An Interview with Alvin Rakoff
Alvin Rakoff is an Emmy Award-winning director, producer, and writer with more than a hundred directing credits in stage, film, and television. In his long and extraordinary career, he has worked with a startling catalogue of talented people, including Ronald Lacey, with whom he worked on several productions.
Mr. Rakoff has recently published two autobiographical volumes recounting memories of his richly varied career, I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, and I Need Another Take, Darling, and they are essential reading for anybody with an interest in, or enthusiasm for, the film and television industry.
Mr. Rakoff very kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his career, and about working with Ron:
CM: In an interview last year, you talked about the impact of seeing Marlon Brando in the original stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and how this inspired your career in film-making. Did you know that you wanted to be a director when you set out in the business, or did you find your calling in another way?
AR: I didn’t know that I wanted to be a director, I didn’t know very much about directors or what they do, or anything like it. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be creative in some way and the easiest creative way for me was to write; I was aware of my desire to write, it began at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I think.
CM: You’ve worked with such a wide range of amazing actors, including a number of young talents who went on to fame and fortune. Were there any up-and-coming actors who impressed you but didn’t subsequently become household names?
AR: Yes, Chelsea, there were, a number of them; but unfortunately, I’ve forgotten their names. If they don’t become known in the industry, they just fall by the wayside. There were some veritable talents that I worked with, but for the life of me I can’t remember one name. Not one.
CM: You spoke very warmly of Ronald Lacey, and you worked with him several times. One of his earliest television credits was Z-Cars: On Watch – Newtown, in which he played a very significant character. Was he already known to you when you cast him, or was he a discovery?
AR: I guess he’s what you’ve called a discovery, he was totally unknown to everyone. In fact, the producer, David Rose, and I disagreed about who was to play the part. David wanted someone else - again, I can’t remember, someone who was quite good - but I insisted we give it to Ronald. And we did, and that was my first time working with him, as you say. Even then he was an amazing talent, he had a depth to his acting that’s hard for other people to achieve.
AR: He did well when auditioning for me, I could see the talent shining through; then I worked with him, and it became very apparent how talented this young man was. Did I follow his career after that, yes, I did. I knew and liked him as a guy, and we stayed in touch as much as one can with a worldwide talent, as he became, as actors necessarily have to rove the world. But yes, I watched his career.
CM: He had small roles in your films The Comedy Man, and Say Hello to Yesterday. Is there any story behind him being cast in those roles?
AR: In Say Hello to Yesterday, the thing I remember most about Ronnie was silly little incidents. He played a car park attendant; he was helping Jean Simmons to park the car - or obstructing her to park the car. It was quite a short scene, and they started to light the scene after I’d set it up and educated them on what I wanted, and Ronnie stood there and I said “Where’s your stand-in?” One of my assistants said “he doesn’t have a stand-in.” So, I said “Ronnie, go and relax.” I didn’t want, I never do want, a major actor playing a major scene to be so busy being lit by the camera people that he’s not concentrating on how he’s going to play the part, he's concentrating more on where he’s standing. So, I said “You go sit down Ronnie, I’m standing here for you.” I stood in as Ronnie’s stand-in, and this so shamed the crew that everybody came forward to stand in for Ron, so I was replaced very quickly. Ronnie was very appreciative of my understanding of an actor’s need to concentrate on acting.
CM: We recently lost Angela Lansbury who you worked with on A Talent for Murder; she had a long career and was working pretty much up to the end. By contrast Ron’s career was sadly cut short; what kind of roles do you think he’d have gone on to play if he’d had the chance.
AR: That’s a silly question I don’t like to answer, because it’s all supposition. Ronnie had the talent, he could have gone on to play any of the major older roles, King Lear, The Tempest, or whatever. He would have gone on to great heights.
CM: It seems you’re still creatively very active, with your latest book I Need Another Take Darling published just a couple of months ago. Do you have any other upcoming projects that we should look out for?
AR: Yes, always. I’m only a mere lad of 95. I’m still in discussion with publishers about a hardback version of I Need Another Take Darling; I’d like to get the other one into hardback, I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, so that’s what I’m working on now, concentrating on that. I’ve always got a book or two wandering around in my head, it’s a question of getting the energy and the time. Energy is something that you’re amazingly lacking of at the age of 95, so I have to allocate and ration my energy to myself carefully. I’m only good for a few hours in the morning, by lunchtime I just want to go to sleep.
I will try to bring out another book, I’d like to write a third book in my sort of autobiography, which I’ve tentatively titled Kill the Lights.
CM: We can follow your Twitter account, can’t we, to keep up on the news about your future work?
AR: Yes, you can. I don’t do much with the account, somebody does it for me. Again, I don’t have the patience for that, or the inclination. I should do but I don’t, I don’t do Facebook or Twitter.
CM: You’ve referred to A Voyage Round My Father as one of my favourite pieces of work. Are there any others that you’re particularly fond of or that you’d want people who are interested in your work to seek out?
AR: Yes. The first one being The Adventures of Don Quixote, with Rex Harrison playing the Don and Frank Finlay playing Sancho Panza, and Rosemary Leach as the maiden. First of all, it’s a BBC television film, all on film. We shot it under difficult circumstances in the summer of 1970-something. There are a lot of things to say about that. I loved it, it was complete; Rex Harrison’s a very difficult man to work with, but we did it, we finished. Somebody quite famous as a film director [Terry Gilliam] has always tried to make Don Quixote and never completed it. I did a complete one, I would urge people to see it, I’m very proud of it.
The reason I like both those things is because I was in control of the final product. A Voyage Round My Father’s been mutilated a bit, to make it fit a certain slot and so I’m always very upset by that. The Comedy Man, which you mentioned earlier particularly upsets me, because it was this one shot in which the two leading actors, Kenneth More and Angela Douglas are in bed together. I started with their feet sticking out the bottom of the bed, under the covers; the feet filling the screen, one foot, her foot, rising and scratching the sole of his foot. And then the camera panned up to find them, and then did a long, 360-degree complete turn, round the bed as they did the scene. Then the censor cut out the scratching of the feet at the beginning. That broke my heart. That’s the sort of mutilation that directors had to put up with in those days.
CM: What was the reasoning behind the censor making that cut?
AR: He said it was too sexy. Most people found it charming. I often went through that. In all films, the director is the last credit as you know; the titles come up one after another, eventually it says ‘produced by’, then it says ‘directed by’, but not in my first film. My first film, ‘directed by’ is the second-to-last credit, the last credit says ‘produced by’. There was nothing I could do or say to change that.
CM: Tristan on Facebook says “One of the last credits on your IMDB page is a television film called A Haunting Harmony”. He really loved it as he’s always found it charming and attractively filmed, and asks “was Worcester Cathedral as much of a gift as a filming location as it looks to have been in the finished product?”
AR: The answer in a single word is ‘yes’. The cathedrals of England – say I, as a non-Christian and a non-Englishman – are inspiring. They’re awe-making. In fact, I always meant to see all of them but it hasn’t happened. I just found them a gift for filming, absolutely, they all of them are, and Worcester Cathedral did inspire that piece of work enormously. Again, it’s a piece of work that was manipulated, had a very bad Canadian producer on it, a very bad English producer on it, and I was fighting them all the time. I’m glad that he likes it. Some of the shots, actually shooting within the cathedral, certainly put any director in his place; all that grandeur, all that history looking down on you. It’s a gift for any film-maker, for any sensitive creator, to be in that atmosphere.
CM: Gavin on Twitter asks “Which TV show or film from your career are you most proud of being associated with?”
AR: That’s a really difficult one, the reason being that the first half of my career was spent in live television, so there’s no recording of it whatsoever. For instance, Requiem for a Heavyweight, which I did in 1957, and Our Town, which I did in ’57, both of those made my career. Our Town was written by Thornton Wilder as an American theatre play, set in a theatre. So, I took it and set it in a television studio; so, cameramen and lighting hands and technicians talk to the camera as characters. That was in March 1957, and that really wowed people. It got terrific notices, unbelievable notices, and set me up with the BBC. Then a few weeks later - in fact it was my next production - was something called Requiem for a Heavyweight. Jack Palance, the American star, was supposed to come over and play the lead, as it was an American play, had been done in America. I asked Mr Palance to come over and play it and he initially said yes, and then on the Friday before the Monday of rehearsal, his agent rang to say he’d changed his mind, he’d got something better to do. I had to find a replacement for the lead man, and I auditioned literally dozens of young people that day, young men capable of playing an American boxer, and I gave the lead to a total unknown who did go on to make a bit of a name for himself, called Sean Connery.
CM: From Sally on Facebook, “What roadblocks did you face when you were first starting out?”
AR: Where do you start? When I was at University in Toronto, I asked about getting into the world of creativity of some kind, to write if I could - and I couldn’t get a job of any kind. I wrote to every publication in Ontario… I still couldn’t get a job. Eventually, I got job on a paper in Toronto, about the garments industry, ladies’
fashions. It was called The Needle. So, I applied and there were only three of us working on the paper, and that was my first writing job. We lasted three weeks. They ran out of money because the manufacturers didn’t like the publication and I was back on the streets again looking for work. I could go on endlessly, it took a long time until I finally wound up on my first real newspaper. Well, it took months, I should say. The year I was twenty-two, in February, I got a job on The Northern Daily News, which is in Kirkland Lake in Ontario, on the fringe of the arctic circle, miles and miles and miles from Toronto. I took the job of course and I went up there as a cub reporter. From then on, I went from one newspaper to another, until eventually I began writing for the radio. The CBC encouraged me to come here to the BBC, and the rest is history.
So, when she says ‘what roadblocks did you face’ – roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, But I think that’s true of almost everybody.
CM: From Terry on Facebook, going back to Z-Cars, “Was the episode featuring Ronald Lacey broadcast live, and were live episodes particularly difficult to film.”
AR: Yes, that was live, as they all were, until telerecording and taping became possible towards the end of the run and then of course they were taped like everything else. But, in those days they were all live. We filmed the exterior scenes, anything to do with cars, with the actual cars, which was on film. I mean, the movement of the cars, running around the streets etc. The scenes within the cars we shot in a studio, with a cut-away car’ any actual movement was shot on film, and cued in, but again even that was an art in itself. You had to cue in the film at the right split second or the audience would know you were jumping about. As it was, there was a difference in texture, of speed, of look, between what was on film and what was going out live from the studio, a different sort of look about it.
Were they particularly difficult to film? Filming was never difficult compared to doing the show live in the studio. That was difficult, because anything could and did happen in those days. Actors forgot lines, cameramen bumped into each other, cameras sometimes broke down; I’ve been on another show where cameras exploded sometimes. Thing was, with live television every split second of the show had to be planned. You had to pre-tell the studio so they knew exactly where they were to be. Every cameraman, every sound operator, every make-up lady, every actor, every technician etc, had to know exactly where they were at any given moment because this was live. So suddenly, if you lost the camera, if an actor suddenly got the words wrong, you had to wing it and change. It was a totally different ability, to deal with that. There are very few of us still around who can talk about it, I think. If any. I think I may be the last.
CM: Thank you so much for giving your time to talk to us.
A Voyage Round My Father is available on DVD; Mr Rakoff’s books, including I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action, and I Need Another Take, Darling, can be purchased in paperback and eBook from Amazon.
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