David Hemmings on BLOW-UP

David Hemmings is with us I would like to point something out about you for a time as an actor or right now as an actor many people think that they discovered you in Antonioni's blow up and it was in fact your 37th film role and I remember the story of antonioni arriving at the Hampstead Theatre Club where you were performing in Andrew Sinclair's adaptation of Dylan Thomas's Adventures in the skin trade and shortly after that evening you were doing a screen test for Antony and all I want to point out was because I think it reveals so much about you you were supposed to have been doing a scene from adventures in the skin trade when you noticed that nickel Angelo antonioni had a tick and a nervous habit of sitting sideways and swallowing in a way that made him look like a swan which you interpreted as incipient rejection totally and absolute and so you burst into a scene from Ted Willis's woman in a dressing gown I improvised around the scene from table as it wound with him but Antonia was sitting underneath the camera and without wishing to cast you know horrors on Antonia on his condition he does have a tick which is that and if you're an actor giving your all and your I was actually giving in my craft or sullen art which is like the worst conceivable idea for the kind of character that I was playing it's always been a great surprise to me and I think it must say something about my performance as a 1920s character as Dylan Thomas in adventures in the skin trade that antonioni could have come to that performance and thought of me as the kind of epitome of the 60s it must have been the worst performer that I've given but indeed I did he was sitting there underneath the camera and going like that and caught him out of the corner of my eye and I knew I'd failed so I went into every conceivable sort of gyration of lunacy in order to get his attention and with others i went home in desperate despair got totally drunk and two days later he called and said i got the role even though he thought when he looked at you and began speaking that a23 you were too blah and and too young didn't you say I'll darken my hair yes and I also told him that I looked older on film and could write you should know 36 films before but you noted to bring it right to the end and the fact that there is blow up finished you did not see a frame of the film you walk into a screening room in Los Angeles California you came out of the screening with Antonioni and he turned to you when he said you didn't like it did you how did he know in the screening room had you picked up a nervous tic we're doing something that he saw during screening I didn't understand the picture at all and I thought the sequence which most people say is incredibly suspenseful was dreadfully slow and I was sitting on my seat and I was literally going on with it get on with it Oh God and I walked out dying and I was standing I'm in Hollywood California my first time ever in California which for actors incredible for a young British actor struggling to make a name for himself the epitome you know I've been the absolute of my whole was there and I hated it hated it didn't understand it at all loved it the second time I saw it but hated it because I didn't know what was going on I had script to 14 pages and originally was called a girl a photographer and a beautiful April morning which was a title I adored and blow up I thought was that and he said as you say you didn't like it did you and I said alright and but and then people were very kind about it and but the thing about the film is whatever one may say or whatever people have said it is very much Antonioni's picture

Channel: criterioncollection

Views: 111,148

Keywords: Blow-Up, David Hemmings

Id: SsVdGr9yNjg

Length: 4min 2sec (242 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2017