BRIAN: In Middlemarch we storyboarded two scenes basically, or one was a scene and was a day of second unit. In the scene, um that we storyboarded, it was a scene involving action, it was in fact a fight scene basically, in its simplest, in its simplest form it was a fight scene. The reason we storyboarded it was to make it absolutely clear to everybody involved exactly what the director had in mind, um and also it helped the director to visualise the set-ups he would need to tell the story. On the face of it it seemed a very simple scene – Fred Vinci um is out riding on a horse in a beautiful piece of countryside and he sees in the distance some railway line, which is just coming into um being - it was the early days of the railway. Coming along the road in the same scene but at a great distance from the railwav workers um is a group of farm labourers going home on the back of a cart, being pulled by a horse. Way up on the other side of the vallev is um one of the great characters of the fi, film, who is in

(p.32, cont)

fact the father of the girl that Fred Vinci is madly in love with. He is up there, he's a land agent and is surveying the land for the farm for the man he's working for. Within this scene a fight takes place between the farm workers and the railway workers - not so much a fight (DISTANT HOOTER HEARD) ... it's not so much a fight as more an impending fight in which the farm workers try and chase the railway workers off the land, um, simply because at base they are luddites I guess. Um, and the, the main character and his assistant intervene to try and stop this happening. Fred's, Fred sees it happening and rides his horse down across the valley and, and inbetween the farm workers and the railway workers to stop the fight getting completely out of hand. It says a lot about Fred at this particular moment in the story, simply because up until now he has not been the strongest of characters, and in this particular scene he becomes a man I suppose, at its most basic (LAUGHS) um by showing what he's made of, and he does it in front of his future father-in-law, which advances the story considerably. Now on the face of it it seems quite a simple scene, but it needed to be worked out in quite detail, um simply because there was a lot of action involved, across a very large area of around, and it was simplified by having a storyboard drawn.

Additional Notes in Pen and Pencil:

Annotation 1: On page 31, in pencil, there is a line on the left side of the text, from line 14 to 19. To the left of this line, there is a hand-written note reading: 'Mollie: I've have this storyboard'.

Annotation 2: In pen, a hand-written 'y' is written over the top of the 'I' in the word 'Vinci' on line 15.

Ref Code: PM-97 Title: Transcript from a video interview with Brian Tufano, Lighting Cameraman for Middlemarch, p. 31-32, explaining the importance of storyboarding complex scenes in relation to the moment when Fred Vincy intervenes in a dispute between the railway Surveyors and farm labourers. Date: 1993 Format: .png Source: ITM-7963 Transcripts of interviews with members of the cast and crew of Middlemarch (BBC/WGBH, 1994). Edited for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Educational Developments/BFI (British Film Institute) Education package Screening Middlemarch: 19th Century Novel to 90s Television. Held at BFI, London, UK. http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceArchive/110008677