tHE METRO FILM
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1980 Friday 1st Aug:
Dual Carriageway and Bridge - Redditch. BL Factory - Longbridge. Monday 4th Aug. Town centre procession - Lavenham, Suffolk. Tuesday 5th Aug. Ford and interiors - Kersey, Suffolk. Then charter flights Stansted to Bournemouth. Wednesday 6th Aug. Landing craft - Shell Bay, Dorset. Metros on cliff - Handfast Point. Thursday 7th Aug. Landing Craft unloading and loading - Weymouth Beach. |
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tHE METRO article - the story of the filming written for 30 years of metro in 2010
Happy Birthday, Metro! The Party Continues.
2010 sees the celebration of the 30th birthday of the Austin Metro, later to become the Rover Metro and eventually the Rover 100 series. It was not a bad car for its time, but the trouble was that its time had really been somewhat before 1980. It should have been produced several years sooner, before British customers had flocked in herds to the showrooms of imported competitors. Paddy Carpenter had a personal involvement with the launch of the Metro, as he reveals in this story of the first British Supermini.
Action! Action! Action!
The Problem.
There’s no doubt that the Mini, introduced in 1959 as the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor, was a revolutionary small car. It showcased British technical innovation, ingenuity and style. Logically it should have led to a resurgence of the motor industry and, for BMC, to a range of models that could capitalise on the Mini’s position as an emerging icon. For a variety of reasons, this failed to happen and a series of cars that had far less flair and appeal were produced. They also became increasingly plagued by problems of build-quality. Buyers looked elsewhere, and there was growing choice on offer. Whereas, in 1959, a British registered foreign built car was a rarity, by the mid-60s many European and the first Far East manufacturers were setting up dealer networks to cater for a public which was progressively less prepared to tolerate stolid and too often poorly manufactured vehicles, simply because they were British-made. The nation’s roads eventually filled up with so-called superminis – Renaults, Citroens, Fiats and Nissans. While the Mini stayed more or less the same, with detail improvements and small facelifts, its slightly larger British brothers came and went, largely unmourned. The overseas competition may often have been not especially exciting, but they were something different, and they were less prone both to breakdown and to falling to pieces; good reasons for any buyer to shift allegiance.
Solve it. Then Sell the Solution.
Astonishingly, it took BMC, by now British Leyland, a whole 21 years to come to the supermini market with the Metro, by which time there was a sales mountain to climb as the foreign manufacturers had firmly established themselves. For its launch, in 1980, BL’s advertising agency, Leo Burnett, had the task of dislodging the entrenched sellers and winning market share for a home-built vehicle from a manufacturer with a tarnished reputation. Their solution would be to attack the problem head-on by acknowledging some of its elements, namely the success of the competitors and the build-quality issue; and it would go on to appeal to patriotic instincts – always a card worth playing.
Exactly 40 years earlier, following Dunkirk, Britain had stood completely alone, expecting Hitler’s armies to invade at any moment. Whether the celebrations of that summer anniversary of the Battle of Britain struck a chord with copywriter Jerry Miller and art director Barry Milas, I don’t know, but they conceived a TV commercial that equated the flow of foreign, imported cars into the UK market with an invasion force. Their idea was that landing craft, those flat-bottomed open vessels with ramps that are able to set tanks and men onto beaches, would be trying to deposit foreign cars onto the British shore. One flying French flags would be loaded with Renaults; Fiats would be on another, and so on.
When you have invaders, you need defenders and their clever pitch was that the Metro would be represented as a potential saviour of the nation, a car that would be good enough to see off the aggressors and send them scuttling for home. The build-quality aspect was dealt with by cars being shown on the modern assembly-line at Longbridge, welded by robots and not (by implication) those Bolshie workers who couldn’t care less and built all those Friday afternoon cars. Once put together, the cars would be seen forming up in a battle column, cheered by a flag-waving population as they headed for the coast. Inserted somewhere near the half-minute mark would be a little product demonstration to show it could carry three men in the back and that it had a split rear seat. It was after all, the first proper British hatchback.
Then it was back to the jingoism. The feeling to be created was that of crack regiments marching proudly off to war, even if the vehicle was slightly more Warmington-on-Sea Home Guard than Royal Marine Commando, although to be fair no one particularly felt that at the time. As the Metros drove towards the beaches, the mere threat of their arrival would be enough to have the Datsun Cherrys and VW Polos executing sharp U-turns on the sand and loading themselves back on the barges from whence they came.
Prep it. Shoot it!
It was a unique script and one that the British Leyland clients decided to go for. Burnett’s next task was to find a film director and a production company who could put Miller and Milas’s script onto film for a reasonable amount of money, for it would be a moderately complex operation with some tricky sequences. No doubt several possible companies were asked to quote. It was my good fortune that a production house for which I worked fairly regularly was the one chosen to take on the job. So it was that a few weeks before the shooting date, I was booked and soon found myself involved in planning the various segments of the shoot.
Some companies would in those days employ me to find locations. Others would use a specialist location manager, which would mean I would have more back-up and no need to worry about location trivialities during a shoot, but less to organise and so probably fewer days’ employment in advance of the job. David Ashwell Limited hired a location manager for this project, but I still had to visit all the chosen places well before to assess them for problems and work out how we could achieve in the most efficient and speedy way the shots that David desired. Directors always want to complete more set-ups than are actually mentioned in the script, so that they have extra options in the editing and can offer their preferred version in the knowledge that they have material that can be cut together in other ways, including of course the basic version that’s been originally laid out.
The first day of shooting was Friday 1st August and the unit assembled at a hotel in Bromsgrove, on the previous evening. This part of the filming was reasonably straightforward. The morning, with a start at some unearthly hour, involved covering six Metros in formation using a dual carriageway in a cutting near Redditch. On an impressive overbridge, 50 mixed extras would react with cheering and flag-waving. British Leyland supplied six delivery drivers, who quickly found that driving in formation for camera is not quite as easy as it sounds but the requirements were not so taxing as to require stunt people or precision driving specialists. We achieved the morning’s work with no great difficulty, with the help of two local traffic policemen, who came I think in a Marina, or something equally uninspiring (and no, I wasn’t taking photographs in that era, sadly). They closed the road every time we were ready for a take, on receipt of my radio message.
The afternoon had two elements, both at the Longbridge works, which was why we were in the Birmingham area that day. The hard part of the day was shooting the welding robots on the production line. Filming in a factory with noise and dangerous machinery is always a challenge; no-one wants the line to be stopped for access or for positioning the camera precisely, very necessary where robotic arms move rapidly about in three dimensions. It’s hard work to achieve anything when making just a documentary, but for a commercial when every shot needs to be discussed and agreed by numerous people, and then lit so that it photographs beautifully, progress can be very hard to make. This was before the days of video assistance; it was a time when everyone who needed to approve the set-up had to have a look through the camera’s eyepiece. Our electricians had pre-rigged most of our lighting after the end of the previous day’s shift. This is vital on a moving production line. Fortunately not too many shots were required as the sequence was but a small fraction of the film. I notice on the breakdown that David wanted to rig a camera on one of the robot arms. It’s the sort of shot that directors always ask for, but I seem to remember that it wasn’t feasible for a number of predictable reasons. The arms move so quickly that even if the camera hadn’t actually been shaken off, or broken the arm, it’s unlikely that the shot would have been usable. The days of mini cameras, the size of a lipstick, were yet to dawn.
The easy part should have been filming six Metros being driven out of the works, past a BL truck in house colours. All the Metro drivers were dressed as “Commandos” in a navy blue Nato woolly pullover bearing a sewn-on patch as seen at the head of this article. This was some time before that garment became so inextricably linked with the police service. I still have a patch in my office, and one of the pullovers in my wardrobe although it has been fit only for gardening this many a year. Shots when the sun is going down and the light is dropping are always pressurised. It’s important to be ready when the light is at its best for the director of photography and the trick is to try and think of everything so that there are no last-minute hold-ups. By film industry standards, this was a fairly easy day, but it was probably quite late in the evening before most of us got back to our homes in London.
Shoot Days 2 & 3. The Best of British.
Sunday night found us checking into several hotels in Suffolk and Essex ready for the call on Monday. The square in the lovely small town of Lavenham was to be the venue for the procession sequence where the cars would parade past the cheering townsfolk including some special characters such as a bemedalled veteran, and for good measure there would be a brass band. The art department had decorated the streets with bunting over the weekend, and I note that the schedule called for a dawn shot, so it would have been another very early start, with all the extras, the specials, the band and the Metro drivers to be costumed and the cars to be unloaded and positioned. I doubt that we were ready to shoot anywhere near dawn, but the light is always likely to be more interesting either early or late in the day, so that’s when directors and DPs like to shoot their key shots. David’s list called for eight set-ups that day, but I’m sure we will have done more. It doesn’t sound a lot, but in commercials everyone is striving for absolute perfection in every frame, and that takes time and usually a lot of repetition.
The following day found us in Kersey, a nearby village with a ford, with the convoy of Metros encountering a cow and calf wading through it. The cars’ progress to the coast is slowed momentarily. I’ve never been entirely sure why, other than to reinforce the theme of beautiful Britain. This was also the day when we would film the interior shots of the Metro, needed to show the roominess and the seat arrangement, plus a shot of a speedo at 50mph, which meant running the car with the driving wheels jacked up; always an interesting exercise. We couldn’t shoot into the evening for a very good reason. Next morning we were due to be on a location in Dorset, 155 miles away. All day, elements had been released to travel to Bournemouth as soon as they could be spared, but for the key crew there was a different plan. After a speedy wrap, we would board a coach that would take us to Stansted Airport, only half an hour or so away. There two chartered aircraft would fly us to Hurn, Bournemouth’s Airport. Discovering at Stansted that our twenty-or-so passenger turboprop was to be flown single-pilot I quickly staked my claim for the co-pilot’s seat, and so enjoyed a glorious evening transit across Southern England to the south coast. There are sometimes perks.
I didn’t make myself very popular by calling a production meeting after dinner at our Bournemouth Hotel. Working with one watercraft is always tricky, two is likely to be difficult and three can be a nightmare. We would have four next morning and once they had left their base in Poole nothing could be changed. In theory I would be in touch with them by walkie talkie, but this was 1980. Even in 2010 film radios can be less than reliable and that was more than true thirty years ago. The landing craft belonged to the Royal Marines, the real commandos, and the CO of the boat squadron had come over to the hotel, and this was the first chance to brief our crew and explain exactly the sequence of events and for us to “tell it to the Marines”. Everyone needed to know the plan and for example the Marine boat crews to understand how we would carry on in the event of radio failure.
Day 4. Fight Them on the Beaches.
In the event, calling the briefing meeting paid dividends, as the shoot could scarcely have gone more smoothly. Predictably the director’s notes called for a dawn shot and indeed we did get off to another early start. The foreign cars had been loaded the previous day and the art department just had time to set the flags and check the artwork on the landing craft before they set off for Shell Bay, which for the shooting unit meant a drive through Bournemouth and Poole and then a trip across the Sandbanks Ferry.
Shots of the craft approaching from a distance were fine, but when we came to the point where we wanted them closer to the beach, they were too widely spaced for any lens that wouldn’t render them too tiny, so we needed them in a much tighter formation. In a real landing, they keep well apart, so that one shell from a defending force doesn’t take out more than one boat. Close formation they don’t normally do. The Red Arrows they weren’t. Standing next to me, the Major in charge was more than happy. “Tell ‘em to tighten up all you want; it’s good practice for ‘em.” After a quick message, their new positioning was perfect, with no nasty moments. One factor with all the wide shots was waiting for commercial and pleasure craft coming in and out of Poole Harbour to clear our frame, as the atmosphere of an invasion couldn’t really be invoked with ferries and sailing yachts cruising through the background. There was no way we could control this, even if we’d had a fleet of launches and assistants with radios and megaphones, so we just had to be ready and take our opportunities when the required stretch of horizon cleared. The boat skippers were amazingly skilled in holding their positions while they waited for my “Action! Action! Action!” call. This is a personal cue that I use on the radio for big set-ups. A single “Action!” on the radio can be blotted out by rogue transmissions or interference. Repeating it three times makes it less likely to be missed and can help to avoid those “Ready when you are, Mr de Mille” moments. Having three landing craft set off and one stay put would not have gone down well with anybody. The waiting put big pressure on everyone to concentrate but crews ashore and afloat performed brilliantly.
We knew that getting cars to drive off the ramps; up the beach; make a U-turn and return up the ramps was not going to happen on this location because of the soft surface. We could only get what we could, before cars would dig in and come to a halt. The Marines had supplied some steel tracking but it was amazingly heavy and for wide set-ups impossible to lay and camouflage in sufficient quantity without employing an army of people that we didn’t have. So we had a back-up plan for the action that we couldn’t achieve. We also did some helicopter shots at Shell Bay, with the camera tracking alongside and around the flotilla of landing craft racing at speed, getting wide views and majoring on the flags, the cars, the bow-waves and other details.
There'll be Agusta-Bells over, the White Cliffs of . . . Swanage?
The remainder of the shooting for that day involved a big location move and was a particular challenge, mainly due to difficult accessibility. This was the key end sequence, where the Metros are lined up defiantly on the “White Cliffs of Dover” as the landing craft steam away from the British shore. Handfast Point, near Studland was to stand in for Dover, and the only way to get the cars there was via farm tracks and footpaths. The landowner was helping, with a tractor available, but fortunately the ground was dry. Once there, the fourteen picture cars had to be positioned on the cliff edge, a task demanding great attention to safety. We had contracted stunt drivers, as the script required three Metros briskly to join the line up in the course of one shot, and they first positioned all the cars under our instructions. They needed to be very close to the drop as the ending was scripted as a helicopter sequence, with the camera rising up the cliff face to reveal the cars, including the arrivals stopping, and then spinning and pulling back and up to see the formation of landing craft heading away. Naturally we’d also had to find a suitable place nearby to set down the Bell Jet Ranger camera ship.
Once the master shot had been set to the director’s satisfaction, everyone and everything not to be seen in the frame had to move several hundred yards away, while I had to hide somewhere, in a gorse bush or something equally uncomfortable, I seem to remember, so that I could cue the arriving cars to move at the right moment for the reveal. Ideally I would have been in the helicopter, but with the camera operator and the camera assistant sitting in the open doorway with the camera on its heavy, gyrostabilised mount, there might just be space and lifting capacity for a director, if he was lucky. Rarely could anyone else be accommodated, especially for a tricky shot like this, climbing in the hover. Everyone else had to view the video on the return to earth, for video recording, not always 100% reliable, was used for helicopter filming long before it became standard practice generally. As usual we shot alternatives and the final cut used one of those and not the scripted spiral.
I think that we also took the main unit with one camera up to the cliffs on the farmer’s trailer, to get some beauty shots of the line of cars formed up. I do remember that again everything went like clockwork and was pretty well perfect, including the light and the weather. There haven’t been too many days of which that can be said, in a career of over 45 years of filming. Everyone was pretty weather-beaten and tired but very satisfied and in good humour, ready for a beer and a decent meal as we headed back to the ferry and the hotel. In the bar, Sue Ashley, the producer, was more than happy to get the drinks. This had been the day with the most serious potential for things to go wrong and nothing had. We all knew that we had shot great material and as we would be back in our own homes the following night, this was our only chance to celebrate the success.
Day 5. Retreat, or Fighting Them on the Beaches – Again!
Members of film units are infamous for eating too much, drinking too much and staying up far too late. Yet they still manage to make their ridiculously early calls. The morning saw us packing, gathering for a minimal hotel breakfast (there would be more later) and checking out before stumbling with our bags onto the coach. It felt like the middle of the night. Don’t let anyone tell you that the film business is glamorous. We were going to the seaside and few, if any, of us felt like it. Many will have slept the 30 miles to Weymouth. By the time the coach had trundled onto the promenade it was light enough to see. The prospect of a job to be done, a blast of cool morning air and promise of coffee and bacon sandwiches revives the most dedicated (and delicate) of night-owls.
Today’s shoot was by no means straightforward. We were on Weymouth Beach because the sand there, when wet, was firm enough to drive on, so we could accomplish the foreign cars’ U-turns. As a location, the place had very little else to recommend it. Weymouth does not have a great length of beach; it was the height of the summer and with a fine day forecast, the beach and the sea would be crowded – and we, albeit with the permission of the Town Council, were roping off a goodly area of it. Also, rather like the previous day with Poole, we were very close to Weymouth Harbour and all manner of craft, including the Channel Islands and Cherbourg ferries, would be making their stately progress through our background.
The fact that we were once again using the four military landing craft, which looked huge in this setting, would only advertise our presence and encourage beachgoers, swimmers and every type of small craft to converge on our position. Now the prom was virtually deserted. In three hours it would start to fill up and by late morning it would be heaving. The sooner we could get started, the better. We needed to be ready to turn the camera on our first set-up the moment that the tide had retreated far enough.
As it happens, all went smoothly again, despite the shallow water and the falling tide causing our boat skippers concern about becoming grounded. Having one or more of the barges stuck and immobile in the middle of the beach would have put the whole day’s shoot in jeopardy. The exercise gave us cause to note two opposite traits of the British character, traits that had probably, in equal measure, caused us to survive the period of history whose anniversary was to the forefront of our minds at the time. The majority were prepared to accept the inconvenience of sharing their holiday beach with a largish film unit. After all, we were giving them the bonus of a free show, even if it was a fairly slow-moving and protracted spectacle. There were others who chose to be affronted by our presence and uncooperative, or just plain awkward. It’s odd that such people always claim in the course of discussion that they never, ever watch television. The number of houses in the nation where the TV is never plugged in must be far greater then anyone could imagine.
The plan was always to shoot wide shots first and as our set-ups and field of view became more limited, to reposition the ropes to return more of the beach for the holidaymakers to use. Our location manager consistently found that family groups were pushing the frontiers, anticipating our retreat and staking their space before we actually moved the posts and lines. Occasionally we had politely to ask them to retire. As the day wore on, the swimmers and the rubber ring, air-bed and plastic dinghy flotilla increased in strength too, eventually requiring my second assistant director, runner and other helpers to be in the water to megaphone and gesticulate the floating armada clear of frame.
It was with enormous relief that we completed our shot list in early afternoon and could wrap, abandoning the sand to a tide of pinkish people. We had not finished a moment too soon. A very late lunch, I think, preceded our return to London in the coach.
Post Production
The material cut together like a dream and the film looked far more expensive than its actual budget. I do not have a copy of it, unfortunately, but on a recent visit to the Gaydon Motor Heritage Museum, I noticed that it is one of the Leyland advertising films permanently on show there on a big screen in the main display area. After all these years, seeing it brought back memories, but this is a job that always lodged in the mind anyway as one that could hardly have gone better. David Ashwell, even took time afterwards to write me a note of appreciation – the only time a director has done that after a commercial in 40+ years as a First Assistant, although such thanks might have been more than due on hundreds of occasions.
I imagine I leapt into a Metro at points during the filming; I generally have a pretty precise idea of where the director and camera operator want a car placed for lining-up, so I tend to get behind the wheel and position it to speed things up. Though I didn’t, I think, do any of the fine adjustments on the cliff top. For some reason I was quite content to let the stuntmen do that job! Beyond that, I rather think that I have never driven one again. That’s a far cry from the case of the Land Rover Discovery, another of the many car launch commercials I’ve worked on. One of those has been outside my house more or less continuously, ever since, and I’ve owned three in all.
The Discovery . . . Now that was a shoot with a story to it.
Perhaps another time.
Copyright Paddy Carpenter 2010
2010 sees the celebration of the 30th birthday of the Austin Metro, later to become the Rover Metro and eventually the Rover 100 series. It was not a bad car for its time, but the trouble was that its time had really been somewhat before 1980. It should have been produced several years sooner, before British customers had flocked in herds to the showrooms of imported competitors. Paddy Carpenter had a personal involvement with the launch of the Metro, as he reveals in this story of the first British Supermini.
Action! Action! Action!
The Problem.
There’s no doubt that the Mini, introduced in 1959 as the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor, was a revolutionary small car. It showcased British technical innovation, ingenuity and style. Logically it should have led to a resurgence of the motor industry and, for BMC, to a range of models that could capitalise on the Mini’s position as an emerging icon. For a variety of reasons, this failed to happen and a series of cars that had far less flair and appeal were produced. They also became increasingly plagued by problems of build-quality. Buyers looked elsewhere, and there was growing choice on offer. Whereas, in 1959, a British registered foreign built car was a rarity, by the mid-60s many European and the first Far East manufacturers were setting up dealer networks to cater for a public which was progressively less prepared to tolerate stolid and too often poorly manufactured vehicles, simply because they were British-made. The nation’s roads eventually filled up with so-called superminis – Renaults, Citroens, Fiats and Nissans. While the Mini stayed more or less the same, with detail improvements and small facelifts, its slightly larger British brothers came and went, largely unmourned. The overseas competition may often have been not especially exciting, but they were something different, and they were less prone both to breakdown and to falling to pieces; good reasons for any buyer to shift allegiance.
Solve it. Then Sell the Solution.
Astonishingly, it took BMC, by now British Leyland, a whole 21 years to come to the supermini market with the Metro, by which time there was a sales mountain to climb as the foreign manufacturers had firmly established themselves. For its launch, in 1980, BL’s advertising agency, Leo Burnett, had the task of dislodging the entrenched sellers and winning market share for a home-built vehicle from a manufacturer with a tarnished reputation. Their solution would be to attack the problem head-on by acknowledging some of its elements, namely the success of the competitors and the build-quality issue; and it would go on to appeal to patriotic instincts – always a card worth playing.
Exactly 40 years earlier, following Dunkirk, Britain had stood completely alone, expecting Hitler’s armies to invade at any moment. Whether the celebrations of that summer anniversary of the Battle of Britain struck a chord with copywriter Jerry Miller and art director Barry Milas, I don’t know, but they conceived a TV commercial that equated the flow of foreign, imported cars into the UK market with an invasion force. Their idea was that landing craft, those flat-bottomed open vessels with ramps that are able to set tanks and men onto beaches, would be trying to deposit foreign cars onto the British shore. One flying French flags would be loaded with Renaults; Fiats would be on another, and so on.
When you have invaders, you need defenders and their clever pitch was that the Metro would be represented as a potential saviour of the nation, a car that would be good enough to see off the aggressors and send them scuttling for home. The build-quality aspect was dealt with by cars being shown on the modern assembly-line at Longbridge, welded by robots and not (by implication) those Bolshie workers who couldn’t care less and built all those Friday afternoon cars. Once put together, the cars would be seen forming up in a battle column, cheered by a flag-waving population as they headed for the coast. Inserted somewhere near the half-minute mark would be a little product demonstration to show it could carry three men in the back and that it had a split rear seat. It was after all, the first proper British hatchback.
Then it was back to the jingoism. The feeling to be created was that of crack regiments marching proudly off to war, even if the vehicle was slightly more Warmington-on-Sea Home Guard than Royal Marine Commando, although to be fair no one particularly felt that at the time. As the Metros drove towards the beaches, the mere threat of their arrival would be enough to have the Datsun Cherrys and VW Polos executing sharp U-turns on the sand and loading themselves back on the barges from whence they came.
Prep it. Shoot it!
It was a unique script and one that the British Leyland clients decided to go for. Burnett’s next task was to find a film director and a production company who could put Miller and Milas’s script onto film for a reasonable amount of money, for it would be a moderately complex operation with some tricky sequences. No doubt several possible companies were asked to quote. It was my good fortune that a production house for which I worked fairly regularly was the one chosen to take on the job. So it was that a few weeks before the shooting date, I was booked and soon found myself involved in planning the various segments of the shoot.
Some companies would in those days employ me to find locations. Others would use a specialist location manager, which would mean I would have more back-up and no need to worry about location trivialities during a shoot, but less to organise and so probably fewer days’ employment in advance of the job. David Ashwell Limited hired a location manager for this project, but I still had to visit all the chosen places well before to assess them for problems and work out how we could achieve in the most efficient and speedy way the shots that David desired. Directors always want to complete more set-ups than are actually mentioned in the script, so that they have extra options in the editing and can offer their preferred version in the knowledge that they have material that can be cut together in other ways, including of course the basic version that’s been originally laid out.
The first day of shooting was Friday 1st August and the unit assembled at a hotel in Bromsgrove, on the previous evening. This part of the filming was reasonably straightforward. The morning, with a start at some unearthly hour, involved covering six Metros in formation using a dual carriageway in a cutting near Redditch. On an impressive overbridge, 50 mixed extras would react with cheering and flag-waving. British Leyland supplied six delivery drivers, who quickly found that driving in formation for camera is not quite as easy as it sounds but the requirements were not so taxing as to require stunt people or precision driving specialists. We achieved the morning’s work with no great difficulty, with the help of two local traffic policemen, who came I think in a Marina, or something equally uninspiring (and no, I wasn’t taking photographs in that era, sadly). They closed the road every time we were ready for a take, on receipt of my radio message.
The afternoon had two elements, both at the Longbridge works, which was why we were in the Birmingham area that day. The hard part of the day was shooting the welding robots on the production line. Filming in a factory with noise and dangerous machinery is always a challenge; no-one wants the line to be stopped for access or for positioning the camera precisely, very necessary where robotic arms move rapidly about in three dimensions. It’s hard work to achieve anything when making just a documentary, but for a commercial when every shot needs to be discussed and agreed by numerous people, and then lit so that it photographs beautifully, progress can be very hard to make. This was before the days of video assistance; it was a time when everyone who needed to approve the set-up had to have a look through the camera’s eyepiece. Our electricians had pre-rigged most of our lighting after the end of the previous day’s shift. This is vital on a moving production line. Fortunately not too many shots were required as the sequence was but a small fraction of the film. I notice on the breakdown that David wanted to rig a camera on one of the robot arms. It’s the sort of shot that directors always ask for, but I seem to remember that it wasn’t feasible for a number of predictable reasons. The arms move so quickly that even if the camera hadn’t actually been shaken off, or broken the arm, it’s unlikely that the shot would have been usable. The days of mini cameras, the size of a lipstick, were yet to dawn.
The easy part should have been filming six Metros being driven out of the works, past a BL truck in house colours. All the Metro drivers were dressed as “Commandos” in a navy blue Nato woolly pullover bearing a sewn-on patch as seen at the head of this article. This was some time before that garment became so inextricably linked with the police service. I still have a patch in my office, and one of the pullovers in my wardrobe although it has been fit only for gardening this many a year. Shots when the sun is going down and the light is dropping are always pressurised. It’s important to be ready when the light is at its best for the director of photography and the trick is to try and think of everything so that there are no last-minute hold-ups. By film industry standards, this was a fairly easy day, but it was probably quite late in the evening before most of us got back to our homes in London.
Shoot Days 2 & 3. The Best of British.
Sunday night found us checking into several hotels in Suffolk and Essex ready for the call on Monday. The square in the lovely small town of Lavenham was to be the venue for the procession sequence where the cars would parade past the cheering townsfolk including some special characters such as a bemedalled veteran, and for good measure there would be a brass band. The art department had decorated the streets with bunting over the weekend, and I note that the schedule called for a dawn shot, so it would have been another very early start, with all the extras, the specials, the band and the Metro drivers to be costumed and the cars to be unloaded and positioned. I doubt that we were ready to shoot anywhere near dawn, but the light is always likely to be more interesting either early or late in the day, so that’s when directors and DPs like to shoot their key shots. David’s list called for eight set-ups that day, but I’m sure we will have done more. It doesn’t sound a lot, but in commercials everyone is striving for absolute perfection in every frame, and that takes time and usually a lot of repetition.
The following day found us in Kersey, a nearby village with a ford, with the convoy of Metros encountering a cow and calf wading through it. The cars’ progress to the coast is slowed momentarily. I’ve never been entirely sure why, other than to reinforce the theme of beautiful Britain. This was also the day when we would film the interior shots of the Metro, needed to show the roominess and the seat arrangement, plus a shot of a speedo at 50mph, which meant running the car with the driving wheels jacked up; always an interesting exercise. We couldn’t shoot into the evening for a very good reason. Next morning we were due to be on a location in Dorset, 155 miles away. All day, elements had been released to travel to Bournemouth as soon as they could be spared, but for the key crew there was a different plan. After a speedy wrap, we would board a coach that would take us to Stansted Airport, only half an hour or so away. There two chartered aircraft would fly us to Hurn, Bournemouth’s Airport. Discovering at Stansted that our twenty-or-so passenger turboprop was to be flown single-pilot I quickly staked my claim for the co-pilot’s seat, and so enjoyed a glorious evening transit across Southern England to the south coast. There are sometimes perks.
I didn’t make myself very popular by calling a production meeting after dinner at our Bournemouth Hotel. Working with one watercraft is always tricky, two is likely to be difficult and three can be a nightmare. We would have four next morning and once they had left their base in Poole nothing could be changed. In theory I would be in touch with them by walkie talkie, but this was 1980. Even in 2010 film radios can be less than reliable and that was more than true thirty years ago. The landing craft belonged to the Royal Marines, the real commandos, and the CO of the boat squadron had come over to the hotel, and this was the first chance to brief our crew and explain exactly the sequence of events and for us to “tell it to the Marines”. Everyone needed to know the plan and for example the Marine boat crews to understand how we would carry on in the event of radio failure.
Day 4. Fight Them on the Beaches.
In the event, calling the briefing meeting paid dividends, as the shoot could scarcely have gone more smoothly. Predictably the director’s notes called for a dawn shot and indeed we did get off to another early start. The foreign cars had been loaded the previous day and the art department just had time to set the flags and check the artwork on the landing craft before they set off for Shell Bay, which for the shooting unit meant a drive through Bournemouth and Poole and then a trip across the Sandbanks Ferry.
Shots of the craft approaching from a distance were fine, but when we came to the point where we wanted them closer to the beach, they were too widely spaced for any lens that wouldn’t render them too tiny, so we needed them in a much tighter formation. In a real landing, they keep well apart, so that one shell from a defending force doesn’t take out more than one boat. Close formation they don’t normally do. The Red Arrows they weren’t. Standing next to me, the Major in charge was more than happy. “Tell ‘em to tighten up all you want; it’s good practice for ‘em.” After a quick message, their new positioning was perfect, with no nasty moments. One factor with all the wide shots was waiting for commercial and pleasure craft coming in and out of Poole Harbour to clear our frame, as the atmosphere of an invasion couldn’t really be invoked with ferries and sailing yachts cruising through the background. There was no way we could control this, even if we’d had a fleet of launches and assistants with radios and megaphones, so we just had to be ready and take our opportunities when the required stretch of horizon cleared. The boat skippers were amazingly skilled in holding their positions while they waited for my “Action! Action! Action!” call. This is a personal cue that I use on the radio for big set-ups. A single “Action!” on the radio can be blotted out by rogue transmissions or interference. Repeating it three times makes it less likely to be missed and can help to avoid those “Ready when you are, Mr de Mille” moments. Having three landing craft set off and one stay put would not have gone down well with anybody. The waiting put big pressure on everyone to concentrate but crews ashore and afloat performed brilliantly.
We knew that getting cars to drive off the ramps; up the beach; make a U-turn and return up the ramps was not going to happen on this location because of the soft surface. We could only get what we could, before cars would dig in and come to a halt. The Marines had supplied some steel tracking but it was amazingly heavy and for wide set-ups impossible to lay and camouflage in sufficient quantity without employing an army of people that we didn’t have. So we had a back-up plan for the action that we couldn’t achieve. We also did some helicopter shots at Shell Bay, with the camera tracking alongside and around the flotilla of landing craft racing at speed, getting wide views and majoring on the flags, the cars, the bow-waves and other details.
There'll be Agusta-Bells over, the White Cliffs of . . . Swanage?
The remainder of the shooting for that day involved a big location move and was a particular challenge, mainly due to difficult accessibility. This was the key end sequence, where the Metros are lined up defiantly on the “White Cliffs of Dover” as the landing craft steam away from the British shore. Handfast Point, near Studland was to stand in for Dover, and the only way to get the cars there was via farm tracks and footpaths. The landowner was helping, with a tractor available, but fortunately the ground was dry. Once there, the fourteen picture cars had to be positioned on the cliff edge, a task demanding great attention to safety. We had contracted stunt drivers, as the script required three Metros briskly to join the line up in the course of one shot, and they first positioned all the cars under our instructions. They needed to be very close to the drop as the ending was scripted as a helicopter sequence, with the camera rising up the cliff face to reveal the cars, including the arrivals stopping, and then spinning and pulling back and up to see the formation of landing craft heading away. Naturally we’d also had to find a suitable place nearby to set down the Bell Jet Ranger camera ship.
Once the master shot had been set to the director’s satisfaction, everyone and everything not to be seen in the frame had to move several hundred yards away, while I had to hide somewhere, in a gorse bush or something equally uncomfortable, I seem to remember, so that I could cue the arriving cars to move at the right moment for the reveal. Ideally I would have been in the helicopter, but with the camera operator and the camera assistant sitting in the open doorway with the camera on its heavy, gyrostabilised mount, there might just be space and lifting capacity for a director, if he was lucky. Rarely could anyone else be accommodated, especially for a tricky shot like this, climbing in the hover. Everyone else had to view the video on the return to earth, for video recording, not always 100% reliable, was used for helicopter filming long before it became standard practice generally. As usual we shot alternatives and the final cut used one of those and not the scripted spiral.
I think that we also took the main unit with one camera up to the cliffs on the farmer’s trailer, to get some beauty shots of the line of cars formed up. I do remember that again everything went like clockwork and was pretty well perfect, including the light and the weather. There haven’t been too many days of which that can be said, in a career of over 45 years of filming. Everyone was pretty weather-beaten and tired but very satisfied and in good humour, ready for a beer and a decent meal as we headed back to the ferry and the hotel. In the bar, Sue Ashley, the producer, was more than happy to get the drinks. This had been the day with the most serious potential for things to go wrong and nothing had. We all knew that we had shot great material and as we would be back in our own homes the following night, this was our only chance to celebrate the success.
Day 5. Retreat, or Fighting Them on the Beaches – Again!
Members of film units are infamous for eating too much, drinking too much and staying up far too late. Yet they still manage to make their ridiculously early calls. The morning saw us packing, gathering for a minimal hotel breakfast (there would be more later) and checking out before stumbling with our bags onto the coach. It felt like the middle of the night. Don’t let anyone tell you that the film business is glamorous. We were going to the seaside and few, if any, of us felt like it. Many will have slept the 30 miles to Weymouth. By the time the coach had trundled onto the promenade it was light enough to see. The prospect of a job to be done, a blast of cool morning air and promise of coffee and bacon sandwiches revives the most dedicated (and delicate) of night-owls.
Today’s shoot was by no means straightforward. We were on Weymouth Beach because the sand there, when wet, was firm enough to drive on, so we could accomplish the foreign cars’ U-turns. As a location, the place had very little else to recommend it. Weymouth does not have a great length of beach; it was the height of the summer and with a fine day forecast, the beach and the sea would be crowded – and we, albeit with the permission of the Town Council, were roping off a goodly area of it. Also, rather like the previous day with Poole, we were very close to Weymouth Harbour and all manner of craft, including the Channel Islands and Cherbourg ferries, would be making their stately progress through our background.
The fact that we were once again using the four military landing craft, which looked huge in this setting, would only advertise our presence and encourage beachgoers, swimmers and every type of small craft to converge on our position. Now the prom was virtually deserted. In three hours it would start to fill up and by late morning it would be heaving. The sooner we could get started, the better. We needed to be ready to turn the camera on our first set-up the moment that the tide had retreated far enough.
As it happens, all went smoothly again, despite the shallow water and the falling tide causing our boat skippers concern about becoming grounded. Having one or more of the barges stuck and immobile in the middle of the beach would have put the whole day’s shoot in jeopardy. The exercise gave us cause to note two opposite traits of the British character, traits that had probably, in equal measure, caused us to survive the period of history whose anniversary was to the forefront of our minds at the time. The majority were prepared to accept the inconvenience of sharing their holiday beach with a largish film unit. After all, we were giving them the bonus of a free show, even if it was a fairly slow-moving and protracted spectacle. There were others who chose to be affronted by our presence and uncooperative, or just plain awkward. It’s odd that such people always claim in the course of discussion that they never, ever watch television. The number of houses in the nation where the TV is never plugged in must be far greater then anyone could imagine.
The plan was always to shoot wide shots first and as our set-ups and field of view became more limited, to reposition the ropes to return more of the beach for the holidaymakers to use. Our location manager consistently found that family groups were pushing the frontiers, anticipating our retreat and staking their space before we actually moved the posts and lines. Occasionally we had politely to ask them to retire. As the day wore on, the swimmers and the rubber ring, air-bed and plastic dinghy flotilla increased in strength too, eventually requiring my second assistant director, runner and other helpers to be in the water to megaphone and gesticulate the floating armada clear of frame.
It was with enormous relief that we completed our shot list in early afternoon and could wrap, abandoning the sand to a tide of pinkish people. We had not finished a moment too soon. A very late lunch, I think, preceded our return to London in the coach.
Post Production
The material cut together like a dream and the film looked far more expensive than its actual budget. I do not have a copy of it, unfortunately, but on a recent visit to the Gaydon Motor Heritage Museum, I noticed that it is one of the Leyland advertising films permanently on show there on a big screen in the main display area. After all these years, seeing it brought back memories, but this is a job that always lodged in the mind anyway as one that could hardly have gone better. David Ashwell, even took time afterwards to write me a note of appreciation – the only time a director has done that after a commercial in 40+ years as a First Assistant, although such thanks might have been more than due on hundreds of occasions.
I imagine I leapt into a Metro at points during the filming; I generally have a pretty precise idea of where the director and camera operator want a car placed for lining-up, so I tend to get behind the wheel and position it to speed things up. Though I didn’t, I think, do any of the fine adjustments on the cliff top. For some reason I was quite content to let the stuntmen do that job! Beyond that, I rather think that I have never driven one again. That’s a far cry from the case of the Land Rover Discovery, another of the many car launch commercials I’ve worked on. One of those has been outside my house more or less continuously, ever since, and I’ve owned three in all.
The Discovery . . . Now that was a shoot with a story to it.
Perhaps another time.
Copyright Paddy Carpenter 2010
Metro Film on Radio?
Ten years after I wrote the article above, I had a message through this site from Radio Suffolk presenter Luke Deal. His researchers had told him that I had made a film about the Metro in Suffolk ten years ago, so might have something to contribute to a planned segment to celebrate the car's now 40th birthday. He was doubly pleased when I told him that it was the launch commercial that I had worked on, in 1980, not 2010, and that major sequences had been shot in the county. The outcome was an interview on his Sunday morning show on 1st November 2020. You can hear the conversation by clicking this link.
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