Mike Bradsell

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Mike Bradsell Part 1

Simon Rose  00:00

Hello, Mike. Thank you very much for agreeing to take part in the history project.

Mike Bradsell  00:06

My pleasure.

Simon Rose  00:08

I'd like to start simply with when and where were you born?

Mike Bradsell  00:13

I was born in 1933 in West Lean on Sea on the Essex coast,

Simon Rose  00:23

and tell me a little bit about your childhood, your family, and your schooling.

Mike Bradsell  00:31

Well, for the first six years, it was a sort of idyllic life because living right by the seaside, a primary school in the summer, particularly, my mother would collect me after school, and if it was a nice day, we'd go and have a picnic tea on the beach, and I would just put some swimming trunks on, and and go paddling. There was there's quite a tide in the South End area. So when when it's out, there's a huge expanse of mud. In fact, it was often nicknamed South End on mud. But there was a little wooden area that that captured the tide when it came in, which never got more than about three feet, maybe two feet deep at the theoretically deep end, which young kids could splash about in, and it was. I loved the the the fact that it wasn't just an ordinary town or a suburb or anything-it was very colourful, even particularly South End itself. Even though it was a bit brash, I loved the places like the Kursaal. Oh no, they're called the Kursel amusement park, and the there were some dodgems and things by by the pier, and some in the summer there were on the what they called the cliff, so they were really only a sort of slope like that, not like Beachy head. They had illuminated gardens at night, and there was a big floral clock, which maybe about 12 feet in diameter. So there was colour everywhere. When the when the war broke out, we we were advised to move from the area if we could, but it wasn't easy. We didn't know where to go, and in any case, the what was called the phoney war was there for several months. So it was a case of well, perhaps war isn't so bad, but then my father, who was an insurance official working in the city of London, went to work one day, and there was no office there, just a pile of rubble. So he had to find somewhere, at least temporarily, to to live near their temporary accommodation for work, which was in a sort of palatial building owned by a lady Crossfield in Highgate. So he found some temporary accommodation in Potter's Bar, and as soon as possible, we, my mother and I, found somewhere a flat in Potters Bar so that we could join join forces again. And I found apologies to the current residents of Potters Bar. I found it a very drab, dull place. I think my my yardstick was that it didn't even have a Woolworths or a Marks and Spencers. I mean, you can't have a shopping street without those. And although my I went to a primary school in Potter's Bar, and it people used to laugh and jeer because it had a big sign up in in the front garden that said Potters Bar High School for girls, and then in small letters and preparatory for boys, and of course people ignore that. Oh, you go to a girls' school, but in retrospect, I got a very good sort of grammar style education from there, and I went to a bigger grammar school in St Albans when I was 11, but then when the war ended, my parents were keen to get back to the South End area, which is something I was very much in favour of, and in 1946. Or incidentally, the the irony of being told to move from the South End area, if we could, was that I think only one bomb fell in that area throughout the war, and that was on a pub when it was wasn't open, and we we were right in the middle of the Blitz in Potter's Bar because it was the Luftwaffe would come in maybe to bomb the docks, and if they met a lot of anti-aircraft fire, they they drop drop some of their bombs and then make a wide sweep to get back to Germany as soon as possible, and unload the rest on any target that they could find, even residential. So, we often heard bombs screaming overhead, and thinking, "Oh, I hope it doesn't land here. And it was-I wouldn't say that we were really in the thick of the Blitz. A lot of people went through far more than we did, but we did have some scary nights.

Mike Bradsell  06:02

The the government had installed a Morrison shelter, which is a bit like a a sheet metal dining table with a wire grill on the side. You you can sleep in it, and you put the the wire mesh up to avoid being cut by any flying glass if you get a hit nearby. So it was used as a dining table, and we would we'd we'd use if there was no warning at bedtime, we would go to sleep in the usual way. But I had this mixture of excitement as well as fear. Sometimes the the sound of the the the warning, moaning mini, as we used to call it, was used to. I used to get really frightened about that, but there was the excitement of, oh, we're actually allowed to get up in the middle of the night and go and have a couple of tea or something. That's can't do that normally. Anyway, we went back to the south. And then you

Simon Rose  07:14

used the Morrison Shelter sometimes, did you? Sorry. If there was a warning, did you use the Morrison Shelter?

Mike Bradsell  07:20

We did some of the time, except that as it was a relatively large house, we some relatives, aunts and uncles, who had perhaps suffered a worse fate than we had and been bombed out, they'd come and stay with us for a few months while they found somewhere else to live, and it was convenient for them to use the shelter, and we would just, if there was a warning, we would just crouch underneath the stairwell and hope that there wasn't a direct hit. But yes, we did use it sometimes.

Simon Rose  08:11

Sorry, I interrupted you. So, did you do you have any brothers or sisters?

Mike Bradsell  08:18

No, no.

Simon Rose  08:20

And what was your first inclinations of feeling you were interested in film?

Mike Bradsell  08:30

Well, I was first interested in presenting films at home when I was about nine or 10, I hadn't got any thought of actually making films at that time. But one of the uncles who had been billeted on us for a while, he had before the war he'd been a cinema projectionist, and although he had been sort of conscripted into munitions work, he had managed to get permission to leave that and become one of the projectionists at our local cinema, and he even managed to get me access to the projection box on one of the Saturday morning kids shows, and it was very exciting because I was allowed to use a lever which opened and closed the tabs. Oh bliss! And my father bought me what what was actually a leaf of a weapon, a hand cranked 35 millimetre projector, which would only take rolls of about 100 feet at a time, and of course everything was on nitrate stock in those days. And my parents smoked like chimneys. I'm surprised the house didn't go up in flames every time. I ran something, and there was no no shutter in it. So there were sort of ghosts, all white things, any text or white shirts or anything, ghost images flying northwards from from every frame. But it was exciting just having something at home, and when I was about 11, I discovered that it was actually possible to fairly cheaply make your own films. My father probably winced a bit at the thought of more, more outlay. But he did find me a fairly cheap 9.5 millimetre camera made by the the British branch of branch of Pathe Brothers. It was called a pathoscope, and I had no idea about editing or anything. I just liked the idea of shooting things and looking at them on the screen. The cassettes that you used with this camera only they're only about 30 feet long, so you had just over a minute, I think, at 16 frames a second, and although I was extremely unadventurous, I would just shoot something like relatives who've been staying with us or just visited us. I'd shoot them walking down the road to the station when they left, and things like that. But but it was it was a very exciting thing to do. I still have no no idea of turning it into a profession, but as the years went on, I got a bit more sophisticated by by about 1949 when I was about to leave school, I did a kind of promotional film for a local yacht club. I was a member of the club not because I did much in the way of sailing, but there were lots of attractive girls who were members of the club as well. So I was interested in the social side. I I shot this film of some of their activities, some of the races they did, some of the social gatherings, and so forth. And because it was, in the first place, too expensive, and I think not very easy to get duplicate copies. Any editing I was doing had to be on my reversal master, so I was very reluctant to make a single cut until I was absolutely sure that was right. It wasn't like the more recent days of film. Oh, I shouldn't have made the cut there. Put put some taper of it and cut it somewhere else. But I did some rudimentary editing just to get it all in the right order, and I began to sort of get get hooked on it. And when it was time to leave school, I just matriculated, which was the equivalent of somewhere between the current GC O level and A level, just a little bit higher than O. The headmaster at school say, Brad Soul, what what are you going to do when you leave school? And I said, Well, I really want to make films. Yes, but what are you going to do for a living? Well, sir, that's what I wanted. Oh, but nobody does that. And I thought, nobody does that. I go with my parents to the cinema twice a week. Somebody's making these films, and a lot of them are British. So, how do I get into it? But it was-I was always being told it's not what you know, but who you know. I don't know anybody. I'll never get into this.

Mike Bradsell  14:14

So, I had to. Once I'd left school, I had to do some kind of a job. I I didn't go to university because I hadn't got the slightest idea what subject I should study. I had vague thoughts of perhaps becoming a schoolmaster, but that doesn't seem right somehow. I loved languages. I was good at English and French, and hated mathematics. But so I went straight into an office job that my father recommended to me. But it was a rather Dickinson office in Fenchurch Street in the city of London, and I was just checking the motor insurance policies to make sure that the cover that was asked for by the insured person was right, and after you've done half a dozen of those, you feel really tired. And when there's a bloody great pile like this to go through, oh, I couldn't stand it. So after I was I was only 16, and I thought, but maybe at least I can stand it until I'm 18. They still had two years of conscription for 18-year-olds at that time, even though the war was over. I didn't fancy the idea of that at all. But I thought there was no point in me sort of settling for something better until I got that out of the way, but for for various reasons of I had some I didn't realise I had some sort of slight psychological nervous problems which could have manifest themselves as being rather dangerous. I don't. Yeah, I was dangerous, but it could be dangerous to my health to actually join the forces. So I was rejected with a mixture of extreme relief and extreme shame because I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be like everybody else. Anyway, I then decided, well, I better try to look for something else. So I first of all thought, well, well, if you can't beat them, join them properly. Let's do some home study to get to get some of the insurance exams done. But I found that it wasn't like An exam in English or French or something where you're asked to be creative and write a little composition. It was just lots of lots of facts and figures that you had to learn by rote. I was actually getting very thin because it was wearing me down. I'd I'd also had this sort of parallel enthusiasm for classical music and recording, so I applied to Decca to see whether they had anything that they could offer me, and they very kindly invited me to spend a day at their LP factory in Fulton Heath, just because I was so enthusiastic, they said we we feel that you're the sort of person that we would like to employ. I think you're probably too ambitious for the kind of jobs we have on offer, and I said, well, yes, I I really would like to to be attached to the the classical recording team in some capacity or other, even even if it's just editing the the usable sections of tape together or something like that. And they said, well, the head of that department really wants people to have a degree in electronics. Oh God, I can't do that. So that was a pleasant day out, but it didn't come to anything. And then I was I was really getting desperate. And in those days there were no film schools. I'm talking about 1953, 54. Some of the photographic colleges had previously had some documentary school sort of subs attached to the photographic department, but they got cameras growing cobwebs in covers. Any grant from the government to go on pursuing that had long since been withdrawn. So I thought, well, photography isn't really my my first choice, but it's a damn sight better than pushing a pen and an insurance company, so having made the decision and been accepted at the what is now poshly called the University of Westminster, which was then just the Regent Street Polly, I've been accepted, and I got a year before having to take up the position. So I saved up what I could from my rather modest earnings in insurance. My parents were quite happy to have me as an unpaid guest again. For for a couple of years, and after that, purely by chance, I'd gone through the the final exams and everything.

Mike Bradsell  20:11

Of course, the the excitement or the anxiety of taking exams keep keeps you from thinking about the future. But in the last couple of weeks of the term, oh, I've got to find a job now. What do I do? And a lot of us would be sitting, perhaps rather glumly, in the common room, envious of those who were going to open their own business or they'd been offered a post as an assistant to some famous photographer or something, and there'd be things on the notice board. Oh, oh no! I don't think I'll go for that. Oh, what about that? Oh no, somebody else has taken it. And one day, the the while we were sitting there rather gloomily, the the head of the school just poked her head round the corner and asked a sort of rhetorical question. There's nobody interested in in doing sort of odd jobs for a film company, and shut the door and said, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Give me the details. So it was it was literally a very small commercial film company, so small I shouldn't say this within the words of the walls of BECTU, but it was so small that ACTT didn't bother, wasn't interested in whether the staff were members or not, and they made commercial films and they had a dubbing theatre and editing facilities for industrial companies that wanted to make films for promotional purposes, but really didn't know much about it. So we we did sometimes make our own documentaries, and a lot of the time, we were servicing other people's films, and it didn't matter what we did because we weren't bothered by the union. If I was initially employed as a dubbing theatre projectionist, which is something you'd be very familiar with, and it was like bliss. When I was at the insurance company, if if it got to about 5o'clock, it was half an hour ago. That seems age. Oh, it's half past five at last. Okay, sometimes we'd be working late because it was particularly if they were doing the voiceover for a documentary and the the actor or member of staff of the the company who sponsored it who was doing the narration was fluffing all the time or or drying up and so forth and I I think. oh, good heavens! It's it's nearly 11 o'clock. I didn't realise we were so late. I'll have to go now because otherwise I won't catch the last train home. So it was so different. I was doing something which was theoretically not very exciting, but I'd managed to make it exciting in my own little world, and when there wasn't anything going on in the dubbing theatre, some of the editors would ask me to help file their trims, which was usually just emptying a big bin of stuff which had been thrown there and try to wind it up carefully and catalogue it, because of my photographic training, I think I had said at one stage, if you need a second cameraman on on this particular shoot, yes, I can I can do that, and it was for all of us. It was the question of if there's nobody else available, yes, I think I can do that. And in a way, over the seven years that I was there, that was like my film school, with the difference being that I was actually being paid for any mistakes I made. And somewhere, if I'm going to make a mistake. Oh, I don't make a simple one. It would do something like sending the the the cut master film and the sound the optical soundtrack for for printing, having marked it up about one minute 35 seconds out of sync, not just a couple of frames. Ultimately, it wasn't my fault because we found that the the people who'd made the film had a a separate title sequence, which was one minute 35 seconds long, which had been cut by somebody. And they hadn't told me they should have passed over to me to stick on the front, but at least for a few days, I thought, "Oh my God, I've made a horrible mistake. I'll get fired.

Simon Rose  25:11

And I guess this company was United Motion Pictures.

Mike Bradsell  25:14

Yes, that's right. Which wasn't

Simon Rose  25:15

quite as grand as it as it sounds from the title.

Mike Bradsell  25:18

Yeah.

Simon Rose  25:19

About how many people did it employ?

Mike Bradsell  25:22

About a dozen, and it was

Simon Rose  25:25

within that dozen, you had a camera department, a sound department, and an editing department.

Mike Bradsell  25:31

Yes, except that the the the borders, a bit like the border between the two islands, was a bit of a Flexible thing that I would sometimes, well, I can remember towards the end of my time there, I was the principal camera on a fairly major industrial shoot. The the director was going to cut it himself, but then found he was urgently required to to shoot or maybe cut something else. So, with some reluctance, he allowed me to cut it instead. So I was both cameraman and editor on that film, and there was some. I began began to be a fairly big fish in what was really a very little pool, and if I had written the CV of my time there, it would look very impressive. Cameraman, editor, writer, director, in terms of direction, it was I did a couple of films for the Asphalt Roads Association, just showing how they lay hot rolled asphalt and how important it is because it's the the best way of laying a smooth surface, which will last longer than concrete or or something like that, but I began to get a bit worried. Some some of my colleagues who had actually left to go to other companies, we'd often meet up or chat or something, and I found that there were certain sort of industry-wide professional practices which we didn't adopt at UMP. The first one seems pretty obvious in retrospect was to put a proper leader on the beginning of the film, so you you had proper start marks. They were, I think, 15 feet long, and count down to three, and then three feet of black to give the projectors time to switch the light on. Yes, we got a proper sync mark, but just a stretch of black, so they got nothing to focus on, nothing to act to, or anything. Also, we were editing with stripped-down projectors for 60 millimetre. The the sort of take-up mechanism wasn't used. We ran the the picture and the track, which would be synced together after the bottom sprocket, and run them into two two bins with clean white bin liners. It's amazing that nothing really got scratched. It worked, but I then realised that if we if we use a four-way synchronizer, one picture and three tracks, it was much more precise and rock solid. And if you use something like a movieola, we had we had some of the the British version, the Act made, which we called the Scratch Mielder, because I seemed to to do much more of that than actually give you a decent picture. It sounded like a lawnmower, and the the picture wasn't all that steady. It was all reminded my my old 35 mil projector at home when I was younger, but once we either rented or acquired a movieola, I thought, well, this, in conjunction with the sink bench, is the way to go,

Simon Rose  29:34

and that, of course, is the way people in the sort of industry outside were working on the whole.

Mike Bradsell  29:42

Yes, it came. The knowledge of that came in handy when I finally decided that I ought to leave, and I chose the the day that we had a sort of. Industrial industry screening of this one of these asphalt roads films, which went down very well, and afterwards I just told the managing director at UNP, I think it's time for me to move on. So he was a bit shocked and gave a sort of wry smile of the just when things are going well, you want to leave, and he was-he'd been so worried about people leaving that a couple of years earlier he'd asked us to sign six-month contracts. So I had to sort of serve my time for another six months before looking for an alternative, and of course, rather like being at the poly when five months were up. I really wanted to do something about my future now. I'll be leaving in a month. What I do

Simon Rose  30:52

before you move on, can we just backtrack a bit? So UMP was generally shooting 16 mil, some 35.

Mike Bradsell  31:01

Yes, yes. Occasionally 35, which then, which we were rather excited about. Although the most of the stuff we shot on 35 was with the a Newman Sinclair silent camera, which was really like a big amateur camera box,

Simon Rose  31:23

and I guess most of it was probably shot silent because this was this would have been before the days of easily having shooting sync sound. There was pre sort of crystal sync and nagras and things. I guess.

Mike Bradsell  31:36

Well, it was before nagras, but they did. I think they used some EMI tape recorders, which had a sync output. But they had to check it on the scope, watch watch carefully for one cycle, and keep keep that manually in in the middle. If it wandered, they had to make sure they got it back again. It didn't to keep

Simon Rose  32:05

the magnetic recorder in sync with the with the camera.

Mike Bradsell  32:09

No, it would it would be shot just with the the mains trying to hold it in sync. But of course, unsprocketed tape is subject to slip.

Simon Rose  32:20

Yeah.

Mike Bradsell  32:20

So when they transferred it onto 35 nag, they they had to keep it in sync manually. Once it was in, of course, it was okay. But we did occasionally rent an ariflex, a blimp ariflex, for some anything a bit posher, and they've got the company got its own 16 millimetre blimped Arry. In in those, I mean, not like you got in the 60s and 70s what looks like an unblemed camera, but it's so soundproof that you don't need a damn great blimp, and of course I can't remember particularly, but I think there was a physical line link between the camera and the recorder to keep sync. Digressing slightly, I can remember when I was cutting Peter Watkins' War Game. There was a very impressive shot near near the front of the film, where Peter Barkett, the cameraman, was sitting on the pillion behind a police motorcyclist, and the recordist was sitting in a sidecar, out of shot, and they had a link, a physical line link between them, and the the motorcycle had to draw up at the steps of a town hall, the driver would get off, cameraman and recordist would get off, follow him into the building, handheld tracking shot up the stairs and into a big conference room before cutting cutting the shot, and it physically. I mean, these days, of course, it it would be no problem with a very lightweight camera sync. Maybe the sync is well. The the the sound is recorded at the same on the same medium, usually, so you haven't even got to have a physical link to a separate recorder. But this was done so smoothly that it looked as if it had been from a feature film and taken several rehearsals to do. In fact, it was just a one.

Simon Rose  35:00

Yeah, so they were sort of umbilically linked with a with a pulse thing. I think it probably worked at that time.

Mike Bradsell  35:07

Yes, that's right.

Simon Rose  35:08

Presumably earlier, when you're talking about it was must have been some sort of physical thing that actually mechanically linked the the drive. I'm not sure because I think, yeah, because pulses. I don't know when the sound pulse came in, but I think it was in the sometime in the 60s.

Mike Bradsell  35:32

Well, it was beginning to come in because I left the company in 1962, So I think by about 1960 it was there. It wasn't a sort of a department that really concerned me very much. I had even before I'd even thought of moving on. I I Thought to myself, the well, I've sort of got a finger in all these pies. Is there anything that I prefer above the others? Well, I found that although I I enjoyed the chance to do a bit of direction, just my my temperament was such that I did even a fairly simple shoot. I did find it a bit of a strain. I got very nervous about it, even even though I didn't panic and run away. I managed to get the thing done, but I was quite exhausting. Yes, I like the camera work, but unless I had the opportunity to cut my own material, it was a bit frustrating handing it all over to somebody else, but I enjoyed editing, whether it was something I'd shot or somebody else had shot, and it seemed to everything sort of came into focus. Yeah, that's what I want to concentrate on. That so when I'd made this decision to leave the company after about five months. I started shopping around, and this was in the summer of 1962. I saw an advert in the newspaper for a BBC Film Department at Ealing was taking on temporary staff for the editing department, so I rang the number to find out what it was all about, and a former editor named Alf Chapman, who was one of the film operations managers, had quite a long, helpful chat with me over the phone, and he said, "Well, I better tell you, even though you may have quite a lot of experience as an editor, the the management don't really like to take on outsiders. They like them to have been trained from scratch here on the premises, but they they take on a lot of freelance people as assistants if you're on a rolling contract two months at a time. So I thought, well, that's at least two months' work. Let's see how it goes. And once I got there, I'd never never been an assistant as such. I always had to assist myself. And again at UMP, I didn't necessarily have the standard method of filing everything or anything like that. So it was a sort of

Simon Rose  38:41

logging key numbers, finding etc. etc. There was a fairly set way of doing these things, wasn't there?

Mike Bradsell  38:48

We we the the only time that we bothered with key numbers was if we were doing a bit of a net cutting job for another company, then of course we had to be very very accurate. Make sure it was so many frames after the last digit or whatever, which I understood perfectly and was quite happy to conform to. But the once I got to Ealing, I was talking to other people on the same level, and saying, "Well, I could well be only here for two months. Oh, forget that. That's just just to cover themselves in case you're absolutely used to renew it on a rolling basis. You can stay to retirement age. Well, my usefulness as an assistant editor, was extremely variable. I did make some mistakes, but if things were a bit out of the ordinary, I'd often rise to the occasion. I can remember there was a. A documentary, a sort of fly on the wall documentary about how the Savoy Hotel works, and this was shot in '35, and it was it was very well covered by I think it was Dick Bush, who was one of the star cameramen at the B at that time, And the I prepared as much as I could for the editor, who was actually very tolerant. He respected the fact that I was, in some sense, on the same level as him, having been an editor at UNP, but he needed somebody who was going to have all the material that he needed for the next scene available, and so on on the bench, which which I would do. But there came a time when he he got everything for the to to last him for the next couple of days, so I started looking through some of the paperwork and found that the the recorders had actually shot a lot of wild tracks of of certain actions. There was a one of the most distinctive, for example, was there was a scene showing the setting up of a special conference room, and they'd got some huge circular tables, and they were they were on edge and they were rolling them across the floor into the room, and it made a very distinctive sort of rumbling sound. So I thought, well, they they shot this. I wonder if it'll sync up with the picture, so I took that particular reel of the editor's cut, and I found that that worked. And there were several other sounds they'd actually shot, and when we got into the kitchens, again lots of wild tracks of activity, but there was one shot of a chef doing some kind of flambe. There was a great fizz. You can see on picture a great sort of fizzing noise when a flame shot up and so forth. But it hadn't got anything like that. So I thought, well, it's not really my department. But I'm going to see what I can do in the kitchen at home. I nearly set fire to the kitchen, but I got the result on quarter-inch tape and took it in the next day to the transfer department, and they put it on 35 for me. And when it was, we went to the dubbing theatre. The director was absolutely delighted. He said, "At last, I always get the recorders to shoot all this stuff, and nobody ever uses it. And he actually had the grace to send a memo to the head of film department about what I had done in this production, so that offset some of the careless mistakes I make from time to time.

Simon Rose  43:08

Apart from the technical stuff, I mean, how about editing? How did you, in a way, you you must have been a sort of self-taught editor and just found a way of doing things? I guess you you you watched you watched films and could sort of see how they were edited. But when you started working as an assistant, then was that did did you learn anything off the editors you worked with?

Mike Bradsell  43:34

It was procedures mainly because most of the stuff for the the editor I was first assigned to. Again, you didn't necessarily have a permanent team. If at the beginning of a production the editor hadn't got an assistant, whoever was maybe some of the temporaries like myself, who's free? Okay, you can go and work with Keith Latham. So anyway, I was with this guy Keith Latham for about nearly a year, and I and most of the stuff was compilation documentaries, some specially shot talking heads, and a lot of library material, which is that it was that area that I would sometimes get a bit unstuck. I'd perhaps order a dupe from library material A winding instead of B winding, so everything was mirror fashion, and we had to send it back again and get it done again. But the the it was how to how to plan something when when you're starting from very little to to to make it grow is mainly what I learnt. I when I was at UMP. It was learning by instinct mainly. Most of the stuff was silent, so of course you fairly quickly learn how to do matching action or whatever. And I discovered that a lot of people will spend a lot of time trying to match a sort of a bounce in from a wide shot to a mid shot, or a mid shot to a close up, which may not be in terms of time the the the place you really want to make a cut. But if you cut to something relevant but totally neutral for a few seconds. When you come back from the wide shot to the close-up of the of the first setup, you can move quite a quite a bit, and there won't be a jump cut. So that was one trick alert, and then then we started doing some sync sound, it took me quite a long time to realise that when you're intercutting dialogue, you want to make the make the cut leaving as much air space as possible and within reason on the incoming shot. Don't. I think I'd start originally by running the the picture to up to a couple of frames before the next person speaks, and then cutting. And it always felt late. I said, "Arah, do the other way. Cut to the incoming shot as soon as comfortably you can, a few frames after the outgoing shot, the dialogue has ended, and that was something that I stuck to fairly rigidly, unless I wanted to get some special, rather edgy feel to it, right through all the documentaries and features that I cut subsequently, and it was really learning that some of these basic things, just by trial and error or some kind of instinct, that stood me in good stead when I was actually given the chance to cut at the beam again, I was an assistant for about 11 months, and I thought, oh, I was it was recommended by various people that if I wanted to get promotion, I should get on the staff. So I took a chance and applied and got accepted as a staff member. I thought I've really done it now. I might be stuck at this until I'm 60. And after about nearly a year as an assistant, I was sort of telling other colleagues, I may have made the wrong decision. I think I'll see if I can move on, even back to a company like UMP. At least I'll have a whole lot more technique at my disposal now. And there was one guy particularly, particularly who just looked me, looked at me very, very sort of soulfully and said, "No, stay. So I stayed, and shortly afterwards, this must have been well. Shortly afterwards, BBC Two was about to open, and panic, panic! We need a lot more programmes. We need lots more cameramen. We need lots more editors to cut them. Where do we go? Oh, we'll have to start making up assistants. So, my chance came on a fairly modest series about. It was called Power in British Politics. It was mainly talking heads, but they assigned me to this six-part half-hour programme, always saying, "Don't forget, you're only made up temporarily. And I was saying, "Yeah, I've got my foot in the door. I'm never taking it out.

Mike Bradsell  49:09

And purely by chance, it really was a case of sort of carpe diem with the venues. I'd when I was still an assistant, I was working on a film by a director named Stephen Hurst about President Tito of Yugoslavia, and Hearst had an assistant producer who was virtually a tradie? He came from commercial films, a young man named Peter Watkins, and the the editor Brian Keen was, pardon the pun, very keen to do some something elaborate with all the library material we'd got about the the. The way the the Yugoslavs repelled the Nazis during the war, and he was spending several days doing right. I'm going to do the fifth offensive today, and Peter Watkins and I were sort of sitting twiddling our films, and Peter had the idea of making a something like a one and a half minute news reel of the the rapid rise of fascism, and he just worked out some sort of headlines. It was interesting. He always his scripts consisted of little index cards in a tray, handwritten, just just sort of headlines, so they they could be shuffled easily to get some sort of running order, and he gave me a tray full of these, and it was a lot of library material. Hitler ranting at speeches, and British pacifists saying there's no no problem and so forth, and then the invasion of Poland, and we found the first movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony had a sort of montage in the middle of it, a very militant sort of thing, which which had laid against it, and we sort of made a. We were a little production unit in the same room as the main editing was going on, and we we dubbed it separately, and then just the the the dub was incorporated as a copy into the main dub when they did the film itself, and that was something that Peter never forgot because once I was made up to editor, although I was doing fairly sort of modest stuff, he called me one day in cutting rooms and said, "I'm setting up a dramatised documentary about the Battle of Culloden. Would you like to cut it? I thought. I said, "What a silly question! Yes, of course I'd love to cut it. And there was all the strength of how well we'd got on with this sequence from the Yugoslav film, and I think that was the that was the first film of the BBC which I cut, which got I'm really not the one to say it, but it got me sort of noticed the day after it was transmitted. Directors from other films, including some I'd done some short sequences for, were were coming up to me in the in the canteen and saying that was a terrific film last night. Well done for your contribution to it, and so forth. And I began just purely by luck. Once we'd finished that, Peter was planning the war game, although it was made to be shot immediately, Ken Russell, who had been working mainly on short and long films for the the Monitor Arts programme with their regular editor Alan Tyra, was doing some films which weren't under the Monitor umbrella, including a 40-minute film which is based on the humorous book by George and Weedon Grossmith, the Diary of a Nobody, and he needed to find an editor that he felt was compatible. The front office didn't like these little groups of technicians who got together. They felt they hadn't got any control over them. But Ken was already making a good name for himself with things like the Elgar biography film, which was really still is very popular, and my name sounded familiar to him because he felt that we had worked together, and he asked to see me and said, "Have we met before? I said, "Yes. When when I was at UMP, you had a film you you'd been making, which was financed by the Catholic Film Institute, about the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes, and you would you got permission to use some of Benjamin Britten's ballet, the Prince of the Pagodas, and you were getting in a bit of a muddle with it because he had it transferred onto an optical track, and he needed it on magnetic for dubbing. And I'd been assigned.

Mike Bradsell  54:52

He'd come to UNP to see if anyone could help, and I'd been assigned to him because I was always both. Not boasting, but always going on about my enjoyment of classical music, to make take a magnetic copy from the well, the master was just a clean LP to match it sort of mod for mod with the what he edited on optical, and we got on very well. We we were both a bit shy, so we didn't speak very much. But there was obviously mutual respect, and he'd remembered that. And he said, "Oh yes, well I'd like you to cut this film. So it was agreed that I could cut Dire of a nobody.

Simon Rose  55:41

Can I interrupt? So, so you, you got on well apparently with with both Watkins and Ken Russell. I mean, quite different characters. And you'd also something that in common between all three of you. You'd all made amateur films. Was that was that coincidental, or did that did that sort of give you a common outlook? Do you think?

Mike Bradsell  56:02

I haven't thought of that. It may be because, as an amateur, you you usually have to do everything yourself, so it gives you the responsibility of making sure that anything you shoot is editable, and anything you edit is of interest to whatever audience you want to show, even if it's only family and friends. And you, in a way, you have to backtrack on that a bit in an organisation like like the Beeb, or even as a freelance, you you have to acknowledge and accept that you've got other people doing the things that you would normally have done for yourself. But as you know what they're doing and why they're doing it and how they're doing, you you have a a kind of empathy with them. They're not just a bunch of people who are tiresomely not doing what you want. Excuse me. So I hadn't actually thought of that. But as an editor,

Simon Rose  57:12

you do have to improvise very often. You don't have the means just to sort of fix things by throwing money at it. You have to sometimes think of ingenious ways to achieve something, which I think probably Russell Ann Watkins had that quality.

Mike Bradsell  57:27

Oh yes, yes, Watkins particularly would. He could make a very respectable-looking suburban street like a look like a Hungarian war-torn bomb site, and with careful makeup and costume, and choosing. He always said that it was important to choose people with the right faces because in both the films he did for the B, the Colomb and the War Game, all the actors were amateurs, and of course there was a bit of a fuss about that in the front office because what's equity going to think about this? Well, later they did have a lot to say about it, but they they managed to placate their their worries. Peter had obviously based his films on a lot of European examples, and he was always impressed by the the kind of out of the ordinary close up faces. They didn't have to speak. Maybe didn't even have to do anything except look pained or soulfully, either at camera or just off camera. And he would-it would work wonders by getting a few close-ups of people who looked not not just like somebody from Central Casting, but looked very different. And Ken, who also started off with well, first of all, he started with no actors at all, and when when he wanted to make the Elgar film, Hugh Weldon, who was head of documentaries at the time, so we we can't have any actors as sort of merging two genre, and he can persuaded him that well, it isn't really because what's wrong with presenting to people something? They know that this is not some old film featuring Sir Edward Elgar. They know it's somebody impersonating him, but it gets them into the feel of the the idea of it. Oh, more! Got to be a long shot, and another film that he did about Bartok. Again, he wanted a professional actor, not a speaking part, but just to occasionally appear in the in the scene as a representation of Bartok. And he said, "Well, no close-ups. And if you want, if you want a close-up, he must be stand. It must be. It's a reflection in a in a lake, and it must be a muddy sort of lake. So it took a lot of persuading on the part. Well, not so much on on the part of Peter Watkins, because that was really documentary, even though it was dramatised. It was sort of hard-edged, journalistic kinds of documentary. Ken was always a kind of lyricist. He would produce a poetic image for you to look at, and people like Hugh Weldon were always a bit suspicious of of drama departments somehow muscling in on on the documentary scene, but ultimately, of course, in both cases, their instincts were right. And you were saying earlier about improvisation. Well, this is something that I, particularly in terms of editing, I had to do a lot when I was at UMP, because if I was actually cutting somebody else's film, maybe it was something like a car manufacturing company. They wanted a promotional film, so they they asked the the staff photographer make a film. Yeah, but I don't know anything. You're a photographer. You know what to do. And of course, he hadn't got enough idea of film technique and basic things like cutaways so that you don't get jump cuts would get forgotten, or everything along would be shot in a long shot with no close cut cover. We often had to try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and because we had to, we managed to find a way to do it. And although things were far more professional in a television context. There were still occasions where you needed to break the rules to to cover something that wasn't there. When I first started as an editor at the Bieb, the it wasn't common for the editor to be assigned on the production at the start of the shoot. In fact, it may have been weeks, maybe months after they'd finished shooting that you you get around to editing, and you had to spend a week in the viewing theatre, probably a week on a full-length shoot, assessing everything with or without the director. It depends on whether he was available or she, and time and time again, you'd get you'd be looking at a day's work.

Mike Bradsell  1:03:17

Yeah, that's good as far as it goes, I hope they they've done an insert or a close up of somebody reacting. Oh, it's going to be the end of a reel. Well, maybe it's on the next reel. The next reel is another shoot, another day. Oh my God, they haven't got that. And of course, if you'd been assigned to it while they were still shooting, even if they were moving around a lot, and they might have left a location where they shot the the offending scene, which had something missing. You can get in touch with them by phone or telegram or something, saying you really do need this. Can you find a way of shooting it? So we, in what was otherwise a very well covered and interesting set of rushes, you'd find these little holes that you you had to try to fill somehow.

Simon Rose  1:04:19

I think one of the first films, according to IMDb, you did BBC was for My Zephyr. Do you remember that film?

Mike Bradsell  1:04:27

Oh, yes, that was that was when I was at UMP. It was

Simon Rose  1:04:35

well the BBC did show it, I think, did they?

Mike Bradsell  1:04:38

Sorry,

Simon Rose  1:04:38

I think the BBC did. It was

Mike Bradsell  1:04:40

sponsored by them. They they paid for it and everything. It was called Lords of Little Egypt, and it was about the gipsies in I think the south of France. Yes, she directed it, and her her husband was. Just a sort of assistant to her, sort of general dog's body. He would drive around. He'd take notes and things, and it was. It was. I thought it was quite good, and yes, it was transmitted, and it was quite well thought of. I thought that was going to be useful to me when I applied for the the job as a temporary editor. I was really rather affronted when they said, "Well, outside work doesn't count. I said, even though it was for the BBC and was transmitted by the BBC, no, no,

Simon Rose  1:05:42

no, no. Yeah, and she she was known as a sort of quite a glamorous actress during the war. I think that this must have been one of her first things she actually directed.

Mike Bradsell  1:05:52

Yeah, I think she she directed one film before. I can't remember what it was. It may may even not have been a British production. It might have been Swedish dialogue, but she'd been anxious to concentrate on that rather than acting for a long time. She used to tell me things about the sort of non-direction she would get in drama, mainly feature films. So for every take, whether whether she felt it had gone well or bad, the director would say, "My, that was a peach. She think it wasn't a peach at all. Why doesn't give me some idea of which way it should go, and there was just one. The only direction I remember getting was somebody who said to me before a take, "My, do the nose trick. The nose trick? What's that? Something that Margaret Lockwood always does when when she's anxious, she sort of flares her nostrils. Whether Mike Zettle actually did it or not, I don't know. But she thought, at last, somebody's at least saying something about what I should do. Which, in a way, leads me to some of the early Ken Russell films that I wasn't working on the biography of Bartok that I mentioned earlier, Barry Gavin, who was at that time a director and producer for music and arts department. He did he would shoot a lot of concerts and and documentaries about musicians. He was at that time assigned short for a short period of time to Ken Russell as a PA, and there was a scene showing Bartok's Incredible sensitivity to sound. He would, at night, he would walk around forests with a torch, looking for insects and birds and listening to them. And so Barry was dressed up with an overcoat and a big homburg hat, so you couldn't really see his face because he didn't look anything like Bartok really. And Barry said that they they shot this in a wood near Crystal Palace, and it went. It was a cold, bitterly cold night, and he got a stinking cold afterwards. And Ken would say things like, "Right, let's go again, but do it differently. And he said, "Well, how do you want me to do it? Oh, Ken would get a bit irritated and say, "Oh, I don't know. Just, just don't do what you did before. At that time, that was the extent of Ken Russell's direction. Of course, by the time he got onto features, he was much more articulate about what he wanted.

Simon Rose  1:09:08

Yes, you seem to have got on with them well. I mean, some people who don't know them might have thought that Ken Russell might be a rather scary person. You know, very sort of forceful character, and Peter Watkins, an angry young man. You always get on well with it with everybody.

Mike Bradsell  1:09:34

Not everybody, and it's interesting that Peter was, if you just met him, he was a sort of quietly spoken, very polite, gentle sort of person. All all the anger and the the frustration politically that was inside him was directed. Purely at the project, I don't think he ever got angry with anybody when they were shooting, and he didn't get angry with me because there was no need to. We were both pulling in the same direction. Ken, I was a bit worried about to begin with because I'd heard the stories of his short temper when he was on the set, and when when we were editing the Diary of a Nobody, first of all he got used to being around doing all the editing, and I've even if he didn't do anything or say anything, I felt incredibly nervous about this big hulk of a man sitting behind me, watching everything I was doing. So, as quickly as I could, I engineered a way to get him out of the room for a while. What I got on with it, so that he, when he came back, he could find he could trust me. Also, if he did get a little bit stroppy, I'm afraid the Irish in me would fight back, and I'd get stroppy with him going forward on the boyfriend. I really thought that this was the end of a beautiful professional relationship because there was a scene. There was a day they they'd been shooting in a disused theatre in Portsmouth, and I was I would visit them occasionally, but was mostly working at Elstree Studios doing the cut, and I got a message on a Thursday saying Ken isn't shooting this weekend, so he'd like you to organise a screening at the studios for Sunday afternoon for everything that you can possibly add that we've shot since you'd last did a cut, so I was working away very fast. And then we got another message on Friday afternoon. Ken's now busy on Sunday. Can you make it Saturday? So we brought it forwarder, and I was a bit edgy when we got into the theatre, and about 10 minutes in, there was one one shot that was not to Ken's taste. Why don't people do what I say? So I just stood up and said, "Well, if you think you can that way, you can do it your bloody self! And I stormed out of the theatre, and when I sat down in reception, God, that's it now. So I just I could hear the film playing. I thought, listen carefully because that's the last time you hear or see anything to do with this production. And as soon as the lights went up. He came out into reception, and I stood up, saying, "Ken, I'm awfully, and he was like, "No, no, no, I'm. I get nervous, you know. It's not your fault. And I said, "Yeah, well, I shouldn't react that way. And we were almost saying, "How dare you apologise? I'm trying to apologise to you. And we just realised that at times you do get really tense, and it's got to come out. It's nothing personal, and it never was personal to even the people that he really gave a real shouting match to. He would, it would be over and done with. He'd let Elstine. He may not have apologised to anyone, but the next day it was a good working relationship again. And both Peter and and Ken, particularly Ken, because I did many more pictures for him. Obviously, if Peter had remained at the Bee, I think I would have been asked by him to do a lot more. In fact, I saw him recently when he was over here for a short visit, and he said it was. He'd always regretted that we hadn't had the opportunity to work together more often, but with Ken having done three television films for him, by the time I got onto doing the features, editing was almost like a process of osmosis. We'd view the rushes together and select the best takes, but he felt he could trust me to to at least generally maybe some polishing to do. But I I knew how his mind worked, how he wanted the film to look. And they didn't need any further instruction, and it even got to the stage. Sorry, I'm jumping around forwards and backwards.

Mike Bradsell  1:15:09

On on Savage Messiah, they were shooting at the the grandly named Lee International Film studio, which was a disused biscuit factory off Kensal Road. The they were shooting mainly in the sort of makeshift studio there, but he was going on two weeks' location fairly soon after we started, and he'd all always been a bit reluctant to see rushes. Sometimes, obviously, the most convenient time would be at lunchtime. But then he'd say, "Well, I need some lunch. I need a break. Let's run them in the evening. Then the evening would come. Oh, I'm too tired. Do it tomorrow. And there came a point where I said, "Ken, the cans are like this, and he said, "I don't want to see it. You know what I want. Just cut it. Only, only contact me if you think there's something wrong that should be dealt with, because in any case, up to now, you've often been doing the first cut without me being around. So, when I see it, it's like looking at somebody else's work. I can be objective if if you do the whole film, and I'll see the first cut at the end. So I felt a very that was a great compliment. I was very proud to, and very pleased to go on working without any-I wouldn't say interference, but any input from him until we got it to a stage where it was really workable. It didn't have to do wade through each individual scene, but maybe run it through and say, "Let's have a look at that scene again. Maybe we can do a little bit of twiddling or something. But it okay.

Simon Rose  1:17:12

So yeah, so the cuts were very much your work. You say you kind of understood by then what he what he wanted, you could. Do you think you had? I mean, you worked with lots of different directors. Do you think you you developed a style, or do you think you always adapted a style to the project or to the director you were working with?

Mike Bradsell  1:17:39

Well, excuse me, mainly to the the project, and that would apply to somebody like Ken anyway, because he was the director that I'd actually worked most for. I'd three television films and seven features. I sometimes think back, and I'm a bit disconcerted to realise that very few of the other directors I worked with-I did more than one film. I hope it wasn't because I blotted my copybook so bad; they never asked me again. But quite often it was the case of a project would come up and it would be delayed, so I did something else, and when they were ready, I was not free or whatever. But even with, as I said, even with Ken, I would adapt what I was doing to suit the material rather than suit the director's personality, shall we say it? And some people have said that they they like my style, and this always sort of puzzles me because I wasn't conscious of having a particular style. I had a few basic rules, which even those I was quite happy to break if it looked sensible to do. I mean, most drama is about 80% people talking to each other. I've found, and there are, if I had established a a good to to me a good starting point of how to tackle the a talking head scene, to to to keep keep it flowing properly, and to be on the right character at the right time. Sometimes in the middle cut in the middle of a sentence because you get a surprised reaction or whatever rather than certainly not character A is speaking so use that shot character B is speaking so use the shot on him but some people. Appear to have felt, I hope not that I'm so repetitive that I do the same thing every bloody time, but they seem to notice some sort of stylistic continuity, which I'm not not really aware of.

End of Part 1

Mike Bradsell Part 2

Simon Rose  00:00

You talked a bit about style, and you were saying how the subject matter obviously influenced your style. And I was wondering, wouldn't the camera style influence it as well? Because some of your some stuff you've cut has been sort of handheld, and others tripod. Would that would that affect the way you edit?

Mike Bradsell  00:23

Possibly, I think if I sort of mentioned the work of Peter Bartlett, it might help to illustrate that he was the cameraman on the War Game, and later on Richard Corston's big two-hour royal family film, and a lot of the he used the the Bfavoured Array Flex cameras. He he used an eclair because it was shoulder mounted, and he was the tripod. So, if particularly if he'd chosen a fairly wide angle lens, he could stand still without shaking around much, or he could do a tracking shot, as I mentioned at the beginning of the war game. He did the smooth tracking shot up the stairs, but if required, which was sometimes quite necessary on the war game, he would have some fairly quite violent handheld camera movements. He, we had a sort of kind of good-natured running battle. He, his aim was to try to do a whole scene in one smooth developing shot, and my aim was to cut it up as much as possible. And there was one scene where he said, "There you are, Mike. Isn't that good? I said yes, very good. I can't wait to cut it up. I didn't do so, but once or twice, if there were scenes where there was such a variety of movement that the first part could be regarded as a different angle from the second part, and the middle bit was actually not necessary. It would make quite a smooth cut, one part of it facing that way, and the other part facing the other way. But with any any handheld work, I always try to favour material which the hand held nature of it was masked by the the subject movement. I mean, sometimes you can only follow really rapid and suddenly direction changing camera movement, subject movement. If you have a handheld camera, perhaps, sorry, saying this in front of a cameraman would probably deny this. But I get the impression that it's sometimes almost physically impossible to turn wheels or move a panhandle as quickly as things are going on, and there it works because you're not aware that it's handheld. But when it is a case of pretending to look a bit wobbly because you're standing and it's just a close-up, a static close-up of somebody, sometimes it has to be used. But I try to avoid it because I've got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about that. I think it is totally incorrect to say that a realistic-looking documentary, which is full of wobbly handheld stuff, is reflecting the true situation of sort of used footage. I think a cameraman will instinctively try to keep it as steady as possible in those circumstances. He certainly won't deliberately start waving the camera about just for the sake of it. Perhaps at the very least, he'll find something to lean on. Well, a wall or something, the top, the top of a pillar box, or something. Put his elbow on to hold it steady. They don't. They're not in the business of of saying, look, I'm I'm a documentary. I'm a news gathering cameraman. That's why I'm making it so wobbly. So when it when it appears in television drama or feature films in a situation where it is obviously not not appropriate or necessary for the camera to be wobbly. About, I I tend to avoid it as much as I can, or alleviate it as as much as I can, because it is even exaggerated if you've got pairs of shots, some of which are on a tripod and the others aren't, because every time you come to the static shot, it and back to the wobbly one, the wobbliness is even exaggerated. But I haven't really had a situation where it's been so extreme that I've had to really do anything very difficult to try to alleviate it.

Simon Rose  05:44

Yes, I understand. But Peter Watkins did deliberately kick the tripod, according to Dick Bush, now and again. He, in order to create the feeling of being in a battle, did you object to that?

Mike Bradsell  05:57

Didn't object at all. The more wobbly it was under those circumstances, the better. Because, for a start, Dick Cameron, Dick Bush was such a good cameraman that he would still be able to give you the the important image in the frame, and it again when it is perhaps this is sort of cancelling out what I said earlier, but when every shot in the battle sequence is of a similar moving nature, you soon forget that it is actually wobbly because it is there's a continuity of wobble from one shot to the next, and if it is suddenly exaggerated because it's a point where a cannonball has been fired or has landed somewhere very close to the camera, that's all all to the good, and it was the same in the war game. Maybe Peter Bartlett was more used to doing than Dick Bush, but they were both good, and and Peter only reserved extreme camera movement for the moments when a nuclear explosion had just taken place, so there was a tremendous shock wave, which would affect the characters on screen.

Simon Rose  07:32

Forgot what I was going to say. You said, "Oh yes, you said Peter Bartlett used an eclair. Generally, the BBC didn't didn't use a class, did they? I think sort of bulk bought in Mary Flex BLs. How did he get away with that? Did he?

Mike Bradsell  07:49

I think by the quality of his work.

Simon Rose  07:52

But I mean, did he have to buy his own camera? Oh no,

Mike Bradsell  07:55

no, I don't think so. I say that, but I don't really know. But no, I think they they either had an eclair or two, which they weren't they simply weren't using, but he wanted to. There was another advantage that he made use of. There was an advertising film directed by Kevin Billington called Madison Avenue, and he was granted permission to just do one magazine of shooting on some advertising executives who reckoned they were far too busy to give a longer interview. So he said, "Okay, when it runs out, I'll stop. But you can apparently you can actually unlock the magazine on a éclair and put a new one on while it's it's still either running or looks as if it's still running. So he was so long as they weren't well, they wouldn't be looking directly at him anyway because they'd be having, like us, conversation between the director and the characters. So he actually ran through about three magazines before stopping and saying, "Okay, the magazines run out now. He got three times as much footage as would be if he'd had to fiddle around loading an array, and and when when I did some stuff as an an amateur, when video eight first came in, I I previously done some material, just sort of home movies on a an eight mil film camera, clockwork motor, and all that, but I like the idea of having something which has got sync sound and can possibly be edited. So I invested in an early Sony camcorder, which was. The same sort of rough design as a eclair It had this curved middle that you could sit on your shoulder, and I realised, although it was about a decade or so later, why Peter Bartlett liked that type so much because you can actually steady it with one hand if you want to do a walking shot, and maybe it's rough ground or something, and there's a fence there, you can sort of shuffle along the fence without it being obtrusive, and you can actually look in two places at once. You can sort of keep an eye on what's coming up next, and then look back in the viewfinder. I think ergonomically, it was probably a very good design of camera. Yes, and

Simon Rose  10:47

also if you were being observational or trying not to be obtrusive in a scene, most of the cameras behind you is only the lens that shows. That's

Mike Bradsell  10:57

right. Yes.

Simon Rose  11:04

So we we were getting towards the end of, well, you were starting to think about leaving the BBC, I think, or getting a bit fed up with it. And you, and was it lucky that Ken Russell at the same time decided to move on to feature films?

Mike Bradsell  11:22

Yes, he had he'd done two previous feature films, a French style comedy called French Dressing, which was very much influenced by Jacques Tattie, and he was at the time he was hoping to do this film about Nijinski and the Ballet Russe, which was going to be produced by the the Bond team of Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. That fell through. Oh, actually, I think what had happened was that they would finance it if he would be prepared to do one of the Harry Palmer series of espionage films, The Billion Dollar Brain. Well, he agreed to do that, but then Dujinski fell through, so he was stuck with doing a feature that he didn't really want to. Although, when I saw it, I thought he'd made quite a remarkable job of it, and he'd he'd actually turned it into almost a left-wing protest film, although he was pretty indifferent to politics, and I was very amused to find that the the big climax was a all not exactly shot for shot, but very very similar to Eisenstein's battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky, and so he he made a virtue out of something that was he had to do, and it was. But it was around about that time that he had to tell me that if I was thinking of leaving, actually two two things happened both in the same breath. Almost he said, "Sorry, I've got some bad news. They've reneged on the Nijinsky picture. Harry Salson wasn't really interested anyway. He thought Nijinsky was a race horse. But I've been asked by United Artists to cut a film, to direct a film about D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love. Would you be prepared to cut it? I said, "Wow, yes. I don't know whether I can get out of my contract with the B, but I'll try. First of all, I went to Jack Muet, the head of films, and said, "I've had this offer. I've got some leave owing and some overtime that hasn't been paid for. I think it would amount to the length of time that I would need to cut a feature film. So, could I have a sabbatical? I would then come back to the BBC with a whole new range of experiences which I could put at the corporation's disposal, and you wouldn't have that. So perhaps in a fit of anger, I said, "Right, I'll resign anyway. All that over time that I Accumulated, I won't be required to give more than about two or three weeks' notice. So they had to accept that. In the meantime, Richard Corston, who I got on very well with a document. He was shooting called the story of the Queen Mary, which was, in general terms, about a compilation documentary about the period of luxury liner travel across the Atlantic in the 30s, and specifically shooting on board the had to be the Queen Elizabeth because Queen Mary was in Los Angeles by then. A sort of fly on the wall documentary about what it's like going on a luxury trip, and he was telling me about all this secret project that's coming up. Nobody must know. Don't tell anybody. But I've got permission to to sort of lid off the royal family. Will you cut that? I said yes, if I'm allowed to. Well, he got hopping mad that Jack Newit had refused to allow me to remain on the staff, and there was a. I didn't realise I was creating a kind of row, but I was sort of passively in in the centre of two factions, it's a bit like remain or leave the European Union, and it was ultimately agreed that as they weren't shooting it anyway, and if my estimate of the time it would take on women in Love was accurate. They could wait for me to come back as a freelance, but working on BBC premises to do this this documentary.

Simon Rose  16:34

How long did you estimate Women in Love would take?

Mike Bradsell  16:37

Six months. It was almost accurate. In fact, it was accurate. I had finished cutting, but the they had a preview while it was still in cutting copy form with a rough dub, and they wanted a couple of scenes altered slightly. And Dick Corston was quite happy about me taking a couple of afternoons off to go to work in an independent cutting room somewhere in Soho, just to tidy these two scenes up. And the assistant I'd had on that production was still around, and he could just integrate it into the the main cut, so I I made a sort of slow departure from the BBC over a period of about a year. Then then I thought that I would still be doing a lot of documentaries. That's what I'd been got used to doing maybe the occasional documentary, the occasional feature film or drama. As it happened, after I'd finished the the royal family film, Ken's next feature, the music lovers, was ready, so I worked on that. Then there was a gap before the Devils, during which time I was able to do a music documentary for Humphrey Burton, who I'd worked with when he was one of the executives on the BBC Musical Arts, and had then left to be head of music and arts at London Weekend Television, and this was a a big two-hour film celebrating the I can never remember whether it's bicentenary or bicentenary the 200 years of Beethoven's death in 1970, and I cut that. It was it was very well thought of. It it won an an Emmy, which of course doesn't not not specifically for the editor, but as it goes to the production as a whole, Humphrey and the principal participant Leonard Bernstein, they both said that it was as much my Emi as theirs. So I was sort of proud of that. Then the Devils, but the boyfriend actually overlapped with the Devils. They'd started shooting that while I was still checking prints of the music lovers. So it was nearly all features back to back with just the occasional documentary from then on until almost the turn of the century.

Simon Rose  19:44

You sort of dashed on a bit. So, have we? We haven't mentioned Isadora, did you? Ah,

Mike Bradsell  19:54

that's. I think that's probably, if not the favourite. Film of those I cut for Ken one one of the one of the top favourites. It was the second film. Excuse me. There was quite a gap between Diary for Nobody and that when I was working. I think I was actually I think I've been working on the war game just before that, so it was rather. Although I was very much in sympathy with the war game because it was so realistically shot day by day, I was having my metaphorical nose rubbed in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. I realised that it was probably a bit debilitating because a friend of mine who wasn't in the film industry came into the cutting rooms one Saturday. We were going out to lunch together, and I said, "I just want to have a look at this cut before we go, it's only about this scene was only about 10 minutes long, and he saw it with me and was profoundly shocked and moved and said, "I don't know how you managed to cope with this sort of day after day, and I think I said something like, "Well, until you mentioned it, I didn't realise I that it has affected me, obviously has. But I thought the next production is another Ken Russell picture, which I'll be much happier with. And already we were getting towards the osmosis stage because he was very happy with what I did with him on Dire of a Nobody, and because there was lots of classical music and dance in this film, I really felt that it was something that it came from Ken's heart, like most pictures did, but it came from mine as well, and When it was transmitted, a lot of my colleagues, not only in film department, other maybe other directors I worked with, said we didn't realise that you could work on lyrical material because they were only used to Colom and the war game and some other sort of relative nondescript documentaries, they thought that I would was permanently the sort of hard-edged, no nonsense, tell it like it is editor. But in fact, something like Isadora was much closer to my my personal tastes, and it was. It there was one other picture I did almost immediately afterwards, the last television one for Ken, the Dantis Inferno about the the Pre-Raphaelite painter Movement with Oliver Reed as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. That was feature length, which was probably good practice for me going on into features. But it, I've always found that efficient, but a little bit cold, a bit cynical compared to Isadora, which I've always found very moving, I think if I had not done anything else for Ken, I was very pleased to have done that one.

Simon Rose  23:33

Talking about getting ready for features, I mean, Ken used 35 mil, didn't he, most of the time?

Mike Bradsell  23:39

Yeah, yes, except he's against his own wishes. He was told to shoot Dante's Inferno on 16 millimetre, and in a way, he was delighted that after a couple of weeks shooting, they were having a lot of technical problems. The rushes weren't coming out as well as they should do, not not because they were badly shot. Although I gather he had a pretty tense time with Nat Crosby. The he said, "I'm not doing any more of this From next Monday, we're shooting on 35, and we'll have all the usable takes on 16 blown up. No, no more nonsense. I think because I didn't work on the dance of the Seven Veils, but I think that was 16. Why

Simon Rose  24:43

did he prefer 35 mil so much?

Mike Bradsell  24:46

Sorry. Why

Simon Rose  24:47

did he like 35 over 16?

Mike Bradsell  24:50

The image. I know that television transmission, particularly as in those days, people rarely had. Larger screens than about 21 inch, the resolution of 16 was good enough, and the image was usually steady and sharp enough to not not stand out like a sore thumb. He was he liked to think big. Obviously, even in one of the Ealing screening rooms, the image quality was noticeably different. The detail, the subtlety of different shades of grey, were immediately apparent, and he he just wanted to use it as much as possible. He was one of the few people who were allowed to continue doing so.

Simon Rose  25:46

He he also. I heard a little story about how he used to when he was dubbing. He used to bring a bring extra instruments into the dubbing theatre to add to the music,

Mike Bradsell  26:01

yeah, that was. Although I didn't meet him, that's the first time I saw him. It was at at UMP shortly before the the Loward picture that I helped him with. He he was doing this delightful documentary called Amelia and the Angel, which is one of the fill-ups on, I think it's on the bfi's Devil's compilation. Well, not a compilation, but the the longest cut that Warner Brothers would allow them to use, and it's got the meteor and the angel as well, and he wanted a music track. Didn't quite understandably didn't like any of the sort of rather anodyne pre-recorded cheap copyright stuff that's in the music libraries, and he had a large collection of Victoriana, one way or another, including some very elaborate music boxes. Some of them were like a 12-inch gramophone. These revolving discs with with spikes in, which would it's like like a huge music box. It would the spikes would coincide with with different prongs underneath, which were tuned to different pitches and give you a very musical sound. Sometimes it was what you might say polyphonic. They'd give you chords, so it was quite a rich sound. But they were they were big and heavy, and he brought them in and into the dubbing theatre at UMP, and I think I there was one occasion where I needed to go and talk to the the mixer about something, and I the red light had been up, and when it was off, I walked in, and the sort of auditorium area. All these things were laid out as though it was a galrah sale, and Ken was standing there, holding this great big thing on on his knee, and and sort of practising with it. And they, one of the engineers got a microphone near it, finding the best position and so forth. And I realised what they were doing, and I was very keen to see the finished film. And of course, it does-they do feature very prominently in that. I don't think he used his collection, certainly not very much, if at all, in any of his other. I

Simon Rose  28:43

just tell us. I remember Alan Dick, who was a dubbing mixer, telling me how he he got a drummer into the booth to sort of add a bit more oomph to to the pre to the music, you know, to the recorded music he was using. I don't know which which film that was,

Mike Bradsell  29:02

unless he did it on more than one occasion, not not in television, but on the Devils, there was a score by Peter Maxwell Davies, and on on one of the cues during a particularly harrowing exorcism, Max himself had engaged a well-known Japanese solo percussionist, Stomo Yumasta, to do an improvisation to to the picture independently from the rest of the band, and Ken was sort of directing that. He was also watching the screen and was if he wants to do that. He wanted something more frenetic, or quieting it down a bit, just as it was running. But maybe he did something similar. It must have been a BBC film if Alan Dykes was the loving mixer. So he must have done it more than once.

Simon Rose  30:19

Going back to Peter Watkins for a bit longer, you were saying how it was you found it be harrowing to be working on the war game, and did you realise early on that it was going to be very controversial?

Mike Bradsell  30:38

I don't think so. I knew it was I knew it was going to be harrowing, and we often used to sort of joke about things in the cutting room. In fact, because he used to be amateur actors, he'd sometimes ask me, "You see him? What do you think he does for a living? And on one occasion, we were doing a scene where there was a firestorm out of control, and there was this very harassed fire chief standing there in his brass helmet, wondering how the hell they were going to sort of stop this fire. And I said, "Oh, I don't. I give up. What does he do for a living? He said, "He's the managing director of a fireworks company, we had a bit of a laugh about that, but we we thought that as Colomban had had no problems, in spite of the fact that it was there were sort of no holes barred about the the gruesome nature of the battle itself. I think, from memory, there was actually a shot of a severed leg on the ground. Peter's narration had just said, in a sort of very cool, matter-of-fact manner, "What happens if you get hit by one of one of these things? Oh, I think it was chain shot. They were firing two two cannonballs chained together, and if you get struck by that, you take your leg off. And so there was this artificial, I hope, leg lying on the ground. We thought that there would that there might be some sort of Artistic, I don't know about interference, but some pressure from the upper echelons of the beam for us perhaps to tone it down a bit or something. We didn't expect this out and out the governments. says we cannot transmit it, so we were both very disappointed, and of course Peter resigned immediately.

Simon Rose  32:52

That wasn't stated at the time, wasn't it? They weren't saying the government wanted out. They were saying things like we just decided it didn't quite meet our expectations and sort of things like things like that.

Mike Bradsell  33:04

Yeah, it was really very recently. I think that that probably as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, the the B all the way up to Hugh Green, the DG at the time, appeared to be having to say, we were very much in favour of this film, but our hands are tied. The government won't let us transmit it. In fact, they were in collusion with the government because they felt embarrassed by it somehow. That there was a half reasonable excuse. They were saying this is so realistic that the effect could be like the notorious War of the Worlds, the radio show that Orson Wells produced, and people were committing suicide because they they thought there were actually Martians coming down their main street. Obviously, well more fool them. But if some elderly or susceptible people turned the television on in the middle of this programme, not knowing that it was a reconstruction of something that could happen, but thought it might be a news report, maybe somebody could have a heart attack. I don't know, but I think you have to take a certain amount of risk in that area, and it was not a really very strong case. I think the government, particularly, were extremely embarrassed by the truth of how ill prepared we would be if there was a nuclear attack on Britain, even though it was it was stated quite categorically that this was a fairly small attack. An atom bomb is an atom bomb. It causes great destruction, but it would it. Not as bad as an H bomb attack would have been. It wouldn't have been as bad as what resulted at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but bad enough to disrupt the entire country. They just said it's too embarrassing for us to. They didn't say this, but what they thought was, it's just too embarrassing for for us to have to risk any questions asked in the house or elsewhere.

Simon Rose  35:31

But as you were editing it, were there sort of forewarnings? Did you have rough cut viewings with executives, you know, with higher ups?

Mike Bradsell  35:41

No, he didn't. Hugh Weldon had well. He he knew roughly what it was going to be like, and I mean, some people used to think him as a bit of a figure of fun. Private Eye were always lampooning him as a sort of pseudo intellectual, as the front man on monitor, which was quite unjust because he had a brilliant mind and was very very brave in the the kind of films that he would agree to be made, and the same it was with the war game. I think maybe he was aware of the dangers more than we would have been, but felt that Peter's growing reputation and integrity would be strong enough with his backing to see it through. But he had even before we'd finished cutting, I think he was kicked upstairs to head of television. So at least theoretically, he had no close contact with the production anymore. And Richard Corston, who took over, I mean, had many qualities. I was quite had great respect for the two films that he directed, which I cut. But he he was really I don't think he was an executive. He was in a way too interested in what was happening to his own films? To to to want to wave a flag for somebody else's. Now that may be a bit of a harsh judgement, but he certainly didn't dig his heels in like Hugh Weldon would have done to try to reverse the government's decision,

Simon Rose  37:43

and I. But then you did start having problems with you to try and modify it to keep to keep people happy, or was it just that was just it? Was it? It

Mike Bradsell  37:54

was. That's the way Peter and I wanted it, and that's the way it had to be the only, the only. Well, I throughout all this, I was thinking it is extremely disappointing, but at least it has been made. It was allowed to be made without any interference. So, although it's no consolation to Peter because he feels so passionately about the anti-war message that this film conveys, he wants as many millions of people to see it as possible. But posterity will be able to judge it. Later generations will still be able to see it, which is of course, what happens. And there was this fairly lengthy run of a 35 mil blow-up at a cinema in Tottenham Court Road. It ran for several months. Obviously, even with full houses, a fraction of the size of a television audience would would be the result, but at least it got out there.

Simon Rose  39:10

Yeah, it actually won an Oscar, didn't it? Was it an Oscar or an EMI?

Mike Bradsell  39:13

I don't know. Emily deserved it, but I think it

Simon Rose  39:17

did. Best documentary, which is you know ironic considering BBC banned it, but I mean they banned it from worldwide television. But it did get some other people had other ways of seeing it on 16 mil.

Mike Bradsell  39:32

Sometimes that led to some unfortunate results. In the early 80s, I was working on an American picture in Los Angeles, and a cinema near the hotel where I was staying was actually screening the war game. So my assistants, who'd heard so much about it, oh, shall we go and see it? I said, yeah. But it was actually part of a kind of hippie festival, and in a way, the film was really just an incidental. There was lots of incense burning and handbell ringing and so forth, and making a great thing about oh, this was totally banned, etc. I was getting quite annoyed. I nearly looked up and said, "Well, first of all, please treat this film with the proper respect that it demands. And there wasn't a total ban because it ran for several months at selected cinemas. But I kept quiet. I didn't say anything.

Simon Rose  40:41

Sorry, Watkinson himself must have been very upset. Did he feel let down by the BBC?

Mike Bradsell  40:47

Yes, he did. He even if he got into a lift, and Dick Corston was in there, he turned his back on him and wouldn't speak to him, and nothing to do with him. Glad when it reached the floor. He wanted to get out. He felt that although it was a sort of a poisoned chalice, Corson had nothing to do with the production. It was a sort of cut and dried before he was appointed head of the documentary department, Peter felt that he should, because of his position, have done done something to champion it instead of just let the the government run roughshod over it. Yes,

Simon Rose  41:39

and and as I said at the time, the BBC really denied that they were being influenced by the government. I think they they said that well, they gave the reason you said that people might commit suicide. That was the sort of best reason they could come up with. I think.

Mike Bradsell  41:57

Yes.

Simon Rose  42:00

Did you did you follow Peter's career any more after that?

Mike Bradsell  42:04

Yes, I I saw one of his feature films. I don't think I went to the cinema. It was Punishment Park. I saw it on television. I found it a bit disappointing because it was almost like a rerun of Culloden, but rather the premise was rather manufactured. Maybe I'm just naive. Maybe maybe that there are some kind of correction facilities in the United States, which would would go to these rather jungle lengths of putting prisoners in a dangerous situation, and if they can get out of it, they're free, and if they don't, hard luck, they're probably dead. I thought this is is making making up a situation which is not necessarily true to life, so that he can get some of the sort of protest message across. But I was much much happier when I saw his documentary about Edvard Munch, three hours long and not a frame too long. I mean, I'm always very suspicious of any film that is more than about 100 minutes long, but it. I could have sat through something twice as long because it was it was so well made, so interesting, and it was nice to see him able wholeheartedly to to do a film which had didn't have to have any sort of political agenda to it, and on a few occasions I've met him recently, I'd said, "Why haven't you done more of that? He said, "Because nobody would finance anything. I, I can't. I haven't got any savings that I can dip into to finance my own productions or get sort of independent backing or anything. They they allowed this Swedish television allowed it to be made, and I was very lucky, but I haven't seen any other of his post BBC work at

Simon Rose  44:31

all. Yes, I mean Watkins has throughout his life has had big sort of struggles to make every film, and I'm sure there's been many more that he's wanted to make and haven't been made. Ken Russell somehow seems to manage to to keep going. How how's he managed that?

Mike Bradsell  44:53

It was a bit of a struggle after the devils, actually. I mean, it's very much the flavour of the month from after his most famous television films, right through Women in Love, the Music Lovers, and then The Devils. But after that, he found it difficult to get finance. Well, I think it lasted long enough for MGM to finance the boyfriend, but they weren't too happy with what they bought. It's it's interesting that towards the end of the Devils, Ken sort of confided to me that although this was his brainchild, he he'd be very glad to deliver it because he's had enough violence. He's worked on enough violence on the screen to last a lifetime. Thank God we've got this nice little musical comedy to follow, but it wasn't at all the the devils. The shooting and the cutting went through like clockwork. On the boyfriend, there were problems from the start. The there were going to be some elaborate studio sets at LL Street Studios, but while they were being built, they spent several weeks at a disused theatre in Portsmouth, and because it was disused, there were things that didn't work properly. The cast didn't like being away from home for too long, he didn't say who, but there was one member of cast who threatened to commit suicide. They were all saying, "Oh, it'll be great when we get to Lstreet, and then all these elaborate sets were giving trouble. There was a a little moment in a sort of an international number. It was the the title song, the boyfriend. There was a little international sequence of boyfriends of different nationalities, and Murray Melvin, dressed as a French gendarme, was doing a little dance in front of a huge tricolour, which was, I think, mercifully it was balsa wood and tracing paper. But in the middle of it, it came adrift and fell on him. And even one of the Balcon wood battens, if they had hit him, it could have been a bit injurious, and there were other things. There was a scene, I think, in the number "Sure La Plage. They'd shot a lot of background plates of the sea side and waves and things to use as front projection, and it wouldn't work. So he had to elaborate it, or rather de-elaborate it, to to be shot on the stage at Portsmouth instead. And all in all, we were very glad when it was finished. And then, when MGM saw it, they appeared to be happy, but when they got their hands on it, they left it alone for their road show, except for putting an interlude in the middle, which is fair enough, because it was rather long. They decided to cut 25 minutes out of it, which didn't make any sense. So that was a that was in a way, not exactly the beginning of the end, but it was a bit of a downturn. His next, Tommy, was apparently a great success, but then the other British films he made, like Listomania and Valentino, didn't quite work. Some films he shot in America, like Alford States, that was back on form. I really enjoyed that. I thought it was. I'm not surprised that the writer Paddy Chefsky nearly had a heart attack when he saw what Ken was doing because he felt every every letter and punctuation mark of the script was sacrosanct, and here was Ken ripping up whole pages or rewriting them, and all the the sort of plot advancing stuff, all the technical stuff between the scientists, he would get it get them to act almost as fast as possible on one master tape, and sort of say, "Well, that's got the that boring stuff out of the out of the way. Let let's have another hallucination. And although I didn't work on it, I was I was very pleased with that one, but. Some others he did were not really very successful.

Simon Rose  50:06

Some people, sure. Okay. Yeah, you mentioned that Cameron was relieved to move on to the boyfriend. Some people have accused him of sort of deliberately being provocative and stirring up feelings in order to be box office. I mean, you know, just going for controversial subjects for the sake of controversy. What do you think of that?

Mike Bradsell  50:48

Having spent so long at the BBC, I will sit a typical B employee. I will sit on the fence and say yes and no. I think the any subjects that he tackled which were controversial, it could be that even if he didn't feel all that strongly, he he probably felt that that the the subject demanded some kind of emphasis, maybe even because his own life was fairly comfortable and straightforward. If it was about outside his own experience, To have deal with characters who might be sort of tortured inside, the he felt it was important to really, if not exaggerate it, at least emphasise it strongly, rather than just because he enjoyed doing that, felt it was only honest if he did it. I suppose there's an element of perhaps the executive producers were prepared to finance that kind of production rather than something good but less controversial. I mean, he. Some of his best films were actually pretty simple and laid back. The two come to mind. One I cut, and one I didn't. The one I didn't cut, which I think is one of his best films in any medium, "Song of Summer, the biography of the last days of Frederick Delius, I've seen that fairly recently, and I find it extremely moving. Yet it's it's basically the story of a a man. sort of house bound through paralysis, living in his house and garden, but still got this passion to to write music, but only do so if he's got a good amanuensis. The other film, one which I did cut, *Savage Messiah* which came immediately after his biography of Marla. Marla was a film which has, I think, got many virtues, very imaginative at times, but he couldn't resist doing these sort of cocking a snook at the audience. A scene where Marla has had a mild heart attack on a train. It's already really established that his wife, who was much younger than he was, he was always suspicious of which she was having affairs with younger people. While he's unconscious during this heart attack, of course, it's an excuse to have a large chunk of music. There's no dialogue in this. He imagines that he is dead, but alive in the coffin, and has to put up with seeing through a glass window in this coffin his wife taunting him by embracing her lover and making lewd gestures and things, and lots of people dressed in something very, very close to Nazi uniform. Oh, here we go again, as pallbearers and so forth. There wasn't much of that, but enough for me to think. Well, he's he's treading on old ground again, but. On Savage Messiah, actually, I've got this the wrong way round. Yes, no, I haven't. No, anyway, on Savage Messiah, he he seemed to have abandoned any attempt at look what a naughty schoolby I am, making rude gestures, got a kind of maturity to the the fantasies and the characterisation. He was able to direct actors very sensitively and get good performances out of them, and Several members of the crew, along with me, felt well. He's left kindergarten. He's he's he's grown up now. If this is the direction he's going in, that's going to be great because he will develop a whole new range of of mature films, but oh yeah, that film was that was the option to run it in the states was taken up by MGM, who in the first place felt a bit guilty about what they'd done to the boyfriend, and in the second place, they thought his name was big enough for them not to, not only not to interfere, but that it would publicise itself, and it didn't. And it took very, very little money. And I think Ken, after that, this is pure conjecture. If he's looking down at me from above. He's probably shaking his fist. That's not true. That's not true. But he, I think he felt, well, if I can't be a good filmmaker, I can be a notorious one, and maybe that's responsible of his choice of subjects.

Simon Rose  57:00

Did you ever think a scene was, you know, a bit going a bit too? Or did you ever say to to Ken, "I saw how long, Ken? Isn't that a bit over the top?

Mike Bradsell  57:12

I didn't, because I knew him well enough to to know that he would immediately dig his heels in, and it's just what we need. On the boyfriend, and I have to say, subsequent to the boyfriend, he said that he had not been well during the production, and some medication that a doctor had recommended had had some effect on his mental processes, and he felt that the boyfriend was too nice. It needed a bit of sort of dirt sprinkled on it, so he Devised a sort of secret lesbian relationship between two members of the cast, and some other similar, slightly sordid scenes, which he shot, and I cut them in, and I had to sort of bite my tongue. How's it going? Well, yes, it sort of works. Okay, trying to look enthusiastic with oh no, Ken, no, no, no, and wait for him to to wake up, which he did, and they all came out. And as I said, subsequently he he reckoned that this medication he was on had clouded his judgement. It had happened on the music lovers as well. He'd felt that, as scripted and shot, when he looked at some of the early part of the film, it didn't emphasise enough the pressure that Tchaikovsky was under. He had no home of his own. He was living in a spare room in Rubinstein's apartment. Rubinstein was the head of the the music school where Tchaikovsky was a professor of music. He there were always parties which were close to orgies going on in the room next to his private room where he was trying to write. Well, you saw enough of got a sense of that in the original version of the film. Every time the the doors opened, you you could see some misty images of people laughing and joking, and some of the positions they were in were obviously something rather sexual. But the doors were shut again, and at one point, I think he chucked a glass of wine on the floor. Can't work under these conditions, and that's all you needed. But no, Ken decided he'd got to have an extra scene. With Tchaikovsky had just been ticked off very severely by Rubinstein after the premiere of his piano concerto, saying it's all rubbish. So he wasn't happy about Rubinstein or any of his associates, but had to come home to his single room through this room where this orgy was going on, and you saw all these details, couples having it off on the piano, and oh, yes, Ken, yeah, it's fine. How long will it take him to realise? Because if I if I had said, Ken is over the top. No, it's not. No, sorry, it's just what we need, and just what we needed was, of course, to take it out, which he did. So it, it never, it never really came to a conflict.

Simon Rose  1:00:59

So your patience paid off. If have you ever regretted not saying anything, you know, once you've seen the finished film on the screen, you think I should have insisted on this, or

Mike Bradsell  1:01:14

I don't think I did in a sort of negative way on the Devils, I mean, I was I was quite happy with the director's cut. I was annoyed in principle that we were asked to remove quite a lot of the the nuns' frenzy, but I I felt that what was left was suggestive enough of what was going on, and quite often you hint at something, and the audience's imagination may be even more lurid than what we were going to believe in. So, I I didn't mind particularly. I never said to Ken, but I didn't mind the the longest of the cut down versions, some of the shorter ones were horrendous, but we had no control over that. And when it was restored, I was happy for Ken. I thought, well, it yes, it's nice to have the directors cut, but I don't know that he's really made that much of an improvement. But of course, I'm very much on Ken's side about the fact that Warners are still refusing to release the complete director's cut. But no, I. other cases, possibly not not for any kind of sensational reason. But there are perhaps there are some scenes which I got the near the nearest I got to conflict with Ken was sometimes I would cut something where I felt we'd we'd had enough, but he wanted to be a bit longer, so I'd make it a a bit longer. He said a bit more, a bit more, a bit more, and maybe I'd get persuaded to shave a bit off the bit more. But in retrospect, I perhaps felt that the yes, I wish I had been in a position to stand my ground because that particular thing does hold proceedings up, even if it's only by about 30 seconds. 30 seconds can seem like an eternity if it's in the wrong place, but it's not in any of the films that have really sort of caught the interest and imagination of the public. So I thought, well, I'm probably being a bit overfussy about this

Simon Rose  1:03:56

then. How about other directors? If you sometimes be more confrontational with different directors.

Mike Bradsell  1:04:10

I've very rarely, if ever, been extremely confrontational. Maybe I'm just inwardly too much of a coward to want to provoke a row? Although I did provoke a short-lived row with Ken at one point, where I thought I was I'd been too rude and outspoken and would probably be dismissed from the production immediately. But it turned out that we were both nervous and under strain, and were at length to apologise to each other. But there were some directors that I hadn't got a great deal of respect for because I thought they were perhaps. Too close to their material, and a bit, shall we say, narcissistic about it. They they loved a particular shot or a particular scene, so they wanted it to be as long as possible. Whereas the audience would obviously much preferred it to be something that you wouldn't have to say, yeah, yeah. Come on, let's get on with the plot. It. I was lucky enough, again, sort of by accident, to fall under the influence of David Putnam. I don't know quite why I was approached, but he was setting up a film called "That'll Be the Day, which starring David Essex as a fictitious but typical sort of school leaver of the 1950s who really wanted to get into the pop world, and it charts his not exactly his rise to fame, but he manages to get into that sort of aura mixing with rock bands and things, and it he'd been a bit of a womaniser earlier in the in the plot, and people advised him not to get married because he won't change. But he does get married, and it seems to be idilic. He has they have a child, but he's still yearning for independence and getting into music, and so he leaves his wife. And the last scene is him going to buy a guitar in a music shop, and gets a bit of preliminary instruction. And the shopkeeper says, "Do you think you can handle it? And he takes that to mean what he wants to do in the future. Yeah, I can handle it all right. It was mainly a vehicle for the the release of a double album of tracks from the 50s by standard artists, the Everly brothers and people like that, which were were sort of fed as source music into the film quite legitimately. It worked very well. But it well the hell did it. What was your original question? I don't know.

Simon Rose  1:07:36

We were talking about conflict when you mentioned David Putt. I mean, he was supportive of you. Sorry, yeah.

Mike Bradsell  1:07:41

David was he was the producer, and the the the director was Claude Watham. It was his first feature film. He'd done a lot of quite distinguished television work, and I think David was a bit suspicious that this television director would not be able to have what it takes to do a feature film, so he was often hovering around like a hawk. At one point, after we'd seen some rushes of a scene, it was meant to be sort of two incidents which are intercut just before the central character gets married. His fiance and his her best friend are having an argument. The best friend is saying, "You're doing the wrong thing. He's he's still a woman. I said, "No, no, no. He's changed completely, and that was intercut with this guy having it off in the back of a van with another woman, and David Puttton was saying, "Get your assistants to order two sets of brushes. I want to see that there's two separate scenes. So I said, "David, we can let's do it as as scripted first if it requires it. I can unpick it and do it as two scenes, but I don't think it's necessary. And when he saw it, he was quite happy with my decision on that. Also, there was a moment towards the end where I did have to improvise a bit to make a bit of a climax, visually and musically, which would spark off his sudden decision to leave the family, and I did it. The director was busy on other scenes, so he didn't know until I'd done it what I was doing. I told him what the sort of thing I was going to do, and I, I chose a particularly aggressive sounding pop track to to go along with it. It was just that the character was sitting in in a sort of suburban park on a bench, looking at some kids. Floating model yachts on the lake, and going through his mind, snippets of conversation pulling him this way or that that they'd been in earlier in the film, and suddenly it comes to a climb from the great sort of wow big percussion chord, and then cut straight to him walking out of the house, and his wife and his mother say, "What are you doing? Come back! Come back! And David Putnam was very taken by that, and he was sort of responsible for me getting onto several other subsequent films by by his company, Good Times Enterprises. I mean, there was a sequel to that anyway, in which the character does called Stardust, in which the character does actually rather like the Beatles, make a sudden rise to fame, but unlike the Beatles, he then disintegrates into suicide. But the because David was sort of my champion, any problem that might have been with directors, if they of course I wouldn't be privy to any of this, but imagining that they'd said, "Well, I don't know this this editor, and he seems to want to sort of start cutting before I'm available, and David would would say, look, he's got a distinguished track record in television. He's done a couple films that I was producing, and they worked out very well. And he likes to get as as as much put as much thought into it, and try to get a respectable cut of as much as possible, to to show the director for the first time. So I'd like you to trust that. And for any of the directors, mostly I got on very well with them. But if there are any that were were inclined to be about a bit unhappy, potentially with what I was doing. I mean, they usually ended up happy with what I and the two of us together at the end had actually polished and come up with. David was very supportive and almost like my agent.

Simon Rose  1:12:42

Yeah, he he produced didn't he produce Marla?

Mike Bradsell  1:12:48

Yes, yes.

Simon Rose  1:12:50

There was an interview with him actually on the on the History Project website, and it sounds like he didn't actually get on with Ken Russell, but that well. Did you? Were you aware of that?

Mike Bradsell  1:13:04

No, I wasn't. He

Simon Rose  1:13:06

seemed to think that Ken didn't care much about him. I think.

Mike Bradsell  1:13:11

Well, that's that's possible, but I don't think David would ever let personal matters cloud his professional judgement, and that this isn't really quite the same. But there was a problem. It was just about fully financed, a pretty low budget anyway, when they started shooting, and within a few days, they were up up to sort of Ken's favourite location, the Lake District, for a week or two. And as is the nature of things, if there's a crisis, it's always once you're away from home and you can't deal with it. The one of the financial backers, I think it was the BFI. They, late in the day, had read the script and decided that there wasn't enough material there to make a feature film, and they wanted to pull out. In fact, they did pull out. You can't stretch this; it's only a few pages long. I mean, it wasn't. It was about 78 pages. The average script is about a minute a page. And of course, they didn't know Ken or the way he worked. And sometimes to be seen, so and so Music sequence, and it names the the piece of music that's going to be used, and just a two line synopsis of the action takes up that much script, but it's going to take about five minutes of screen time. As always, Ken. The highlights of the films, as far as he was concerned, were the big musical set pieces, whether classical or any other kind of music. And David hastily arranged, I think it was some people from Rothschilds, who he'd use them as backwards in the past. They came to see what had been cut so far. Ken's, I think, actually at this stage, Ken was even unaware. I mean, like a good producer, that he was. David didn't bother Ken with it and wasn't going to mention it at all unless it really got ugly, and so he persuaded them that it would be worth their while to fill the gap that had been left by the BFI or whoever it was, and they they were they were very pleased with what they saw. In fact, they they're obviously not used to film work because they they were sort of surprised at the at the quality of the camera work and the the general standard of acting and so forth was something we took for granted, particularly with the Ken picture. So whatever may have actually passed between David and Ken, something of course I wouldn't have known. David was really well behind Ken, and Marlow was going to be one of six films about sort of typical music by augurative films, only only for the cinema instead of the television. There was going to be one on Charles Ives, one on George Gershwin. I can't remember the other three, but they didn't actually manage to get the finance form. So David wouldn't have suggested entering that kind of commitment. If he wasn't happy with Ken, in fact, I can remember the the very first day of shooting in the studio. David and I think his PA were sort of peeping through the open door to get a glimpse of Ken to see how does the great master work? What does he say to the artists and so forth? Like fans would be hovering at the edge of the stage, so he he was very much on ken's wavelength.

Simon Rose  1:17:39

Let's backtrack a bit. So, during the 60s, you were kind of swapping backwards and forwards a bit between documentaries and features. What's the difference? What is there a different sort of culture and an outlook between documentary makers and feature filmmakers.

Mike Bradsell  1:18:04

I suppose there there is, because unless you've got some somebody like Peter Watkins or Ken for that matter, who although the subject may be documentary, they want it to be told in a dramatised way, documentary makers don't usually have to deal with actors, or they're not used to dealing with actors, and so their concentration often, if they don't, they know roughly what they want to shoot, but they they don't know exactly what is going to be possible to shoot until they get to the situation. I think they they have to keep a very cool head about improvising what they're going to do because it's not actually scripted, whereas in in features, I mean the director may have written or part written screenplay him himself or herself, and they they are following. Even if they depart from it, they're starting off by following a sort of a pre-arranged plan in their head. But otherwise, it's the there may be a temperamental difference. I mean, I can think of Michael Apted, who I only worked with once on Stardust. We were going to work together on subsequent films, but our timing wasn't right. He had started off by doing television documentaries. A whole series of shooting ordinary people at the age of seven.

Simon Rose  1:20:08

Yeah, the Seven Up series, which is still just just continuing still. 63 now. Wow,

Mike Bradsell  1:20:15

and yet he did television drama. Stardust was complete drama. He he really had a foot in both camps and was quite happy in either. Actually, the reason we didn't work again was because of a project that actually failed after 10 weeks of shooting, called Trick or Treat, as the first acting part for Bianca Jagger. Actually, I don't know whether she's still around. I think I don't know whether we should use this. Perhaps

Simon Rose  1:20:55

we shouldn't talk about it. No, no. I was wondering more about what they're what they're trying to achieve. I mean, I suppose documentary makers are more interested in real life, but even drama is is another way of reflecting on real life, isn't

Mike Bradsell  1:21:12

it? Very much.

Simon Rose  1:21:13

Documentary makers are maybe more political, maybe more left wing, as I've heard

Mike Bradsell  1:21:19

it. Well, how how much more left wing can you get than Ken Loach, something like I, Daniel?

Simon Rose  1:21:35

Well, again, I suppose I think of him more as a documentary make, although he does obviously they're all dramas, but he seemed again to come from that background of being very much with the nitty-gritty of real life.

Mike Bradsell  1:21:56

Well, I thought somebody like Ken Russell would probably never feel really at home with something really nitty gritty because that's. I wouldn't say that he shuts his mind to it. He I think he's he was probably fairly left wing in his personal political views, but it wasn't something that he wanted to make films about, particularly that he felt perhaps other people were better qualified with the their temperament and their their makeup than he was. He would prefer to make work on this sort of fantastic poetic side of life. He always said that the Devils was the only political film he made, and the only one that he could make because they they say a week is a long time in politics and Attitudes of of the people who make films and the people who see them could change totally during the the span of time that the the film took to shoot and cut. But he said he he was able to make the devils because the the political conflict in it was as relevant today as it was in 1635 or whatever, but that because it was an actual series of events that were finite, they really happened, and this was the outcome. There was no no two ways about it. He felt he was able to to make it, but if it was a contemporary subject, he wouldn't even attempt

Simon Rose  1:23:51

it. How about his religious views and beliefs? Did did did you talk about that much with him?

Mike Bradsell  1:24:01

Only in the the last years of his life, often there wasn't really much. I mean, I knew that he was at least theoretically a Catholic, but his faith in that direction seemed to swing a lot when he was living for 10 years in the Lake District. In in a documentary about him, I can remember him saying quite categorically that he didn't actually denounce Catholicism, but he said the my religion is all around me. The the mountains they're my altar, and even the lakes were something else to do with. Something ecclesiastical, so he sort of had a kind of humanist attitude. But then, a bit later, certainly when he came back to London, he he sort of renewed his Catholicism in a general sense. It's I've often reflected on the fact that we were very close professionally, but we very rarely, if at all, met for purely social occasions. I was often round at his house in Kensington. To see him and his wife Shirley, but it was nearly always some kind of informal production meeting. Even though I'd stay to dinner, and Shirley was a very good cook, and there'd be lots of wine flowing. It would always be to discuss something that we were in the middle of, or something that was coming up-not a particularly intense discussion-but we'd listen to a few LPs and things sometimes just for the pleasure of it. Oh, I've just got this. Have you heard it? Or sometimes a case of I'm thinking this scene we're going to shoot in a couple of weeks. I'm thinking of using this, so can you get it transferred and do what you think is right with it, and so forth. It's only in his really later years when he wasn't getting any work at all because he was, in the best sense of the word, an alcohol, a workaholic, certainly not an alcoholic. He drank plenty, but not that to that extent. He was. He had to do something on film, so he made what he and his then wife called the garage films, because the first couple were literally shot in the garage. They moved the car out into the into the drive and made a little set in the space with just themselves as actors. If she was on screen, he'd shoot it. If he was on screen, he'd set it up and get her to press the button and so forth. They were a variable artistic quality, but as good technically as possible. After a couple of them that he'd done, he had no idea whether they would make any sort of commercial headway. He just wanted to make something. He wrote all the scripts himself. When I went down to his cottage in the New Forest, on the day that he was being interviewed in the garden about the the restoration of the missing bits from the devils, Paul Joyce, the director of the documentary, had asked me. I had made a VHS copy of the section with quite a bit of footage either side, which had been reinserted, which wasn't straightforward. It wasn't a question of pulling it apart and sticking this in. There were bits which were common because we, when we knew we had to lose something, we used perhaps some of the less controversial but interesting shots in what was left. So they had to come out of the main body of the film and something be substituted. I'd done a temporary track of some odds and ends of Max's music, which matched it and everything, and Paul Joyce has said that we won't tell Ken you're coming. It can be a sort of surprise reunion, and it went very well. They they even filmed our embrace when I turned up in the garden unexpectedly, and when we we went into the the house, into the spare room, which was he'd call the cutting room. I just happened to notice that he'd he'd got a Casablanca editing machine, and I just said, "Oh, I've got one of those. And later he called me up to say, you've got a Casablanca, haven't you? That's right. Well, could you come and give me some tutorials? Because I really can't do anything other assemble sections of picture and track. I don't know how to overlap the picture or overlap the sound. Would do fades and dissolves or anything elaborate.

Mike Bradsell  1:30:02

How to add music while keeping the dialogue running? So I went down and spent a day with him, and after a couple of hours, he looked very thoughtful, and he was halfway through one of these garage films, and he said, "Would I'll never remember all that, and if I do remember, I'll never know how to do it. Could you cut the rest of this for me? So I hadn't got any night clothes or anything with me, so I couldn't do it for the time. I said, "I'll come down for a few days a bit later, and this set a sort of process where I think he made another four garage type films, and I would come down for about four days at a time, and in the evenings, it's the first time we were really socialising. As always, there's plenty of red wine flowing, and he'd learnt since he'd divorced his first wife. He was determined to cook for himself because I think she had said something. Now you're going. Who's going to cook for you? And so he was he'd do some quite good delicacies of homemade pate on toast or something like that, and we'd sit down to watch a feature film which was being transmitted live on television that particular night, and we'd chat. His wife Would for Kate her usual comfortable seat on the sofa, so I'd got somewhere to sit with Ken, and she'd kneel at his feet and watch from there. Or if we were having dinner separately from the television, anecdotes and things, and we, I told him round about that time that I was interested in the the branch of Christianity known as Anthroposophy, and he was interested. Oh, tell me more about it, and he was telling me about certain Catholic experiences, although he he wasn't anything like as intense a Catholic as he had been in his younger days. He still went to mass occasionally, and we we had much more of a a kind of intimate, friendly relationship than we had when we were really working hard at it professionally. Possibly because it was a simpler sort of genre that we were working on. We had the time to to socialise, but I always thought it was a bit odd that it wasn't until we were both well into our 70s that we really became firm friends.

Simon Rose  1:32:56

And your own beliefs, political, religious, etc. Have you ever turned down a job because you you didn't like like the treatment and the fit?

Mike Bradsell  1:33:11

Yes, not for religious reasons. I was I was invited to cut a film about a well-known punk rock star. I didn't actually know what the subject was. I was invited to the production office and told, terribly sorry, the director is at a meeting that he can't get out of. He'll be away for about an hour and a half. Is that? Do you mind waiting? Would you like some tea or coffee or a stronger drink? We can give you a copy of the script to read. And he was way long enough for me to actually have read the whole script through before he came back, and when he did, as politely as I could, I said, "Well, thank you very much for asking me. I feel very flattered that you would like me to cut your film, but honestly, I don't think this is for me. However, professional I would try to be, I'm really not in sympathy with this subject or the characters. And I know they're real people, but I I don't think I could do it. So I sort of turned the picture down before it even started.

Simon Rose  1:34:49

Let's speed on to Jabberwocky.

Mike Bradsell  1:34:53

Ah,

Simon Rose  1:34:54

sounds interesting. Terry Gilliam's first first feature. Yeah.

Mike Bradsell  1:35:00

I think it was yes. I think on the Monty Python series, most of them there was officially a director, but they, I think, each of the principal characters would direct a bit themselves, and I think he had a free hand with all the the cartoons that he produced for for the series, but yeah, this was certainly his first big drama production. In a way, he didn't really want an editor. I mean, he said to me, sort of quite good-naturedly, "I'm sure you enjoy what you're doing. I would enjoy doing it as well. I wish I didn't have to. However good you are, I wish I didn't have to have somebody else do it for me. But apart from a momentary lack of temper for me. I didn't really blow up. I just got a little bit sort of. Hey, come on, let's be a bit disciplined about this, because he, I've been trying to do something, and he already wanted to show me some something else or to do something else. And I'm no good at multitasking accidents. I'm I'm a very good serial monotasker. I want to get this bit finished before I get on to the next bit. Not start looking at that while I'm still trying to do this. But we ended up very good friends on it, and I think he wanted to use me on the life of Brian, but it wasn't possible. We did. There was an unfortunate thing towards the end of it. I mean, I've been very lucky that any painful illness I may have had during my life has never actually occurred during a working day, but I started to get excruciating groyne pain as though I was trying to pass kidney stones, but the doctors could find nothing there. But it would happen for about two hours and then go away, and I wouldn't know when it came back again. And it just so happened that I got a bad attack during the working day while they were trying to dub, and I was really required in the dubbing theatre. But I was sort of sitting squirming uncomfortably on a chair in the cutting room, and every time I went into the Dubbing Theatre, I was a bit irritable. I went home. I had to go home, and of course, as soon as I got home, I felt much better. But I went. In the interest of time, I had to go to go privately to a consultant who couldn't again couldn't find anything wrong. Just gave me some advice as to what to do if it reoccurred, but it didn't. And that was in a morning, and I decided to go into the cut room once in the afternoon. Although I was I'd been anticipating trouble. I was afraid he might say I got something seriously wrong, and I was shaking a bit. And I I got into the dubbing theatre, and I didn't like what I heard. I I felt that there was too much mushy general effects which weren't contributing to anything, and some of the carefully selected music because we didn't have a composer. We used the what we could find that was any good from the Dwarf Library. It wasn't making its impact, and I think I probably said something like, "Oh, why bother to have music? This thing's not going to be heard, and he also turned on me a bit and said, "Well, all right, be temperamental. I had plenty of vacations when I could throw a tantrum, you know, on this production. But you could see that sort of hurt me a bit. So he sort of put his hand up and ruffled my hair a bit, and that was the end of it, but we did get on very well. It was-it's one of my favourite pictures. I think a lot of people still like it, although it's years old now. And

Simon Rose  1:39:35

then, oh well, a couple of years after that, scum.

Mike Bradsell  1:39:42

Ah, yes.

Simon Rose  1:39:43

Another banned film, although it wasn't. I think it was banned. You weren't. You didn't edit the BBC version, which was.

Mike Bradsell  1:39:49

It was the BBC version that was banned. Yes, I. I think most of us who were going to work on the feature version were allowed to see the BBC. Version, and I thought, apart from the fact that it was banned, it seemed to have been a very good picture. I can't see that this will be any better. In in some ways, it was. It was a little bit different. Alan Clark had had perhaps had time to to think about what he would do differently, and it was again it's a case rather like Peter Watkins of a very mild, Polite man tackling an extremely violent subject. Although I was told by some people that he he could be not exactly violent, but he would sometimes drink too much and get embarrassing. Was once thrown onto the BBC club for trying to dance naked on the on the table or something, but I thought that doesn't sound like the Alan Clark I know. But there's presumably several aspects to Alan Clark. But we again, he was one of those I got on very well with. He got a he contracted glandular fever during post production, and very wisely kept apart from us as much as possible because it's quite contagious. And we'd done most of the cut, but we were just sort of fine cutting a few scenes by telephone because he he went to stay with a friend in the West Country somewhere, I think. Because one of the the principal symptoms was extreme tiredness, so he spent a lot of time during the day on the sofa, just lying down, and be a sort of maybe a 10 minute conversation each day. Hi, how's it going? Did you try that scene before the other one? Yes, I did. What do you think? I said, yeah, I think it's better that way. But the other one you suggested should go after another one that was better before, and so oh, I'll try it like that. So

Simon Rose  1:42:19

you were sending him cups to watch at home, or was this?

Mike Bradsell  1:42:22

In those days, it wasn't easy. Well, first of all, it was it was time-consuming, and there wasn't always the facility because it had to be on VHS. There would be it would be time-consuming to extract those scenes from the cut and put them on VHS, and then it's got to go down by post. And as he was living so far away, you can't just bike it across London to him. Of course, these days I haven't. I understand the principle and applaud it very much, but I haven't really grasped the the technicality of how you magically send your cut through cyberspace in an instant-it's really great. There was a director I was working with who was shooting in Mexico, and his producers were not happy with what he was doing, and if we'd been able to do that, I I could send him a cut of a scene I'd done, which the executives were worried about, and perhaps within half an hour of him ringing me up and saying, "Can you get me this as soon as possible? Which was actually several days sending a VHS all that way. They could see on their own television set whether it worked or not, and yes, it did work. And they backed off a bit and let him get on with it. But it in those in the 70s and probably 80s as well. It was there wasn't enough sort of instant technology available to do something like that. I thought it was remarkable enough that, as I was actually editing on Avid, if he rang up and say, can you have a look at scene number so and so? I want to know whether we need a particular shot. I didn't have to take everything off the horse, take that scene out of its can and wind it down. I could just a click of the mouse, just hide what I was doing and leave it to its own devices. Well, bring up the the new one, scroll through it quickly to the bit he talked about, and said, "No, no, it's fine. Trust me, that you don't need any more." I mean, ring off and another click, and there I was back to what was I doing when I was so rudely interrupted? There were other occasions where I've I've actually spent a couple of days totally recutting a particular area of the film because the director felt that it would be better that way, and when we saw it together, decided we both decided that we were right the first time. So I've got to then unpick the unpicking and try to make it back where it was. Whereas with a digital system, all you have to do is make a copy of the project and do a different one. So here's one I prepared earlier. You don't like it? Okay, forget it. We go back to the other one. I think technically there have been vast strides in the the direction of being able to work almost as fast as you can think, which sometimes, in my case, that means not very fast. But it at least you, if you do have a sudden idea, yeah, it'd be better if we started at the end and work back to the beginning. Let's try it. You can try it without altering a single frame of the cut you'd already done. If you don't want to,

Simon Rose  1:46:26

yes. In a way, it sort of maybe takes away a little bit of your power. You can't now. You used to be able to say, "Well, I tried it, but it doesn't really work. And they say, "Oh, don't worry. And now they say, "Well, just show me, show it me. So you know, I mean, generally, hopefully, they can see that you're right, but it does take a bit of the editor's power away. I feel.

Mike Bradsell  1:46:48

Well, I've I've never maybe once or twice with Ken, I may have said that, knowing that he wouldn't he would know because I knew what more or less what he wanted. That if I said it doesn't work, probably doesn't work. But generally, I don't say that because I think the director has, if he feels fairly strongly about how it should go, I think has a a right to be able to see it having gone that way, and as you say, it's so simple. You just create another version of the project, preferably dating them and timing them. So say, right, let's go back to the one we had. Oh, was that yesterday? Was it the day before? Was it last week?

Simon Rose  1:47:38

Yeah, it does in a way, I know you know another editor who just didn't do that, but he said, "Well, he said, well, we're just making it better all the time. Why would I want to keep an older version? It does it does open up the possibility of filmmaking by committee, where you sort of have a well, let's have a bit of this version, the bit of that version. Do you see what I mean?

Mike Bradsell  1:48:04

Yes. Well, I agree with that totally. And what I should have said is, it can be done if required. I didn't say I always do that. In fact, I never really got into the habit of keeping multiple versions. More recently, when I've been working at home, I've sometimes independently of the director. If I just wanted to try something for my own curiosity and satisfaction, I'll create a different version and keep it to show the director if I think it's worth bothering with, but otherwise I'll junk it so that I don't have a great long list of alternative versions. In fact, there was one one production where somebody else had cut it, but I was asked to put a fresh eye to it, and I found that the assistant who'd been on on the first cut was my assistant on this as well because I needed some sort of continuity of information. He was rather put out by the fact that I wasn't keeping versions. So, as he pointed out, the director wasn't present. I think the director refused to be involved in recutting because it was thought to be good enough as it was. The previous director sort of kept every cut, so he felt that we should respect the director's ideas, and so I was doing that. All I knew, I wasn't going to refer to it again, and nobody else was likely to. But it was, it was there just in case, available for reference. But I agree, if you if you do that a lot. There is a danger of never making a decision. I mean, another thing. I've never understood the the process of assembly editing. I see no point in not going for what you think it's going to be at the end first time, you make some mistakes maybe, but why why cut it loosely or over simply when you know that it's got to be intercut more elaborately or this scene has got to be really fast moving? Go for it. Doesn't matter these particularly since wet splicing was abandoned, and you just got tape joints. If you've really overdone it, you just extend it and put put the tape over it. And digitally, of course, you don't even see the join. So, I. I've never understood what the need, or even the how you do an assembly cut. I just go for a fine, what I feel is a fine cut, first time. I'm usually wrong. I usually find that it needs to be much finer still, but at least it's going in the right direction without an unnecessary intermediate process.

Simon Rose  1:51:26

So you've been through quite a few technical changes: 1635, Presumably, probably more or less skipped tape, but we've done some tape editing, maybe, and and nonlinear digital. Did you find those changes hard?

Mike Bradsell  1:51:46

No, but what what I did find hard was a kind of catch 22. When digital, certainly, God can't remember the Russian nonlinear digital got going, which is rather like reinventing the wheel because the process is very similar to the way you should cut on film, in my opinion. I was being asked, would you cut this film for us? Yes, I'd be delighted to. It's we're using Avid, so I say I'm afraid I haven't got any experience of it. Oh, and I'm afraid we we can't have somebody who is isn't experienced. Well, how do I get some experience? Oh, by cutting on average. Yes, but if if I can't cut on average, I can't get any experience. So rather a bit futile. But I went on a three day crash course at Beckinsfield in nonlinear editing. I was almost at that time computer illiterate. I couldn't even open it up and write a letter. I still can't actually. I've sort of sort of mastered the difficult end of film editing, but I have to ask my wife to tell me what I press to to change the font size in this letter I'm writing, or something like that. When

Simon Rose  1:53:28

did you go on this course? Was that in the 80s?

Mike Bradsell  1:53:32

Yeah, I can't remember. It was quite a long time ago. It was certainly fairly soon after that, the the system came into operation, but it that three days was pretty useless because I had nothing to practice on. It's it's rather like taking some expensive driving lessons and having neither a car nor an experienced driver who's allowed to sit with you, so you can drive around and practice what you've been told, and eventually has a sort of a dream conversation. I could hardly believe my ears. Somebody I thought it was going to go the usual way. Somebody called me and said, "There's a film that has been cut, but the director feels it needs certainly needs a couple of new scenes we're going to shoot, and some tidying up. So I said, "Okay, I'll do that, but it's it was cut on film. But since the editor has gone on to other things, the director had it transferred onto. A system whereby he could use Avid to play around with it, and he's got really rather used to that. So we'd like you to work on Avid. I said, but in all honesty, I would love to, but I haven't got enough experience, and my assistant, who is more computer literate than I. Also, hasn't got enough experience. We'd we'd be sort of learning how to do it and be making making mistakes at your expense. Okay, okay. Anyway, it was just that they took both me and my assistant on, and we they paid for. Actually, it wasn't David. It was Light Works, and there was a representative from Light Works was at our disposal for about three days, and he just sort of sat there waiting for how do we do this and what's the alternative to that? Is there a faster way of so and so? And at the end of the third day, we were both asking him questions which he didn't know the answers to because it was a bit beyond the basic. And yes, it was a bit slow moving, but I was then actually in the in with the process. I was day by day. I was still not not not having time to forget anything because I'd only dealt with something similar the day before or something like that, but it was that was only sort of half a film, and when we were making Local Hero, after we'd got what we reckoned was the cut, Bill Forsyth and the producer took that cut to the states to get some reactions to it, and I said to the director, "Do you think they would go to the expense of running off a digital copy of it before they take it away, so that we we're not sitting twiddling our thumbs for three weeks. We can try some things out. So yes, I think so. So we we were doing what you might call a non-destructive cut on Avid, and when we'd finished, and Bill and the producer came back. The producer saying, "Well, guys, it went great, but we thought there's that scene that we we don't really know. Yeah, we take take that out, and this needs shorting and shortening and turning around the other way. Yes, we've done that. Everything he said, we'd already done so. It was only a question of conforming the film to what we had done on the on David. But it was it was quite a time. It was actually not until the turn of the century. That sounds very ominous. That I actually cut a complete film on a digital system.

Simon Rose  1:58:23

Okay, briefly, what what was it like working with Kenneth Branagh on Henry the Fifth? Sorry, what what what was it like working on Henry the Fifth with Kenneth Branagh?

Mike Bradsell  1:58:34

Oh, that was great. Henry the Fifth was I would first of all, when I first heard about it, I was a bit concerned as to whether it could actually do anything to top the famous Lawrence Olivier version. But when I was shown the script, there were several scenes which, quite understandably, had been deleted from the version that Olivier shot. One about spies and traitors and British soldiers looting and pillaging in in France was obviously not the done thing, even in 1415. But I I met Ken Branagh, and I was I was sort of reassured by his just general manner that he was likely to attempt to make a not a film which is different for the sake of it, but something which would perhaps stand up as a viable alternative. I knew it wouldn't have. The sense of pageantry or extravagance of colour or anything, but good it would be much more documentary in feel. And we had a conversation about sort of precedents. I asked him if he he said that he wanted it to to look a bit a bit sort of documentary, and I asked him if he knew Orson Welles's chimes at midnight, and he said he didn't, but he would have a look. And there were scenes in the battle that he thought should be shot entirely in slow motion, and I said, "Well, if the budget will run to it, perhaps you should have a second camera running at 25 frames a second, just in case, because sometimes when you double up the speed to try to get back to normal, it doesn't, or maybe faster than that. If you shot at 100 frames or something, it doesn't quite work technically. Anyway, we we again we we got on extremely well. He he did something which is obviously something which is common in the theatrical world, something which I was very pleased about. He arranged a read-through. He booked a room, just like this conference room here, and the the actors were all assembled, which was a good opportunity to meet them, and they knew who I was, who this strange bearded character was. Why was he always hanging around? And get a sense of, and some of the other principal members of the crew as well. And the it was interesting to to get to know, although it was more or less treated as a kind of radio play, what kind of performance we get from each of the the actors and the characters they were portraying, and Ken was obviously very familiar with them all. They're all good friends because they were all in the Renaissance Theatre Company, but I-I was sort of welcomed. I wasn't just a bystander. I was made to feel like part of the company, and when they they were shooting at Shepperton Studios, most of it, well, the the location work was usually in the the studio garden or nearby. So, apart from a couple of scenes on the south coast with the white cliffs, it was all sort of confined to a studio area, which meant that Ken, although he was pretty assured with film technique already, even though he hadn't shot one before, during the first couple of days in the studio, there was one shot he had directed, which jarred a bit. It was it was several minutes before you actually saw Henry the Fifth. He was a shadow passing on the wall, or he was seen in back view or in silhouette, and there was a subjective point of view. He was coming into the throne room, and he was looking to the left and seeing noel men going past him that way, and noblemen going past him that way, and then suddenly it's like a kind of visual shriek of brakes, because suddenly got a static shot of the throne, and he turns and sits into it, and I said, if you're still on that set, can you please move into the empty throne at the same speed as your tracking shots? Because you might argue theoretically that it's no longer a subjective shot, so why are you tracking? But visually, it's the action of the king coming in and sitting down, which must bring it to a stop, not the cut, which they willingly did.

Mike Bradsell  2:04:31

And I thought this must be what it was like in the old days in Hollywood, when the editor was always fairly close at hand, and any any problems that could be dealt with almost immediately, but that's sort of a minor thing. We we we got on extremely well, and in fact, Ken said to me afterwards that. If he did any more films, and he had got a couple lined up, he would like me to cut them. But of course, in the theatre world, the timing is not quite the same as in the film world. You you may have a a run of several months and then a long gap before the next project, theatre project comes up, and so forth. Whereas in films, even if there are gaps, you can't guarantee that you're going to be available the day they start. A man very much wanted to do his next film, which was an American film called "Dead Again, I'd read the script and I liked it very much. It involving two sets of characters in two time scales, and it just it didn't work out. I'd already been asked to do something else and agreed to it when he was due to shoot, so never mind the next one. But then I was still on this other film when he was ready to do that. So I had to turn him down again. I had to turn him down three times before I was actually free. By which time he, as often is the case, and quite rightly, he was getting on quite well with the the editor who who had done the the previous film, who wanted to be with him on the next one. So I lost out. I never worked with him again, which is a shame because I Really, certainly, the first three or four films he directed, I was very pleased. Would Noel would like to have cut any one of them?

Simon Rose  2:06:50

And jumping right on to quite recently, almost playing up to date, postcards from the 44% Yeah, a documentary and sounds a bit political again.

Mike Bradsell  2:07:08

Yes, yeah, very political, but rather gentle. It was, as the 48% in the title implies, it was the director wanted to make it not necessarily as any kind of propaganda for an English audience, but to show the Europeans that we are not all a bunch of Brexiters. A hell of a lot of us, in fact, at least 48% desperately want to remain part of Europe, and I I put my services forward because I felt it was I'd been thinking ever ever since the the awful referendum I'd felt I want to do something to try to contribute to getting out of this wrong judgement. Everything seems to be going the wrong way. What could I do? And to be able to offer my professional experience to a film which was going to put exactly my point of view. I thought, well, this is a golden opportunity, but technicality at last sort of got in the way. They were going to they'd prepared it for for editing on Avid, and they'd got a. Every everybody was contributing, either for expenses or just for nothing. I said I would certainly work for nothing because I think it's very important. They had an editor who was fairly busy, but had some spare time, so he set up all the parameters, and when I came on board, the I had to rely on him a lot to help me get back to any kind of familiarity with Avid. People were saying, "Oh, you've been working on Final Cut Pro, and David is superior to that, and it's exactly the same as a doddle. It's like driving a car; you get a different make and model, and it's exactly the. So I thought, well, even that isn't so. I mean, if you're used to a particular vehicle, you might, in an emergency, go for the break or to change gear, and it's just not where you're used to finding it. You make a mistake because of hesitation or so forth, and so it proved to be because I think in. For years since I used Avid before, to my surprise, it seems to have grown away from film thinking, in much more into computer thinking. The first basic thing is that they don't necessarily call certain processes that you want to do by any kind of title that would be familiar to a filmmaker, and I was constantly bringing up this other editor, or even getting him round to my place and saying, "Look, this is I've only managed to cut about 30 seconds since I spoke to you last because I I want to do certain things. For example, I I want to crop and resize a shot which is okay, but it's they've got half a policeman's head on the right hand side, which is distracting. I just want to enlarge it a bit and recenter it on Final Cut Pro. All I'd do is drag it and lay it in, and but he was very good natured and helped me a lot. But I wasn't able to contribute as much as I wanted to the film because I felt that I was like a beginner all over again. I could not forget. Just let all the the technique take care of itself. I I want to do this process. I want to add this to that and take that away and not think about it. Just do it. I I started off with a scene which was at the very beginning of the film, a kind of prologue of that the big march they had. They call it the the March March. I think it was took place in in in March of 2016, and I treated it like a almost like an Eisenstein documentary, and it was only five minutes long, and I'd only spoken to the director on the phone up to that point, and not very often. I was a bit nervous about getting him round to see it, but he seemed very happy. He asked if he could see it again, and then I took my wife and I out to a snack lunch locally, and seemed more keen just to talk about. It was like an interview. He seen my CV by that time, and he wanted to ask me lots of gossipy questions about people I knew and worked with and so forth.

Mike Bradsell  2:12:47

And I found out later that when I had to leave the production because I felt I couldn't work quickly enough, and the eye problems I have were exaggerated by having to spend longer looking at the screen each day than I really wanted to. So look, I'm sorry to bow out at such an early stage without having really contributed to anything, you say, "Well, no, really. When I saw that opening scene, I know it's all going to change a lot, but that's what gave me the the heart to continue. I thought, "Yes, we got a real documentary here. So, although a lot of that disappeared when the before was finished, but if he really meant that that I had sort of given him a kind of metaphorical push to get going, all right, I've done my job. But but I was I was very disappointed that I I didn't quickly master the. the the latest version of Avid to be able to work unaided. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to. I did a sort of long cut of about two thirds of it, but it wasn't actually. This was more like the the kind of assembly that I was running. Yeah, we've always.

Simon Rose  2:14:28

We got any time left? A

Mike Bradsell  2:14:29

little bit, yeah.

Simon Rose  2:14:31

Well, just tell me what's the best thing about editing.

Mike Bradsell  2:14:38

Broadly speaking, although the current political situation has made taking control a really dirty phrase, I like the whether the. Himself or herself is is doing it, or whether it's a collaboration between the editor and the director. This is real filmmaking. When I mean, I have a a kind of love-hate relationship with the the rest of the process of filmmaking, I like to be around when they're shooting, whether it's officially I've visited the set because I've got something I need to discuss with the director, or whether I've just informally joined them on occasion because I've got some spare time, but I I feel that it there is obviously a kind of artistic come mechanical process which is going on with lots of really important but non cinematic things that are involved: a row of electrical generators, which have got to be attended to, catering trucks, things which you have to try to put out of your mind because you're trying to concentrate on the pure act of making a film, but as an editor, you don't have to worry about any of that. You can, you, if you want to, unless you really have to, you can keep well apart from the rest of the crew. You can say, "Yeah, I don't want to know about the trouble you had getting a good take of that tracking shot. I know you will have done your best. Don't tell me about it. I want to see whether it works in rushes, and then I want to concentrate on nothing but pure filmmaking. Sounds perhaps a bit spoilt, or I'm talking about living in a kind of ivory tower. But it's not. It's just the director and the editor. Yes, of course. If if you haven't had a really good cameraman to shoot something, you've got nothing to work with at all, but ultimately, it's it's what's going on in the cutting room, which is bringing life to something which is really just a few zeros and ones on a computer or a bit of a couple of bits of cellotape celluloid that you're joining together with sellotape, but if you put them together at the right length and in the right order, you can see something organic growing out of it. I mean, my main, for most of the time, my main task in editing is to make it look as if I've done nothing. The audience should be able to feel that they, not not exactly watching a stage play, but that they've watched a dramatic process which has had no interruption whatsoever, and except at certain key points, where you've got something stylized, where the editing is deliberately obtrusive, but some of the the most complimentary remarks I've ever had are when people say, in that scene, I've no idea where the cuts were. I said, "Cool, that's what it's supposed to be like. Very

Simon Rose  2:18:43

good, thank you. I thought it was a very good end.

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