When Bruce Beresford was in

Melbourne in August to promote

his memoir, Josh Hartnett defi-

nitely wants to do this … true stories from

a life in the screen trade (harperCollins,

2007), he spoke to Brian McFarlane about

his Australian films.

To get the trivial over first, did you once, as one database confidently states, use the pseudonym ‘Martin Agrippa’?

no, Barry humphries and I made a film for

one of his stage shows about a moviemak-

er whose name was Martin Agrippa. It was

a send-up; he was an underground film-

maker and we called him Martin Agrippa.

How did you come to get your first film, The Hunter, made?

It was made when I was still a student. I’d

just got a 16mm camera, a wind-up Bolex,

and I was in the country. It was the first

16mm film I’d made, though I’d done quite

a lot of 8mm films before that. I shot it out

at my uncle’s farm at Coora in new South

Wales, and then, when I came back to Syd-

ney, I thought it would be nice to put sound

on it. I didn’t really know how to do this, so

I went to one of the studios where I got a

girl who played the violin to play a couple

of folk songs, and then I added some gun-

shots. There was a guy at the studio who

said, ‘That’s easy,’ and I could see how he

did it – laying the film in one synchroniz-

er and putting parallel ‘bang-bangs’ in the

other. I thought this was a pushover and we

just mixed the sound. The film was shown

at the Sydney Film Festival, then it went off

to a few european ones.

As I understand it, you spent the early part of your career in the UK. What took you there?

When I graduated from the University of

Sydney in 1962, there was actually no film

work here of any kind, and also I found no

one was interested. I used to talk about

films to people and there wasn’t much re-

sponse. It’s completely different now. So I

got on a boat, even before I knew whether

I’d got my degree or not, and I went off to

england thinking I’d find some sort of work

there. That was the only reason I went.

Did you then get involved with BFI [Brit-ish Film Institute] Production Board?

When I first got to england, I started apply-

ing for some jobs … There was a job

110 • Metro Magazine 154

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Bruce Beresford was one of the most prolific and proficient of the first generation of filmmakers in the Australian revival of the 1970s. More than most he worked adventurously across a

wide genre range, and perhaps it was this facility that made him such an attractive proposition to Hollywood and elsewhere.

BruceBeresford

From ockers to the oscars: an interview with

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1-7: Money Movers. 8-9 the getting of wisdoM. 10-12: the adventures of barry Mckenzie. 13: director Bruce Beresford at the W hotel in Woolloomooloo, 08.03.04 (photo marco del Grande). 14 deBBie (nell schofield) and sue (Jad capelJa), Puberty blues. 15: front l-r: danny (tony huGhes), sue, deBBie, Garry (Geoff rhoe). Back l-r: stratch (ned lander) & Glenn (michael shearman), Puberty blues. 16: deBBie, Puberty blues. 17: deBBie & sue in the school toilets, Puberty blues. 18: the Greenhills GanG surfie chicks. l-r: kim (Julie medana), deBBie, sue, cheryl (leander Brett), Vicki (Joanne olsen) and tracey (sandy paul), Puberty blues.

‘ The only reason I made all those very different films is that

I find each film so absorbing of my time

and thought that, when it’s finished, I like to think of something

completely different, because it’s more

stimulating to me. ’bruce beresford [pictured right]

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Metro Magazine 153 • 111

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[ The NFSA’s Atlab/Kodak Cinema Collection ]

advertised in the papers for a film editor at the

Central Office of Information on the South

Bank. I applied for that, and I showed them

The Hunter and a couple of little films I’d

done in Australia, and they said, ‘These are

good, you can have the job.’ I thought this

was great, but they added, ‘The thing is

you’ve got to go to the union and get their

approval. They’re running a closed shop

and they’ve got to approve you.’

So I went to the ACTT’s [Association of

Cinema and Television Technicians] place in

Soho Square: it was very hard even to get

in there, as it had a great big steel door. I fi-

nally got in and met a funny little man who

told me: ‘You can’t have the job because a

lot of our members are unemployed.’

I said, ‘Then why didn’t your members ap-

ply for the job?’

‘That’s beside the point. We’re going to let

them know now that the job’s available,

and, when all our members are employed,

then people like you can apply for jobs.’

I went back to the Central Office of Infor-

mation and was told, ‘Well, that’s it, I’m

afraid. You can’t have the job.’

I was supply teaching in London for a

while, which was just awful. Then I saw a

job advertised for a film editor in nigeria. I

applied and found out I was the only appli-

cant, and I went off and ended up in enugu

in eastern nigeria in this government film

unit, which was a shambles. Inadvertently,

it was quite good for me. They never made

any films there at all: it was run by a very

strange Swiss man who seemed deter-

mined to do absolutely nothing, so I joined

an African theatre group, and I directed and

acted in plays for them. All I ever learned

about directing actors was what I picked

up working with those guys. It was very

good for me.

I was going to ask you if you just like working with actors, because you are a director who always gets good acting performances from casts. How much and what sort of direction do you give them?

Yes, I really do like to work with actors. I

don’t know that I give them a lot of direc-

tion. I try to guide them into the emphasis

that I think the role should have, and I talk

to them quite a bit about their roles. I al-

ways like to exploit what they can do rather

than put them in a straitjacket.

When did you start with the BFI Produc-tion Board?

About 1965, I think. It had some sort of

link-up with the Arts Council which got in

touch with me and asked me to come and

give them some advice on art film … So

I sat on a board at the Arts Council and

found they wanted to make a number of

these films about Barbara hepworth, hen-

ry Moore, the Pre-Raphaelites and the arts

of village India and so on, but they had very

little money. Well, one thing I did know by

this time was how to make films with very

little money, as a result of budgeting all the

films for the BFI Production Board, and get-

ting the maximum I could out of the mon-

ey available, giving grants to as many peo-

ple as possible. So I fell into doing those art

films, and working with people who were

experts in those fields.

How did you become involved in the ‘Barry McKenzie’ films [The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972; Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, 1974]?

Barry [humphries] and I were friendly in

London and ‘Barry McKenzie’ was a com-

ic strip in Private Eye. Well, I was reading

it one day and thought, This would make

a very funny film, and I suggested to Bar-

ry that we should do a film script of it, be-

cause I’d heard they were going to set up

a film fund in Australia and I thought that

was the kind of thing we should make first

off because it would probably be popular. It

seemed to me a good idea if they put gov-

ernment funding into a film that people ac-

tually went to watch. This would create

confidence. And it was very funny.

Anyway, I did an adaptation of it while Barry

was away on some tour, and when he came

back we went through it together and pol-

ished it a bit. he gave me some stuff from

a musical he’d written based on the com-

ic strip; it was never quite finished but I put

quite a bit of the material from it into the

film script, including some of the songs.

A lot of it was filmed in england. It had to

be, really, because it was a sort of ‘innocent

abroad’ story, but we did about a quarter of

it back here.

Why do you think that strain of ‘ock-er’ comedies (Alvin Purple [Tim Burstall, 1973], Stork [Tim Burstall, 1971], etc.) were so popular then?

I can’t imagine! [laughs] Maybe people had

never seen Australian comedies on the

screen. everyone was surprised, because

when we first showed the Barry McKenzie

film to distributors they didn’t want to show

it at all. no one showed the remotest inter-

est, so Phillip Adams [producer] arranged

to hire the cinemas and we just showed it

ourselves. Maybe they thought it was too

‘rude’, but also there’d never been any tra-

dition of Australian films being shown and

drawing an audience.

I don’t know how watchable those ocker comedies are now …

Oh, they’re terrible, but I thought the sec-

ond Barry McKenzie film was quite fun-

ny. It’s got some longueurs in it but it did

have some very funny scenes – it ends with

Dame edna kissing Gough Whitlam!

They [the ocker comedies] really got the revival going, didn’t they?

They did, but they didn’t do me any good.

It was a huge mistake for me. I suppose

it did get my foot in the door, but the crit-

ical reaction was so hostile I could hard-

ly believe it. Barry and I would read some

of the reviews and say, ‘What on earth are

they on about?’ It’s just a comedy, and a

very good-natured one. They were going on

as if, in some way, we were betraying the

country. There was a whole period where

I was totally persona non grata. The Film

Commission would have cocktail parties for

visiting directors and I’d never be invited!

You are one of the major names of the 1970s Australian revival. What would you say to the idea that you were the great craftsman of the period across a wide genre range?

That’s usually taken as a sign of essential

triviality! The only reason I made all those

very different films is that I find each film

so absorbing of my time and thought that,

when it’s finished, I like to think of some-

thing completely different, because it’s

more stimulating to me. Perhaps if you set-

tle to one genre, you’re likely to get more

acclaim.

Did you have any sense of pattern? Were you deliberately moving from broad com-edy to period drama to heist thriller, or did you just take whatever came up?

no, to any of that. I just took whatever in-

Metro Magazine 154 • 113

terested me or excited me. Things like The

Getting of Wisdom [1978] I’d wanted to do

since I read [henry handel Richardson’s]

book when I was about fifteen, and I always

wanted to make a film of it.

What attracted you to it particularly?

I think, you know, it was the story of the girl

being an outsider, and I’d always felt that

this was my position, which was probably

not true. I never was particularly an outsid-

er; I always had friends and was well ac-

cepted. I think it was just a role I liked to

cast myself in. Also, I thought it was a very

good novel, much more concise than any

of her other novels, to put it mildly. And it

had a very well observed, very cleverly de-

lineated range of characters. It was based

on her own experiences at school, but I’d

also based the film script on her mem-

oir, Myself When Young, which covered the

same period.

Was it reading Myself When Young that inclined you to change Laura from a bud-ding novelist in the novel to a promising pianist in the film?

Yes. But it was also a matter of its being

much more filmable. It meant we had

scenes of Laura sitting at the piano and out-

raging people by playing Thalberg, whereas

it would have been much more difficult to

make it interesting to show her writing.

It was one of a number of classic Australian novels adapted to the screen then …

I know. Someone recently wrote an article

in a literary magazine saying this wasn’t so

and I wrote a rebuttal naming them all.

Why do you think there were so many of these adaptations of novels, often peri-od pieces about young people coming of age?

Maybe they were from books people had

read when they were younger and that had

made a big impact on them, and they just

felt ‘I’ve got to film this’.

Do you think there may have been an el-ement of hoping the prestige of the nov-els and their titles would rub off a bit on the films?

I don’t know. You see, I don’t think those

novels were all that well known – perhaps

in Australia but not really outside the coun-

try. I even wonder how well known they

were here. As for My Brilliant Career, I think

it’s a pretty boring book.

I heard that you were once trying to set up a production of [Henry Handel Rich-ardson’s trilogy] The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and I wondered what has be-come of the project.

I wrote a miniseries adaptation of it. I’ve

read all of the Richardson novels, and very

much liked Maurice Guest, which they

made into a film called Rhapsody [Charles

Vidor, 1953], a real shocker. About Maho-

ny, I wrote first of all a thesis script and

expanded it into a miniseries, and they

both exist. I haven’t given up on this and

there are people in Melbourne I’m talking

to about it. Zelda Rosenbaum and Oscar

Whitbread commissioned the script about

two years ago now. Financing has been a

problem. At one point the ABC was inter-

ested, then it wasn’t.

It’s a harrowing story but it would make

a great miniseries. I greatly simplified the

number of characters. When you break

down those three volumes of the book,

there’s not all that much plot. It’s fairly

straightforward, but it’s got a huge cast of

characters, though people keep coming in

who are recreations of earlier characters, so

in the miniseries I combined some of these,

because there was often no advantage in

introducing new people.

When and where did you first see the play Don’s Party?

I didn’t see the play at all. I was in London,

where I’d gone to live after the critical bat-

tering of the Barry McKenzie films made

me persona non grata in Australia. The play

was sent to me by Phillip Adams. I thought

it was quite outstanding, very funny, very

acute and with a great bunch of characters.

Part of the enthusiasm of my response was

that it was about types of people I knew,

mainly from my days at university. It’s the

only film I’ve directed where I didn’t have to

do extensive research.

If you were asked what is this play/film about, how would you answer? For ex-ample, is it a study in disappointed aspirations? Is its satire chiefly directed at suburban middle-class leftism?

The targets seemed to me to be both left

and right. David [Williamson] cleverly wove

the characterizations into the politics – all

are failures in some way and most were

compensating with political/social idealism.

I think he based all the people on friends

of his.

The whole swimming sequence is an in-vention for the film: what did you see as its function? What other changes did you feel necessary to accommodate the so-cial change in the period since the play first appeared?

I think the swimming sequence was re-

ferred to in the play, although I’m not sure

about this now. Anyway, it fitted in with the

disintegration of behaviour as the evening

wore on. The film gave David the chance to

add little bits and pieces that were impossi-

ble, at that time, to realize on stage.

What do you remember of the way the film was received by the critics and the public?

I had the impression that Phillip and Dav-

id didn’t think much of it at first, but when

it was shown publicly it had a good re-

sponse. Critics were in general quite enthu-

siastic.

Am I straining too hard to find continuity in your early work if I suggest that in their different ways quite a few of them deal with people straining against authori-ty figures and structures of various kinds – Barry McKenzie and the Brits; the La-bor voters in Don’s Party [1976], Laura in Wisdom, the soldiers in Breaker Morant [1980], the girls in Puberty Blues [1981]?

You’re right, I think, though I’ve never real-

ly thought about it. I guess I’m attracted to

certain kinds of story and that’s probably

true for everyone, according to their per-

sonality traits, to something that’s already

within them. It may have something to do

with what I said before about ‘casting’ my-

self as an outsider.

One of your films which gets less written about was Money Movers [1978]. It was a bit of an oddity among the films that got the revival moving.

Well, that came about inadvertently be-

cause I had written this script I wanted

the SAFC [South Australian Film Commis-

sion] to do, called ‘The Ferryman’, based

on a very famous attempted murder case

114 • Metro Magazine 154

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in Sydney, round 1906. There was a book

called Death Cellar Darlinghurst, which I’d

loosely adapted. The script was about the

manipulation of crowds: because the guy

who’d tried to murder his wife was very

good-looking, he’d managed to turn pop-

ular opinion against the wife and to per-

suade everyone that she had administered

the poison to herself in order to discredit

the husband – an absurd proposition. It be-

came a cause célèbre. I thought it was an

interesting psychological study.

The SAFC then suddenly changed its mind

and said it wouldn’t do it, and I always

thought it was because the lawyer involved

was a founder-member of the Australian

Labor Party, canonized by the Left but he

was manipulative and devious in this case.

My feeling was always that someone had

said to the SAFC that they didn’t want that

film made, though I could be complete-

ly wrong. Then I had to find something to

do quickly, because they said, ‘You’ve still

got to make a film and we’re not going to

do that one.’ I didn’t have another one pre-

pared, but then I stumbled across this book

of Money Movers, which I thought was a

pretty badly written book, but I thought it

was an interesting kind of world.

It was very unusual in the context of the time: a genre thriller …

Yes, and very gory too. It was very savage-

ly cut when they showed it in england. It

wasn’t at all popular in Australia. I’ve never

seen it since it first came out.

How did you come across the Breaker Morant story?

I fiddled with that for a while. ‘Breaker’ Mo-

rant lived for a while near Kurrajong heights

where my parents lived in new South

Wales, and my mother pointed out his

house to me. It’s now a kind of convales-

cent hospital or hospice. I started getting a

bit of interest then and did some research

about him. Then a whole lot of things hap-

pened. Someone gave me a copy of this

play by Kenneth Ross and a film script had

been written by Jonathan hardy and Dav-

id Stevens for a TV movie about ‘Breaker’

Morant, but I didn’t like it at all.

They get a credit for it …

I know they do! They didn’t originally but

they took me to court and won. I had the

only credit as I didn’t film their script at all.

What happened was that the SAFC bought

their script and bought the play, and they

gave them all to me and said, ‘You can use

this as research material.’ Well, I didn’t use

any of their script because it was complete-

ly different from what I was doing. I used

a little bit out of the play, mainly in the first

scene where the Scotsman’s on the stand.

The play was one of those where the actors

talk to the audience and you couldn’t really

adapt it to the screen.

When the film was first released it only had

my name on the screenplay, but David Ste-

vens and Jon hardy kicked up a huge fuss,

and it went to court in Adelaide. The judge

pointed out they had a contract with the

SAFC that said they were to get screen

credit. I didn’t know this and said that if you

look at the screenplay I wrote and look at

the film, you’ll see that there’s nothing they

wrote in the movie. But the judge said, ‘I

have no interest in that. The contract says

they are to get screen credit and they must.

The contract has to be observed.’

What sorts of things about it attracted you to it? In what ways does it seem a peculiarly Australian story?

It had a lot of things that interested me.

The basis of any screenplay is conflict, and

the conflict in this was enormous, and it

had a very interesting range of characters.

I had a lot of fun writing it and it took me

a long time to write. I did a lot of research

about the Boer War: I went to the Imperi-

al War Museum in London and read letters

home. It was in a letter from a guy in the fir-

ing squad that I found they’d held hands as

they walked towards the chairs.

I never found out all that much about the

three main soldiers. I knew a reasonable

amount about ‘Breaker’, but I kind of made

up the other two characters played by Bry-

an Brown [handcock] and Lewis Fitz-Ger-

ald [Witton]. I thought, maybe the Bry-

an Brown character was a very ordinary,

down-to-earth Australian. he’d been a farri-

er, so I based him on uncles I’d had. Then I

thought the other one was just a naïve boy,

who was really quite at sea in all this con-

flict. So I set out to contrast those three

people. They were very much up against

authority, against Kitchener and the rest.

The fact that those other soldiers were giv-

en orders to shoot people was true, but

that doesn’t mean you should do it.

There were a lot of interesting moral aspects

to the story. You know that big summing-up

speech of Jack’s [Thompson], I wrote that.

It’s not in the play, though everyone thinks it

is and though you might expect it to be, and

it wasn’t in the hardy–Stevens script. When

I was working on the script I thought, we’ve

got to give a speech that summarizes the is-

sues. You can hardly ever do that in a film;

you can hardly ever have a scene where one

character says, ‘This is the way it is.’ But in

a courtroom you can do it. So I thought, I’m

going to give him a speech that presents the

case for the defence, so I was able to bring

out all the issues of fighting a guerrilla war

and the rest. It was a long five minutes on

screen.

Elements of war adventure and court-room drama – a surefire combination? But an inevitably non-happy ending – did that concern you?

It was a worry commercially! The film nev-

er made any money, even though it is quite

highly regarded. In england, though, the re-

views were horrendous, but very good in

America.

Were the English cross about the repre-sentation of Kitchener?

I don’t know. It opened in London about the

same time as Gallipoli [Peter Weir, 1981],

and that was very nasty about the Brits,

but it made a fortune and ran forever in

the West end, whereas Breaker Morant ran

three days in London. It started on a Friday

and they pulled it out of the cinema on the

Monday. This was depressing but in spite

of good reviews in Australia and the US it

never did find an audience. But, after all

these years, I’ve just been to Canberra to

introduce a screening of it.

You seemed to be interested in the way hierarchies worked and in more or less enclosed milieus in films like the football club’s committees in The Club [1980] and that surfing enclave in Puberty Blues.

It’s the conflict again that’s interesting. The

conflict in The Club is fabulous, with all

those guys pulling in different directions.

About Puberty Blues, I picked up that book

in a newsagent’s while I was waiting for a

bus. It was written by a girl who was only

fifteen, Kathy Lette [co-written with Gabri-

elle Carey], and it gave me such insight

into the way those kids were living. And the

conflicts get heightened in groups like a

club or a surfie culture, but, as well, most of

Metro Magazine 154 • 115

those films have both got quite a bit of hu-

mour in them. even Breaker Morant has got

some very funny lines, right down to the

ending when Morant [edward Woodward]

tells the firing squad to make sure they

shoot straight.

The Fringe Dwellers [1986] may well have been the first feature film with all the key roles played by Indigenous actors.

no, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda [1955] was

the first. I found nene Gare’s novel on a

street stall in London, and it had a picture

on the front that looked to me like an Aus-

tralian Aborigine, so I bought it just for that,

but it turned out to be a very well-written

novel and it was such a touching story. her

husband was director of Aboriginal

Affairs in Western Australia, and they’d

spent years living on various communities

in remote areas, and The Fringe Dwellers

was based on a true story.

How did you cast the film?

There were two actors, Bob Maza and Jus-

tine Saunders, who played the mother and

father. They’d both had professional acting

experience, but Kristina nehm, who played

Trilby, hadn’t. She was with an Aboriginal

dance group, and I went up to Townsville to

see her when someone recommended her.

And where did you film it?

In Queensland. The town was called Mur-

gon, only about a hundred miles from Bris-

bane, and near there was an Aboriginal

community …. We shot a lot of it in Mur-

gon but we built the Aboriginal community

you see in the film. It was like the real one,

but the trouble was that the real one was

much further from the town, and I wanted

one where you could walk into the town, so

we found a grove of gumtrees and we built

it in there.

It was a rarity among films being made here

at the time, but nobody went to see it. I

knew it wasn’t going to do any good when

I went to a dinner party on the Gold Coast

with these very rich people. The lady sitting

next to me asked me what film I was mak-

ing, and when I told her I’d just made one

with an all-Aboriginal cast, she said, ‘how

disgusting!’

Did you see it primarily as an individual’s story and struggle or were you drawn to the notion of the social problem film?

Probably a mix of both. I thought it was

a very good individual story, and I ad-

mired the way the book treated the Abo-

riginal characters with the same respect

you’d have for white characters, like the

way Conrad always dealt with native peo-

ples in a time when this was rare. nene

had this same unpatronizing approach, and

I thought how interesting to make a film

showing that these people had the same

loves, hates, hopes and aspirations as the

rest of us, instead of regarding them as

strange or exotic.

It’s photographed by Don McAlpine who has shot a lot of films for you. What do you value about him particularly as a col-laborator?

he shot ten films for me. he’s very resource-

ful and he’s very fast, which is a great advan-

tage when you’re doing a low-budget film.

he lights scenes very fast and with great

artistry. he’s got the same quality that Pe-

ter James has got; he’s also done ten films

for me. They’re both very versatile: they ad-

just their lighting style to suit the subject,

so no two of the films they’ve shot look the

same. I could say to Don, I want such and

such a look, harsh, romantic, whatever, and

he could do it. Some cameramen, like the fa-

mous American Gordon Willis … whatever

he shoots, they all look the same.

Have there been other regular collaborators you’ve found especially congenial to work with? Editor William Anderson, Judy Lovell, Fran Burke, David Copping …

If they’re really good, like those people, it’s

enormously helpful. You know what they’re

like, and they know how I like to work. And

it’s been like that in America by and large

too, like herbert Pinter who’s designed

about six films for me, and John Stoddart’s

done about the same.

The [Australian/Canadian] co-production Black Robe [1991]: how did you come across that story?

Again, I read the novel, by Brian Moore.

I’d read all of his books up to that point. I

bought the novel in a bookshop in Los An-

geles and when I read it I thought, This is

like opening up another world. The insight

he had into the Jesuits and the Indians, and

how they related to one another, seemed

really true, stripped of any kind of roman-

tic overlay about either group, and I was

gripped by it. I called my agent and said I

had to make a film of this novel, and when

I told him it was by Brian Moore, he said, ‘I

think he lives here in California.’ So I looked

him up in the phone book, found him and

drove out to his house.

I thought it was a great story to tell, and

you feel when you watch it that everyone is

so real and believable. It’s not just a mat-

ter of adventure but of sheer hard slog. I

thought Peter James made it look great.

He also shot [Australian/American co-production] Paradise Road [1997], which I was greatly moved by …

It didn’t do any business, in spite of that

fantastic cast of women. I felt it wasn’t going

to work when I was at a movie, in

Double Bay I think, and a trailer came on for

Paradise Road, and it showed all the wom-

en in the camp. There were two ladies sitting

behind me and one of them said, ‘There’s a

film I don’t want to see.’ I think they – and

other people – thought it was going to be

horribly harrowing. Anyway, the critics didn’t

like it. And those women! Pauline Collins was

wonderful – and so was elizabeth Spriggs.

I’m sorry you didn’t make a lot of money out of such a good film.

We were all amazed when it didn’t do well. It

was so-so in Australia, terrible in the US and

Britain. I think they thought it was just sil-

ly, the business of forming that humming or-

chestra. I spent a year researching it all over

the world, talking to women who’d been in

those camps. I read Betty Jeffrey’s White

Coolies, and there were quite a few other

books by women who’d survived the camps.

I thought it was a great story, but for some

reason it just didn’t interest anybody.

You’ve filmed all over the place: do you have any preference for where you film? Is it easier in Australia?

Australians are easy to deal with. For one

thing, nobody’s impressed by celebrities,

so that they tend to be very relaxed and

behave normally, which does the celebrities

a lot of good, because they’re not used to

that. Australians aren’t rude to them; they

just take it in their stride and treat it like a

job. The english are like that too, and the

english actors are so charming. I’ve hardly

ever worked with one I didn’t like. •