Conversations With John Schlesinger

Chapter 1 childhood John Schlesinger was the son of a pediatrician and an accomplished violinist. Three of his grandparents were immigrants from Germany. One of his grandmothers was born in Manchester. Before going to St. Edmund's, a preparatory school in Surrey, he attended the Hall School in London. After St. Edmund's he spent five years at Uppingham in Rutland. Let's start at the beginning. Your first memory of theater or film. The first theater I ever saw was of two famous magicians, called Maskelyne and Devant. My father took me to see them, and I became fascinated by magic. There were big stage illusions which in one way or another have continued to be popular with magicians ever since, probably using the same principles. I loved the show and thought that one of the things, apart from a cinema organist, that I would like to be was a stage magician, and I took it up very keenly. A cinema organist? Yes, the image of a purple spotlight on the cinema organist, as he waves and then sinks with his organ down into the bowels of the earth, was always rather special. When I was eleven, I read in a magazine about the Paris Exhibition, and there was an organ which played colored waterfallsyou know, waterspouts. My father took me to Paris to see it. I went to the restaurant where you could play this organ and see the colored fountains. It was all terribly glamorous. I was really quite serious about learning to play the organ and indeed did so at the West London Synagogue. I had lessons, and at boarding schoolmy prep schoolI used to play the organ in chapel. It was only a two-manual organ, not more complicated than that, and I can't say that I listen avidly now to organ recitals, but it started me off being interested in music, which became a very important part of my life. I suppose the organ, particularly in a church, though perhaps not in the West London Synagogue so much, was also part of the drama of religion. Was that part of the attraction? Was there a magical quality about being in a chapel, the chanting and so on? Maybe. My first sexual experience was linked to my playing the organ at school. We were changing to go horse riding one day, and another boy beckoned me over to the cubicle he was changing in. And I suppose one could say that we fiddlednot much more than that. That night I was playing the organ in chapel and when I pulled out the stops to start playing whatever hymn it was, there was a terrible kind of subterranean noise, which went like eeeeeeeer, and I thought, What on earth is this? and pushed all the stops in to try and stop it, and then they announced the hymn ancient and modern number, and I pulled the stops out againeeeeeeeer. I thought, Oh, my God! This is a visitation, this is because of something terribly wrong that I have done, and I'm being punished for it. Anyhow, it was a rather embarrassing service, because I couldn't stop this noise. In the end I realized that it was a pure accident. My cassock had got caught on one of the pedals, which caused this noise to happen, and guilt vanishedforever, I thinkas a result of that. How old were you when this happened? Eleven, I suppose. Apart from cinema organs and magic shows, what other theater did you see as a child? I can remember going to Peter Pan. We saw Charles Laughton playing the parts of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. And Jean Forbes-Robertson was the perennial Petershe was said to have gin hidden in her wig box. But it was wonderful. These were special occasions, on my grandmothers' birthdays and in the Christmas holidays. The first opera I ever saw was Hansel andBuruma, Ian is the author of 'Conversations With John Schlesinger ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780375757631 and ISBN 0375757635.