The British Entertainment History Project

PM: No, I suppose they were a lower middle-class family. My father was a stock keeper in the City, for a manufacturing company. My mother ran a restaurant in a hotel. Nobody in the business, no not at all.

DB: And what sort of school did you go to? A local school presumably.

PM: Well, I had a very sketchy education because of the war.

DB: Ah.

PM: The war [Second World War] started when I was nine, and I was in a local school then, in Holborn. And then I was evacuated for a couple of weeks. We got bombed out while I was evacuated down in Kent. A marauding German bomber just dropped some bombs, for fun I think. I saw a light-

DB: Where you were in Kent?

PM: In Kent. I was sleeping in a bed with two other boys. We were evacuees and the ceiling came down. It was an old farmhouse; on the end of the bed and the rest of the room there was black dust everywhere. My mother heard about this and came down and got me and dragged me back home, and I stayed with the family through most of The Blitz actually, before I was evacuated to Teignmouth in Devonshire; and then I went to a local school for three or four years, came back to London, went to a little secondary school, called Sir Hugh Myddelton, which is now a posh block of flats down in Farringdon [Darrol laughs].

DB: Did you have any ambitions at that time?

PM: I wanted to be a cowboy, I think! ‘Cos I used to like Westerns. Still do. Gene Autry and all that stuff.

No, not really, I left school when I was fifteen and a half. I left school, and through my father’s old wartime friend, who was known as ‘Uncle’ Mac in the family – he was never an uncle but in those days you called everybody uncle. He turned out to be David MacDonald who was a reputable film director in those days. I went down to Lime Grove studios with my dad and sat on the set. In his chair. And started work next Monday. In the scenic arts department. As an apprentice.

DB: Can you remember the early films that you worked on?

PM: The first film was, I think, Snowbound, which David MacDonald directed. But there was quite a lot of films, probably about thirty or something.

DB: Something like that.

PM: Until it closed, because the studio closed.

DB. Yes.

PM: I think the lack of funding or something.

DB: Can you remember that incredible old building, Lime Grove Studios?

PM: Very well.

DB: It was a bizarre place, wasn’t it?

PM: Yes it was on various floors. [indicates]

DB: Yes – there were two stages on the fourth floor.

PM: And there was a glass section – the old glass roof.

DB: Oh, still?

PM: Yeah. And of course, the best thing for me was there was a railway line behind it, and behind that was Shepherd’s Bush Market, where my lunch hours were spent running up and down looking at everything. Yeah, I remember that well.

DB: And three studios or stages on the first floor as I remember. With the big one with the tank in the middle.

PM: I don’t remember that.

DB: Ah.

PM: I know you had to clock in.

DB: Yes.

PM: Every morning.

DB: So, can you remember any particular jobs on the films in that time? In terms of the painting and what you actually did?

PM: Well, as an apprentice, any job, you know you are the teaboy, you’re the errand boy, starting at the bottom, but looking back on it without realising at the time, there was – I seem to remember there was a problem on another film and they wanted extra scenic artists to work the weekend to paint stuff. So, two scenic artists from Lime Grove-

5 minutes

PM: -were sent to Pinewood. And they said “You go with them.” So I remember getting the train to Uxbridge and someone waiting for me and took me to Pinewood on a Saturday morning, and we painted – what it was for was retakes and inserts for The Red Shoes, which meant nothing to me at the time. And then one of the scenic artists stayed on for another day, and there was others as well and they shot three or four days and they said “Will you stay there?” So, I stayed there while they were shooting and they were doing things like close-ups of the shoes in the shop window; when the newspaper turns into the dancer. They had guys with wires and moving newspapers about. I mean all this was totally alien to me I’d just come from school a couple of weeks before, and finding myself standing next to Robert Helpmann in full outfit or Moira Shearer or Léonide Massine, who I met later when I worked on Tales of Hoffmann which I suppose was quite mind blowing in those days. Anyway…

DB: But the Gainsborough films were also made in Islington, weren’t they? Did you nip up there?

PM: Once. I was again sent up there to help out on an Eve Boswell series. Eve Boswell was a singer, and I remember there was set with trees with orange blossoms wired on and the background was painted with clouds which I worked on, and she was walking around singing, you know. That was only for about a week. That’s the only time I ever went there.

DB: Yeah. Then – in ’49 – Lime Grove closed.

PM: Yeah, it closed then I believe because the government funding cut-back on the Quota Quickies.

DB: And it was owned by Rank by then.

PM: I suppose it was, wasn’t it? I thought – not Ostrers, the Ostrers had moved on.

DB: Yeah.

PM: Oh, okay. So then I moved on, I can’t remember how, but I got a job at Covent Garden.

DB: Oh yes, yes. Again it was just a ‘jobbing’ job?

PM: Yeah. I was out of work I think for a week and then I – in those days you didn’t have mobiles, it was a telephone, and somebody called and said” Go along to Covent Garden”, and I worked on the – Coppélia they were doing. You have to remember this was just after the war and there was a resurgence of the arts ‘cos everything had been very austere – still was austere, rationing was still going on. They were resurging the arts: theatre, ballet and Coppélia was a big iconic thing they were mounting, and so I worked on that for about three weeks, painting scenery, again as an assistant, apprenticed. And then the unions came along and said “Where is your card? Why are you working? It appears the film union card wasn’t all right at Covent Garden, so they booted me out of that and sent me into the Wardrobe Department, where I was making earrings and headdresses and bits and pieces.

DB: Hugh Skillen: I noticed the name in your cv here. He was a very famous man for making crowns and hats and stuff like that.

PM: Yeah, well from that job, which I did for a couple of months I got a recommendation to Hugh Skillen at a studio in Chelsea and I went over to see him and I always remember I rang the doorbell to go in and see him and which I didn’t see because he was behind the door, was coming down with Vivien Leigh to see her out because she had been for a fitting, and the door opens and [there was] Hugh Skillen whom I’d never met before and Vivien Leigh!

And I worked with him on and off. Again, everything was on and off. It was kind of “I need desperate help, work night and day.” For two weeks, at, well I was getting one and ninepence an hour [less than 10p DS], something like that which was about three pounds ten a week. In old money. I was still living at home with my mum – I had to give my mum a pound a week, and live on the rest. Which you could quite well. Funnily enough. And my friends at that time which I’d met on The Huggetts, with Diana Dors and Tony Newley, who were just young, up and coming. So, we used to hang out together with other mates and things.

DB: You seem to have avoided National Service.

PM: I was B4.

DB: Oh right.

10 minutes

PM: I was born with a stone in a kidney, and the Army never likes people who might have back troubles, ‘cos you can swing the lead easy and get the pension. [They laugh] I didn’t go.

DB: Ah, okay. So, then Shepperton popped up.

PM: Yeah. In fact, not going in the Army did me a lot of good, because it meant as a young lad I was available, whereas if I’d gone in the Army, I’d have, for a year and a half or two years I wouldn’t have been around.

DB: Perhaps, before you went to Shepperton, there were one or two extra jobs: Hue and Cry?

PM: Well Hue and Cry was 1947ish.

DB: Yes, quite early.

PM: And we got that from school.

DB: Ah.

PM: Someone came to the school, because the school was in the City of London. Farringdon. Somebody came and said “We want some lads on Saturday morning or whatever, to run across the bomb sites of London.” Of which there were many.

DB: Yes.

PM: I mean you could stand at one side of the City and look right through to the other side, where it was just flat. And I remember running around a couple of Saturdays or Sundays with three or four hundred other boys as part of that, yeah.

DB: That was for Ealing Studios. Did you ever work for Ealing Studios?

PM: I did. The only time I worked there was much later. I did Tales from the Crypt. I did nine episodes of Tales from the Crypt.

DB: Okay. Let’s get to Shepperton which was a relatively permanent job wasn’t it…employed by the Scenic Department.

PM: Yeah – well I was employed by the studio, so again it’s all a matter of where you are and what you hear.

DB: And who you know.

PM: And who you know, and you meet somebody and it’s “Ooh we’re looking for…” anyway, when you make your mark with somebody and they like you and you fit then you get the next job, whatever. So that’s what happened at Shepperton, and I went there and |I worked on – I can’t think what the first one was: [The] Sound Barrier or [The]Third Man, again painting scenery. You were allocated-

DB: Sewers. Sewers.

PM: Sewers. They built the whole show on the silent stage, and I remember being there when Joseph Cotton shoots Orson Welles.

DB: Yeah.

PM: You don’t see him being shot in the film, but they filmed it: and I remember Orson Welles up the spiral staircase where he gets shot saying “More blood, more blood.” And somebody came forward with the film studio blood. He said “No, no, no, no, ketchup, ketchup!” Somebody had to run down to the canteen and he went boom, boom, boom [Peter demonstrates – they laugh] And I later worked with him doing Sandeman Port. [Commercials. DS]

DB: Oh. That wasn’t at Shepperton.

PM: We did about six of those. That wasn’t Shepperton, no. Some little studio. Can’t remember.

DB: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Let’s stay with Shepperton for a bit. You say the silent stage at Shepperton.

PM: Yes.

DB: Now I was under the impression that the silent stage was one that came from Isleworth.

PM: Yes.

DB: In ’49, I think so that would be right, would it, that one?

PM: It could be flooded – it had a six-foot wall round, and then the rest was asbestos, can you believe?

DB: Yes, I can.

PM: Corrugated iron and asbestos, and of course they could flood it and they used it for many jobs, you know. But the sewers they built along with rushing water.

And you were allocated: the studio would take you on for two weeks, which might become six. One time I remember I was there for about six months, constantly going from one picture to another. So, you could be there days on a Vincent Korda picture, The Holly and The Ivy or whatever; and rush across to Moulin Rouge with John Huston directing.

DB: The Kordas were obviously very strong, ‘cos Alex owned the place or at least owned the company. Tell me a bit about Vincent Korda, the Art Director.

PM: Well there was Alex, there was Vincent, there was Zoltan…

DB: You didn’t see much of Zoltan?

PM: No, no. Wasn’t aware too much of Alex. You could see him around and stuff, the only experience I had with Alex was I was desperate to go to the loo once and I had to rush in for a pee at the old house-

15 minutes

PM: - The first place I knew that I had seen a toilet and I rushed in – which was the Executive pee room, I’m standing having a pee and Alex comes in. Stands next to me, says “Good Morning” and walks out. And I lived in fear for weeks wondering if I’d ever get fired. [laughter] Anyway, Vincent was a lovely kind of eccentric character and I worked with him as his kind of junior person/assistant for two or three pictures.

DB: Did you at that stage get to work on a drawing board for him?

PM: Do you know, I never got into art directing through drawing. That’s the traditional way. Come into the business, you’re tea boy, whatever; print boy – get the prints done, you know run them around to different departments, do a bit of drawing, another job, another job. Fine. I never did that. A bit of it but hardly ever. I came in through set-dressing. I worked, I had two or three people in my life who were my champions. And in the early days one of them was Fred Pusey. Fred was a lovely man. I ended up working with him as Assistant Set-Dresser. In various pictures he would give me various little jobs to do. Because I worked in the Prop Department, making props with Hugh Skillen in the early days for theatre, if there was something to be done – a little book or something special he’d say “Well why don’t you make that?” And I got into art directing that way.

DB: Right. Okay. Fred Pusey, his very last job, at Thames Television was a play for me, when I was directing Armchair Theatre. Great old bloke, wasn’t he wonderful?

PM: Yes. Really nice, yes.

DB: Anyway, that’s a coincidence.

PM: He worked on The Thief of Baghdad, the Korda one.

DB: Yes, yes!

PM: He goes back a long way.

DB: Yes, ‘cos Denham was closed by then, by your time in the business.

PM: He was very much Vincent Korda’s Art Director, because he did An Inspector Calls, The Holly and the Ivy, all those things which I worked on with Vincent.

DB: Yes, yes.

PM: And then you had to walk Vincent’s dog of course! As the junior you walked his dog. The other story was if I was painting something, he’d come up and say “You are a good boy, you must work the weekends. Young people should have money in their pocket to take out the girls.” Fine. So, you’d come in on Saturday and you’d come in on Sunday. Came in on Saturday, you could get home by train; if you came in on Sunday, he’d send his Rolls Royce to pick you up, and anyone else who was working in your department. To take you home. And give you a bottle of wine.

DB: Very Nice.

PM: That was the perks.

DB: And then of course, Korda had to sell, had to get out.

PM: Yes.

DB: Presumably Vincent went with him.

PM: Yes, Vincent then went freelance. I never worked with him after that. It was purely that whole Shepperton thing, but while Shepperton was going on and I was working at Shepperton, in the breaks was doing other things in the theatre. And doing Assistant Director jobs. I was moonlighting. It was highly illegal union-wise I suppose, but I knew somebody I think it was a second assistant, they wanted help on a picture called Night and the City which was Jules Dassin-

DB: Richard Widmark.

PM: That’s right. Googie Withers. [BEHP Interview No 0594] Most of it shot around London, in the streets.

DB: Hammersmith Bridge.

PM: Yeah, all that. So we used to work nights as a kind of third assistant, or crowd controller, really, because there was five or six of us: a couple who went on to become well-known First Assistants. We were controlling the crowd, holding them back and running around. I did that and various other pictures. A little picture at Walton-on-Thames called The Blue Parrot, which I was the Third Assistant on.

DB: I see. Assistant, yeah. So, when did you climb up the art directing ladder then?

PM: Well, the – with Fred Pusey, before television started, they had a company called Associated Rediffusion.

DB: Yes.

20 minutes.

PM: Future productions, I think they were and they were stockpiling. Little vignettes. Fifteen- or ten-minute little episodes. Something to put on the television.

DB: At Shepperton.

PM: At Shepperton. We had Moura Lympany, the concert pianist playing on the great Steinway, with the white cyclorama, and the camera would go past a column with a bust of Mozart and a bunch of flowers and down onto something else, some ballet shoes, or whatever, and my job was to run round the prop room, find stuff, give it a lick of paint, stand it there. That was really for Fred, Fred Pusey and then he would come on the [set] and look at it and say “Oh I think you could have a bit more of this or that. But that’s really the first thing.

DB: Would that be ’55. During ’55. Because ITV started in the Autumn of ’55?

PM: About that, yeah. Yes. Yes. And then my first break was on the Tales of Hoffmann, where I was Assistant Scenic Artist with Hein Heckroth, who had done The Red Shoes. I’d met him earlier although I don’t particularly remember; and I was doing a job. There was a scene with Ludmilla Tcherina, who plays the courtesan, in a gondola, with Robert Helpmann, and she is singing a duet to herself.

DB: On the silent stage.

PM: On the silent stage. Right. So we did that by having all these cloud glasses. There were about twelve, they were clear glass, optical glass, with a wooden frame usually, ten foot by six foot, eight foot, very heavy hoisted by chains, and we had a row of them. And then in front of that we had a nine-inch-deep trough, sixty feet long, painted black inside, with water on it. And then we had oil, coloured oils on the water and a fan blowing it, so the oil floated on the water. On the cloud glasses, we painted Venice. Impressionist Venice, right. Lit from behind, so you had the reflection of that being lit on the water. Then the camera went along, which was her point of view of Venice being reflected in the water; and I was scratching out some of the paint work in order to get lights behind for the window. And Hein Heckroth walked past several times and looked and said “You’ve done a good job here. Come with me.” And I never picked up a paintbrush again particularly.

DB: Aha!

PM: I became his junior assistant, walked around behind him, did jobs for him, and that was my first ‘leg up’. And after that came Vincent. So, Luck! Luck, luck, luck.

[Intervention while Dan adjusts microphone and breaks into frame.23.14 – 23.27]

PM: I’m probably running out of context.

DB: Yes. In the cv it says one or two jobs for MGM, about this time. Up at Elstree.

PM: Yeah.

DB: Or Borehamwood as we know it.

PM: Yeah, again because of the making props and stuff like that I got a job with Alfred Junge, who was a famous designer: he worked on [The Cabinet of] Dr Caligari, I believe. Anyway, he was a nice rather humourless German gentleman, with a Homburg hat and a big black coat; but very powerful. And a very good designer.

DB: Head of the Department at MGM.

PM: Yes. Yes. Shares in MGM I do believe. So, he had quite a lot to say. And they were doing a picture called Quentin Durwood, with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, and they had a throne room with tapestries. And he wanted the tapestries illuminated. They were painted by the scenic artists, but then he wanted bits of gold paper on or when there was armour a highlight of silver, so I worked on the tapestries to bring them to life a bit more. So I did that.

DB: And what can you remember of the actual studio at MGM?

25 minutes

DB: Was it grander than Shepperton; or just the same or you can’t remember?

PM: It was more organised. I always liked Shepperton because it was more higgledy-piggledy. It was easy-peasy – it was relaxed. I found MGM was more [pauses]

DB: Factory-like.

PM: Factory like. Guys on the gate would look at you when you came in, even asked who you were working for, whatever. Whereas at Shepperton you always drove through and away, you know. It was probably a better studio from the point of view of the technicalities; and I worked there later, on [Where] Eagles Dare. So I was there for some time.

DB: Yes, that’s the biggie we’ll come to.

PM: And I also made some – I’ve got a picture somewhere – did some props for Invitation to the Dance. So, again – this was for another guy called Terence Morgan. Terence Morgan made masks and puppetry and stuff from Tales of Hoffmann and I worked with him and helped him out on various things, and he was doing all these masks and bits and pieces for Invitation to the Dance, with Gene Kelly. And we were making them – he mainly, but I helping him. Then I’d take them down to the studio and present them to Gene Kelly and get the feedback. So it was great to kind of meet…you know.

DB: Yes. Yes. ‘Cos that was his first as a director.

PM: I don’t think it was: he’d worked with Stanley Donen as a co-director on…

DB: Oh, Choreographer/Director, yes you are right. I think it was actually the first time he’d –

PM: Done his own thing.

DB: Yeah.

PM: Which were five separate stories. One was cartoon, dancing with the mouse and all that.

DB: Done in Hollywood of course.

PM: Yeah, I don’t think they did very well. They kind of died.

DB: That’s true, that’s true. Not very well received.

PM: No.

DB: So, towards the end – oh, Oh Rosalinda – that was at Elstree of course.

PM: No, no that was at Shepperton.

DB: Was it? All the books say Elstree.

PM: I’m sure it was at Shepperton.

DB: Okay, well you would know.

PM: Well I’m sure it was. That was Die Fledermaus wasn’t it?

DB: Yes.

PM: Michael Powell.

DB: Yes.

PM: I had a couple of weeks on that I remember. It may have been – I always thought it was Shepperton. [shrugs]

DB: Michael Powell in his book says Elstree.

PM: [indicates] I’ve got his book here. No, no I’m sure you’re right. I can’t remember it all, right.

DB: No, no. Quite soon you got onto the television series – filmed for television.

PM: Yes, that was ’53 or something; ’55.

DB: Robin Hood and William Tell, The Invisible Man and all that sort of stuff. Can you – choose one of them, whichever you like and tell us the sort of day-to-day on those sort of things because I presume that you had one stage and six or seven or eight sets which you redressed and redressed.

PM: Until they wore out. That’s right. That was all at National Studios.

DB: Which is now BBC.

PM: Yeah. And we had one big stage as you say with the sets around, and then one end of it was green, with mountains.

DB: For exteriors.

PM: William Tell for instance. We had our mountains painted and foreground plaster rocks and all the rest of it, and then we had a second unit stage. That was like a spill-over smaller stage which we could do extra stuff on. But Robin Hood was done at Walton-on-Thames.

DB: Walton-on-Thames, yes.

PM: I think I did 39 or something of those. And then we built a castle at Foxwarren. Foxwarren was off the Portsmouth Road. A big estate which is now a hotel, owned by Hannah Weinstein, and she instigated the building of the castle with moat and all the rest of it.

DB: This is Robin Hood.

PM: Robin Hood. So that we could do Second Unit there.

DB: Exteriors.

PM: John Schlesinger was directing second units in those days, and I always remember there was a funny instance where we had Ned Lynch, I remember was a crowd artist, a crowd man, and he fired an arrow at a man on the battlements. Then the man on the battlements receives the arrow – and it’s Ned Lynch! [They laugh]

30 minutes

PM: They cut it together – it’s the same man. Which is probably a mistake.

DB: What sort of, what was it? Five-day, six-day shoot?

PM: Yup, five days. You generally got a script in the middle of the previous week.

DB: Yes.

PM: Sometimes on the Friday. Generally worked every Saturday.

DB: To redress the sets.

PM: To redress, yes. Robin Hood was designed-

DB: So your set-dressing days came in very handy.

PM: Yes, yes, exactly. But the Head Designer was Peter Proud. [BEHP Interview No 0027] Peter Proud was absolutely brilliant. He was a marvellous artist and he devised this kind of Lego system on wheels: there was three arches on a base and you could put windows in the arches, or just have arches, or put window and two doors, and you’d move that about or put a straight run of flats [a type of stage scenery, typically with little depth. DS]; or you put half a tower, with a door in it. Which could be a window, and they were all on wheels. It was like a kind of giant…

DB: Jigsaw.

PM: Yeah. And we used to push all that stuff around. Kind of make it up as you went along half the time. All kinds of people were in it. Paul Eddington played Will Scarlet.

DB: Yes. William Tell is running at the moment on Talking Pictures TV I think.

PM: Ah, okay.

DB: Or London Live.

PM: Oh is it? I’d love to see that.

DB: Well, there it is. But you did two series, William Tell and The Invisible Man up at National Studios.

PM: Yes.

DB: What can you remember of either of those? Much the same I would imagine.

PM: Much the same. It was all for Lew Grade. Well, no, the other stuff was Hannah Weinstein, but all the stuff at National was for Lew Grade, ITV.

DB: ITC.

PM: ITC, and Ralph Smart was the Producer, and we had various directors who came through. I mean some who went on to be quite well known and others who disappeared. But it was [a] five-day week, similar situation, standing sets. The main thing was lighting, so you had to build under the rig so the lamps were in position, you had your square box or whatever it was and then you put your windows and doors in, changed it around.

DB: And you are credited as Art Director on those.

PM: Yes.

DB: But you still haven’t been on a drawing board!

PM: Not really. [Darrol laughs] Not really. A funny story: when I was a scenic artist, working as a scenic artist, there was another scenic artist around at the time and much later I saw him, and he said “Oh I see they’ve made you an Art Director – no bloody good as a scenic artist so they made you an Art Director! [they laugh] I thought ‘well maybe he’s right.’

DB: Now from 1964 I think it is [checking paperwork] right through to 1990, there’s an incredible list of feature films, which to me is mind-boggling, just the number and the complexity. Beginning with King and Country and Alfie, The Spy with the Cold Nose etc., etc. Now – as Production Designer.

PM: Some are called Art Directors.

DB: But you were in charge of the look at those films.

PM: Well King and Country was the first one, the first meaningful picture I did. Really. Joe Losey.

DB: Shepperton?

PM: Shepperton, on one stage. And we filled the stage with mud – well it wasn’t really mud. We built a three-foot tank and all these duckboards floating above the mud. A twenty-eight day shoot and it stank. And if you fell off the duckboard you were up to your knees in kind of wet sand and Quaker oats and God knows what else. That was quite hard to shoot really.

DB: I think it started off as a television play didn’t it?

PM: It was a stage play, called Hamp with Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde. It was a good one.

35 minutes

DB: What do you remember of the actors in these films? Were they ever with you in the bar? Or in the canteen? Did they keep themselves to themselves?

PM: No, not particularly.

DB: I mean, I’m just thinking who you went to the bar or went to the canteen with on those days. Were you always with the art department or [who] were you with?

PM: Well, we always used to go with the posh restaurant if you could. I mean in those days at Shepperton in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was The Canteen, which, [was] where the actors went.

DB: Was that in the old house?

PM: Oh, that was before then. There were three restaurants: there was one in the old house which was very grand and that had a bar which opened out, down to the river. That’s in the ‘50s I suppose. If you went to The Restaurant you sat with all kinds of people. But I had a series of funny old cars in those days so I was always giving people lifts… you’d give an actor a lift. I used to – ‘cos I lived in London all the time, people lived outside London so if I was coming to London and an actor had a reason to go to or he lived in London, sometimes used to say” Oh you going to London, can you give me a lift?” And he went on to be whoever, later on. [laughter]

[Microphone slips and Dan enters frame to fix it 36.37 to 36.60]

PM: I’m rattling on, is that alright?

DB: Absolutely fine, yes. I’ll throw a few directors’ names at you if I may?

PM: Okay

DB: Most of them I know, but some I’d never heard of. Several Directors: Lewis Gilbert [BEHP Interview No 386], Peter Collinson, Guy Green [BEHP Interview No 233], Lee J Thompson. [J. Lee Thompson. DS] What do you remember of any of those?

PM: Peter Collinson, first picture he ever did was The Penthouse. Which I did at Twickenham Studios. It was a leftover from another set. I’d done a picture called The Man Outside with Van Heflin, Director was Sam Gallu, and the set was left over, and Guido Cohen, the studio manager said “We’re not going to pull that set down, I’ve done a deal with the last production and we are doing a little picture and we are going to use the set again.” He said “But, can you make some changes for us?” So I’d done the set, the set is standing there, so I changed a door and a window around, painted it a different colour, re-dressed it and for that I remember I got £250. And never went back to the film because it all happened in one set. So they said “You’re finished, thank you very much, £250.” Which was quite a lot of money in those days, and that was about a week or so’s work. And it turned out to be Peter Collinson’s first picture. I had meetings with him and stuff.

DB: Yeah. What do you remember of him because he was quite young – and wild, I seem to remember.

PM: Yeah, I suppose he was yes. Well, he went on to do The Italian Job, you know. Yeah, he was a bit kind of that, yeah. Lewis Gilbert of course I did Alfie with him. I was doing commercials for Shell Oil, and his son was the Location Manager, and he just said to me one day “Oh, my dad’s doing a picture. Shall I mention you to him?” “Yes, yes, yes.” And it would turn out to be Lewis Gilbert and the picture was Alfie, and I got £85 a week, I remember.

DB: Also at Twickenham.

PM: Also at Twickenham. And locations, yes. And then twenty-five years later I worked for Lewis, and Lewis rang me up and said “This is Lewis.” Like you are supposed to know who Lewis is after years, but I recognised the voice, “Yes Lewis.” “Now” he said “I’m about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” I said “What’s that?” He said “Twenty-five years ago you did a picture for me called Alfie.” I said “Yes!” He said “I’m now about to offer you another picture called Stepping Out and if you don’t do it, it will be twenty-five years before I ring you and offer you another one!” [laughter] So, I did Stepping Out, in Canada.

40 minutes

DB: In Canada – I thought so, yes.

PM: Well it was tax – he was a tax [exile?]. It was the kind of picture that would have fitted wonderfully into Twickenham. Anyway we went to Toronto.

The other director, Guy Green.

DB: Yeah.

PM: Lovely man. First thing I did for him was called Pretty Polly. In Singapore.

DB: Aha.

PM: First location I ever went on outside England. Singapore. Guy Green, it was Arthur Ibbetson was the lighter.

DB: Sorry?

PM: Arthur Ibbetson was cameraman.

DB: Oh, I see, yes. Apart from that, did you work much abroad?

PM: Yeah.

DB: You went to Australia, I gather, later on.

PM: Oh that was going back to the TV series. That was again ITC, Lew Grade, doing a thing called Whiplash, which was a kind of a cowboy, Wells Fargo style thing in Australia, and I went out and built the ‘western’ town and did three or four of them. I was there for about a year or so. And then my marriage broke up and she came back to England and I left early and came back…

DB: Right. [pause] Geoffrey Reeve. James Clavell Last Valley. That was Austria or somewhere, wasn’t it?

PM: Yes, we built - it was set in the 1600s, the Thirty Years War, it was from a novel and James Clavell wrote, produced and directed. Michael Caine, Omar Sharif. It was as I say Thirty Years War.

DB: Yeah.

PM: We had to do this valley which was like a secret valley, the whole of Europe was in turmoil and war, and then there is this one valley which escaped all that and Omar Sharif, who is like a teacher, when everyone is dying around him, he runs, finds the valley but then the soldiers come headed by Michael Caine and his band of cut-throats. They take the valley over and they kind of winter there and get their strength back to go on to fight their war. So it’s what happened then.

We had to take this valley and build a 1600 village, full-size everything, church whole thing and what you saw was another village which we put screens of trees, 40-foot, 60-foot screens of pine trees in front of them. We even bought houses and knocked them down, you know and we totally farmed the land below…diverted a river so we had water running through it with a bridge and all the rest of it. It was quite a thing. Very, very [expensive] it was a six and a half million dollars then, and it was the last of the big epics made about that time, and it was quite fun to work. Innsbruck, we shot it just outside Innsbruck. Then the Austrian government said “Could we leave it?” and they were going to use it as a tourist thing. But the land was owned by 60 or 70 different people who all wanted their extra bits of money or didn’t want it. Anyway [we] pulled it all down eventually.

DB: So it was entirely done there. No Pinewood or anything?

PM: We came back, we went to Frensham and we built a castle in Frensham for an attack on the castle, night attack on the castle and we went to Halliford Studios, which were the little studios-

DB: Near Shepperton, yes.

PM: Which I’d only done commercials in before and we built one set there, but it [otherwise] all done in Austria. I was on it for about nine or ten months, I suppose.

DB: Yes, well a hell of a lot of building.

PM: Yeah, it was a big build. We had forty, fifty tradesmen from England: carpenters, painters. A big deal.

DB: [Mischievously] Something not possible in Lime Grove.

PM: No, no, no. [they laugh] Although there they would paint it!

DB: Yes.

The Pink Panther. I see you did up to [counts] one, two, three, four-

PM: Six.

DB: Six Pink Panthers. So, you know Blake Edwards rather well.

PM: Yeah, I don’t know if you get to know Blake Edwards rather well, really.

45 minutes

PM: I got on with him quite well. You know go on location, out to dinner nights, but he was a kind of insular character really.

DB: Really.

PM: For me, anyway. But I got on with him alright. Listen I did six pictures so I couldn’t have been doing something wrong.

DB: Right, right. But you were Production Designer on those films.

PM: Yeah. The first one I did was Return of the Pink Panther, and they hadn’t made one for ten years; ‘cos they made The Pink Panther. And then they made [A] Shot in the Dark. Michael Stringer art directed those. And then they made Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin, which was not very good. And then there was nothing for ten years; and then Lew Grade came along and wanted to make The Tamarind Seed, with Omar Sharif and Julie Andrews, and I believe the story was “I’ll make a picture for you, Mr. Grade, if you back a picture from my husband.” So I was told. Anyway, there was a picture which Blake did which was Return of the Pink Panther, which cost $2million I believe, at the time. And I think it took 60, or something. And that started the run. There were three with [Peter] Sellers before he died.

DB: Yeah.

PM: And after that there was various other people. It didn’t really work without Sellers.

DB: No, no, indeed. The Arkin one was not good.

PM: There was always a battle between Sellers and Blake because Blake was the puppet master or… and Sellers was not an easy man to work with.

DB: No, I gather.

PM: One minute he’d be friendly with you, the next he wouldn’t. I mean, he walked past my office and look in and say “What are you doing tonight? I’ve found a wonderful Chinese restaurant. You still living in the same place? I’ll send the car for you. Bring your lady.” And you’d go to a Chinese restaurant in Kensington somewhere and there would be half a dozen people there from the unit. And he’d disappear and come back dressed as a waiter, with little black lines on the eyes. [Imitates Sellers’ impression of a Chinese waiter] “I’m taking the order, you know. You like…” I mean, hilarious. You could have a wonderful evening. Next day you’d walk past him in the corridor and you’d say “Lovely evening last night Peter.” He’d totally ignore you. He wouldn’t speak to you for a week. You’d think ‘What have I done?’ Moody, you know.

DB: [consulting cv] Ah, Jack Gold! My mate!

PM: Ah, lovely he was lovely, yes. And I did The Return of the Native with him as well, with Catherine Zeta-Jones. No less.

DB: Which to pick out? Goldengirl. What’s that? Joseph Sargent.

PM: Joseph Sargent directed a picture called The Taking of Pelham 123 – the original, not the remake, right. And he came over to England to make it – Joe Levine put the money up for it, and we were making it here. And it was about – Curt Jurgens was in it; Leslie Caron, and the girl who plays the golden girl, I can’t think of her name now. [Susan Anton. DS] Anyway, it’s a story of Curt Jurgen’s German gentleman bringing up his daughter to be a superhuman athlete. Feeding her various serums and concoctions that he has developed. Anyway, she becomes this great athlete but she doesn’t want to do it, it was like a TV series: it was going to be like a three-parter.

DB: It was a pilot, as it were?

PM: Well we went to Helsinki because we had to have an Olympic stadium. We went to Helsinki and we were going to use that… and then the money fell through, and the Producer, this end, the English Producer said “The picture’s off. We’re not going to make it now.” And then rang me from LA a couple of weeks later and said “We’ve got it together, we are going to make it here in LA, because you’ve done a certain amount of work on it, you’d better come over for a couple of weeks, with the American Art Director, point him in the right direction…” Anyway, I went over to see and stayed for five months.

50 minutes.

PM: And ended up doing the picture.

DB: No problem with the union?

PM: Yes. I had to be called a visual consultant. And I had a terrible time with Gene Allen

DB: Oh, sounds like Warner Brothers.

PM: Yeah well Gene Allen didn’t like us because he did Bhowani Junction. As an Art Director, in England.

DB: MGM, yes.

PM: And was given a bad time by our unions, so he was giving a bad time to English people, so I applied to be in the union over there: I never, ever, made it.

DB: Oh.

PM: No. And so I was over there for about five months doing that. Eventually it came out … cobbled together as a film. But I never saw it. It didn’t do all that well I don’t think. We had James Coburn, a lot of, a big cast.

DB: Dogs of War?

PM: Dogs of War, yeah. We went to Belize for Dogs of War.

DB: Oh, you’re getting about!

PM: Yes. [laughs] Well Larry DeWaay produced it with Norman Jewison. Norman Jewison was like the background producer. Larry Dewaay was Producer.

DB: Oh, I see. John Irvin it says here

PM: Director was John Irvin. And it was a Freddie Forsyth book, and it was set in a kind of mythical Nigerian-type state about deposing a dictator and putting another man in his place. Mercenaries and all that. And they – Larry DeWaay and somebody, I think Freddie Forsyth went to Africa and looked around and thought it was politically too difficult, so they looked somewhere else, so they eventually went to Belize and again, I got a call, I was in London, got a call from Larry, saying “Come over to Belize.” So I flew to Miami, and then a small plane down to Belize and we did it in Belize, which was, worked very well.

DB: So, you built sets and interiors, the whole thing?

PM: Well we had a couple of scenes which were meant to be in Paris which we shot in the Great Western Hotel in Liverpool Street, [It must be the Great Eastern Hotel. DS] before it had all been modernised. And we had a couple of street scenes, meant to be night time in the Netherlands which we shot in Colnbrook and the rest in Belize. We had a barracks, a military barracks which we had to build where the Dictator lives, and all his army, which gets blown up and destroyed at the end, and we found an old hospital there, which was heavily overgrown, trees growing up through the roof, so we pulled that together and again we took out quite a few people and used a lot of locals, and pulled it together and shot it there. And that was quite nice to do. Good job.

DB: Now, in addition to these feature films is the odd television production as well. I mean I see there is Armchair Theatre and things, at Teddington.

PM: Philip Saville and John Moxey.

DB: Yeah. What do you remember about that. That was something totally different for you.

PM: Totally different. I came back from Australia.

DB: Multi-cam and-

PM: Yeah. I came back from Australia, 1961 and the first thing I did when I came back was a TV thing called The Cheaters.

DB: Mm. Danzigers.

PM: Danzigers. Real cheapie, cheapie, cheapie. One every two-and-a-half days. Half an hour, one every two-and-a half-days. The scripts were printed on the backs of – to save money – the call sheets. They would print the call sheets on the Xerox, and then at the end of the day collect the call sheets in from everybody, and then print the script on the backs.

DB: Of the scrap paper.

PM: Yeah. And the Danziger Brothers were rebuilding a hotel in Mayfair. The Mayfair Hotel.

55 minutes

PM: Because they were property developers really. And they were ripping all that out and they were sending all the furniture, hotel bedroom furniture mainly, into a big warehouse which was adjacent to the studios at Elstree. The studios, they used to be old wind tunnels. In the war, they developed the aeroplane engines–

DB: Yes, De Haviland testing beds.

PM: Exactly.

DB: So, they were soundproof!

PM: They were long and narrow. So there was this big warehouse that was full of furniture and I remember Harry Danziger saying “You’re spending too much money”, or something and I said “Well we got this embassy – you have to have gold inlaid desk- “He said “We got desks – go up to the warehouse.” I went to the warehouse and it’s full of brown hotel furniture and I came back and said “That’s no good.” And he said “Paint it Gold!” [they laugh] And I said “But” I said “They are all desks.” He said “You want a coffee table – cut the legs off!” And that’s the kind of thing it was and what we did.

John Ireland – we had all these American actors who of course are famous and then it was the end of their days, they want to make a bit of money; all kinds of actors came over here: John Ireland we had. Van Heflin, that picture we did earlier. John Ireland came over, and we shot these things, The Cheaters, about insurance, finding out cheating insurance, so we did that.

DB: So it was the two of them as regulars, Heflin and Ireland?

PM: No Van Heflin was the film we did earlier, The Man Outside.

DB: Sorry.

PM: The TV series was just John Ireland.

DB: Okay, mm.

PM: Then they did another one called Saber of the Yard, [variously titled The Vise; Saber of London; Mark Saber. DS] which I did a couple of. Anyway, from then onwards, I then went to Merton Park. After that. Again, you know, you walk into a pub and you see someone you haven’t seen for years: “What are you doing?” And I worked with Jack Greenwood.

DB: Scales of Justice.

PM: Yes that’s right. Ernest Lustgarten. [Edgar. DS]

DB: Yes.

PM: Same set all the time… you just pulled the set out and set it up. The Edgar Wallace’s, great learning curve, you know, you have to do a picture, two-week shoot, to get together. And you leapfrog. All kinds of directors.

DB: But you were the Art Director on all of it.

PM: All of ‘em.

DB: You weren’t leapfrogging with another Art Director?

PM: No, no, no, you did the whole thing. Found the locations, the location guy matched the doors, the windows, for the set. It was not a big stage a lot of it very high – well used to be an old bus garage, so it was high enough for double-decker buses, but it was pitched roof and it had a column in the middle, and everything had to be – well you couldn’t take the column out, everything happened around the column: you either build it in, you know or made it part of something, and again you changed things. I remember, funnily enough I had to build a sewer, ‘cos they were doing a robbery, they came through the sewers, we had these arches with plaster brick and stuff and a bit of water in the bottom they waded through and they made a hole up into the bank, but the next set on the next picture on the Monday, they wanted a bistro restaurant, so I painted the sewers white and hung chianti bottles and check table cloths . You’ve got to imagine.

DB: And there you were, there you are.

PM: In those days you could get away with it. Black and white – and they were hour-long co-features; and I think they were released in America as a television series.

DB: Oh.

PM: Yeah. And again all kinds of people came through as Directors…

DB: Yes, I’ve noticed.

PM: Sam Wanamaker came to do one. He fell out with the management somehow, didn’t like the script or something or other but I got on with him quite well. We looked for locations and stuff. And he was building a house in Hampstead, and we diverted looking for the locations and went to Hampstead because he was asking my advice on a staircase. Anyway, years later he called me when he was trying to get together the Globe Theatre project, and he said could I give him a hand? “All I can do is promise you a good lunch.” So, I went to Shepperton, and Tony Masters was also there who’d Art Directed 2001.

1 hour

PM: And we both built this model of the Globe Theatre, which you could stand inside and paint, and it came into four pieces like an orange, in quadrants, which could be packed into boxes which he took around the world trying to raise money.

DB: How did you know what the Globe Theatre looked like, ‘cos nobody knows what it was like really, what the measurements were, where the columns were.

PM: Well I’ve still got some information actually, and if you look it up now – well now you’d look it up on Google, it will tell you a lot of stuff. But we did have quite a bit of drawings from the time.

DB: Right.

PM: Also we ran Henry V. Because the opening sequence of Olivier’s Henry V is in the Globe Theatre, so I remember we ran that and we had prints. Technicolor took prints of for us. So, we copied a lot of that.

DB: I see. Was – what was the last film? Stepping Out is the last one on the list.

PM: Yes.

DB: But before that – sorry to have you jumping back. Shanghai Surprise. With my mate Jim Goddard.

PM: Well of course I worked with Jim Goddard when I was doing Armchair Theatre.

DB: Yes.

PM: We had this communal open-plan office. With Bob Fuest, Jim Goddard, Assheton Gorton – there were about six of us all in the open thing.

DB: Design Department.

PM: Design Department, yeah. Jim was there. And then I got Shanghai Surprise, I was in Los Angeles. I used to occasionally go to Los Angeles to look up a few mates, as I’d got a lot of English friends there: have a bit of a holiday, ring around, and kind of rekindle a few old producers and people you’d worked for. And there was a nice man called John Cohen who I’d worked for before and I was just about to leave, I mean, literally, the day I was leaving, in the morning I thought ‘My God, I’ve been here two weeks and I haven’t rung John Cohen.’ So I rang him up and he said “Oh you’ve got to come up for lunch.” And I said “Well I’m leaving [at] six ‘o’ clock tonight.” He said “Oh no, you’ve got to come!” so anyway I rushed up, sat by his pool to have a drink and a sandwich, and he said “Oh, I’ve got a script here. Read this.” Which was Shanghai Surprise. He said “You know Hong Kong – you’ve worked there.” I said “Yeah.” He said “It’s just up your street – read this. Take it with you!” okay.

Went home – I mean by the time I’d got home, literally the next day he phoned up and said “I’m on my way – I’m staying at The Athenaeum, I’ll see you for breakfast tomorrow. The picture’s on.” [Darrol exclaims] And it was backed by Handmade Films, which was whatsis name?

DB: Yes, I know who you mean.

PM: One of The Beatles [voice off-mic: George Harrison] George! So, we had a breakfast meeting with George Harrison and he said “Well you’d better get down to Hong Kong and find the locations.” And then they said “No, don’t go to Hong Kong, it’s set in Shanghai, go to Shanghai.” So I went to Shanghai: had four or five days in Shanghai, which was not like it is now.

DB: With Jim, or?

PM: No just myself. Obviously as a film department I was picked up somebody, I was driven around by this kind of very dour faced Chinese gentleman who spoke a little English, and wouldn’t let me out of the car in certain places, and the minute you got out of the car to take a picture you were surrounded by fifty, sixty, a hundred Chinese people all looking exactly the same with white shirts and black trousers, just standing, looking at you. It was very odd. I never had one good Chinese meal while I was there – and they shrank my shirts! Right.

DB: Not a successful visit!

PM: I was there for four or five days, had to ring the Producer in Los Angeles, and I rang John, and he said “What’s it like, what’s it like?” I said “Let me tell you this. I haven’t eaten well and they’ve shrunk my shirts.” He said “Where else can we do it?” I said “Hong Kong.” “Okay. We’ll do it in Hong Kong.”

1 hour 5 minutes

DB: Right.

PM: So we went to Hong Kong. And we did quite a bit in Hong Kong. All kinds of problems we had there with Madonna. Anyway – it was not a good picture. And poor Jim had a terrible time.

DB: I gather.

PM: He didn’t come out of it well at all.

DB: No.

PM: And then we came back to Shepperton and built a lot of stuff at Shepperton. And locations around London.

DB: So, Jim having been Designer, Set Designer, the conversation, the planning meetings, as it were, were easier? Or-?

PM: Didn’t interfere at all. He just – I don’t really remember him being anti-anything.

DB: I’ve always, when I became a Director and worked with a Designer, you know I always found it very easy because I knew how much to let them do, like most of it! And I would give them some ideas, some starters.

PM: He wasn’t controlling at all. I don’t remember him ever walking on the set and saying “Well, I wouldn’t have done it like that.” I ‘ve had Directors say that.

DB: I had other preoccupations.

PM: Well you certainly did, yes. The funniest thing, I did a picture called Luther, with Stacey Keach, about the preacher.

DB: Oh, yes!

PM: Set in Germany.

DB: At Elstree or somewhere?

PM: No, at Shepperton.

DB: Ah, okay.

PM: For HBO, directed by Guy Green, and lit by Freddie Young [BEHP Interview No 0004] so you got Oscar winner Guy Green, Oscar winner…right, so Guy Green would be sitting there in his chair, waiting for lighting to be finished, and Freddie would be [demonstrates], and I used to look at them and Guy Green would say “Don’t worry Freddie, you do what you do… doesn’t matter, I know you know what you’re doing. Just get on with it.” [laughter] This kind of dialogue between the two of them.

DB: Yes, yes. But that was shot like a play?

PM: On one set. A kind of cathedral set. We actually went all over Europe: Cologne Cathedral and all the rest of it. To do it in real places. Wells Cathedral, all kinds of places, and ended up deciding you had more control for effects and things, so we built the nave and all the rest on I think it was “A” stage at Shepperton.

DB: The aforementioned silent stage.

PM: We didn’t do it there, no. It was one of the others, big stages.

DB: Ah. Yes, ‘cos it was a play actually wasn’t it?

PM: Yeah, it was. Yes. Called Luther.

DB: Indeed! [laughter] Lassiter?

PM: Lassiter. Yes, that was Raymond Chow, Golden Harvest.

DB: That’s the company.

PM: That’s the company. Chinese company, [based in Hong Kong DS] made kung-fu pictures and all the rest of it. Then they were venturing out of the far-Eastern market into the West, and this was one of their ventures. Again I got the job through people I’d met when I’d been in Hong Kong; I’ve forgotten his name now, but I think he was one of the sons of Raymond Chow I’d met. Anyway through him I got the picture. And it was produced in London by Fred Muller, who I went on to do various things with, and the Director: Robert Young.

DB: Yes.

PM: Wasn’t Robert.

DB: Yes it says here, Robert, I think. [checks] Robert Young, yeah.

PM: Oh, I didn’t think it was. Anyway, it was his first time feature. And we had Tom Selleck, who had the TV series Magnum I think it was.

DB: Was it a, was Lassiter a policeman or something? I can’t remember.

PM: He was a safe-cracker, who had kind of retired, and was brought out of retirement to break into the German embassy and steal the papers.

1 hour 10 minutes

PM: And then he gets away by sliding on a rope, across from one building to another. Did the whole thing down in the City, all that stuff and the rest was sets at Twickenham.

DB: Oh, right.

PM: And locations were in London, so it was a nice picture to work on. Nice Director: I did a couple of other things with him.

DB: Robert Young was from television?

PM: Yes, I believe so.

DB: I seem to remember the name. Yes, you’ve explained about the fact that there was another Peter Mullins because I got this note about this stuff at Granada, which I didn’t realise they were two.

PM: I-N-G-S, yes.

DB: So I can ignore that.

Better Late Than Never, Bryan Forbes. It says here.

PM: Also Raymond Chow, also Golden Harvest. Same connections how I got the job. That was absolutely wonderful – not the best picture in the world, but the best location in the world: that’s the South of France, for five months. And I’d just got married. In Los Angeles.

DB: Which time was that?

PM: Third time. To my present lady. We’d just got married and I was going into Tower Records in Sunset Boulevard, and Bryan Forbes was coming in as I was coming out, with a tall gentleman who was called David Niven junior, and he said “What are you doing here?” and I said “Oh I’ve been here for a while now, blah, blah, blah and I just got married…what are you doing?” He said “We are leaving tomorrow, we are going to the South of France, doing a picture in Nice.” I said “Ooh, wonderful! Anything going?” He said “No, no, no, we are using locals, we’ve found a guy, we’ve been out, found all the locations and we are going back.” “Oh, who have you got?” He told me who he’s got and I knew he was useless. Because he’d worked for me a couple of times, before we’d sacked him. A total waste of time. Okay.

A few days later…

DB: The phone rang.

PM: The phone rang, and it was Colin Brewer, who was the Production Supervisor saying “Get your arse over here!”

DB: How did you know Bryan Forbes? Apart from The Holly and the Ivy?

PM: Just like, when he was around. In the bar, or something. Anyway, my wife and I flew to London, I went to Shepperton, no Pinewood, met Bryan, picked my car up, drove down to – that was our honeymoon. So it was five months in…but it was all shot in the South of France. Quite a lot of stuff on a yacht so we had to build a couple of cabins. There was the inside of a chateau: there was an inside of a chateau standing in the studios.

DB: Victorine?

PM: [Pointing off screen] La Victorine. The sign.

DB: Oh, sorry.

PM: For my office door! [laughs] Anyway, we made use of that. It was a nice picture to do. And we had David Niven, who had just had some problems, and had to take it easy. We had Art Carney junior who’d just had a heart attack. We had Maggie Smith. Three Oscar winners. Five Oscars on that picture. Lionel Jeffries and a couple of others. We didn’t start work until 9 ‘o’ clock in the morning; we had an hour-and-a-half for lunch, because David had to have a rest or whatever. We finished at 5 and we never worked weekends. We shot a couple of Sundays on Antibes station, but we had Monday off.

DB: Very gracious.

PM: Very, very gracious. It was like a twelve-week schedule, and you used to wait for lunchtimes and try and get a chair as near as you could to David Niven, so you could hear the stories. That was the best part of the day really. It was a nice picture to do.

1 hour 15 minutes

PM: It was all on location, but it wasn’t a particularly good picture. It had several names: Ménage à trois; Better late than never; Whose Little Girl are You? Three different.

DB: Scandalous?

PM: Scandalous was directed by Rob Cohen, who went on to be quite a big deal in Hollywood. And it was his first picture, I think. Jack Cardiff lit it. It was round London, all that.

DB: All location – no studio?
PM: Twickenham Studios, we built the inside of a house and a few other bits and pieces. Quite a lot was location.

DB: So that included re-dressing.

PM: Oh yes.

DB: Tarting up.

PM: Tarting up, yes. It’s one of those things about which I don’t remember an awful amount.

DB: Right, right.

PM: I remember Rob Cohen because we used to go and have lunch every Saturday. You always remember the best parts don’t you?

DB: [chuckles] Death Wish 3. With my friend Michael Winner.

PM: I got on very well with Michael Winner. I quite liked Michael. I mean he was a bit of a monster, you know but I got on quite well with him.

DB: Was that in America?

PM: No, no, but they went to America for seven or eight days and shot in the streets over there, and there were various things I had to match. Go into a shop I had to match. He would take the picture he said “There’s no need for you to come.” [mimics Michael Winner] “No need for you to come dear… because I’ve got a camera, I can do what you do.” I must say he came back with hundreds of pictures of things, and he put things there for scale. He’d put a milk bottle – but of course he didn’t bring the milk bottle back, and being an American milk bottle, it was slightly different. Anyway, we got round all that. But we did it all in a hospital in Lambeth. They’d pulled a hospital down – most of it down. There’s a vast empty space at the back with mounds of rubble, and then there was the front of the hospital, which we used as the Queens New York police station. The inside we used as a police station because it was all Victorian, green tiles and that sort of stuff, and then the back of the hospital, the bit they had standing had fire escapes going up-

DB: Very New York.

PM: [We] put water towers on the top of the roof and did an awful lot to it.

It worked so well that when the picture came out, the unions, the American unions wrote to Michael Winner, and said “You cheated us, because we agreed that you could only shoot seven days and only do this and its obvious seeing the picture that you shot more here than you said you would.”

DB: [quietly] “Oh no we didn’t.”

PM: And Michael gave me the letter. “Read that.” he said, “That’s the best accolade you’ll ever get!” Anyway, the last thing I ever did was with Michael.

DB: What was that?

PM: And that was one of those commercials he did.

DB: Oh.

PM: Where he dressed up as a woman. And that was an hilarious couple of days, with Michael Winner coming on in drag. He took it very seriously, but it was funny.

DB: Now you’ve done quite a few commercials down the years – when did you first get into that scene?

PM: Sixties. I worked a lot with – oh God – Dougal Rankin was the man. Had a company, I can’t remember what it was called, in Berwick Market. Did quite a lot with him: Shell commercials…the first ones I did were out of Shepperton, with Peter Hall directing.

DB: The Peter Hall?

PM: The Peter Hall.

DB: Right.

PM: And they were called Go to Work on an Egg.

DB: Oh, yes.

PM: And I remember we had a caravan down at Virginia Water, and it was meant to be mum and dad and the kids: wake up in the morning, fry the eggs and bacon, and you break the eggs and it had a little lion stamped on it.

1 hour 20 minutes

PM: British lion stamped on it.

DB: Yes.

PM: And I remember, I used to keep that lion, and when they rang me up to do the next commercial, they’d say “Don’t forget to bring the lion.” … But we used to do these fry-ups: half-a-dozen eggs, and then “Do it again”, throw the eggs away. Right, so we started off with three or four dozen eggs, and then I had to run down to the local thing [shop], by another half-dozen eggs; and I kept going back and they were “Why are you buying all these eggs?” But when we finished, I said to the props man “What are you doing with the eggs?” “Oh” he said “I’ve dug a hole over there to put the eggs in.” and I went over, and there’s this hole with four, five, six, seven dozen half-fried eggs in, and when we were leaving I noticed he threw a bit of earth in, and scattered some leaves on the top. And I always thought someone would be walking along one day and…[laughs]

DB: Give them a terrible shock, yes.

PM: Anyway, I did those. Hamlet Cigars.

DB: Halliford was a great studio for commercials I seem to remember.

PM: There was a company called BBR and K.

DB: Yes.

PM: Who did a lot with David Bill.

DB: The ‘K’ was my ex-flatmate, Kirkland.

PM: Geoff Kirkland.

DB: The other guy in the flat was Ridley Scott.

PM: Aha!

DB: Anyway, that’s my story, not yours. So, BBRK were quite a strong company. Vast, because they bought Ealing Studios and things.

PM: But they had stages, E, F and G at Shepperton, and it was a marvellous conception at the time because they used to have an executive restaurant so the Producers, the Agency guys would come down and have a wonderful lunch, and all the rest of it. Then there would be the stage with all the shooting, you know it was a good conception. They had so much work that they couldn’t cope so they took Halliford Studios, and then David Bill took me on to look after the extras; and I used to sleep at Halliford Studios sometimes. We did four or five commercials a day.

DB: Oh, gosh.

PM: And I would be in charge of all of them, with maybe a couple of set-dressers to help, but we were, I mean it was manic!

DB: But they used to do very long hours on those commercials, I seem to remember.

PM: Yes. They’d shoot forever, till Midnight. Yeah.

DB: Very uncontrolled, as it were.

PM: Yeah, but a lot of money to spend – and a lot of money to be made, so I did quite a few of those.

DB: Dotted between the films.

PM: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I’ve gotta wipe my nose. Are you alright down there?

David Sharp: [off camera]: Yeah, I’m surviving down here. Thank you.

PM: I moved am I alright?

Dan Thurley [off camera] Yes, fine, yes.

DB: I’m jumping about really. There Goes the Bride?

PM: Ray Cooney was the – they were stage plays.

DB: Yes.

PM: There were two of them.

DB: And Why Not Stay for Breakfast?

PM: That’s it they were stage plays. Terry Marcel, who was a First Assistant Director on The Pink Panthers, aspiring Director, got those together … and made these very cheap little movies and I used to kind of fit them in as it were. They’d be one set or a couple of sets, and my assistant at the time would draw them up and go down and supervise them being built, some little studio somewhere.

DB: So it wasn’t Pinewood or somewhere?

PM: No it would be a small studio somewhere, one set, two sets. Very controlled. Stage plays…

DB: Shot single camera were they?

PM: Yeah, I think single yes. He then went on to do the other one, which I also did a few things on, with Jack Palance, which became quite a cult thing. I’ve forgotten what it was called now. [Possibly Hawk the Slayer. DS] Anyway. A lot of things keep coming back to you.

DB: Yeah. I can’t see any more of Terry Marcel. Well, it’s not on your list.

PM: Well I worked with him quite a bit as an Assistant Director – he was very good.

DB: Yes, you said. [pause]

1 hour 25 minutes

DB: Is there any sort of area that we haven’t talked about, that you’d like to talk about? I mean any sort of studios or people?

PM: Well, theatre.

DB: Oh yes, let’s talk a bit about that. This is some time ago.

PM: Well again, yes. In ’49 onwards, when I was making props, costumes for Hugh Skillen, so via that, got involved with Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel. I worked with Oliver Messel quite a bit. There was The Royal Opera House [which] had a Gala Performance of Sleeping Beauty which was the first one after the War. So, it was big, and the French President came over, and we had to decorate the Royal Box and the rest of it. I remember making little bird cages and things, with mirror at the back and putting them all round and garlands and things. And quite a few operas: Queen of Spades; and ballets. Worked with George Balanchine. I mean, endless names of people that you think people now talk about on television. You think ‘Oh! I worked with him.’ They’re revered, but they were just doing their job and you were doing your job. At the time.

DB: Yes, of course. Did you go – did you design straight plays in the West End or anything like that?

PM: No. …not at all. I worked for Donald Wolfit, at The King’s Theatre, Hammersmith.

DB: Yes.

PM: Before they pulled it down. I remember getting a job, going along. He was doing The Wandering Jew, Oedipus Rex, and King Lear was it? Anyway, the scenery, because it was a touring company, it needed freshening. So, they’d undo the cloths and drop them down, and you’d be there touching them up. All the rest of it. And then the great man would come, he always wore a cloak with a big hat, give you a great lecture: “My boy…” you know…. And pay you nothing of course. Very lowly paid. Then I worked for a ballet company, which was the first black ballet company in England, called The Ballet Nègre. Berto Pasuka was the lead dancer, choreographer – it was his company. He was Jamaican I think. And they had a UK tour and I did a lot of bits and pieces on, and painted stuff. That was quite interesting. Festival Ballet – I worked for quite a-

DB: [interrupts] So, did you design from the ground up as it were-?

PM: No, no.

DB: Just bits of retouching and bits and pieces.

PM: Yeah. Bits and pieces, yes.

[Long pause whilst Darrol checks paperwork]

DB: It’s going right back to the ‘50s, early ‘50s, I’ve got from your list, I’ve got the mentions of being an Assistant Director, most of which you’ve talked about and Night and the City, Blue Parrot. That Lady and Children Galore. That Lady of course was MGM.

PM: That Lady was at MGM and that was the second unit on a bullfighting sequence. They’d built a bullring there.

DB: Out the back?

PM: Yes. I was up there a couple of weeks as a kind of Third Assistant. Crowd control. It was all outside and I seem to remember the sun was shining all the time.

DB: Very nice. Knave of Hearts.

PM: Knave of Hearts was-

DB: René Clément.

PM: [French accent] René Clément was the Director and the star was… Gérard Philipe.

1 hour 30 minutes

PM: And again, I was Assistant Director, crowd control. I remember we had a dog which we had to hold back, because the dog follows him everywhere, kind of wherever Gérard Philipe goes, the dog is always around. So, we’d hold the dog back, let the dog go. That seemed to be my main thing at that time. I also remember we were in a mews at the back of Baker Street and it was meant to be rainy and wet, and they had the Fire Brigade there, like you do, with hosepipes and all the rest of it, and there was this corner house, which was all glass windows, and it was owned by a concert pianist, I’ve forgotten the name now. Big Steinway in the window, and they turned the hoses on and the full pressure came, took the whole windows right out!

DB: Ooooh! Smash!

[they laugh]

PM: One of the memories you have.

DB: Yes, indeed. One remembers disasters. Okay, anything else around that time? I think you’ve listed them anyway. What was Children Galore?

PM: Children Galore was a little picture – Terry [Terence] Fisher directed it. And we did it-

DB: Yeah – Brighton?

PM: Yes, based out of Brighton Studios which was a little studio they had there, and in the surrounding countryside. It was about kids at school and wartime; kids at school and stuff.

DB: It wasn’t a Children’s Film Foundation thing?

PM: It could have been – I think it was. I got a feeling it was. Yeah. I did a couple of those things: something egghead something, I seem to remember. [Egghead’s Robot. DS]

DB: Yeah. So that was quite early on, that was ’55, I think. It says here. You’d been nipping about all over the place at that time. Well you continued to nip about!

PM: Yeah, well that period – also because the film industry was in a bad state – ACT [Association of Cinematograph Technicians – the trade union. DS] allowed you to move between departments. A kind of distant cousin of mine, Peter Hunt was…

DB: An editor.

PM: Editing The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, with Claude Rains, and he got me a job on that, helping him out, carrying cans of film and doing a bit of blooping [an editing process. DS] and I had six or seven weeks doing that.

DB: Oh.

PM: Again, its all interesting and advantageous because you are getting insight to different areas of the business.

DB: Different areas of interest.

PM: Even, I’ve always thought all this stuff, even if you are only standing watching, you’re absorbing, even if you never use it. But somewhere along the line something clicks and it works.

DB: Yeah. It helps. Indeed, I’m sure. Now, various jobs outside the business: interior design and decoration, it says here. Daphne’s Restaurant.

PM: Yeah, well there was a famous woman called Daphne Rye.

DB: Yes.

PM: Who was the Casting Director for H.M Tennent, and very powerful: she used to read all the scripts that were going to the West End and would advise ‘Binkie’ Beaumont should he make it or not and all the rest of it? And she discovered Kenneth More, Richard Burton…. And she was very fat, jovial woman when I knew her, smoked a lot and drank a lot, and lived to excess and was a great friend of a friend of mine called Anthony Squire who was a Director. Who I shared a flat with for many years.

DB: Ah. So you’d know George Baker.

PM: Yeah, that’s his brother-in-law. Yeah.

DB: I’d worked with George plenty of times.

PM: He didn’t speak. Because Julia Squire who George married – of course was the costume designer – Tony Squire always thought his sister was hard done by so he never spoke to George, but I got on quite well with George, but what was I saying?

DB: Daphne.

PM: Oh yeah. So, through him I met Daphne who was going to open up a restaurant-

1 hour 35 minutes

PM: -and she was looking for premises and I wandered around with her and looked at several premises and she found these premises in Draycott Avenue, which is still there, and it was just one room. And we made the restaurant from one room; kitchens at the back, and I designed it and I got a few of the guys at the studios weekend work and stuff, evening work to make up the banquette seating and all the rest of it and what was interesting about that was that she got the money together from all the people in the film business, in the theatre: Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Terence Rattigan…

I was with her on a bus once and she said “Ooh look.” She said “There’s Terry,” (Terry Rattigan) “Come on” she said – we were up the top, and we went down, got off at the next stop and walked back – Sloane Avenue, Terence Rattigan is walking up – “Terry darling, hello.” And she got £2000 off him for the restaurant! “I’m opening a restaurant, are you interested?” And all these people put money in. Robert Helpmann, I mean everybody, all the names, the first night they all came, and dinner was served at 10.30 [pm], because most of them were in the theatre. And she got a special licence to stay open with drinks until two and three in the morning; and I was there.

And you just sat in this room: I kept the place-names, for years with all these [names]. I got the studio signwriter to [do them]

DB: Well, even I heard of it: Daphne’s, way back.

PM: It’s still there.

DB: Is it!

PM: Oh, its now three times the size, and two hundred times more expensive, probably. And doesn’t look anything like the simple restaurant we had.

DB: A couple of Soho clubs.

PM: Yes, I did the second strip-club that ever opened. Raymond Revue Bar was the first and the second one, there were two gay guys, two actors, Ray and Jackson, Ray Jackson? Anyway, these two gay guys wanted to open this club, and it’s a strip-club and somehow or other I got the job of designing it. It was in a basement, we built a stage, and we found all these old cinema seats, and I got the boys at the studio to make me some swags to go round the top. I did that…. They did very well out of it, I believe.

DB: And Gerry’s Club, which is famous.

PM: A drinking club. Yeah. It’s closed. It was in Shaftesbury Avenue, and then it moved round the corner, but when it was in Shaftesbury Avenue that was a great place because after hours people would come for drinks, all kinds of actors, Alec Guinness and people. So, I redesigned that… Alistair MacLean-

DB: A flat in Knightsbridge.

PM: Well, he was a tax-exile, so his wife, Marcelle-

DB: In L.A.

PM: Then they divorced and she had a place in L.A. and I did her house in L.A. as well while I was out there.

DB: Ray Galton’s house.

PM: Yeah, well I did the spy picture. With Laurence Harvey. Not The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the other one: it’s on my list.

DB: [checking list] Spy film, spy film.

PM: On that list maybe. [pause]

DB: I can’t think what that can be.

PM: God, what’s it called?

DB: Not Puppet on a Chain, that’s not a spy…

PM: No that was Alistair MacLean. The word spy is in it.

DB: I can’t find a spy on the list. [He suggests a couple of other titles]

PM: Maybe I’m wrong-

DB: - The Spy with the Cold Nose! Sorry, right at the top.

PM: The Spy with the Cold Nose. It was a dog. The dog with a cold nose. Laurence Harvey, Lionel Jeffries, Daliah Lavi-

1 hour 40 minutes

PM: - who was Miss Israel at one time. Ray Galton – Alan Simpson and Ray Galton wrote the script, it was directed by lovely Dan Petrie, and we had to find The Kremlin, so we went to Spain, all over, anywhere but The Kremlin. We ended up doing it in Castle Howard with foreground pieces and statues of Lenin. We built the great wall of the Kremin on the back lot at Shepperton and the sets at Shepperton.

And Ray Galton had a very nice house, that he bought for £27,000 as I remember, because he was on the film when he bought it. It was an enormous Queen Anne house next to Hampton Court. It was built for the Admiral at the time. Vast house, and I did the interior of that for him. Then I went on to do Steptoe and Son with him as well.

DB: At Elstree.

PM: Clive [Cliff. DS] Owen directing.

DB: Aha. I think there were two, weren’t there?

PM: Yeah, I did the first one. But that was quite fun.

DB: So, the writers were around a lot were they on the shoots?

PM: Oh yes. Yeah, practically every day.

DB: Interesting.

PM: Making stuff up, probably, as they went along.

DB: Yeah.

PM: But that was an okay film.

DB: What, Steptoe… or The Spy… ?

PM: The Spy…

DB: Yes, that was quite early on. Well not really. Mid ‘60s.

PM: Yeah. But in those days there was a lot of work about. I mean you could go to Pinewood for lunch, and come home with three scripts.

DB: Yeah. [laughs] Yes! Because you were known!

PM: Yeah. It’s also luck. I mean Where Eagles Dare, I‘d just come back from Singapore, I think it was, anyway I had a bit of a tan I was looking good, all the rest of it and I walked into the bar at Pinewood, and Maurice Carter, the Art Director [BEHP interview 0174] , who I’d worked with at Lime Grove, when he was there. Nice man. Sitting there. “Hello” he says “How are you? What are you doing?” “I’ve got a picture here” he said “I can’t do it, because my wife’s not well and it means me going away. Read it I’ve got to give my answer by after lunch.” he said. “I’ve got to go up and see Elliott Kastner. Read it.” It was Where Eagles Dare.

DB: Aha!

PM: So I read it, out in the garden. Terrified the life out of me, I’d never done anything of that scale. Obviously that intensity and the money involved with people like [Richard] Burton and all the rest of it, and I went back and I said “I can’t do this.” “Of course you can” he said “Course you can” He said – the best bit of advice I’ve ever had, “Just remember you’re reading it as boom, boom, boom, boom. But every shot is a single problem. So, you work out – I’ll get you the right people.” And he got me a very good draughtsman, a very good Special Effects draughtsman, and I went up to see Dennis Holt [who] was the-

DB: MGM.

PM: This was at Pinewood, with Elliott Kastner, oh yes, and Alfie had just come out, making a big lot of money, terrific headlines and a lot of money, and I remember Elliott Kastner saying [imitates] “Anyone who’s worked on Alfie, and that took $3 million in the first…works for me!”

You know. You’re as good as the last picture that made money I suppose. And that’s how I got the job. And it was very daunting. The Director had never done – Brian Hutton – had only ever done a couple of small pictures before. He was brought up with Elliott Kastner in New York … with the gangs and all the rest of it… and he’d never done a big picture before, and he used to say to me at the end of the day “Are you coming in tomorrow?” I said “Why?” He says “Shit… I don’t think I am.” ‘Cos he knew it was my first big picture. [they laugh]

1 hour 45 minutes

DB: You were in a splendid studio.

PM: Yes, of course. Couldn’t be better.

DB: Beautifully supported. And Austria or Switzerland?

PM: Austria, again. Salzburg. We were there for five months, including the Second Unit. We had three or four units at one time.

DB: Yes, I’ve seen a picture – in a book, there’s a fairly recently published book about MGM Studios, and there’s a nice picture of you on the lot, looking up at your fake castle.

You’ve probably got it.

PM: [Points up behind himself.] There’s the castle.

DB: Oh, that’s it!

PM: That’s the original sketch.

DB: Yeah, oh gosh, I didn’t realise! But it was about twenty, thirty feet high?

PM: Yes.

DB: The model.

PM: Yes, the model. There’s a picture of the model there alongside it.

DB: Oh, so it is. I’ll have few feet of that!

PM: [laughs] Brian was wonderful.

DB: But you had a decent run-up, preparation period presumably and recces?

PM: Oh yeah.

DB: You did it properly. It wasn’t a hasty job.

PM: No we went to various places, Arthur Ibbetson lit it; Denis Holt was co-producer. Colin Brewer was First Assistant, then there was myself, Construction Manager. We went out to Austria, Germany, various places, and then we found a castle, we shot the interiors, but we built most of it …but that was an epic to work on, I tell you. I mean we had three hundred vehicles.

DB: Prop vehicles, you mean.

PM: Yeah, it was like D-Day. I mean there was fields lined up with Kübelwagens and trucks, motor-cycles and all this kind of stuff. I mean I wasn’t in charge of that but they had someone looking after all that, and a lot of local people who were very good, and a German special effects man, Charlie Baumgarten, who was great. An American special effects man, [Richard] Parker his name was. No, it was good. And Burton, and Elizabeth [Taylor] was there most of the time. With the Rolls Royce being bogged down in snow.

DB: And Clint, baby.

PM: Clint baby, yes….

DB: And quite a strong English cast supporting.

PM: Oh, Anton Diffring of course, Ferdy Mayne. I used to stay with Ferdy when I went to Los Angeles. He used to ring me up occasionally and say “What are you doing? What are you doing?” “Oh I’m doing a spy thing.” “Do they need any Arab Sheiks? Polish refugees? Or Nazi officers?” [laughs]

DB: Yeah, yeah. Many films he’d appeared in, doing just that. So, can I do the process of doing say one set, for that film? Take us through the process. You didn’t bother to do anything on the drawing board because somebody else did that.

PM: Well by then I was exalted, well, only called Art Director on that, ‘cos Production Designer hadn’t really filtered in.

DB: It’s a new game, isn’t it?

PM: Well, Ken Adam kind of brought that in. Really kind of spearheaded that. But, no, heaven forbid, didn’t do any drawing. Though I did lay out the castle because I had to give an answer to the Producers whether we could do it on that stage at MGM. Or not, and I worked – we went down into the tank, we built up … as far as we could, the grid, and then we went to the tank, and went down in the tank. I dug the tank out down about another ten, twelve, feet, so the cable cars could disappear. [demonstrates]

DB: Oh, I see. Yes, yes.

PM: Then we got, Armstrong Vickers came in, built the cable car. The cable car company in Austria, ‘cos we had to match the cable cars, so I went to the factory, went to the cable car people and said “We need four of your cable cars, exactly like that, two of them to blow up, so they don’t have to be special.

1 hour 50 minutes

PM: But the other two have got to have our artists in. To be in London, and go up and down, and co-ordinated to do that. So, we had all the machinery at the back. The thought of doing all that – I didn’t know anything about it, but you learn as you go along. If you get an expert cable car man comes over, listen and keep quiet, you pick an awful lot up about how to do cable cars.

DB: Yes, I’ve … seen pictures of the escalator made for-

[They talk over each other]

PM: A Matter of Life and Death.

DB: Or Stairway to Heaven as it’s called in America. And they got the London Underground people in to [help]

PM: Yes, exactly, that’s what you do. I mean on the Robin Hoods, when we did the bows and arrows and things, we had the English champion used to come down. Line up – not with the ordinary kind of longbow but with his special, fibre-glass, whatever it was. Shoot the arrows. You get the specialists in, you know.

DB: Indeed.

PM: But we made a model of that to start with. Of the station the cable car goes into. We built all that full-sized….The base was all built with iron girders and Vickers-Armstrong sank pylons into the studio floor, to take the weight and the stress of course.

DB: They’d have to. Have to.

PM: The cables, you’ve got these cable cars running up and down and you’ve got multi-million-dollar actors on board. Its all got to be done. They did all the basic and then we dressed it up with plaster rock, the trees and things.

DB: It looks totally convincing, it looks bloody good on the screen. You know, that whole sequence.

PM: Yes, I think if they did it now, it would probably look more convincing.

DB: Ah well, with CGI.

PM: Yeah. I had a German company ring me up some years ago, with this German guy who wanted to remake Where Eagles Dare, from the German point of view. [Darrol laughs] There was a different twist on it altogether.

DB: It didn’t happen.

PM: No.

DB: Yes, tell me, there must have been along the way, there must have been some projects that you thought were going to be wonderful and then didn’t happen.

PM: Oh yes, of course.

DB: Do you remember any of those?

PM: Well Shanghai Surprise I thought might have been a success, which it wasn’t. Bit of a disaster.

DB: No, I meant things that were pulled before they even started.

PM: Oh yes, there was a thing I was in Hong Kong for about three months preparing a picture called Terry and the Pirates, which was an American comic book thing, with Sean Connery, and we took a studio over there, studio wasn’t big enough so we knocked the wall down between the two stages to make a big studio. We added bits on, we built extra toilets, and then they didn’t make the picture. Sean Connery decided he didn’t want to do it.

DB: He was the money.

PM: And he was the money, and the Director was Hal Needham. Hal Needham was Burt Reynolds’ stuntman, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. That kind of stuff. Never happened. But I had three months in Hong Kong which was quite nice.

DB: You’ve spent a lot of time in Hong Kong, one way and another.

PM: Yeah, yeah. Singapore and Hong Kong. Taiwan. ‘Cos we did The Chairman, with Gregory Peck.

DB: Oh, right.

PM: Which was Pinewood.

DB: Did it have other names? The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

PM: The Most Dangerous Man in the World. I think it was called, in America. With Gregory, and Burt Kwouk of course.

DB: Of course.

PM: Lee J. Thompson. [J. Lee Thompson. DS] He used to have a telephone book and he’d tear a couple of pages out of a telephone book and while he’s talking to you or while directing, he’d be folding it up and then tying it into a knot and dropping it on the floor and then do another one.

DB: Strange.

PM: You’d find all these bits tied up. He was very-

DB: That’s tension, isn’t it? Trying to relieve the tension.

PM: Yeah. Nice man.

DB: Any other near misses?

1 hour 55 minutes

PM: Can’t think of any off-hand. No. [Fade]

DB: Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about, that you could remember, that I’ve missed out?

PM: Probably, but I can’t remember. [they laugh]

DB: Well thank you very much, that’s been wonderful for me and I’m sure it will be very useful for people checking up on the various films and series in your past.

PM: Good, good.

DB: Thank you very much indeed.

PM: Okay, my pleasure. Thank you.

[END] Transcribed by David Sharp, February 2025.

Biographical

Peter Mullins – an overview.

This is a fascinating interview with someone who had a lengthy career, starting as an apprentice, from the late 1940s up until the early 21^st Century, which encompassed working uncredited on films by Powell & Pressburger right through to credits on many major pictures* such as Alfie and Where Eagles Dare. This latter also serves as a useful example – towards the end of the interview - of the kind of work Art Directors and Scenic Artists do.

He had a grounding designing in theatre and opera, which is discussed and which informs his work.

His television work ranged from the early commercial television series for children, such as William Tell and Robin Hood. He worked on Armchair Theatre dramas and some of the crime series that were made at Merton Park Studios.

In between films – often abroad - and television Peter also worked on a lot of commercials.

In addition to Merton Park, Peter worked extensively at Shepperton Studios, but also at Pinewood, Walton, Twickenham, Halliford and MGM Elstree.

Peter gives us a lot insight into the way various productions were made, real ‘behind the scenes’ stuff.

Unusually Peter also carried out interior design work on private houses, clubs and a restaurant.

*To get a more complete idea, in addition to checking IMDB and the BFI database, please refer to Peter’s own CV which is accessible via the link below; as is the lists of credits.

David Sharp

Further information:

Peter Mullins credits.pdf

Peter Mullins cv and credits.pdf