Walter Lassally interview

From our good friends at the English Section of Radio Prague we learn that Oscar-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally recently appeared at Prague's Cinematographers' Days festival. While there, he gave an interview to one of the staffers from the English Section:

A good film should be comprehensible with the volume off, says Oscar-winning cameraman Walter Lassally

German-born cameraman Walter Lassally worked on some of the greatest films produced in the British New Wave of the 1960s, including classics such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey. The recipient of an Oscar for Zorba the Greek, he also has some Czech connections, including shooting the movie The Clown with his friend Vojtěch Jasný. Lassally (88), who was in Prague last week for the Cinematographers Days festival, made documentaries early in his career as part of the ground-breaking Free Cinema movement – so I asked him what he had taken from that form to his work on feature films.

The article can be found on Czech Radio's website here, which comes complete with a transcript of the interview. If you'd rather listen to the interview, there's a direct link here; the MP3 is about 4.9 MB and a little under 11 minutes. If memory serves, Radio Prague's audio files are up more or less permanently, so it's not as if you absolutely have to download it today if you want to listen.

I found the interview interesting, ranging from talking about Kitchen Sink-era directors like Tony Richardson and Czech-born Karel Riesz, as well as discussing the differences between filmmaking then and now.