We had some real Borstal boys for all the extras that Tom Courtnay and James Bolam mixed with quite effortlessly, and the mix was so good that you couldn't... unless you knew that this is an actor and this is an extra and this is a Borstal boy, you... you couldn't tell. The only time you could tell was at lunchtime, because they were absolutely ravenous. It looked like in the Borstal they were never properly fed because they were always looking... if you'd finished your dinner and you'd left something on your... on your plate, they'd say, 'Can I have that?' That's the only way you could tell the... the Borstal boys and they... of course they participated with great glee in... in the riot, which was interestingly staged. It's... it's largely improvised. We had one camera that was tracking up and down the... one of the aisles at the edge of the.. of the... hall, the dining room. And the other camera was hand-held, operated by yours truly, of course, and sometimes the... the fixed camera comes into the picture, but so what, you know, you cut that bit out. No point in taking care... not that it doesn't come into the picture, but it doesn't matter. The thing that matters, as with all... as with all scenes of that nature, is that you maintain the spontaneity and, if at all possible, you don't have to do it more than once. Matching in any case would be difficult, but also the spontaneity gets lost very quickly. So using my usual technique, which hasn't really varied through the Greek films, was to... to go hand-held at the moment... at a precise moment where the action turns violent, or... or lively, and to stop again the moment the action stops being violent or lively. The choice, I think, of that moment, where you switch from tripod to... to, or dolly, to hand-held, is very important. And that's what I have against things like the Dogma movement recently, is that everything has to be hand-held, tripod is anathema. It... it goes against the... the grain. It... it negates the whole point of going hand-held. Like in... in music, if you... if you have a climax, if it's preceded by silence, then the climax, of course, is much... is much more emphatic... much more effective. But if you... if you have climax all the time, it gets lost. So for me it's always been very important to plan the moment. Of course, in... in close collaboration with the director. But if you have a good relationship with the director, then you... you plan the moment. At this moment we'll go hand-held. In the case of the riot it was a mix of the two cameras running, as I've just said. But often only one camera is in use and the moment where the hand-holding begins and the moment where the hand-holding stops, is in... in itself very...very effective.
