And I was there and I stood in the foyer with Spiegel and with David Lean and we watched and it was amazing the number of film critics who came in at 5 10 tapped on the glass doors, couldn’t understand why they were locked and went away.
And we found it was a very solitary lesson to the critics because the film was so good that it got all the good reviews anyway. And of course those that hadn’t seen it had to try and find to see it some other time. We didn’t make any facilities for them. We just outsmarted the critics for once. It made a great deal of profit for Colombia Pictures. It was nominated for eight Oscars and it was awarded seven.
This picture did establish David Lean as a big international director from being a British homegrown director, shall we say. I knew it was going to be a classic when we were filming it. I felt it. And it first happened to me when their men marched into the prisoner of war camp. They marched in and you felt a pride. You felt a pride in a human animal. And that’s the thing we’ve all got really.
Then when he did that brilliant little closeup of the boot going up and down in time to the da da da da da da da and a flapping soul on it, you know, brilliantly touches. That’s when I first realized when they marched in my camp, I thought we making a classic. Wasn’t the blowing up of a bridge. No, it wasn’t that. It was the psychological fight between the colonels. Blown up beach was an incidental thing.
