(Charles)
Back in 1975, I travelled to Tuscany to visit my friend Jacy Davies (now Jacy Wall, the talented weaver) who was working for sculptor Fiore de Henriquez. Fiore is best known for her many portrait works of sitters from President Kennedy to the Queen Mother, but I was especially fascinated by the restoration she was undertaking in Tuscany of an ancient Etruscan settlement, Peralta, built on the side of a mountain - her magnum opus.
I asked cinematographer Ian Wilson BSC if he fancied an unpaid working holiday in Italy and we soon found ourselves in Rome, with Jacy as production assistant, to film a Fiore sculpture exhibition. From there we went to Tuscany and later filmed Fiore in London, Leicestershire and even followed her to New York. We were shooting on 16mm Eastmancolor film with no budget, so every time I made a corporate film we had a little more money to spend on the Fiore film, and this went on for several years, with return trips to Tuscany, filming at Peralta, Cararra and Pietrasanta, featuring marble quarries, workshops, plaster casters and foundries - all the supporting network essential for sculpture.
We ended up with a 90 minute rough cut, but could never afford to complete it on film, because of the huge above-the-line costs of dubbing, negative cutting and laboratory work. However, with the advent of digital video, I've now had all our original negative telecined to HDCAM high definition video, and we are now re-editing the film in our own Edit Suite where we can do all the completion work in-house for later release on DVD.