part 1 **part 2**part 3** PART 4

Michael Palin's   "Mr. Ray Cooper, who was coordinating the music, was working for Handmade films at the time. Big friend of George. He said they want a musical singer and he said, 'Do you know any songs?' I said, 'I've got a book of old music hall songs.' So I went thumbing through it, and I found that song, Put on your Tat-Ta Little Girlie. I thought, this sounds about right, because it's the missionary trying to save fallen women. And Put On Your Tat-Ta Little Girlie seemed to fit the bill, and they liked the song, and so we recorded that. But I think previously to that, Michael had appeared in one of the Innes Book of Records episodes as a policeman doing a suite. And he did it for the equity minimum, which is very little money. 60 pounds or something. And he repaid the complement by giving me the equity minimum for appearing in The Missionary! 'Richard Longcrain was the director, and I had to get hit in the face with a bar stool. They had this bar stool rigged up on a wire. It came sliding down this wire with another wire to hold it, and it would look as if I got it full in the face, and I had to recoil. They had set it all up, and it was getting towards the end of the day, and they said, 'Okay let's go for it then.' I said, 'Well hang on, Richard, you haven't tested it yet.' He said, 'Oh, don't be an old woman.' I said, 'Honestly, Richard, it's coming from about 30 feet away, and I think the break wire ought to be tested!' He goes, 'Oh, god' and he gets up there and he takes my position. 'All right, let it go!' The thing snaps and he only gets his arm up just in time to stop himself getting whacked in the head by the barstool. He says, 'All right, put a thicker bit of wire on.' Then I did it. Then they had trouble with the sound. I ended up having to go in and dub my voice on the biggest close-up on the movie. I was quite proud that I actually managed to do that. I had to because I did it live. There was something wrong with the synch between the sound thing and the camera. Something was running slow and it didn't look real so I had to dub it on. And that is the biggest close-up in the bloody film! I managed to get the timing absolutely right, and it's on the bit there was no tempo. 'Come have a ta ta WEEEEEEETH-a MEEEE.' We had several goes, but I managed to get it. The consummate professional."     Neil's scene Real Video, med quality, 1.6 MB stream    download

Download   MP3  or  Real Audio Right-click and "save target as" or "save link as". Written by Fred Leigh in 1920 or something like that. Performed by Neil Innes. From the Handmade Films 10th Anniversary CD.

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Terry Jones' "Terry showed me the script, or told me about the script, and I said, 'Oh, wonderful, I'd love to do the music for that.' He said, 'Oh, what a good idea.' So I talked myself into doing the music for that. And talked myself in getting out to Malta to watch the filming, even though there's no reason for a composer to be there! So I got roped in for a few extra scenes and things like that. "When we looked at a kind of rough cut, he said, 'Right, Neilie, better get with the music.' Because I'd already done a couple of themes. I said, 'What do you think of this theme?' and he said, 'Oh, I like that.' So I knew the theme was already there. But when they showed us the rough cut, and John Goldstone said, 'Right, you'd better start spotting, as they call it, the music cues.' And I said, 'Are you sure? Because I think, personally, it needs 20 minutes cut out of the film.' And the editor was standing next to me and he said, 'More like 30.' And he said, 'no, no, go ahead, spot the music.' So I did. I went in on the budget we had and went in and made the music on that cut. And of course by then they'd played it to focus groups (laughs) and they cut 30 minutes out the film. So they said, 'We've got to re-do a couple of cues.' 'Ah, well, no problem. Which ones are they?' 'Well, the one where the ship lands on the ice plane.' I said, 'No problem, that's mostly me on the keyboards.' But then it turned out, the truth be told, it was 2/3 of it, including the battle scene. I had to re-score it, and they found the money to get the orchestra in and a choir, and I was getting pretty annoyed by then. If they'd kept their powder dry, or even used odd bits of the demo music I'd given them — I'd given them everything on demo, I'd recorded it all myself on synthesizers — they could have cut it together with that and shown that to a focus group and gotten the same result. "The upshot was, I scored pretty much all of it all again, and the usual thing that goes on between composers and writers and directors. In the middle of the battle scene he wants to duck the music down for somebody to say, 'He's mad!' And I'm saying, 'You're mad! You don't stop the… this is costing a lot of money to build up this head of music, and you want to pull a fade out so you can hear somebody say, 'he's mad'?' That sort of thing went on. And then again, it got cut again, even after lots of prints had been made. Julian Doyle and I ended up cutting the music on magnetic tape on a Steenbeck. "It was very unsatisfactory, really, how it ended up. It's not Jones' fault, it's the kind of thing that happens in films now. The suits come in and the market researchers and the focus groups and it isn't a personal statement anymore. You don't get filmmakers, you get people who have this unenviable task of trying to steady a ship amongst focus groups and nervous accountancy. "It was fun, and the cast were all great. And most memorably, they had to whizz around this tank in Malta. There's a tank which has all this water in it, and then it backs onto the sea, and I used this tank years ago for a commercial. We got there, there was two guys in a rowing boat with string vests on and a tin and a spoon and they were dropping dye into this tank to match it to the color of the sea. It takes ages. And the director's tearing his hair out because time is slipping by. But you've got to understand, the water is clear in the tank, and it runs off, and behind it is the sea and the camera. You can't see the line once the dye is absolutely right. All the Vikings are sweltering in 80 degrees, they've had enough. They go on a charge round in the tank in the motorboat, and this is an accident waiting to happen, because there are too many of them at the front of the boat. And of course the boat stops and the bow dips down and the next thing it goes down gracefully with all hands on board! You know they wear furs and things, including the quite elderly Freddy Jones. But it's good fun. Good shoot."

Music: Neil Innes Orchestration/Conductor: John Altman Music Supervisor: Ray Williams Music Mixer: Austin Ince 4 min 13 sec 4 MB download

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