THE FAB INTERVIEW

Conducted with Stephen Brown.

GARY FILES
Man in a Briefcase

Actor, writer and director Gary Files is the only Australian graduate of the three year acting course at the National Theatre School of Canada. As an actor, he worked for eighteen years in Canada and England with companies as diverse as the Stratford Shakespearean Company in Canada and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in England, while back home in australia he has acted with most o the major city companies.

Gary made his movie debut as the driver in The Dirty Dozen and has appeared in numerous television roles both in England and Australia, from Softly, Softly, The Sullivan's and Prisoner to A Country Practice, The Flying Doctors and E.A.R.T.H. Force, although he is best known for his regular role as Tom Ramsey in Neighbours. More recently, he has been seen in Butterfly Island, The Man From Snowy River, Blue Heelers, State Coroner and the thriller feature film Dead End.

Gary is the co-founder of the Period Pieces company in Melbourne and as such, he has directed and appeared in a full range of classical plays as well as directing a Mozart one act opera "Lo Sposo Deluso" for the Collins St Promenade ad the National Gallery of Victoria. He is also the Artistic Director of "Crossing the Line", a series of plays written by screenwriters under the umbrella of the Melbourne Writer's Festival, two of which he also directed.

As a writer, Gary won an AWGIE from the Australian Writers Guild for his comedy radio serial Uncle Vinny's Wireless, produced for the ABC Radio Comedy Unit in Sydney. He has recently completed work on another comedy series for ABC Radio, Bruce Roxon, The All Australian Time Traveller, which he both wrote and performed in.

Despite these impressive credentials, Gary Files will always be remembered by Anderson fans for no fewer than 148 different roles in the Century 21 productions, among them, The Black Phantom in Thunderbird 6, Captain Magenta in Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, Matthew Harding in The Secret Service and Phil Wade in the UFO episode identified.

Stephen Brown conducted the following interview with him by air mail.

Perhaps I could start by asking how you first got involved in providing voices for the Gerry Anderson Supermarionation productions?
Well, I was fortunate enough to be working down at the Bristol Old Vic in '65/'66 with a lot of respectable actors who went on to become big names later - Frank Middlemass, Jan LaPotaire, Gawn Grainer, Janet Key t name a few - when word cam down the Gerry Anderson and the Thunderbirds people were looking for actors with American accents.

As the pay was terrific (for the time) and as they all thought that my American/Canadian accents were pretty good, a lot of actors down there advised me to make contact with Century 21 productions (Gerry's company) post haste. To explain. my accents were good because they had to be. I'd trained at the National Theatre School of Canada - I was the only Australian to have ever done so and had really started acting professionally there. So my Canadian accent had to be perfect to get me work there - especially on the TV - and a good series of American accents widened my possibilities.

So I cheated a bit and put together a tape (introducing myself as a Canadian) and did a whole lot of American accents, plus a few others, and sent it up to Gerry Anderson in London.

He later told me that I got the hob - first on the movie Thunderbird 6 and then on the series Captain Scarlet And the Mysterons - because he was amazed to hear a Canadian of all people, doing such a terrific Australian accent.

Were you aware at the time of the various Gerry Anderson productions and their popularity?

I really had no idea just who or what the Century 21 and the puppet series were about. It was only after I was one of the team that I realised just what a big success they were both in England and the States, and the amazing thing that they were doing with their funny puppets out in the miniaturised studios they had in the London suburb of Slough.

I was tremendously grateful for Gerry's job at the time as it supported me and my little family (Canadian wife and I had a daughter in my second year in England whilst we lived in a nice flat in Wimbledon) and allowed me to do a lot of unusual work in both TV and theatre that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to do. My residuals from the Century 21 productions even supported my early efforts in theatre on my return to Canada in 1969.

What do you remember of the vocal recording sessions?

We worked in several studios in London, but the first recordings that I was involved with were out at Denham in the old Korda studios. That was very impressive to a colonial actor in the big smoke. The other thing that was very impressive was the depth of the talent that Gerry seemed to be able to call on. Geoffrey Keen was in our movie along with many others of the same ilk. After recording, we repaired to a wonderful English pub out in the country near Denham for a lunch to end all lunches, courtesy of Gerry and Sylvia. I can't remember if we had more recording to do after that. Somehow I doubt it.

In those days, they everything in style. I remember being flown down for a day's recording from Edinburgh where I was doing a play in the Festival at the Traverse. They guaranteed to get me back for that night's performance - how they could do that without getting God on their side was beyond me, but I believed them. The flight was impressive enough, but being met at the airport by Gerry's chauffeur holding up a board that read "Mr. Files" just blew me away. We drove to the session at Slough, this time in Gerry's Rolls Royce. Too much.

Did you ever visit the Century 21 studios to see any of the filming on the puppet sets?

We were shown around the Century 21 Studios at Slough a couple of times, as much to get to see what our characters looked like as to understand the way that they moved them and the constraints involved. For instance, we could never overlap lines. Even if the scene's dynamics called for it (an argument for example) we just had to butt up our cues as closely as we could to each other to get the pace needed.

When we saw what the Supermarionation wires were like in the tiny heads of the puppets and how our pre-recorded voices moved their jaws, we could see the problem. In shooting a wide shot of, say, several puppets, each puppet's voice had to be clear of the others so that they could throw it to the right one. Overlap and some other puppet's head would have a moving jaw as well - not good if the person speaking was one of the women and there was this man's voice coming out of her head.

Did you get to see any of the visual effects filming while you were there?

Oh yes, we were there the day they filmed the big tower that was blown up in the first episode of Captain Scarlet. The special effects were all filmed with amazingly high speed cameras and the scene with the tower was done on a very miniature scale model. When we were stood there watching, it sort of went up "PAFF!" - like a superannuated firecracker - all very sudden and quick and quite comic really. But with the slow motion filming y several camreras and some wonderful sound effects added, it was a knockout when we saw it in the episode later.

We actually saw that particular episode up there on the big screen as part of a huge presentation for, I think the Delfonts, at the Columbia Theatre in London's Shaftesbury Avenue. As I said, Gerry did it with style in those days. It tickled us all no end to be attending as "the voices" in a television series for children which was being premiered at on of the major movie houses in the West End.

Thinking about filming at Slough, I remember that Gerry was one of the first - if not the first - to have a video camera using the same lens as the camera, which was rolled back at the same time to cover the scene that had to be shot. That way you could roll back on the video and see what the scene you had just shot looked like. It meant that you didn't have to develop all the takes, just the takes that you thought were right. Just about every big movie that I have worked on since, apart from The Dirty Dozen, uses this technique as a matter of course. Thanks to Gerry, a big savng on costs for the film industry.

But not all of his great ideas paid off. At one time we were recording in a studio near Covent Garden in the good old days when the fruit and veggie market was still there. Because we were recording on highly sensitive film recording equipment we had to stop whatever we were in the midst of doing (and that could include the dramatic climax of an episode) if we heard the first faint rumble of one of the market's favourite carrying trolleys coming our way. These trolleys had solid steel wheels which thundered down the footpaths and went through all manner of sound proofing like a hot knife through butter.

Gerry couldn't do much about that, but he was determined to get rid of the paper noise that our scripts made when we had to slip one sheet under another in a long scene. As in radio work, we usually came to the mike with the particular pages for the scene we were about to do - that made it all easier anyway. But Gerry decided that blotting paper was going to be the answer to what was (we felt) a small problem in the scale of things.

Well, the first, and last, trial of it reduced us all to hysteria. The main reason being that there's a sort of locking effect of the soft furry blotting paper when one page of it is placed on another of the same. We ended up making more noise than ever in our desperation to just turn the page, or slip one under the other, or anything, and we were reduced to fanning the pages like a huge hand of cards so that we could move frm one page to the other, dropping the used pages on the floor. Not a winner!

Although you played a regular character, Captain Magenta, in Captain Scarlet, your big Anderson role was as Matthew Harding in The Secret Service. What do you remember of your work on that series with Stanley Unwin?

Yes, it was on The Secret Service that I had my big chance and was chosen to be the co-lead with Stanley Unwin. He was a marvellous comedy actor, best known then for a funny language that he'd invented. Gerry built the show around it. He used this language to confuse the villains whenever we got into trouble. As you know, he was a village curate and amateur sleuth and I was his gardener, but as this was a Gerry Anderson sci-fi series, he was a gardener with a difference: he shrank down to a tiny size when needed and thus was able to foil the villain of the day.

Aside from the challenge of not only playing Matthew but the occasional 'other voices' when required, the main thing I remember about that time were all of Stanley's wonderful stories about the profession. He had started out as a studio engineer at the BBC and had all sorts of stories from there as well as some wonderful and rare personal recordings, on vinyl disc I guess, but possibly on tape. One he boasted about having, was the famous (in the profession) "Now children, throw your balls in the air!" broadcast. It was made in all innocence by a dear old lady who, did the childre's pogrames at that time. Standley's description of that had us in stitches.

Does the continuing popularity of the Anderson programmes surprise you?

Yes. I had always imagined that all of Gerry's series were essentially aimed at the yournger end of the market but, surprisingly, they have appealed to people right across the age spectrum. Maybe it had something to do with their childhood as the first generation of children that were really brought up glued to their television.

Gerry was out here not long ago to sign memorabilia from of his shows at a very exclusive Melbourne art gallery connected with art in film and TV - I guess they flew him out. I went along in the hope of just saying hello again after all this time. It was only then that I really became aware of the huge following that Gerry's productions have, even today. I had to stand in line for half an hour to finally get to see him. As it was we could only have a fleeting chat then, as he was being swamped by people. However, he got my phone number and called me later that day from his hotel - typically Gerry - and we had a really good chat and a catch-up. He really is a terribly nice man and very, very loyal to all of us, who had the pleasure of working with him, and I feel very grateful to have been a part of his incredible programmes.