My Three Lessons from Director John Schlesinger
Screen and audience. A director’s practicality. A master’s diligence.
Alan Bates in John Schlesinger’s “An Englishman Abroad” (1983). Screenplay: Alan Bennett | Production company: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
John Schlesinger (1926–2003) was a British director of movies such as Midnight Cowboy (1969) (one of Francis Ford Coppola’s ten favorite films), for which he won an Academy Award, The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), and many others, including his earlier works made as a leading light of the British New Wave.
I was fortunate enough to work with Schlesinger in a position called at the “Beeb” an “assistant floor manager” on his BBC film An Englishman Abroad (1983).
After a couple of weeks of rehearsal at the BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Action, for which I marked out the sets, managed the props, and was “on the book” — following the dialogue in the screenplay as Schlesinger blocked each scene with his cast, Alan Bates and Coral Browne among them — the team left the Television Centre in White City for physical production on location.
My tasks were legion during the shoot — booking the extras, supervising the action props on the set, working with the 1st AD orchestrating the background action on the day, giving the actors their calls each evening, driving star Coral Browne from hotel to location, stopping passers-by from walking into shot, holding up traffic, plus various other menial tasks I’ve happily forgotten.
A ludicrous general factotum of a position that made no sense as regards responsible filmmaking, but taught me valuable insights into the complexity of physical production.
What I learned from John Schlesinger, though, was of a higher order altogether…
Lesson 1
The Scene: 1955. Moscow. Brit defector Guy Burgess walks across a footbridge over the Moskva river.
Location: 1983. The Clyde footbridge. Glasgow, Scotland, Alan Bates plays Burgess.
Problem: The teeming Glasgow rush hour traffic, crossing the Clyde road bridge further upriver, sluices across the back of shot behind Bates.
So… despite collective admiration for our distinguished director, we all throw up our hands in horror. He can’t shoot that! This is supposed to be Moscow! Supposed to be 1955! That’s when the events depicted took place. This gives the game away.
To which, our revered filmmaker, with laconic amusement, replies: SWK!
What? We cry, baffled.
SWK! Schlesinger repeats his sardonic response.
What’s SWK when it’s at home? We ask.
He casts a cursory glance around us, his assembled, clueless team.
Sillies won’t know! The master explains.
A brief hiatus, then we get it. The viewer is watching Alan Bates. It’s Burgess they care about, his story they are following. The background traffic, in soft focus, forms nothing but a blur of movement, a subliminal energy in the frame. No one is going to notice it for what it is. (Even sad individuals like myself, who might watch a movie fifty times will in all probability miss it — until the 51st perhaps.)
Lesson learned:
Sillies won’t know.
The director determines what the viewer looks at. Storytelling, character, eye trace, lensing inform the screen’s address to the viewer. The screen is no neutral canvas but a filmmaker’s designed utterance. The purposeful conduit between story and audience.
Lesson 2
The Scene: 1955, Moscow. A couple of KGB goons sit in their lumbering black car waiting for Burgess to emerge from the building opposite. Once he appears, they are to creep along behind in this cumbrous vehicle.
Location. 1983. Dundee. Scotland.
Problem: The car, a Soviet Zil, adapted for British roads, is no longer left- but now right-hand drive.
Appropriately annoyed, if not quite red-faced, Schlesinger ponders, searching for some unlikely solution. How is he to remedy this? Cancel the day’s shoot? No. Too expensive, and anyway, what’s the likelihood of a left-hand drive Zil being found readily available in Scotland, or anywhere else in the UK for the matter?
Rewrite the script, penned by the great Alan Bennett? And remove the offending tank of a thing so the secret police have to loiter on the sidewalk? Conspicuous for all to see?
No. The leviathan has to remain in the scene.
Schlesinger sighs, deliberates, and in the space of a few negligible minutes, comes up with the practical solution evident to none of the rest of us lesser mortals.
He sends the props buyer off to find another steering wheel. Which they do.
He has the new, dummy steering wheel mounted on the dashboard where it would it be on a right-hand drive vehicle.
He has me provide the man on the side of the functioning steering wheel with a copy of Pravda.
The man drapes the newspaper over the real steering wheel as if he’s reading it.
When the Zil pulls away, the man with the Pravda carefully steers the car with the wheel under his newspaper while the guy with the false wheel mimes the action of turning it.
Brilliant!
Lesson learned:
The director, an artist responsible for the creative aspects of a movie and blamed if they go wrong, must also be eminently practical, capable of thinking on their feet, in the spur of the moment, under pressure of budget and time, with no one to turn to, and with no additional resources on hand. The director must be a problem solver on an immediate, fundamentally practical level.
Lesson 3
When John Schlesinger asks the production manager Who runs rehearsals? The answer is Peter.
When he asks Who supervises the action props? The answer is Peter.
Who gives the daily calls to the actors? Answer: Peter.
Who will bring the leading lady to the set each morning? Answer: Peter.
Who books the extras? Answer: Peter.
Who polices the location? Answer: Peter.
Who stops the traffic from driving through shot? Answer: Peter.
(This last task I recall well, having once, in Troubles-torn Belfast, been told to halt a British army troop carrier, bristling with assault rifles and heading for the back of shot. Needless to say, I declined — and live to this day.)
With each of my additional duties, the seasoned Schlesinger grows increasingly bemused. Madness! He’s obviously thinking.
Lesson learned:
Yes, it was madness. The BBC gentleman-amateur attitude. (Where had it come from? Some bizarre colonialist mindset?) Filmmaking needs to be safe, responsible, and professional. The value of individual crew members and their jobs should be recognized. Props masters need to be competent. (I’ve always been intimidated by inanimate objects and was consequently hopeless at handling props.)
Wandering out into the middle of the road to stop traffic is downright dangerous. Proper policing is mandatory. Driving the star needs to be left to a driver, not any old AD. (I was, in effect, a combination of 2nd and 3rd AD, in addition to multiple other functions.)
More than this, what I should have been asking was why was I doing it all? It frustrated me. It involved no artistic or intellectual dimension whatsoever. Once the madness was over, though, I realized the actual lesson I had learned:
Being privileged to watch so closely a master director at work over many weeks, from pre-production when I was in the office with him, to rehearsal, to the shoot, and witnessing his inexhaustible engagement, commitment, and laser focus both on every detail and on the organic connectivity of all elements of a film was, in and of itself, one of the best film schools you could ever hope to attend.
Plus, Coral Browne presented me with a box of chocolates at the wrap.
Peter Markham
May 2025