Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,6
but worth it.’
The resulting sighs round the table came from relief. We’d spent the whole day in the stable yard, the human action in the foreground taking place against a background of routine equine life. Never could rows of horses have been mucked out, fed, watered and groomed more times in any twelve hours before: but we had enough shots in the can to give the fictional stable unending life.
The script meeting over, everyone dispersed except a tall thin, disjointed-looking man in an untidy beard and unkempt clothes whose unimpressive appearance hid an artistic confidence as unassailable as granite. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He slouched in his seat and waited until all backs but our own had passed through the door.
‘You wanted me to stay?’ he asked. ‘Ed said.’
‘Yes.’
Every film with any hope of acclaimed success needed an eye that saw all life as through a camera lens. Someone to whom focus and light intensities were extrasensory dimensions taken for granted. His title on the credits might variously be ‘cinematographer’ or ‘director of photography’. I’d had a mathematical friend once who said he thought in algebra: Moncrieff, director of photography, thought in moving light and shadows.
We were used to each other. This was our third film together. I’d been disconcerted the first time by his surrealist sense of humour, then seen that it was the aquifer of his geysers of visual genius, then felt that to work without him would leave me nakedly exposed in the realm of translating my own perceptions into revelations on the screen. When I told Moncrieff what I wanted an audience to understand, he could instinctively slant a lens to achieve it.
We had once staged a ‘last rites’ scene for a man about to be murdered by terrorists: the ultimate cruelty of that wicked blasphemy had been underscored by Moncrieff’s lighting of the faces; the petrified victim, the sweating priest and the hard men’s absence of mercy. Ego te absolvo… it had brought me death threats by post.
On that Tuesday in Newmarket I asked Moncrieff, ‘Have you seen the railings outside the Jockey Club? The ones enclosing the private parking forecourt?’
‘Tall and black? Yes.’
‘I want a shot that emphasises the barrier qualities. I want to establish the way the railings shut out everyone but the elite. Inside can be mandarins of racing. Outside, hoi polloi.’
Moncrieff nodded.
I said, ‘I also want to give an impression that the people inside, Cibber and George, the Jockey Club members, are themselves prisoners in their own conventions. Behind bars, one might say.’
Moncrieff nodded.
‘And,’ I said, ‘take a five-second shot of the hinges of the gates as they open, also as they close.’
‘Right.’
‘The scene between Cibber and George is shot to begin with from outside the bars. I’d like the zoo aspect made clear. Then track the lens forward between the railings to establish where they’re standing. The rest of that conversation is in close-ups.’
Moncrieff nodded. He seldom made notes while we talked, but he would write a meticulous worksheet before bedtime.
‘We’re not being judgmental,’ I said. ‘Not heavy handed. No great social stance. Just a fleeting impression.’
‘A feather touch,’ Moncrieff said. ‘Got you.’
‘Contributing to Cibber’s crack-up,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘I’ll get Howard to write that crack-up tomorrow,’ I said. ‘It’s mainly a matter of a shift in intensity from the calm scene already in the script. Howard just needs to put some juice into it.’
‘Howard’s juice is watered cranberry.’ Moncrieff picked up a vodka bottle from among the drinks clutter, and squinted at it against the light. ‘Empty,’ he commented morosely. ‘Have you tried vodka and cranberry juice? It’s disgusting.’
Howard drank it all the time.
‘Howard,’ Moncrieff said, ‘is radioactive waste. You can’t get rid of it safely.’
He knew as well as I did that Howard Tyler’s name on the billboards would bring to the film both the lending library audience and attention from upmarket critics. Howard Tyler won prestigious prizes and had received honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic. Moncrieff and I were considered lucky to be working with such a luminous figure.
Few authors could, or even wanted to, write screenplays of their own novels: Howard Tyler had been nominated for an Oscar at his first attempt and subsequently refused to sell his film rights unless the package included himself. Moncrieff and I were stuck with Howard, to put it briefly, as fast as it seemed he was stuck with me.
Our producer, bald, sixty, a heavily-framed American, had put a canny deal together for the company. Big-name