A documentary celebrating the centenary of an eccentric English photographer who never took a picture without his magic hat on and produced his own brand of sausages was always going to be a joy to make. The first thing I did was watch Kind Hearts and Coronets again. My hunch was that the spry tone of the film would be somehow apropos, but I'd forgotten that Louis, the suburban draper's assistant hell bent on becoming a duke, actually poses as a fellow amateur photographer to bump off one of his aristocratic relatives. This made me think about the social mobility of successful photographers and I wanted to try and bring a hint of Ealing comedy to the story of how Ronald Smith from Putney became Parks, the royals' favourite snapper.
Norman Parkinson was an old-school connoisseur of women. In his autobiography he wrote character sketches of his favourite models (his "Top Girls") and I liked the idea of reversing the roles and focusing on their views of him. In his photographs and in person, his models are spirited women. What surprised me was how vividly they could recall particular fashion shoots, sometimes from decades before. Working with Parks was clearly an indelible experience.
The Carlyle hotel in New York was the venue chosen by the impossibly glamorous Carmen Dell'Orefice to vet me before agreeing to an interview. In the plush restaurant, softly-lit by chandeliers, the world's oldest supermodel ordered a modest salad for lunch and later requested more bread. Accompanied by Tim Petersen, a gentle and courteous photographer making his own film about her (and whose devotion has just the faintest whisper of Max, the butler in Sunset Boulevard), Carmen was open about about her close relationship with Parkinson and candid about the financial difficulties that have recently beset her. When the bill came, she glanced around the table. "Does anybody else want these?" she asked before deftly slipping the remaining bread rolls in her handbag.
Carmen really is a one-off.
The Norman Parkinson Archive gave Arena access to a treasure trove of pictures from his exceptionally long career. Sometimes a chronological approach isn't the most illuminating way to explore a character, but in this instance, anything else would have distracted from showing how his images evolved to keep pace with the times. But although the photographs provided a straightforward structural spine, it wasn't an easy documentary to assemble.
Parkinson was a well-known personality in his day and often appeared on TV shows - Wogan, Breakfast Time, This Is Your Life - so Andrew Wright, Arena's outstanding Archive Producer, was able to find us loads of material. Fortunately, Parks was already bald by his early twenties so he always looked, well, quite old, which allowed us some flexibility, continuity-wise. The problem was that in interviews he often tailed off into wafty generalisations which initially drove me and my editor nuts. For instance, "Women are like wine," he declared, which, OK, was something of a cliche, but surely there would be some little nugget of insight to follow? "This year, next year.". Hmmm.
Eventually it dawned on us that if we treated his interviews as performances rather than as sources of information, then they were terrific. This gave us the confidence to begin the documentary with his announcement that his name wasn't really Norman Parkinson and establish him as a slightly unreliable narrator from the start.
I would like to have used more excerpts from a fantastic 60s documentary called Stay Baby, Stay. It was visually beautiful and it made me quite wistful to see how impressionistic television documentaries once were. There was a great section where Parkinson goes scouting for girls, finds a really natural sixties teenager with a breezy attitude and takes her on a test shoot. The trouble was, in isolation, it was a lot more obvious that this was all slightly set up. It wasn't so discernible in the original film because the whole thing was so groovy and fluid, but when we tried to shoehorn it into our own profile, it jarred. Sometimes great material can't be used for really subtle reasons.
Stay Baby, Stay had a great soundtrack and we lifted The Hipster by Harold McNair and some far-out tracks by jazz flautist Roland Kirk from it. That was the best part of editing: finding the right music to put the photographs in context. Roy Deverell's choices were more elegant than mine. He came up with Delius. I went for True by Spandau Ballet. We both fell in love with John Barry's Mr Lolly from another British comedy, The Amorous Prawn. It felt consistent with our thinking that if there'd ever been a film based on Norman Parkinson's life, it would definitely have starred Terry Thomas.
Arena: aka Norman Parkinson (BBC) is nominated for Best Arts Documentary at The Grierson British Documentray Awards 2013. Directed by Nicola Roberts.
