John Krish

John Krish was interviewed by Patrick Russell at the National Film Theatre on 27 May, 2003.

Krish discusses his career, stretching from behind-the-scenes wartime work with documentary figures including Jennings and Massingham, through some 30 years as a writer and director.

• The Great Tradition
• Cecil B. De Musk
• The Elephant Never Forgets
• Red Cross - That's Us!
• Return to Life

Interview © BFI 2003

The Great Tradition

Geoff Andrew: Good evening, I'm Geoff Andrew, Programmer of the NFT, and I'd like to welcome you here to an evening with John Krish, the culmination of our season of John's films. I'd just like to say a few words. When Kevin Brownlow suggested this season to us I was extremely intrigued by the proposition, because John used to come to a cinema I worked in many years ago, but I had never actually seen any of his films, so I said yes at once [to an NFT season]. I was very glad to discover, upon going to the first programme, that my interest was rewarded aplenty. I think we've got a fairly remarkable film-maker here and it'll be very interesting to hear him in conversation with Patrick Russell here tonight.

Before we get started, I'd like to thank Kevin Brownlow for that proposal; Julie Pearce, Maggi Hurt and Lesley Jones of the NFT for their various services for this season; the many staff of the National Archive at Berkhamsted, particularly Joss Winn; Paul Sargent of the Imperial War Museum; and particular thanks to Patrick Russell, Keeper of Non-fiction at the Archive, who will be doing the interview tonight and who has put lots and lots of work into this retrospective. Also, of course, I'd like to thank John Krish for being such a wonderful person at these screenings. Before John and Patrick come on, we're going to show you Let My People Go, made in 1961. It's about twenty minutes long, and it's the start of a wonderful evening, so enjoy yourselves.

[screening of Let My People Go]

Patrick Russell: John, when you look back at a film you made over forty years ago, what sort of feelings does it bring to mind?

John Krish: Well, this one gets me very near tears always, because of what they went through, and because of the people who helped to make it who had come out of South Africa in the underground. It was a terrible time. It's not possible to make films like this and not feel for them. I'm glad I had the chance to make it. But the important thing about this is that everybody who worked on this worked for nothing - the money for it came from appeals in the press. Letters were sent to the Telegraph, the Times and the Manchester Guardian, as it was then, saying that we were going to make this film, and asking for no more than a pound to get us going. And the money came, so we started. When we ran out of money we showed what we had made in a viewing theatre in Wardour St. and handed the hat round and got more money and we continued. When we had finished it, we had the greatest piece of luck because the South African government were very frightened of it. They put an advertisement on the front page of all the big papers warning everyone against this film - which was the greatest publicity we could ever have had! [audience laughs] So that's my cherished memory of it, that advertisement.

PR: We'll go right back to the beginning now. You entered the film industry at a remarkably young age, how did this come about?

JK: Well, I was very cheeky. I wanted to get into the theatre but there were no vacancies. I'd seen Night Mail [Basil Wright/Harry Watt, 1936] when I was thirteen and it had stayed in my head. So when the theatre wasn't available, I thought of going into the unit that had made Night Mail. I looked in the phone book and saw it was the GPO Film Unit. They had an office in Soho Square so I rang them - and discovered they had moved to Denham! But I got the name of the production manager, who was in charge of employing people, and I took myself to Denham. When I arrived I was horrified to find there were studio police at the gates, stopping anybody from going in. And so I said I had an appointment with Dora Wright, the production manager, which I hadn't - and they let me through. She - and the man who ran it, Ian Dalrymple, were so impressed at my impertinence they gave me a job on the spot! [audience laughs]

PR: The result was that you found yourself at the heart of what we think of as the Great British Documentary Tradition. Did it feel like something that momentous at the time?

JK: Not at all, no. I was working with wonderful, sane, and loony people, like Humphrey Jennings, who was a total lunatic but wonderful, a passionate film-maker. No, I had no feeling of being somewhere important until I grew up and realised how much I cherished what they had given me. Because none of them were cynics and the film industry, as I discovered later, is full of cynicism. But these people were in it because they loved the business. The very first man I assisted was Harry Watt on Target for Tonight [1941]. I was second assistant, which meant I went for the tea and I went for the fags. And I watched what was going on. The second man I assisted was Jack Lee. The idea behind employing me was not to use me as a 'dogsbody' but to train me, so I was very privileged in that I would work with a director on location and then go back in the cutting room and work with the editor on the same film. That is the most glorious start any young fellow could have. I was seventeen. It couldn't have been better.

PR: Probably the most famous non-fiction film-makers that you were associated with at different points in the 1940s were Humphrey Jennings and Richard Massingham. I presume it would be difficult to imagine two more different personalities or film-makers.

JK: Yes, Richard Massingham was an amateur, and Humphrey was the most passionate man about film. He showed me it was possible to be passionate about film - but he also showed me how not to behave towards other people, especially the unit around you. I mean, he was a total sod with people! [JK laughs] And he was incredibly impatient. When I was working on Listen to Britain [1942] as the assistant to the editor he used to stand over me when I was on the joining machine. Now the joining machine was lethal to one's fingers and if you didn't watch what you were doing you might lose one. You might make a perfect join but you would lose a finger. And [Humphrey] would walk up and down behind me. He would do exactly the same thing when he was seeing morning rushes. He could not sit still looking at his own work in the cinema. He'd be walking up and down. Of course, the cutting room - with him and [Stewart] McAllister - was in absolute chaos.

Because I was very much the junior I was not allowed to work overtime, so come half past five or six o' clock - and we worked six days a week then - I would have to go home. They would work all night and would have the film all over the floor, all up the walls, and every morning I had to re-file the entire film. Then they would shout at me because they'd want a piece of film which they had lost and which I would have to find! I mean, I don't exaggerate Humphrey's behaviour. I was having a sly cup of tea in the canteen at Denham - and the canteen at Denham was huge because it was a major film studio. It was full of extras. The actors went to the posh restaurant but the café was very large. There I was, sitting at a table minding my own business, and suddenly Humphrey, right at the other end, was standing in the door shouting at me, 'What the bloody hell do you think you're doing there?' In front of a totally full canteen! And he felt no shame about it, you know - that was him. But I loved him. He taught me a great deal. It was wonderful to work on Listen to Britain. It was a wonderful start.

Cecil B. De Musk

PR: Do you feel that your own later films as a director were extensions of the principles of the documentary movement or a reaction against them?

JK: Oh, I think a reaction against them. I've only made one conventional documentary which was called Away for the Day [1952], which was about a whole lot of coach trips. You've seen it, haven't you? It's pretty dull, I think.

PR: It's not that bad...

JK: Well, thank you [JK laughs]. But it's in the tradition. I made it at British Transport and it was made to sell coach trips, which it did. I'm glad I didn't have to make any more. No, I have tried to push it, and some people may think I pushed it too far with films like Drive Carefully Darling [1975] and The Finishing Line [1977], but I don't think I have.

PR: How did you first make the transition from the cutting room to the director's chair?

JK: Oh, by being betrayed - which is endemic in the business. I was an editor at Merton Park Studios which was a conglomeration of different documentary units. I was cutting a terrible film directed by a terrible director called Cecil Musk, who was known as Cecil B. De Musk. [audience laughs] He actually worked with a megaphone and wore riding breeches! At Merton Park - I mean, really. He directed this RAF film called Flying with Prudence [1946], which is a pun. Prudence was personified by a blonde actress called Patricia Cutts. She appeared in the cockpit of this bomber telling the pilot and the co-pilot what they were doing wrong - it was absolutely ludicrous.

Anyway, I had to cut it and because Cecil B. De Musk insisted on reality, they didn't build a set - they brought in the fuselage of a plane. Well, there was nowhere for the mike, let alone the lamps, so every single line in that film was post-synched. The supervising editor there said, 'How long will it take you?' and I said at least a fortnight because every single line of this forty-minute picture had to be post-synched - that is, the actors had to come into the recording theatre and say the lines to the screen - a very long, arduous and difficult process. So we did it. We did all the recordings and I took all the material back to the cutting room and started to fit it. After three days I was at it and there was a phone call in the cutting room. It was the producer. He said, 'I'm sitting in the theatre, waiting to dub the film. Where is it?' I said, 'I told the supervising editor it would take me two weeks to fit it.' He said, 'Don't rat on your colleagues' and I said, 'I'm going!' And I left. But another producer from one of the other companies, hearing that I was going, said, 'How would you like to direct a film?' I said, 'Fine, what's it about?' He said, 'Steel.' [audience laughs]. That was the first film I directed in south Wales, in Ebbw Vale.

PR: Well, you'll be pleased...

JK: Oh no, you haven't got it...!

PR: ... or horrified to know we're going to show three minutes from your first film, Pattern for Progress [1948].

JK: Oh, my god! And they paid to come here, these people.

PR: We chose the best three minutes we could find. [audience laughs] If we could run Pattern for Progress, please.

JK: Oh, you swine...!

[run clip]

JK: That's when I thought I was Eisenstein. [audience laughs]

The Elephant Never Forgets

PR: It does have the look of an editor's mind at work. We'll move onto the next stage of your career. From the beginning, then, you were very much associated with the sponsored documentary and this remains at the heart of your career for many years afterwards. And early in the 1950s you are working for some of the great centres of public sector documentary film-making. First of all, the Mining Reviews. You worked on a number of those. I'm sure there are many people here who aren't familiar with the Mining Reviews, so perhaps you could say something about those.

JK: Well, the Coal Board had its own film unit and every month a newsreel would go out to all the pits. They would be full of 'human interest' stories or technical advances or about safety in the mines. They'd be one reel and it was casual work for all of us directors and cameramen. They were made by a company called Data who were very left-wing and, as a result, got very little work from the government. They were mostly card-carrying members, but the Coal Board was their principal employer. I did some of the 'human interest' stories from time to time when I wasn't busy doing something else. I didn't go underground because I'm a natural claustrophobe.

PR: We'll look at one of them in a minute, but let's move on to British Transport Films - an even more famous centre of documentary film-making. What's the story there?

JK: You mean, how did it start?

PR: How did it start and how did you find British Transport Films as a place to work?

JK: It started just at the point when a whole lot of other units were closing due to lack of sponsors, and the war was over so the Crown Film Unit closed. British Transport, having just happened because of nationalisation, had a huge pot of money and a huge number of subjects, but the pot of money wasn't really related to what we were being paid, I seem to remember. We started very modestly, in two rooms in the headquarters of London Transport, and the feeling was wonderful as this really did seem as if it was going to be a wonderfully exciting new unit.

I made with Jack Holmes - who had been in the Crown Film Unit as a senior director and was a very lovely man - their fourth production, This Year - London [1951], which was about a factory outing, a shoe factory coming from Leicester to London for the day. I think it's a very jolly, simple film that works. We ran it in one of the [NFT's season of John Krish] programmes, didn't we? Then they moved to Saville Row and everything changed. We all had offices, and it was not like being in a film unit at all. It was like being in a ministry of a film unit. It was dreadful. The producer had a three-bar electric fire and a fitted carpet. The production manager had a two-bar electric fire and a carpet. Jack Holmes and I, who shared an office, had a radiator, and there was even a tea lady! All the atmosphere had gone. Jack Holmes left, and I made The Elephant Will Never Forget [1953]. Are we coming to that later?

PR: We're coming to that very soon, so tell us the story.

JK: In 1952 the trams in London were coming to an end, and I was ordered to go to the New Cross depot on Saturday night with five minutes of film to photograph the chairman of London Transport shaking hands with the driver of the last tram. [audience laughs] I said to [producer] Edgar Anstey, 'There has to be a film here about London's last tram.' And he said, 'There isn't.' [audience laughs] And that was that. So I came out of his office determined to make one. I teamed up with Bob Paynter - who is here today, I'm happy to say - who was an assistant cameraman there. Between us and a sympathetic associate producer, we stole film stock from the cupboard, and in those last five days, we made this film without a script. It was a very strange arrangement because the unit knew we were doing it and yet they didn't own up to it. The production manager was so strongly 'in favour of' the film that he didn't allow us any transport! We went to New Cross on a sodding bus, with a camera and a tripod! Well, that was alright. But with Bob Paynter, and Claude Hudson - who is dead, unfortunately, but who was the most wonderful assistant I've ever had - and Bob Paynter's assistant, we just worked our guts off and made this film.

I had no preconception about how it should be, but I did know that I wanted an old couple taking their last tram ride in London before it all finished. I went to a Darby and Joan club in Lewisham and found a couple. I made sure that they weren't married because I didn't want them sitting in silence throughout the whole trip [audience laughs], and so we shot.

On the very last night I wanted a shot of the 'last tram' going over Blackfriars Bridge with no traffic on the bridge, just the tram going away from camera. Technically, it was very difficult because it was night and in those days we had no hypersensitive stock. The tram had to go very, very slowly and we had to turn the camera very slowly in order to get an exposure. So there couldn't be any other traffic on the bridge, otherwise it would be [appear to be] going like mad. So we had to have an elaborate signalling system with the police, whose permission we had got to empty the bridge of traffic. We had Claude and the City of London policeman, who was going to be on the brow of Blackfriars Bridge, making sure no traffic was coming towards the camera. I had one [lookout] on my side, making sure no traffic was coming from behind camera. Claude worked out a very complicated signalling process. He said to this City of London policeman, 'You stand on the brow of the bridge. When I flash once, it means we're ready and you flash me back. When I flash you twice, you flash me twice and you are telling me it means the traffic has stopped. When I flash you three times,' Claude says, 'that means we are rolling, the camera's going now. Is that clear? Any problems?' And the City of London policeman said 'Yes, I don't have a torch.' [audience laughs]. So it was handkerchief time - but we got the shot.

When the film had been cut, I had by chance a collection of old music hall songs - because in the army I had done an old music hall show regularly. I came across a song about the tram called 'Riding on Top of the Car' and Edward Williams, who is here, did a wonderful arrangement of it. I got the Darby and Joan club and Archie Harradine from the Players Theatre to sing the track you will hear. We had a sing-song at the Darby and Joan club: we gave them tea, there were song sheets, and there was a band. They sang the song I needed, but when I got back to the cutting room I discovered something really dreadful. When I was setting it up, I said to the production manager at British Transport - who was against the film, remember - that I wanted Ken Cameron, the old Crown Film Unit sound recordist to do it. He said, 'Oh, we can't have Ken, he's too much money.' He was about £5-an-hour more - it was absolute rubbish. So they gave me a 'backstreet abortionist' for a recordist, and when I heard the stuff it was unusable. So we had to do it all over again for the sake of £10 or £20. By the time that we did it, it was already winter and I was asking very old people - like me now, of course - to turn out and come to the club for another sing-song, and Edward had to bring the band back. It was awful to have to do it again but the spirit of the thing was almost the same, although not quite in my ears.

[screening of Mining Review and The Elephant Will Never Forget]

JK: There is, of course, a postscript to this. I was sacked for making that. Edgar Anstey wrote to me - it was just a couple of lines thanking me for all the hard work. I can't remember the lines. Patrick [Russell] said I should have framed it. In fact, I tore it up, I was so angry. So Anstey thanked me for all the work I had done but said it was time the unit had 'new blood'. And I was twenty-nine! [audience laughs] But it stayed on his conscience until he died, because every time we met he'd say, 'Oh, I must tell you about the tram film. They're holding it in Moscow as a supreme example of British documentary. They love our film.' Our film? Please... [audience laughs]

Red Cross - That's Us!

PR: But it does seem that one of the threads running through this whole season is the creative tension between the sponsor and the film-maker...

JK: You can say that again, Patrick.

PR: Do you feel that you needed that creative tension to do your best work?

JK: I tell you, I didn't. Not for one minute. I would much rather have had a comfortable life and so would my family, because all that tension got back behind the front door. No, they were very difficult times always, endless struggles.

PR: And were there any times that you felt you had the free hand you wanted?

JK: Oh yes, this [The Elephant Will Never Forget] was a free hand. A lot of the films I've made, I've had a free hand, but at a price, really. I've taken chances. This is going to sound vain - I don't mean it to - but when I've been presented with a brief which I thought wouldn't make a film and I've said 'I think it should be done this way' and they've said 'right, do it that way' - you know, that is taking a huge chance because it's not what they wanted in the first place. That's very true of the last film we are going to see [Return to Life, 1960], of course, which we'll talk about later.

PR: We can look at another example first, we can show a bit of Red Cross - That's Us!. Now this is a film you made towards the end of your very long association with the producer Leon Clore, and it was made to promote the junior branch of the Red Cross.

JK: That's right, a recruiting film for children.

PR: We're going to look at two or three minutes. This is a moving scene that was filmed at a centre for mentally handicapped people. We'll have a look at the clip and talk about the circumstances afterwards.

[screening of clip]

JK: The thing about that sequence is that the children were helping them choose pictures and the pictures changed every month. I think the most remarkable thing about this is that none of the children are afraid. They show absolutely no fear. When I showed the whole film to the Red Cross for their approval so we could complete it, they said this sequence had to come out, because if parents saw it they wouldn't want their children associating with 'these kind of people'. And this is the Red Cross talking! My producer Leon Clore, with whom I did all the prize-winning films I've made, said, 'If this sequence comes out I'm going to give you all your money back. That sequence must stay in, otherwise you won't have the film. I'll gladly give you every penny of the budget but you're not going to touch the film.' And so they thought about it, and it stayed in. But it was an appalling piece of behaviour from a sponsor again. And if I hadn't had Leon by me, as one of the most loyal producers a director could wish to have... He always believed his director was right. In point of fact, I remember a meeting - I can't remember the film but it was with a government department who were objecting to something - and he said, 'We don't tell you how to run the government and you don't tell us how to make pictures.' [audience laughs] So he didn't get much work from the government, surprisingly, but he was a wonderful man to head a unit because he always gave 100% support.

PR: Now obviously there's a lot of spontaneity in a scene like the one we have just seen, but would it be fair to say, as a documentary maker, you have a particular emphasis on a purposeful and controlled approach instead of improvisation?

JK: Yes, I loathe improvisation. I have to have control because the spirit of the film is residing in me, not them. They don't know what I'm making so I can't let them have the liberty, because the film will go astray or the spirit will go astray. So yes, I am very controlling. Ask my children. Ask my grandchildren.

PR: At the same time, close colleagues of yours like Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz were promoting what they felt was a more liberated cinema under the banner of 'Free Cinema'. How did you feel about that?

JK: I hated it. It seemed to me the most amateur way of going about things, and I was totally intolerant of it. Enough?

PR: Tell us what you really feel... [audience laughs] Well, the emphasis of tonight and this season is very much on your documentary work, but you did do some work in features and television. In fact, we're going to see a short piece here that you did for television in the 1960s. I'm sure that just about everybody in the audience has seen this bit of film before but most of you probably didn't know - as I didn't know - that this was actually directed by John Krish.

[screening of The Avengers titles sequence]

PR: So how on earth did that come about?

JK: Well, the man who produced this was the man who double-crossed me in Merton Park studios, the one who said the film would be ready in three days when I said it would be ready in a fortnight. I think I was on his conscience and he thought I could do it, so I did it. I was, in fact, asked to do the first of these colour Avengers to set the style, but the script was so awful that I did the titles instead and the third, fifth and seventh one instead.

Return to Life

PR: Back to films with a message - particularly in the 1970s you made a lot of very short public information films. Do you want to tell us about your work on this sort of film.

JK: Ah, when I got the nickname of Dr Death. Yes, I did run over an awful lot of children. And burnt a few. [audience laughs] I don't know, one gets type-cast. Commercials and the government - once you've done one or two with children they think you can't work with adults. It's exactly the same with commercials. If you've made a commercial for sausages they think you can't direct one for chopped herring - it's crazy! So I was doing one after another of road safety commercials. Are you going to show some?

PR: We are, and we're also going to show - I don't know if you'll thank me or curse me for this - but you also did a lot of straight-forward product commercial advertisements over the years...

JK: Oh god, yes!

PR: And so we're going to look at a compilation reel of some of your public information films from the 1970s and then some adverts, one of which is from 1950 and the rest of which are also from the 1970s.

[screening of clips]

JK: I just want to say one thing about the sewing machine commercial where you saw the child running across to her black friend. That's the first black child to appear in a commercial and there were letters of complaint to the Central Office of Information about it.

PR: We're running rather short of time, so I'm afraid we won't have time for questions this evening. I'm sure John will be happy to answer any questions that you have individually after the screening because we do need to make time for our final film, which runs for half an hour. Tonight's concluding film is called Return to Life [1960] and you said from the beginning that this was a film you wanted to end the retrospective with. Tell us the story please.

JK: Well, it's about refugees. I am the son of a refugee and my grandparents were refugees. And this film needed to be made. It was made in an entirely different climate when World Refugee Year happened in 1960. When we welcomed refugees, when a man didn't have to sew up his eyes and his ears and his mouth to get attention, which is what we read in our papers today with this man from Iran. [Abas Amini, a Kurdish Iranian, made the dramatic protest against Home Office efforts to overturn his successful asylum application.] I was asked by the Foreign Office to make a film celebrating World Refugee Year, which was instigated by three young Englishmen, one of whom was Chris Chattaway. The film the Foreign Office wanted was the history of Britain and the way we have taken in refugees over the years. It was to be shown in foreign embassies all over the world. I had to put forward my own point of view because I thought that kind of information - it was a list, really - belonged to written material, not to film.

I suggested that a more telling film about refugees would be one that showed audiences what it was like to be a refugee. And they agreed. They wanted a historic sequence, which they have - it's very short and it's done with drawings. When we ran it for their approval they only wanted one thing changed - utterly ridiculous! - a line in the commentary which said 'In France, the Huguenots...' and they said 'We'd rather you didn't say "In France...", its going to upset the French.' I said, 'Where do you think the Huguenots came from, the Isle of Wight?' [audience laughs]

I made it with refugees. There are no actors in the film. I constructed a family for the film. The family is a man, his wife, a small boy, a baby and their grandmother. The only three who are related are the mother, the baby and the son. For the man who played her husband, I wanted somebody who would not instantly be sympathetic to an audience. I didn't want anybody looking like Yehudi Menuhin. I didn't want you feeling sorry for him. I wanted you feeling antagonistic. I searched for this face and this man, and I found him. He was a Serb living in Brighton, and he'd been a prisoner of the Russians. He'd spent his time in solitary confinement in the dark and his face shows it. The woman who plays his wife was Croatian and, at that time, I had no idea of the tensions between them. I didn't speak their language and they didn't speak English, so I worked through a script that was translated into Croatian, and through an interpreter a lot of the time.

The woman who plays the grandmother had been a slave worker in Auschwitz. She wasn't Jewish but she had had a terrible time. She prayed the RAF would bomb and kill her. They didn't. She killed herself before I had finished editing the film. There was one moment when we were shooting, a sequence in a holiday home for old people, which you will see and in which she features. When I was filming her there, I said to her one afternoon, 'I don't need you this afternoon', meaning 'you can have a rest, the time is yours'. She thought I said I didn't love her and she had hysterics. She locked the door of her room and it was a hell of a job to get her out. So, in a way, it was no surprise when I heard she had killed herself. She had gone out and bought a length of rubber tubing. She lived in a tiny room in Brighton. She put one end of the rubber tubing on the gas tap, stood over the kitchen table and put the other end in her mouth. She turned on the gas and died, collapsed over her table.

There were three of us at her funeral, the warden of the refugee hostel, who you'll see, the priest, and myself. My family tried to make her feel wanted. She came home to our house in Hampstead and she made some clothes for our children, but it wasn't enough. She just believed that nobody loved her. That was bad enough, but there was worse to come. On the final day of shooting, when I was saying good bye to everybody - and we'd had six difficult weeks, it was a very hard picture for them to have acted in and for me to have directed. When the husband and wife were saying goodbye to each other, they spat at each other. They so loathed each other - one was Croatian, one was Serb - that they spat at each other. That was the way they said goodbye.

As a Jew, having to make a film about a Croatian who was pro-Nazi and proud of the fact that she had smuggled the Ustasha flag - the Ustasha party was the fascist party of Croatia - she had smuggled it into this country and that was what she was most proud of - I couldn't let it make any difference. They were refugees and I was there to make a film about them. I think what is so terrible is what I started out by saying, the climate today is so different from when I made this, and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves now that it is so different today. And that's all I'd like to say, really.

PR: Ladies and gentlemen, John Krish.

[screening of Return to Life]