Terence Fisher was born on 23 February 1904.
He worked his way up in the London film industry of the 1930s — starting as a clapper. From there, he became an assistant editor. And he worked as an editor for about a decade for Warner Brothers.
I think editing is the best preparation you can have for directing films — especially modest-budget films. Because editing is the key to film syntax. Having a good eye is great. But if you don’t have a good idea of how what you shoot will cut together, you (or your editor) will have a lot of trouble!
He directed films for a couple of independent production companies before landing at Hammer Film Productions in 1951. From its founding to the mid-1950s, Hammer produced low-budget crime and mystery dramas. So Fisher made those kinds of films for them. For several years, he worked about half-time for Hammer and half-time for other independent companies like Association of Cinema Technicians and Cybex Film Productions.
In 1957, Terence Fisher’s career took a turn. Hammer had been experimenting with science fiction. In fact, Fisher directed one of these, Spaceways (1953). But the turning point for Hammer was 1955 when they produced the science fiction horror film The Quatermass Xperiment. Fisher wasn’t involved with that, but Hammer picked him to direct their first true horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein.
Fisher ultimately directed five of the seven Frankenstein films, the first three of the nine Dracula films, the first of four Mummy films, and its only werewolf film, The Curse of the Werewolf. He also directed The Devil Rides Out — a much loved film that I’ve never connected with (but the issue is Matheson’s script, not Fisher’s direction). Overall, he directed about twice as many films as Hammer mainstays Roy Ward Baker, Freddie Francis, and Jimmy Sangster combined.
Since I’ve recently written articles on the Frankenstein and Dracula series, let’s watch The Curse of the Werewolf to celebrate Terence Fisher — primarily because I haven’t seen it before.
Terrence Fisher via Dracula Fandom under Fair Use.
Interesting! Because you know who else got his start in British film of the 1930s as an editor? David Lean. He did the fine “verbal training montage” on Pygmalion, among other things.
Lean had his flaws as a director (getting addicted to size/spectacle was a major one), but even in his annoying movies, you never get lost as to what’s happening, what the point of the scene is. It may be a dumb point, yet you’re never confused.
That’s a great observation about editing being good training for a director. If I had it all to do again, I might have tried my hand at editing. But then again, a lot would involve being handed junk footage and told “fix this,” then trying to fix it and having moron directors go “you missed my favorite part!” Plus I’d have had to live in L.A., blah, and I wouldn’t know the nice people I know now.
I wonder why editing wasn’t a path to directing in America. But I imagine British editors of the 1930s weren’t being handed as many garbage movies like “second-tier Hopalong Cassidy ripoff” and such. They were trying to fix stuff which wasn’t quite as dumb.
The problem might be people over-valuing the director. It does seem a lot of directors have come from the editing department. Edward Dmytryk is one such person. Almost everything I know about editing I learned from his book. I’m more surprised that we see so few directors start as cinematographers or camera operators.
I just finished Roger Deakins’s new book on cinematography; it’s terrific. He mentions, multiple times, how he chose the framing of a particular shot! Not because of aesthetic principles, but to hide the lights needed for the shot! And sometimes this stuff is determined by how the production designer constructs the set, too.
I am sure that, right now, film studies college professors are using shots like these to demonstrate “how the director makes every frame meaningful” and some such nonsense. Certainly sometimes directors DO use image composition to convey emotion/feeling. But to overstate the importance of the director on a movie, as opposed to the other contributors, is silly, and doesn’t reflect any understanding of how movies are made.
And yes, I did just request They Might Be Giants from the library, but I don’t want to bury that other person’s nice comment in the “recent comments” thingy at the bottom. So I’ll keep it to this.