Articles/Interviews

IF Sitting Target doesn't turn out to be the year's fastest moving action thriller, then it will hardly be the fault of its director, Douglas Hickox. An international award-winner for his TV and cinema commercials, he directed Entertaining Mr Sloane two years ago and has been searching ever since for a gangster movie to change his image. In Sitting Target he has a promising combination of cast (Oliver Reed, Ian McShane, Edward Woodward and Jill St John) and material (the script is by Alexander Jacobs, author of Point Blank).

Hickox's new film casts Reed as a convicted murderer who breaks out of a top-security jail with a fellow convict (Ian McShane) when he hears that his flighty wife is living with another man and wanting a divorce. Reed's sole aim is to get his unfaithful wife in the sights of his telescopic rifle and make her pay for her adultery.

That Hickox is naturally an action merchant becomes evident as you watch him at work. With a long experience of making his point in thirty-second commercials, he does not waste time or energy. He knows in his head precisely how he wants the scene to look on the screen. He is a cheer-leader for his actors and, with teeth and fists firmly clenched, he pummels thin air, egging on the protagonists as Oliver Reed launches a vicious attack on Edward Woodward in the confined space of a top-storey balcony on a Clapham Junction council estate.

It is a contemporary subject and one that Reed was quick to accept. "It was easily the best script I had been offered in a long while," he says. "We are going through a phase in which cinematic violence is on the upswing. This is a lean subject: the people are direct, their emotions are basic and the story will grip audiences. In other words, it's entertainment."

The film presents another character of brooding meance for Ian McShane. He and his family were planning to spend the summer in the south of France after the success of Villain when he was offered this film. So Clapham Junction, and various other south London locations, replaced St Tropez for this steadily working young actor who seems well on the way to being one of the British film industry's biggest heart throbs.

McShane admits: "I deliberately did very little work while they were in the process of getting Villain ready for release. After so many false starts in the business, when this new film came along, I just sat back and let it all happen."

We were talking in Weekley Square, on the vast Winstanley Estate, not five minutes from bustling Clapham Junction station. At times the noise was deafening, conspiring to drown all attempts at conversation. Every few minutes came the shattering blast of bulldozers on the fast-growing estate; trains rattled through Europe's busiest marshalling yard; Boeings jetted overhead joined at intervals by the whir of helicopters from the Battersea Heliport. If it was realism the makers of Sitting Target were after, then they had found it in this vibrant corner of south London.

It was here that Reed, McShane and Woodward had come to film the attempted assassination of Jill St John (playing Reed's wayward wife). The local residents dutifully turned out to watch the unexpected activity. "Is Callan here?" a group of schoolkids wanted to know. "We saw him run up some steps yesterday. Is he going to fight Oliver Reed again?"

Meanwhile Reed and McShane were squatting on a two level stairway with an unrestricted view of the twenty-first storey flat supposedly occupied by Miss St John. McShane looked tense as Reed nursed his Mauser special combination rifle and hand-gun. The camera crew went into a last-minute huddle with Hickox. I noted three cameras ranged on adjoining roofs to cover the action from every conceivable angle.

"This scene is really the semi-climax of the film," I was told. "McShane throws a petrol bomb at a hut by the railway line to create a diversion in the flats opposite. As the hut explodes in flames, people rush out on to their balconies to see what is going on. It's then that Oliver Reed gets the perfect chance to aim his Mauser at his wife."

Technicians and special effects men were spreading petrol around the hut as rehearsals proceeded for a camera run-through. McShane's stunt double pitched the bottle containing the petrol bomb. Flames enveloped the hut on cue.

"That looked fine," called an assistant director over his walkie-talkie. "Can we have quiet, everyone. We're shooting for real this time. The next one's the big one."

Reed and McShane crouched on the stairs, Mauser at the ready, awaiting Doug Hickox's call of "Action!"

"Aim a fraction lower with the gun, Ollie," requested director of photography Ted Scaife. "Ian, look at the trees and take the same eye-line."

"I'm three storeys lower than you said," reported Reed, levelling his Mauser at the council flats.

Technical camera adjustments were hastily made. "Right, we're going to shoot this time," declared Hickox. Ian McShane ran down the stairs and hurled his bomb over the embankment railings. The hut exploded into flames which leapt high into the air as the occupiers of the flats opposite ran out on to their balconies to witness the commotion.

This was the signal for Reed to let go with a short burst from his Mauser.

"It's all right. He's got sixteen bullets left," advised a props man.

"Keep on after the explosion, Ollie," Hickox shouted from his camera rostrum. "Don't look round. Your wife's appeared on the balcony. Shoot now". Reed fired another three rounds into the air before the final call of "Cut!" "Very good!" cried Hickox. "Print that one. Firemen in now."

The two waiting fire-engine crews rushed in to extinguish the blaze.

Later that week, on the film's set at Twickenham Studios, I was able to talk more fully to Hickox. "Sitting Target is going to be a really explosive film," he told me. "Everything has worked out perfectly. We have been lucky with the weather, the script, the actors. Oliver Reed is remarkable, an extraordinary talent. He is very disciplined and enormously talented. Also he has star presence: there is simply nothing more a director can ask of an actor."

"Oliver is very generous with other actors: the other night we had three girls in to test for a small role in the film and he stayed on for an hour and a half just to give them their feed lines. How many other stars would do that? They would normally just have the director of somebody read the lines for them off-camera."

Returning to the theme of Sitting Target, Hickox continued: "I don't want gratuitous violence in my film. I want the action to hit the audience fast. I don't want to show people dying in slow motion because I think that sort of thing slows up the action. When somebody is shot, it all happens very quickly except, perhaps, for the person who is dying. I have been a small arms instructor, and I know that when you fire a gun it all happens at great speed. The bullet will have gone through the victim and perhaps three other men before they know what has hit them."

"I'm really having a ball making this film. Imagine, here I am working on a gangster movie for MGM. Fantastic!"

"We rehearse minimally because what I want is to free the reins and let the action go forward like a galloping racehorse. I believe in using more than one camera - three, in fact, for this film. Did I have a struggle to get my own way? Well, let's say there was a bit of a fight, but a struggle, no."

"We have been unusually lucky with all of our actors, but the big surprise is Jill St John. Ideally, you wouldn't cast her as a Balham housewife, would you? She still looks beautiful, of course, but it's her first real acting part and we are all delighted with her performance."

"During the two weeks we spent in Southern Ireland, we shot in two Dublin jails at Kilmainham and Arbour Hill Detention Barracks. We were not allowed to shoot inside any actual prisons in England. Although the jail in our story is meant to be in England, the Irish ones were both built to the same pattern as Wandsworth."

"There must have been a set of plans for all the jails built by the British in the nineteenth century."

The whole schedule for the film has been crisp and compact. "I think the film will be the better for it," says Hickox. "We simply didn't have time to over-indulge; we had to cut away all the fatty parts. I had eight weeks beforehand to prepare and the print had to be delivered to MGM by February. I want to make films that are entertaining for people. Entertaining Mr Sloane was very well received by the critics but only about three people came to see it. After that, I wanted to get away from the "Sloane" image of kinky sex in a weird, literate setting. I had always wanted to make a gangster movie, and then this one came along. My personal favourites are The Big Heat and The Maltese Falcon. I also admire the ritual of Kurosawa's films, particularly Seven Samurai."

"In the old days in Hollywood, they would give you a script, say there's The Maltese Falcon, you have Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and you start on Monday. The great thing was that they weren't special subjects at the time, just plain everyday movies that turned out to be great. I think you can spend too long preparing a subject today. We have to get the best out of our films in a short time."

Hickox started as an office boy at Pinewood in 1946 when they were making Black Narcissus. He graduated to B-movies and, when they stopped making them, had to turn to something else. That is how he came to forge an immensely successful career as a director of cinema and television commercials. Hickox, now is his early forties, also worked on popular TV series such as "William Tell" and "The Invisible Man". Later he directed a series of shorts and documentaries. Then came thirty-two musical shorts and the pop film Just For You. He also co-directed the British horror film Behemoth, the Sea Monster. He first attracted serious critical attention in 1962 with the short, Four Hits and a Mister, made in three days. The next year he made It's All Over Town for British Lion. His early career seemed linked to the field of pop musical featurettes. A semi breakthrough to recognition by the critics came in 1968 with the half-hour featurette, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, based on four pop songs. It became the official British entry at that year's San Sebastian Film Festival, and is still going the rounds on more discerning cinema programmes. But, since forming Illustra Films in 1966, Hickox's talents have flourished in the highly competitive world of advertising commercials. Within the first three years of the company's existence he had won second position in that specialised area. He has since scooped practically every international award offered, including a brace of Palmes D'Or. In 1969 he entered Joe Orton territory as a fully-fledged feature director on Entertaining Mr Sloane. He has personally collected over seventy awards for his endeavours as a highly gifted maker of commercials, including his most recent triumph at Cannes 71.

Douglas Hickox believes that the cinema is now going through a period of artistic renaissance in which creative people have the freedom to make films which will appeal to the tastes of specialised audiences. For his next project, he hopes to direct a feature-length adaptation of Edward II.