A to C

I didn’t agree with Michael Winner about very much, but when he said the following about The Third Man, he was spot on. “If people tell me: I want to be a film director, I say, You don’t need to go to film school. Just watch The Third Man 100 times.”

The Third Man contains so many lessons that it’s hard to know where to begin, but this is the lesson – as told by Guy Hamilton –that I try to remember the most, because it’s a key not only to good film-making but good writing too:

Somewhere where the cat goes out of the window and there are about ten or twenty of the most beautiful shots of Vienna – lit by Krasker – night that are magical, the rhythm of the cutting, the photography, the everything, and we used to sit looking at the rough cut, and say, “You know, you can’t do black and white photography better than this,” and the rhythm of one out to the next is absolute, and suddenly the lights went up and Carol was white and sweating and he said, “It’s got to go.” We all said, "Never! It's the best bit.” “You don’t need it, it’s dead footage.” I said, “Carol, maybe, story-wise, it’s dead footage, but it’s just unbelievable, it’s so lovely and beautiful and we spent five months shooting the sodding stuff. Don’t make up your mind now.” “You tell the story, and the story demands that you go from A to C and you don’t need B. B is fabulous, I know, but it goes.” We all felt for him. That’s the best lesson I ever learned. Don’t fall in love with your own work. And it hurt him, and I’m sure he had sleepless nights, but he knew that you had to go from A to C, and although B was beautiful, fabulous, it had to go into the cutting bin.

I remember how much it hurt when I first heard the story. “It’s a pity!” I said to Guy. “Today they’d call it ‘The Director’s Cut’,” he went on, “but it’s bullshit. You make the picture and that’s it.” “None the less, it would be nice to see those snippets.” “Oh yes. They’re probably lying around somewhere.” My hunch is buried under the M3 somewhere near Shepperton with the uncut Wicker Man.