hire actors mainly for their looks.’ He looked for
support at the casting director, a mature woman, whom he had brought along with
him on this occasion. But the casting director had eyes only for Tom, whom she
adored.
‘They
are adequate actors,’ said Tom, ‘but more important, they look like the actors
who play the parts of their respective parents.’
‘Uncannily
like,’ said the casting director. ‘Plausibility, my dear man,’ said Tom, ‘is
what you aim for as a basis for a film. Achieve that basic something, and you
can then do what you like. You can make the audience go along with you,
anywhere, everywhere. It is extremely difficult to cast parents and their
adult children, except in a homogeneous society. To me,’ he hammered on with
justified pride and no tact, ‘it is not good enough to cast sons and daughters
totally different from at least one of the parents, or parents who have no
pretence of a family likeness with their children, as you see in so many films.
In Scandinavia, of course, the casting is easier. Bergman’s blood-relations,
for instance, always look like blood-relations.’
When
the new director shortly flopped out Tom tried to get back his original ‘blood-relations’
into the act. He was not successful because the screenplay had been changed to
eliminate them. They were unnecessary.
Tom had
money in the film. ‘Call Fortescue-Brown, ‘he told Claire. ‘I want to withdraw
from the film altogether. It’s no longer mine. I wash my hands of it. I
withdraw my name. I want my money back.’
‘You
could go and direct in a wheel chair,’ said Claire.
‘You’ll
be about in a wheel chair before long. We could easily arrange for you to go on
the set a few hours a day.’
‘I
wouldn’t dream of it,’ Tom said.
However,
he did dream of it. He was now able to leave his room and get himself wheeled
into the house’s new service lift. Claire fussed greatly, getting him into the
car with his folding chair at the back. The driver. The instructions. He
suspected that Claire was glad to get him out of the way for hours on end.
‘Where’s
my great crane?’ said Tom. ‘What have you done with our Chapman crane?’
‘Tom,’
said his assistant. ‘You can’t go up in that crane any more.’
‘I want
to know where it is?’
‘We
rented it out. Anyway, you can’t even use the dolly just yet. Do you really
think they’d let you sit at those angles?’
‘They
say that it was being at maximum tilt that saved me in my fall from the crane.
Something scientific about the angle of the fall. Pilots who crash go up again
and fly. The crane —’Oh, no, Tom, there is no crane. You can’t have any more
trips on the crane. The insurance would never take you on, even if we would.’
‘Who is
we?’
‘All of
us. The crew. The production people. No crane. To be honest, we sold it.’
‘I need
an amplifier. I need a lot of hand-cameras and camera rests. There is frequent
sprinting towards the object in this movie. I don’t want you to be afraid of
wrecking cameras. The man has to sprint and stop just inches away.’
‘All
that’s been done already, Tom. At least a lot of it’s been done. There are
plenty of cameras.’
‘There
is all the difference,’ Tom proceeded, ‘between a dedicated cameraman and a
cameraman full-stop. You need inspiration. Where have we got to?’
‘There’s
had to be a lot of re-editing, Tom. We’re in a state of transition.’
‘I want
the screenplay, my screenplay,’ Tom said. ‘I want to take it home and see what
you’ve changed. I want some sign of inspiration. Do you know what inspiration
is? It is the descent of the Holy Spirit. I was talking to a Cardinal the other
day. He said there was a theory that the ages of the Father and the Son were
over and we were approaching the age of the Holy Spirit, or as we used to say,
Ghost. The century is old, very old. Call my car.’
‘The
screenplay, Tom,’ said his assistant director, ‘is