A Stravinsky Portrait
German TV asked us to film a portrait of Stravinsky. I knew who he was, so I went on that one with Rolf Lieberman, director of the Hamburg Opera and composer in his own right. Bliss! Rolf and I went out to California and started filming Igor in his home. Rolf took sound but tended to conduct with the microphone. I got a call from the lab early the next morning. All my footage was out of focus. My lens was wrongly mounted. So I offered my resignation, which Rolf turned down. Then I suggested hiring a friend of mine who was a good listener and had some friends in common with Stravinsky. I could teach her to take sound in ten minutes... He agreed, and from there on the filming went like a dream.
Sarah Hudson (whose New York apartment I had been living in) was a perfectchoice. Together we just fit in, swimming, eating, sitting around with friends and talking. Not constantly asking Stravinsky to do unnatural things, not filming the whole time, but building a friendship that would last a lifetime -- his! Stravinsky had been filmed by CBS and didn’t like it; then he was filmed by CBC from Canada and hated it. Sarah never wore headphones and she was a lovely part of the scene. We talked with Igor, his wife Vera, his amanuensis Robert Craft and his friend Nicky Nabukov till late at night. We went to Hamburg with them, where we were joined by Stravinsky’s valued friend and collaborator, George Balanchine and his Ballet company who performed Apollon Musagete with Susan Farrell in the lead.
Stravinsky loved this film and it was shown everywhere except in America. It had never occurred to me to tell Stravinsky what language to speak, and he had a wonderful habit of shifting languages in mid-sentence. When we tried to sell it to American TV they gasped, “But he talks French!” And Russian and German as well as English! So we were in trouble again. It ran for months in a theater in Paris. We retained the American rights to the film and never sold a single copy!
The way you film a subject is so important but hard to specify. Sarah, Rolf and I did not go simply to film. We went as friends. We would never dream of assaulting Igor by attaching a radio-mike and running wires down his trouser legs. Nor would we ever dream of asking him to “tell us what happened when the Sacre was first performed”. Rolf and he talked of experiences that they had in common. It was Stravinsky that invited his English neighbors, Gerald Herd and Christopher Isherwood, over to talk about the “creative process”.
The camera and tape recorder were secondary to what was going on; they were there but not all the time. When we ate together, we ate together. When Igor completed his recording session with the Hamburg Orchestra, I did film him with his shirt off drying himself with a towel as he talked with Nicky Nabukov. Well, I worried about his feeling embarrassed so later I showed him the shot and asked if he minded and he replied, “No, no, Ricky... is true!”
Sarah Hudson (whose New York apartment I had been living in) was a perfectchoice. Together we just fit in, swimming, eating, sitting around with friends and talking. Not constantly asking Stravinsky to do unnatural things, not filming the whole time, but building a friendship that would last a lifetime -- his! Stravinsky had been filmed by CBS and didn’t like it; then he was filmed by CBC from Canada and hated it. Sarah never wore headphones and she was a lovely part of the scene. We talked with Igor, his wife Vera, his amanuensis Robert Craft and his friend Nicky Nabukov till late at night. We went to Hamburg with them, where we were joined by Stravinsky’s valued friend and collaborator, George Balanchine and his Ballet company who performed Apollon Musagete with Susan Farrell in the lead.
Stravinsky loved this film and it was shown everywhere except in America. It had never occurred to me to tell Stravinsky what language to speak, and he had a wonderful habit of shifting languages in mid-sentence. When we tried to sell it to American TV they gasped, “But he talks French!” And Russian and German as well as English! So we were in trouble again. It ran for months in a theater in Paris. We retained the American rights to the film and never sold a single copy!
The way you film a subject is so important but hard to specify. Sarah, Rolf and I did not go simply to film. We went as friends. We would never dream of assaulting Igor by attaching a radio-mike and running wires down his trouser legs. Nor would we ever dream of asking him to “tell us what happened when the Sacre was first performed”. Rolf and he talked of experiences that they had in common. It was Stravinsky that invited his English neighbors, Gerald Herd and Christopher Isherwood, over to talk about the “creative process”.
The camera and tape recorder were secondary to what was going on; they were there but not all the time. When we ate together, we ate together. When Igor completed his recording session with the Hamburg Orchestra, I did film him with his shirt off drying himself with a towel as he talked with Nicky Nabukov. Well, I worried about his feeling embarrassed so later I showed him the shot and asked if he minded and he replied, “No, no, Ricky... is true!”