Original at
Glasgow University
Reggie Mills
Of all the Archers Reggie Mills is the least written about in all the published
material. He was a successful film editor in Britain and America for forty
years and went on to direct a musical film about Beatrix Potter in the 1970s,
using costumed dancers in the animal roles. Indeed when he joined the Archers
at the end of the war he worked on only one 'straight' film before the experiments
in 'composed film' (for an explanation of which, found in the Brian Easdale
section
click here) and musical pictures became the order of the day. According
to Powell "He loved opera and spent all his money on concerts and recordings.
He lived in a world of his own and hardly ever made a public statement."
In his capacity as editor Mills "used to drive [Powell] mad because when
I had what I thought was a good suggestion, I found that he had already
tried it and discarded it. He had worked with masters and was a master himself.
He always used to remind me of a brown owl. He would sit at his cutting
table and look at me with his round eyes, with his round face, with his
round spectacles, blinking amiably and cutting ruthlessly. He was extraordinarily
precise in his timing". Once A Matter of Life and Death had been
finished and shooting on the next film
[Black Narcissus]
begun Mills had to adapt to a new
method of working. The ten minute sequence in that film which had been shot
on set to Brian Easdale's pre-recorded piano track arrived in Mills's cutting
room. He had already gotten to know Easdale through his presence at rough
cut screenings as the film went along, Easdale would take notes as Mills,
Powell and Pressburger discussed what they saw and made suggestions. Being
musically inclined anyway Mills was apparently 'delighted' by this development
in their working practice.
He put the ten minute sequence "together in about three days, editing with
the score propped up in front of him and the piano track Brian had written
and recored himself on the side."This method of scoring, shooting and cutting
profoundly affected the nuances of the image on the screen. "Here was the
'composed film' that I had been dreaming about in which music, emotion and
acting made a complete whole, of which the music was the master."So effective
was the method found to be that their next film The Red Shoes featured
an extended seventeen minute ballet sequence made in the same fashion. The
apotheosis of this technique came with Tales of Hoffmann in the early
fifties, a entire filmed opera. Mills influence would sometimes extend on
to the set, where the Archers would collaborate on solving a problem, for
instance on The Red Shoes a shot of Moira Shearer running down a
sprial staircase was taking too long, they worked out a method of spinning
the staircase, with the camera craning down the side of it but that still
didn't provide enough footage so Mills told them to just shoot it twice
and he would cut it together and make it look like it was one shot, as it
does in the finished film.
