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Unusual among film directors, John Schlesinger is a diligent and
enthusiastic theatre-goer and over many years we have met in my own and
other actors' dressing-rooms. Cold Comfort Farm (one of my
favourite comic novels) was my first chance to work with him and I
jumped at it.
 Amos
Starkadder, the hell-fire preacher to his congregation of "Quiverers",
is a parody of the non-conformist preachers I remember from my
childhood. My maternal grandfather was a gentle minister in the
Congregational Church but my father's father, William Henry McKellen was
a grandiloquent lay preacher, with a soaring tenor voice and a
theatrical flair. One of his attention-grabbing tricks was suddenly to
stop the flow of his sermon and, gesturing to the back wall of the
church, gasp: "I can see the children of Israel!" The
congregation's heads would turn round to follow his pointing finger.
Amos would have admired that.
 The day we filmed the comic sermon in a chapel in the village of
Rye (where Henry James and where E. F. Benson lived and imagined "Mapp
and Lucia") I worked hard and long. The quivering worshippers were
played by local extras and Schlesinger wanted to shoot on their upturned
faces early in the day, before boredom might set in. A score of times,
acting full out, I shouted the warning "There's no budder in
Hell!" and by the middle of the afternoon, when it was time for the
camera to reverse its angle and film me in the pulpit, my voice was
beginning to crack. Before I had finished, the extras were released and
the sermon was preached to the few loyal professionals  who stayed behind
to give me the eyelines. Fortunately my voice took on a new strength and
the resulting scene even makes me laugh.
John was often out of sorts during shooting: not with his cast,
whom he by turns indulged and chivvied but with the BBC, whose slender
funding was, he felt, inadequate. When the first take of a scene was
half-good, it had to be accepted as good enough, the schedule was so
tight. The BBC had luck on its side (or had consulted their weather
forecasters) because the sun shone day after day and we never had to
waste time while rain stopped filming. Offset, the actors' accommodation
was minimal. There were only two small trailers for us all - women in
one and all the men (plus the director at lunchtime) in the other. This
meant many of us changed into costume in the open fields of Sussex.
Thank goodness for the weather.
The BBC's miserliness persisted after filming. After its initial
success on UK television, Cold Comfort Farm should have had
an immediate theatrical release; but it had been shot on 16mm film and
cinemas prefer 35mm. John Schlesinger himself paid for the transfer to
the larger format and then took the resplendent new version to the
Toronto Film Festival where it was a hit leading to a triumphant release
in North America. I hope that by now John's financial outlay has been
re-paid!
Among the cast of British eccentrics it was a joy to be
entertained between takes by Eileen Atkins, Stephen Fry and Miriam
Margolyes, three of the most accomplished raconteurs in the business. —
Ian McKellen, June 2000
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