Christophe Dupin: How did the Unit Five Seven start?

Michael Grigsby: When I started work at Granada – I was 18, 19 or whatever it was – I was actually hired by Harry Watt. He had set up a documentary film unit at Granada, which he invited me to join as an assistant-editor. When I joined Granada, the Film Unit had collapsed and Watt had left quickly. I got the job as a TV cameraman, which I didn't know anything about. But I thought oh my god I've got a foot in the door, I'm going to stay here. But I realised I was a lonely trainee, running around, when what I wanted was to make films. So I used the money that Granada was paying me to buy a 16-mm Bolex with only one 25-mm lens. I got it on credit from a shop back in Berkshire. And around that camera, I went to find another group of very frustrated 18, 19 year-olds who also wanted to make films. And we decided to form our own band of brothers, the Unit Five Seven.

CD Where did you live at the time?

MG I was living in Manchester, because when I was hired by Granada I had to go and work there. I'm actually from a place just outside Reading. I knew when I was at school that I loved cinema. To go back again, when I was at school I was the secretary of the film society, which I had set up. Every Saturday I organised a show for all the guys. So I was expected to show the mainstream films, from the Carry On films to whatever, and occasionally the old Russian classic. Through the post I would also get all these catalogues talking about British documentaries. I tried to get some of these. As the 'B' film I'd put up those films by Jennings, Watt, Cavalcanti, and I got totally entranced. I suddenly saw these poetic movies talking to me through sound and image. I thought ‘oh my god, this is so beautiful’. I really believed – I was arrogant enough to believe it – that I could do this. I wanted to do this. The school bough a cine-camera, some cheap army stock, and we made a couple of films. The first one, that I made when I was fifteen, sixteen, got the first prize at the Slough Arts festival. They called up the winners and all expected a forty year-old to come up, it was just a boy in short pants. The school were actually thrilled. Now I remember that somebody from the BFI came down and reviewed our film, or maybe it was the second one, in the school magazine, a two or three-page review. But the school was so pleased by the first one that they said "we'll give you some backing to make another one". So I then made a nineteen-minute film which was a tongue-in-cheek look at life in a small public school in Britain.

CD When was that?

MG Just before I left school, so it must have been around 1954-55. When I came out of school, I remember talking to my parents, who wanted me to go into a much more conservative line of work, but I said "no, no I want to be a film-maker". Back in the 50s, coming from a conservative background, this wasn't a thing you said. But they were incredibly supportive. I remember my mother saying "you've got to do what you want to do", and I did! And I then wrote all these applications, because that's when ITV was starting up, in 1955-56. I wrote all these applications to different companies. I remember being interviewed by Stuart Legg at Shell, and I remember something he said to me. As he was talking to me, behind him was the Strand, and my eyes were dosing around all the time. At the end of the interview, he said "look, I really think you're going to be a film-maker, because all through the interview you've been watching what's going on outside the window". Anyway, I didn't take the university option up because the job had came up at Granada, so I went off to Manchester. And that was a revelation because being a Southerner, and brought up in a sort of green and pleasant land, I'd never seen the real industrial Britain, and how it shaped people's lives, and what it did to people. I had no understanding of it.
What I'd read in geography books, and having lessons didn't mean a damn thing until I actually met people, sat in a pub and talked. So it shocked my social awareness very rapidly, and heightened my awareness that Britain was in two halves, and also that I desperately wanted to make a film about what I was seeing. So I saved up, got the Bolex, got my friends together, and I decided to make this film about the railway workers in Newton Heath, because that was the time when diesel was coming in. That didn't interest me per se but what interested me more was the sense of identity. Having started to look around in these northern communities, and to think about Britain, I'd be down to feel that communities were being fragmented, that life was being fragmented, things were changing, technological changes were happening. So we tried to do two things. One was to try to capture a sense a of a passing of generation, and what it meant in terms of identity. The second was to evoke very strongly the feeling of this aging shed on a winter's morning. And in order to do that I had to have a very loyal band of brothers with me because we used to get up every Saturday morning at like 4 o'clock, probably having not finished work until late the previous night in the studio at Granada. With my rotating bunch of cameramen – I had about 2 or 3 people working with me – I did it for most part of the year, on and off, mainly through the winter months, because I know that the light was very special, that the atmosphere was very special, and we shot basically between 5am and 8am, and then it was too bright, so we did about three hours shooting, then we had breakfast and that was it for the weekend.

CD Where did the money come from?

MG We had a collective system, where we all put in what we could afford into a central little fund, which we then drew out of according to need. We were a very self-supporting group, and very supportive of one another. And it was like a little (?) company, for a bout five years. What happened with Enginemen was that I lived in Manchester, in a Bed and Breakfast place called the Barcombe Hotel, and around that table every morning were a few reporters from the Manchester Guardian, including Michael Frayn, Neal Ascherson, Richard West and Gerald Leach. They all knew I was doing this little film in my spare time, with my friends. One had to go off to Liverpool to cover a lecture that Lindsay Anderson was giving over there and he mentioned to Anderson that Mike Grigsby was doing a little film in Manchester, and Anderson apparently was quite amazed that somebody was out there on their own – I didn't know anything about Free Cinema – and he said to one of these people "ask him to send me the material when it's ready".
Lindsay and Karel saw the material and sent me a wonderful telegramme basically saying "Wonderful. How can we help?" So I came to London and met them, and they then got me money from the BFI Production Fund to complete the film, which was basically the editing and the sound, which was a mess. I have to say the equipment we worked on was very poor. We had no synch sound, we had a little mini tape-recorder we did all our soundtrack on, and the soundtrack is extremely weak in the film. But you get some sort of leading (?) through it. I just remember the smell of splicers and glue and tape.
But it was interesting because shooting in that discipline, shooting non-sync, forced me to think very clearly about the imagery. It forced me to try and tell a story with images. And when we came to lay the soundtrack in, it forced me to think about the creative possibilities of sound, which I'd picked up several years before in school, watching the Jennings and Cavalcanti films. So that was really good (?). Having no money, not having much gear, forces you into a (?)

CD I personally think the fact that the Free Cinema film-makers could not afford synch sound and better equipment forced them to be creative with the sounds and images they recorded. For me it is a crucial point for the poetry of the Free Cinema films. Had there been more money available, it would probably have not generated such poetry. Would you agree?

MG I think it is a very good point. Today, if you talk to sound recorders I work with, they really enjoy working with me because I give them a lot of freedom. I love wild tracks. Most of the time sound recorders are really used as recording instruments by directors, just point the mike and record and they are (?) to the camera. And for me the two should be equally balanced, because movie-making is an organic process, and we all contribute to that. The director is just one part of that. So it was wonderful to have that forced discipline that we had, but also to have the backing of somebody like Lindsay Anderson or Karel Reisz, and the backing of the BFI to help us actually make the film into a print. I don't know what I would have done, because to make a print is really expensive.

CD Do you remember the Free Cinema screenings at the National Film Theatre, and especially the last Free Cinema programme in March 1959, where the Enginemen was shown?

MG Yes I do. I don't remember the actual screening but I do remember being terribly nervous, that the film was going to be shown at the NFT. Walking over Hungerford bridge, and looking down at the NFT, I could see the people outside, many queuing. I thought "oh my god, I can't believe they're coming to see my film". In fact I'm sure they weren't, they were going to see Karel Reisz's Lambeth Boys. I really thought "this is incredible". And then I was stunned. I was in Manchester. Peter square, I remember, and I read one of the reviews, and I could not believe it. And y mother phoned me up that night and said "this is incredible Michael". I said thanks, because you didn't stand in the way, and you let me get on with this and be myself. So it was an overwhelming experience. It was a very supportive atmosphere. I remember Lindsay wrote a manifesto for that last programme. The last paragraph said "we're going but there's another lot coming up. And that gave us such motivation to go on, because after that we then got more money from the BFI, and the band of brothers got a little bigger, and we consolidated a bit. It was a great feeling to have that kind of support from Anderson and from the Institute. And it gave us the confidence to keep going.

CD When the BFI gave you money for Enginemen, and then for Tomorrow's Saturday, do you remember having any contact with Michael Balcon, who chaired the Experimental Film Fund's Committee?

MG No I don't. But I remember him mentioning me in some letter he wrote about the people who got helped. My god I was 20 years old, I didn't know my way around London at all. It wad a whole new world for me. And something that had been a labour of love suddenly was being recognised. Anderson was really moved that there was somebody out there, on his own, making a film that had its genesis within a group of people and nowhere else. I must say, through all my professional life he's always been there, wonderfully supportive. The last time I saw him was at the NFT when I'd made The Time of Our Lives in 1993/94, and he came to the opening of that, and afterwards he put his arm around my shoulder and he said to me "I'm the man who stopped you going to Hollywood". I said "yes you are, Lindsay, thank you". He was always being there, keeping a quiet eye on me. At the time of Enginemen, I already wanted to direct, and Granada said "you're far too young". I Lindsay arranged for them to see Enginemen. And Denis Forman and Sydney Bernstein saw it. I still remember this wonderful memo they sent me saying "this is a good film, and you've got a lot of potential, and not long after that I got a chance to start as a trainee director.

CD the interesting thing is that Denis Forman had been closely associated with the BFI Experimental Film Fund a few years earlier when he was director of the Institute.

MG Denis actually in a sense took over from Lindsay. I was blessed that I had two mentors, one was Lindsay and then Denis would be very supportive when I was at Granada, which was at that time a lean company. And they were very careful, very selective about people they took into the company. If it didn't work out you were out. Denis actually set me up for this series of short, impressionistic films about northern England. One of those was a film about music in the north of England – they were all between 4 and 5 minutes. One part of this film was about a brass band. The other part of the film was the Beatles in the Cavern Club. We were the first people to actually film them. So that grainy footage you see today, was ours! Again, it was shot without any synch sound. Denis saw these films. I just remember his face was saying "it's fantastic". Then I worked with my first producer who was Jeremy Isaacs, and so it went on until I said "I want to make my own films". And I had to stand up in front of a Granada conference called Avanti, where they had a lot of key directors, producers and writers. I had to explain why I wanted to make my particular film. I thought I was back at school, I so nervous I was shaking in my boots. And I remember saying I really thought passionately about documentary as cinema, and cinema as documentary, and I wanted to be given a chance to express that. And then, on a show of hands, I got the job. I went off and made my first film on my own, which was then nominated for a British Academy Award. From then on I had something that couldn't happened today, which was that crucial chain of support from companies or from individuals.

CD I am quite surprised that even though you were working for Granada and making some progress there, you still managed to keep the Unit Five Seven alive until 1963/64.

MG It was only at the time of the Beatles thing, around 1963, that I became a proper trainee at Granada. Between 1959 and 1963, it was a period when I just thought "OK, despite the success of that, I'm still on probation, I've got to show my colours and I'm going to keep going and make more films", and I made Tomorrow's Saturday, and the other guys made their own films as well. Enginemen had given us the incentive, and we loved working together as a group. Plus, a lot of people in the group had ideas they wanted to express and couldn't find another way of doing it. So, "let's do it in our own little way, with maybe a bit of money coming from the BFI, or different foundations, and from our central fund". We were very organised. We had regular meetings, and since most of us worked at Granada it wasn't hard. We even had something called the Unit Five Seven Newsletter. It was between 6 and 10 pages.

CD Did you know Robert Vas, who was also part of the Free Cinema experience and was to become a well-known documentary film-maker at the BBC?

MG Of course. After making Refuge England and The Vanishing Street, Robert Vas actually edited Deckie Learner, the first film I was commissioned by Granada to make on my own. And he was just a fantastic editor. Being a Hungarian, he had a very strong sensitivity and sense on what is possible. Nothing is impossible in cinema. We cut the film somewhere in Oxford street, and I remember walking in and seeing Robert working – it was not on a Steenbeck, it was on a A? [name of the cutting bench] – and there was film all over the place, but he knew were everything was. We used to argue and shouted at each other a lot, it was an incredible relationship. It was very exciting. Robert and I were growing out of Free Cinema, growing of this sort of vague umbrella which he was also associated with, and then we came together professionally, being paid real money, to make Deckie Learner around 1966. That was magic. So yes, Robert was a dear friend of mine, and a very good film-maker.
So I think throughout my life, from the time I was at school to now, today, I've always believed very much in this collective approach to film-making, and working as loosely allying (?) groups. Because ultimately I think it's rewarding to exchange ideas, develop things together, but also it avoids this curse of our current society which is individualism, fragmentation and competitiveness, and where no-one wants to share anything. I believe the best film-making can only come about as a collective experience. I loathe the kind of hierarchical system you have in current cinema, with the director at the top. I'm totally lost without my cinematographer, my sound people and my editor. We're all on a par. If people understand that, they will give us their best. And people don't feel intimidated or threatened. As directors we have to put ourselves in other people's shoes and look out through their eyes. One of the great things I did get out of Granada, was understanding the different technical levels and layers of film-making. Although I couldn't tell you anything about optics, I understand what lenses can do, so I know how to use them. If somebody says "well, I can't do this", then I say "yes you can, but we'll try it this way". So if you've got that kind of mutual respect as a group then we're all helping one another and the best films are loved films, where you see the love shining through. That's as true back in Enginemen days as it is true today when I'm making Lockerbie or whatever I'm doing now.

CD To be a little provocative, you will still be the one who is remembered when people evoke Enginemen, Tomorrow's Saturday or your more recent films. The other people in the film-making group will rarely get a mention.

MG I agree, and I think it is very sad. A lot of people tell me "why don't you give more interviews?". It's just that I don't want to. Particularly in the last few years, we're buying (?) more and more into this individualism, into this cult of celebrity, and therefore when you're approached by the press you're expected to 'perform' and you almost become a caricature of yourself. And I think we film-makers are around (?) that danger that the more we talk up ourselves, the less chance we have of remaining true to ourselves actually. And we suddenly find we're beginning to fit the mould that other people expect from us. I find a lot of the time that a lot of people don't know where to place me. They either love my work or they hate it. And that's fine by me. I think it's very healthy.
So I think it is rather sad that I will be remembered for x, y or z, even if in a way I think the media, the press, even the BFI, need names to hold on to. But it is a problem, and it is one I am very conscious of. So again, when we're shooting, I try to encourage discussions on what we're doing. And one of my jobs as a director is to listen. A lot of us don't because we're so insecure. Once I know where I'm going, I'm very clear. I'm going down that highway, but I'm not afraid to go off the highway, down the little side roads, and have a look, have a listen, to what other people are saying. It's particularly true for documentary. You have a very strong idea, but then you're improvising within that structure.

CD To go back to the Unit Five Seven days, you were talking about the sharing experience. Would you say there was any political consciousness in that group, like there was in other film groups at the time, or was it only a 'practical' unit?

MG No, it wasn't a practical unit. I think there was, certainly with me, a very strong sense of social injustice, which I was witnessing around me, in Manchester and in industrial Britain. I always felt, and the others in the Unit felt in their different ways that the way to engage all these things was engage people emotionally. I believed that then and I believe it today. If you engage people emotionally, then you have a strong chance to actually be able to talk in a way that people will empathise with, understand, and won't feel that they've been preached to. I think that some of the so-called 'political films' are so didactic that they can actually drive people away, the very people would like to have seen them in the first place. There's room for everything, but I think you can be political, but it doesn't mean you have to bang people over the head to do it. The way I tend to do everything in life is as if it's come from underneath. In fact it's the way in which I've always survived within the system – and I used to be criticised by people working within the system. I said "but if I don't work in the system how can I get my films shown? And I therefore had to work out ways of beating the system to make the films I wanted to make. I'm doing exactly the same thing today. Through that system – television or cinema – I've got access to thousands or millions of people. And the feedback I get from people, that's fantastic. When I did Life Apart: Anxieties in a Trawling Community in 1973, the film about the way the trawlermen were being exploited (we lived on this trawler in the North Sea for three weeks), it was shown by Granada and it had a huge impact. The thing I've never forgotten is that it was a film about trawlermen begin exploited by their bosses, but the letters and phone calls I got afterwards were from people who were in manufacturing industries, bus drivers or whatever. They all said one thing in different ways: "thanks for giving us a voice". They understood because they empathised and engaged with those fishermen. They understood what they'd been going through. I've always believed since the age of 18, 19 that if I've got a particular talent, I want to try and use it to give people a voice in whatever way it forms. And I think I've succeeded in many ways. People talk in their terms, not in some sort of commentary that's imposed later. If they stumble over words, it doesn't matter. I think we have to respect the people we are filming, and try and get inside their heads, inside their lives.

CD This great respect for the people being filmed was one of the main mottos of the Free Cinema film-makers.

MG And therefore the films don't seem overtly political, but of course subconsciously very political. And that's another reason why I survived, because if the films have a strong political message, I've managed to get them through the commercial system. And a lot of people are still surprised by that.

CD Would you say now that the Unit Five Seven was a necessary step towards the mainstream film or TV industry, or primarily a deliberate choice to set up, or to be part of, an alternative film-making practice?

MG To be honest with you, we just saw it as a way of making films in a way we wanted to make them. I didn't even understand the words 'alternative' or 'mainstream' at that point. But I knew that we were all frustrated that we couldn't express ourselves. Therefore it's easier sometimes to work as a group than to try and do it on your own. But the reason I made my films, and I'm sure Robert Vas as well, was because we cared passionately about their subjects, and we'd beg, borrow or steal to make them. That's why when I saw Enginemen shown at the NFT, and then picked up in the press, I was absolutely stunned. I couldn't believe that a crumbly amateur like myself could actually do something which could attract this sort of attention. So I think we all had a very strong sense of the things we wanted to talk about, and then we had to find a way of doing it. So we were practical in the sense that we formed the Unit, being supportive of one another (in every sense). As for where it would lead, I don't think anybody actually considered that. I certainly didn't. At the same time, I started to feel that if I could get this sort of attention as an amateur, surely I could do it professionally! That's when I started banging on the door at Granada. And thank god they picked me up. And today the system is even worse because there are even fewer opportunities for people to really do their thing in their own terms. It's so important to just not trap yourself into a corner and just lose sight of your vision, and lose sight that it is possible. And now particularly with digital cameras, ?, quite cheaply, and maybe have a good chance of getting screened. Of course the companies exploit that too because they try to put up the cheapest product possible, or do things very fast. I have phone calls from people in their twenties saying "help! What shall I do?". I say "do your thing and use it as a learning process but be careful. You've got to carve out your own voice and then fight to it if that's what you really want to do. I spend quite a lot of my time encouraging people.

CD… as Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson did in the 1950s!

MG Absolutely. And Denis Forman too.

CD Talking about the digital technology, don't you think that it is a similar revolution to the 16-mm one in the late 1950s-early 1960s, which allowed a new generation of filmmakers to emerge?

MG Yes. Forty years later, the same thing is happening again. Ultimately, you've got the equipment, it's up to you. If you haven't got the ideas, and the vision, forget it. In television, they've got all this high tech, but a lot of what they produce is absolute rubbish, because the ideas are not there with the director, or the ideas are not there with the commissioning editors and producers. In that sense the digital age in one sense is very exciting, but it's also very dangerous. The technological advances are fantastic, but it's always comes back to how we use it, either creatively and well, or if it's only used as a means to an end, for the producers and distributors to make cheap products, and without any real care of how it's done or what it's actually talking about. It's very had to deal with that if you're told "OK, you can make that idea but you've got to do it in two days shooting plus two days editing. That's why I get a lot of phone calls saying "how can I handle this?". So I think all that technology is wonderful, particularly for community projects, in local councils, where people in communities try to express their anger. I think this is a very exciting aspect of digital technology. But we, as film-makers, we have to make sure we control that technology. So in a funny way, to make films like Enginemen, and in another way it's harder. These contradictions always exist. People always say to me "Mike, it was so easy back then". No, it wasn't bloody easy.

CD Because in a way, digital technology is even cheaper than 16-mm was.

MG Yes. I was talking earlier about the discipline and the restrictions that one had. And I was very o that. I had a 16-mm camera that I had to pay back, and the film stock. Every frame counted. I can't remember the ratio I could afford for Enginemen, but it was probably 3 or 4 to one. Therefore we had to be very careful every time we had to turn that camera on. And it was only a forty-second run on a wind-up Bolex. So it really made me think. And when I shoot today, on 16, super-16, I still work on a very low ratios (between 9 and 11 to 1). The problem with Digi, is that because it is available, you just keep on filming everything that moves, thinking "I'll sort it out in the editing room". I talk to editors who say "Mike, I've just been given all this material, and I haven't been able to view half of it", because they haven't got the time! So you have to understand the language you're using to express yourself – writing, painting, filming – and if you don't understand the language, the discipline, and if you don't have anything to say, then you're lost. And I see it when I do my course, in University, where I spend the first few months almost 'deconstructing', looking at film-making from inside out. I try to convey the idea that you have to make the system wok for you, rather than it dominating you, or compromising you. Thirty or fourty years on, I'm still as excited as ever.

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