Monty Python Speaks by David Morgan

Author:David Morgan [Morgan, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

We Must Examine You

ATHERTON: Coming from a film background, I can remember the rushes have always been a secret. I worked as a loader for a particular cameraman for a couple of years, and he was very protective of his rushes in that he wouldn’t let anyone else see them. And being brought up in that school, I thought the rushes should be a very private thing as well. But the Pythons had it set up in one of the main rooms of this local hotel, and of course all the locals heard about it—it wasn’t a very big town we were shooting in, and half of them were in the film—so they always used to come along and watch the dailies as well. The first couple of days I tried to stop them. I protested to Mark Forstater: “We can’t allow them in, people watching our dailies.”

But as it turned out, it was a blessing in disguise because they used to sit in the back and laugh their heads off! It was good feedback to the Pythons as to whether they got their humor right. And it was a good cover for us if ever we made any mistakes. Because as everyone was laughing, no one was worried about looking for our technical errors. Everyone goes to watch the rushes for their particular angle; wardrobe are in there to see whether they might have got the wrong tunics on that day; the camera boys are in there watching for our side of things. So having the local audience actually lightened the whole thing and made it quite a fun affair, something we all looked forward to.

JONES: I think once we’d started seeing the rushes we felt pretty good; we had good material in there, we liked the look of it because Terry Bedford’s camerawork was just superb, so yeah, I think the rushes were the thing that kept us going, really, because everybody laughed, everybody had a good time. You’d come out of rushes feeling a charge of adrenaline, thinking, “Wow, this is really good, this is really worth doing.” Otherwise you might have given up!

BEDFORD: There was a lot of material not shot during the actual main production. When we wrapped, the “Black Knight” sequence in the forest had not been tackled and that was shot as a pickup in Epping Forest in East London. And a lot of inserts were done by Julian Doyle. Julian is another ex-film school guy who was a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I suppose because we’d been through film school we knew everybody else’s job in a way. Julian I think was good for the Pythons because he got a lot done for them, and if anything he was the one who represented the “amateurish” way of approaching it that satisfied that aspect of it. So when the pressure was on about getting a closeup of something or other, he’d say, “Oh, don’t worry, I can pick that up later.” Things

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