Polteroid

 

This is my dear friend Lawrie. I’ve spoken of him before — assistant on THE RED SHOES, BLACK NARCISSUS, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS…

Also onetime chairman of Films of Scotland and, somewhat bizarrely, producer of an animated Pink Floyd music promo in Holland.

I took this picture on a visit to see Lawrie in hospital. I just happened to have a camera on me at the time, and it occurred to me that I had no photographs of my friend. He’d gone in for a minor operation and his heart had stopped, so it seemed like a good time to carpe diem and all that.

Lawrie is looking pleased with himself as he’s recently learned that he was dead for a few minutes, and he didn’t feel a thing. Having no religious beliefs (beyond a vague kindly feeling that religious people should be treated respectfully, like the disabled) he wasn’t afraid of death, and his wartime experiences (fishing bodies out the sea for the R.A.F.) had given him a lifelong obsession with mortality, but it was very reassuring to him that he had travelled up that stairway to heaven, however briefly, and not experienced any pain.

(Lawrie had prior experience running DOWN that stairway, doubling for David Niven in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.)

In the picture he’s seen just a few hours after this first death, and a few months from the final one. If you look hard, you can ALMOST see the pillow through his head.

But this isn’t the true Polteroid, READ ON.

In the last months of his life, Lawrie was visited by a few Spectral Ladies. “I was lying in bed, and there was this, oh, quite nice-looking middle-aged lady standing in the doorway in a long, oatmeal dress.” The experience was repeated, with a different woman each time. Apparently this is not uncommon with people nearing the end of their lives. They didn’t bother him at all, these phantasmal visitors, and in due course, Lawrie died.

I was unable to attend the funeral as I was directing a nightmarishly complicated and kids’ TV show in Glasgow, on an incredibly tight schedule. As is usual, the costume department had a Polaroid camera to snap the actors for continuity purposes. A picture had just been taken and the camera placed on a table when

FLASH!

it went off all by itself. This was startling to the costume assistant who’d just put it down, but not as startling as it was to me, watching the picture develop…

I don’t know what’s going on with my hair — it looks like a child’s drawing of a vole, folded in half. And the camera, being on a table at waist level, rather emphasises my GIRTH in a manner I’m not too happy about. But since nobody was physically operating the camera, I would have to say it’s a pretty well-composed shot. I think Lawrie was actually getting buried at the time this was taken.

SUPPOSEDLY.

It’s fun to think of Lawrie, enjoying the freedom from his wheelchair that he could previously experience only in his dreams, larking about on the set and distracting me from my job when I really needed my wits about me. I nearly got fired!

With all respect to my ace cinematographer Scott Ward, I find this humble, unflattering snap more interesting than anything else we managed to film on the set that day.