David Bowie on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth

Tony Rich­mond has worked in film since the ear­ly 1960s, start­ing out from the very bot­tom as a clap­per-board loader on From Rus­sia With Love. He grad­u­al­ly worked his way up the ranks, becom­ing Nico­las Roeg’s assis­tant cam­era oper­a­tor on John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd from 1967, before becom­ing a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er out­right in the late six­ties – one of his ear­ly solo efforts was with Jean-Luc Godard, on his intox­i­cat­ing 1968 Rolling Stones film, Sym­pa­thy for the Devil.

Then, Rich­mond and Roeg became a team, work­ing togeth­er on 1971’s Aussie chimera, Walk­a­bout, 1973’s goth­ic clas­sic, Don’t Look Now, and his exper­i­men­tal sci-fi fea­ture, The Man Who Fell to Earth, in 1976. Rich­mond has worked as a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er ever since, work­ing on every type of movie you could imag­ine, from moody dra­mas like Sean Penn’s The Indi­an Run­ner, to glossy come­dies like Legal­ly Blonde and baroque hor­ror films like Anto­nia Bird’s high­ly under­rat­ed Ravenous.

His hir­ing on The Man Who Fell to Earth was sur­pris­ing­ly quick and sim­ple: ​“I got a call from Nic one day and he said, ​‘lis­ten, I’m in Amer­i­ca. Go in to the British Lion offices on Mon­day, sort out a deal, and get out here by the end of the week.’ It was that quick.”

“Nic is obvi­ous­ly some­one who ini­tial­ly worked as a cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, so he would line the shots up and then leave them to me. But I knew Nic. I knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. I don’t have a style, most cin­e­matog­ra­phers, this isn’t to knock them in any way, have a style. I always think, let the sto­ry dic­tate the style. I think that’s very impor­tant because real­ly the most impor­tant thing is the sto­ry, with­out a good script you can’t have a good movie.”

“In this shot, David is in his alien make­up. Every­thing we did on that movie would be very sim­ple today. Obvi­ous­ly those pros­thet­ics that David wears we bought them cheap­ly. No breasts, no tes­ti­cles, no anus. They were all put on by our make­up depart­ment and it took hours. And also with the sort of stuff they were using, com­pared to all the stuff we have today, it would be so sim­ple today. They would start work on David at about two o’ clock in the morn­ing. My wife did the make­up, and she and her assis­tants would get a very high end den­tist chair which they would work him up on the front, and then turn him over we’d get him ready in all those pros­thet­ics like at ten in the morn­ing, and we would shoot those as quick­ly as pos­si­ble before they start to peel off in the heat.

“He was pret­ty strange because he’d just come off of a mas­sive amount of drugs and alco­hol. Apart from being very strange and weird, he had an assis­tant, I can’t remem­ber what her name was who took care of him. Then you had Tony Mas­cia who was David’s body­guard and who actu­al­ly plays the chauf­feur in the film. It was a strange shoot. And the lim­ou­sine was Bowie’s own lim­ou­sine. Bowie was won­der­ful, he was nev­er late, he knew his lines he was always on time. Though he kept a lot to him­self and he was very alien-like – what can I say?”

“I like to do the heli­copter stuff rather than have a sec­ond unit do it. We did a 360 loop round the top of the moun­tains. Drones have real­ly opened up these kinds of shots for every­body, because heli­copters are real­ly expen­sive. With the pilot and this and that, they cost a for­tune. Here I was oper­at­ing the cam­era and Nic was just sit­ting on the back of the heli­copter. We were just talk­ing to each oth­er so we could see what we were doing.”

“I love this pic­ture. This is from one of my favourite scenes. It’s just bril­liant. It was an incred­i­ble loca­tion the whole crew was British so it was real­ly fab­u­lous for us all to be in New Mex­i­co. It’s such an incred­i­ble place to shoot a movie because you go 15, 20 miles along the road and the land­scape is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. I love that scene, it’s also got one of my favourite lines in the movie, when Rip Torn asks Bowie where is he from and Bowie points down at the ground in the dis­tance and says, ​‘Some­where down there’.”

“There’s that huge cloud that’s. That cloud hung there all after­noon it was fan­tas­tic, we were real­ly lucky. Prob­a­bly most cin­e­matog­ra­phers would hate for me to say it but there real­ly is a lot of luck involved. That cloud was just fantastic.”

“Here, I think we were prac­tis­ing shoot­ing the gun for what we call the ​‘S&M’ scene. I don’t know why they call it that, I don’t think we called it that I think some­one put a title on it. It’s quite a bizarre scene. When you’re on loca­tion on a movie, it’s real­ly easy because when you’re shoot­ing a movie in, say Lon­don or Los Ange­les, you have an office and you prep and you talk and you go home at the end of the day. It’s so much bet­ter to shoot a movie on loca­tion, because every­one is always talk­ing about the movie. Every cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er is dif­fer­ent, but for me what I need to know is what the vision is.

“It was easy with Nic because we were friends. I’d known Nic for a long long time, as I start­ed out as his assis­tant when he was a DoP. We used to hang out a lot and go to bars or have din­ner and we were always talk­ing about the movies. I knew what he want­ed and that’s just the way it was. He used to get a gen­er­al feel­ing of what he want­ed, but he doesn’t do sto­ry boards. He might sto­ry board the odd sequence if it’s got spe­cial effects in it, but he didn’t do shot lists. Nic Roeg is prob­a­bly the most organ­ic direc­tor I’ve ever worked with, and one of the most incredible.”

The 4K restora­tion of The Man Who Fell to Earth opens in UK cin­e­mas on 9 Sept and is then avail­able to own from 24 Oct.