 Equally comfortable in drama and documentary, big-budget cinema features and
low-budget television, cinematographer-director Chris Menges has amassed one of
the most impressive British filmmaking CVs of the last half-century. A double
Oscar winner for Roland Joffé's films The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission
(1986), he is just as renowned for his contributions to Ken Loach's films and to
Adrian Cowell's campaigning TV documentaries - one of which led to a real-life
adventure as gripping as any fictional thriller.
Born into a musical family (his father was the composer and conductor Herbert
Menges), he first became involved with film in 1958, at the age of 17, when he
was taken on as an apprentice by his parents' neighbour, American documentary
filmmaker Alan Forbes. He then worked as an assistant editor, soundman and
camera assistant before joining the team of Granada TV's World in Action (ITV,
1963-98) as a cameraman in 1963. Much of the rest of the 60s was spent covering
conflicts around the world in such places as Angola, Burma, Cyprus, Nepal, South
Africa and Vietnam, often undercover. In an interview for the American Society
of Cinematographers, Menges reminisced:
"Those types of documentaries expose you to a different world. You learn
about composition, and how it affects the story, and about natural lighting. You
experience those things by observing. You also learn to fit into the environment
with the indigenous people and that there is no one right way to tell a story.
The experience of being a fly-on-the-wall while shooting documentaries helps you
develop as a filmmaker."
He also assisted cinematographers Brian Probyn and Miroslav Ondricek, in
which capacity he was camera operator on Ken Loach's feature debut Poor Cow
(1967) and Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). Promoted to cinematographer on Kes
(1969), he would shoot many of Loach's films over the next two decades,
including the features Family Life (1971), Black Jack (1979), Looks and Smiles
(1981) and Fatherland (1986), as well as the TV drama The Gamekeeper (ITV,
tx. 16/121980) and the controversial political documentaries that Loach made for
LWT and Channel Four in the early 1980s.
Menges had been used to chasing the subject with his camera, but in tandem
with Loach he devised a new approach whereby the space in which they were
shooting would be pre-lit and the actors would have a considerable amount of
freedom within that space. As Loach put it in an interview with Graham
Fuller:
"We wanted to light the space so that the light fell democratically but
unostentatiously on everyone. Not only is it more pleasing that way, but the
lighting isn't then saying, 'This is the leading actor in the scene or the film
and these other actors aren't so important'. This is what we did on Kes, and it
became a central tenet of how we worked."
Menges continued to work in documentary, travelling with director Adrian
Cowell to shoot The Opium Warlords (ITV, tx. 9/10/1974) in Burma. They entered
the country illegally and remained trapped there for 18 months after getting
caught up in a skirmish between the Shan State Army and remnants of Chiang
Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces.
By the turn of the decade he had built a reputation as one of Britain's
outstanding feature cinematographers, thanks to collaborations with many of the
country's major filmmakers. In addition to Loach, they included Stephen Frears
(Gumshoe, 1971; Bloody Kids, ITV, tx. 23/3/1980; Walter, Channel 4, tx.
2/11/1982), Franco Rosso (Babylon, 1980), Neil Jordan (Angel, 1982), Alan Clarke
(Made in Britain, ITV, tx. 10/7/1983) and Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, 1983;
Comfort and Joy, 1984).
Incongruously, he was also second unit cinematographer on The Empire Strikes
Back (US, 1980), which gave him valuable experience of big-budget production
logistics and special effects. He drew on this and his extensive knowledge of
south-east Asia when shooting The Killing Fields (1984) for Roland Joffé. It won
him the first of two best cinematography Oscars, the second for Joffé's The
Mission (1986), shot in demanding jungle locations in four South American
countries.
Menges then made his directorial debut with A World Apart (1987), for which
he received much acclaim, especially for his sensitive direction of the teenage
Jodhi May, playing the 13-year-old daughter of prominent apartheid activists in
1960s South Africa. It seemed to herald an equally high-profile directing
career, but Menges' three subsequent features - CrissCross (US, 1991), Second
Best (US/UK, 1993) and The Lost Son (UK/France, 1998) - were less well received,
and by the mid-1990s he had resumed his former profession in collaboration with
Neil Jordan (Michael Collins, US, 1996) and Jim Sheridan (The Boxer, US/UK,
1997).
Since 2000, Menges has continued to shoot high-profile feature films, mostly
in the US, though he was reunited with Stephen Frears for Dirty Pretty Things
(US/UK, 2002) and with Ken Loach for Route Irish (2010).
Michael Brooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
