Ronald Neame very kindly agreed to give the following interview to mark David Lean's centenary, pointing out that it is only three years until his own centenary. Neame first worked with Lean on the film adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play, Major Barbara (1941), which Lean edited and Neame photographed. He is the last surviving member of Cineguild, which was formed after the great success of Lean's first film as a director, In Which We Serve, in 1942. Enjoying the generous financial backing of the Rank Organisation, the partnership - which consisted of Neame, David Lean and the producer Anthony Havelock-Allan - was behind all Lean's films from This Happy Breed (1944) to Madeleine (1950).
Neame's recently published memoirs, Straight from the Horse's Mouth, contain a full and frank account of not only his close partnership with Lean but also his own long, rich and varied career in both the British cinema and Hollywood.
David and I were lifetime friends. Our partnership lasted ten years, during which time we made nine feature films together. David's whole life was dedicated to film. Nothing else really mattered to him. He loved the medium. I swear that if you had gone into David when he was busy on a script session and said, "Your mother's just died," he would have said, "Don't worry me now. I'm busy."
He was also a brilliant editor. For actors, [he was] not so good with the insecure. Like most over-achievers, he was impatient with insecurity. He couldn't tolerate inefficiency of any kind, but he was very polite to them. He never showed his resentment of them when they weren't good. But he took it out on them in the cutting-room. The problem was that some actors, and great actors too, bring a lot of themselves to the screen. And if David didn't agree with what they presented, then there was friction. At the end of every film he made with Guinness, for example, Guinness would say, "I never want to work with David again."
We started out together separately in two different studios at about the same time. I was a messenger boy, a call boy at Elstree, and he was in the wardrobe department at Shepherd's Bush, and we came together when he was an editor. He learned editing from an American editor, whom he said was absolutely wonderful - Merrill White. And of course the very, very best way into direction is through the cutting-room, because the editor is a second story-teller. The director is the story-teller, and the editor is a second story-teller. And David was brilliant in both.
He knew what he wanted when he was shooting a film. You see, so many directors shoot everything in long shot, everything in medium shot, everything in close shot, and they've got thousands of feet of film. Then the editor sorts it out in some sort of way and puts it together. Now David knew exactly the way it was going to be put together when he was actually shooting it. He felt that he should supply to the editor his idea of the way it should be put together. So David needed an editor who was malleable, and who would try out what he had planned - which didn't always work 100 per cent, because when you're actually shooting the sequence, things happen that make it different from what you actually started out with. So he needed a very good editor - he couldn't bear an inefficient editor - but he needed an editor who would in the first cut follow what he had intended when he rehearsed the sequence on the floor.
Charles Drazin: One notices that he had favourite collaborators with whom he would work again and again.
Oh, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. I always tried to use as many people as I could that I liked from previous films, because you feel at home with them, and you don't have to be polite in the wrong way. And David was very much like that. He hated the fact that I wanted to be his producer instead of his cameraman.
CD: Because he'd lost a good cameraman?
Well, that's right. You see, if there was anything I really helped David in, it would have been the knowledge of the camera, and its uses, because when we first worked together, it was on Major Barbara, in 1940, he was the editor, and I was the cameraman, and, in those early days, I was a great asset to him on the camera. He hated the idea of me becoming a producer, because he hated producers. He got on with me all right, because I was still basically a cameraman. I knew what he needed and what he wanted from a producer. A producer and a director should be great friends, because directing is a very lonely job. If a producer is a sympathetic producer, he's very much needed by a director, but David hated the producers who said you've got to get off that set tonight because we can't afford to be there tomorrow morning. He couldn't bear that.
CD: What is the essence of a David Lean film? What do you think he was looking for in the cinema?
First and foremost, story. It's putting the story and the actors' performance up on that screen. That is the director's job. To tell the story in the best possible way that it can be told with a movie camera, and to bring out the very best that the actor can give. Now the difference between David and me is that I never tried to force an actor into doing what he didn't want to do, but David insisted on it being his way, and that's why he sometimes fell out with Alec Guinness, because Alec was very, very certain about the way in which he wanted to do something.
CD: Did that also apply to cameramen and other technicians?
No. I'll tell you a little story which should explain it to you. On This Happy Breed I was the cameraman, and there was a very difficult shot. It took about six or seven takes. When David finally said "cut", he asked, "How's it for you, Ronnie?" I said, "fine," because I was the cameraman. "How is it for you?" to the operator. "How is it for you?" to the sound man. "And how is it for you?" to somebody else. And Johnnie Mills who was playing in the scene as an actor said, "What about the f****ing actors, then?"
CD: What was his favourite film, do you think, among the films he made?
I think Brief Encounter. We all loved Brief Encounter. We thought we had got a disaster on our hands by the way. We were shooting Great Expectations, which followed Brief Encounter. We were shooting in Essex on the Marshes. They'd just finished the first print on Brief Encounter, and we decided we'd have a screening in Essex. We put the film on, and we sat in the audience. After the first three minutes, there was a particularly moving line, we thought, but a woman in the fourth row laughed, and of course one or two other people laughed with her. The next time anything moving came up, knowing she was a success, this lady in the audience, laughed again, and all the people around her laughed. It was an utter disaster. We thought, "Oh dear, oh dear, what have we done?" Of course, it was a very, very rough audience. We should never have had the preview of Brief Encounter in that particular part of the world. But I think he loved it. And, actually, I think he wanted, with Ryan's Daughter, to make another intimate love story, but by then he had become so used to big, spectacular [films] that he couldn't really go back to making a small picture. Ryan's Daughter would have been much better had it not been blown up to the size that it was.
CD: Do you recognize him in any of the characters in his films? It seems to me we can find touches of him in Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai, or in Lawrence.
Yes. I think that's true. You've got to put a lot of yourself into a film. And David put everything he'd got of course. David is there all the time in everything that he did.
CD: So how would you sum him up?
Well, I would sum him up as one of the greatest directors of all time, without any doubt. He had his faults, as indeed we all do, but my assessment of David Lean is that I can count on one hand the top directors in the world, and he would be one of those five.
© Queen Mary, University of London