Object of the week: Original budget breakdown for Black Narcissus – who got paid what

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) was a hugely ambitious production. Powell famously decided not to shoot any of the Indian-set story in India, decreeing “the atmosphere in this film is everything… we must create and control it from the start”. It was therefore filmed primarily at Pinewood Studios, with a small number of exteriors at Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex doubling for India, and Irish-set flashbacks filmed in Galway.

The film was made under the banner of Independent Producers, a group of individual companies set up in 1942, and financed by the Rank Organisation. Rank gave creative freedom to his filmmakers and provided generous budgets with the aim of breaking into the international market. This had been successful with earlier films such as Henry V (1944), which cost around £500,000, but significantly less so with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which had got nowhere near earning back its huge budget of £1,300,000.

The total estimated budget for Black Narcissus was £326,120 and this budget document preserved in the BFI National Archive gives a fascinating insight into how the costs break down. Powell and Pressburger took home £10,000 apiece for their shared writer-producer-director duties. The hand annotation of £2,020 under ‘Story and Script’ shows that Pressburger belatedly remembered to reimburse himself for the rights to Rumer Godden’s source novel, which he had optioned independently before Black Narcissus was confirmed as an Archers project.

One of the biggest budget lines was, unsurprisingly, the art department. The monumental convent, formerly the Palace of Mopu, was constructed on the lot at Pinewood and raised on scaffolding to facilitate clever camerawork that gave the impression of a high altitude. It was used for interiors and exteriors and was supplemented with skilfully rendered backdrops, matte paintings and miniatures.

The next biggest cost was the talent. MGM originally demanded a huge loan fee of £20,000 for Deborah Kerr. Seeing Powell’s dismay, Ben Goetz, head of MGM British, took pity on him and reduced it to (a still fairly substantial) £16,000. Rank recognised the value of Kerr’s star power so signed it off. Almost as costly – in fact more so, given he worked less days than Kerr, plus received expenses – is Sabu, the Indian child star of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), by then based in Hollywood and commanding a base salary of £12,500.

Black Narcissus shot across the summer of 1946 and, while it finished on schedule, its ambitious scale meant it eventually cost just over £350,000. It did reasonable box office in Britain, Europe and America, however, and won Oscars for its art direction and cinematography, vindicating Rank’s faith in his prestige strategy and paving the way for Powell and Pressburger’s even bolder next film, The Red Shoes (1948).

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.