The Filmumentaries Podcast

This one's a bit different. It's shorter, and it's about a film that doesn't exist yet. Christopher Jacobsen is an actor and filmmaker, and full disclosure, the brother of one of my good friends. He's trying to get a documentary made about Daragh O'Malley, who played Sergeant Patrick Harper in Sharpe.

Daragh and Sean Bean were the only two actors in every episode, from 1993 to 2008. Chris grew up a huge Sharpe fan. In 2021 he and his filmmaking partner Marco sent Daragh a short film script. Daragh said yes, and a friendship followed, along with a lot of two-hour phone calls.

The spine of the documentary is Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando. In 1995 the two were cast in Divine Rapture, alongside Johnny Depp, Debra Winger and John Hurt. Two weeks into the shoot the money fell apart and production shut down for good. Daragh and Brando stayed friends. Daragh took him for his first pint of Guinness in a rural Irish pub, kept his voicemails, and still has thirty or forty minutes of largely unseen Divine Rapture footage. There's plenty more.

Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy on Grant's first job. Swapping Brando stories with Ron Perlman, who'd survived The Island of Dr. Moreau. Pete Postlethwaite brushing his teeth with lager on the Sharpe shoot. A family connection to Richard Harris. And the angry Irishman in the pub in Withnail and I. Chris is raising £7,000 for the first shoot.

That's a week in Ireland with Daragh, visiting places tied to Divine Rapture and his early life, and a week in London interviewing the people who knew him. The kit is already covered. The money pays for flights, fuel, a car and an extra crew member.

I've been on the other side of this. The Joe Alves documentary got to Martha's Vineyard and LA because people listening to this podcast chipped in. If you can spare the price of a coffee or a pint, send it Chris's way. Support the documentary Daragh and Brando on

GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/how-to-make-the-documentary-daragh-and-brando If you've got a question you'd like Chris to put to Daragh, about Sharpe, Brando, Withnail or anything else, get in touch and I'll pass it on.

Timestamps

00:34 How Chris and I know each other, and what the project is
01:00 A short film script, and how Daragh O'Malley came on board
01:58 Daragh's friendship with Marlon Brando
02:29 Divine Rapture: the cast, the collapse, the two weeks of footage
04:10 The Guinness, the voicemails and the unseen footage
05:02 Neil Sedaka, Shoreham Towers and a parrot called Vincent
06:17 Getting the stories on tape
07:15 How relationships form in this industry
08:15 Sharpe: fifteen years, and every episode
08:43 Jason Salkey, Brian Cox, Daniel Craig, and Pete Postlethwaite's lager
10:04 Richard Harris
11:05 Six months in a cabin with Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy
11:32 Ron Perlman, The Magnificent Seven, and swapping Brando stories
12:48 Theatre, sets and the bonds that last
13:37 The wish list: Barry Navidi, Debra Winger, Johnny Depp, Brian Cox
14:25 The Sharpe fan community and an archive producer from Facebook
17:26 The GoFundMe: £7,000, a week in Ireland, a week in London
19:48 Why these projects need backing
21:07 Withnail and I, and sending in your questions

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn't arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.

The show where he cut his teeth was The Clone Wars. There was one foley stage at the Ranch in those days, so he and Ronni Brown took the night shift and cranked the episodes out, learning to work fast and picking up the Star Wars tricks handed down from Dennie Thorpe and Jana Vance.He's very good on what the job actually is. An egg crack might be an ice cream cone. The sizzle in the pan might be a candle held under tinfoil. He's got a recording of a cattle gate on his phone that he still hasn't cracked, and then somebody gave him a metal contraption built for hanging blueprints and it turned out to be exactly the sound.

He picks up leather purses in thrift shops and holds them to his ear to check for creak. He puts shoes on and looks for a hard surface to walk on.He's a drummer too, and he came up in the eighties being told drum machines would replace him, so he has a settled view on whether sound libraries and new tech are coming for his job.We cover the anatomy of a foley stage, why the mixer isn't watching his hands, the weight difference between Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar, Lincoln split between a day crew and a night crew who had to match each other, grasshopper footsteps for documentaries, mic placement as performance, and the off-mic tricks he doesn't always mention to the mixer.

Thanks so much for your continued support!

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Ep 154 — Wolf Kahler — Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark

For Episode 154 of The Filmumentaries Podcast, I’m going back to one of my earliest and most memorable interviews: a conversation with German actor Wolf Kahler, best known to film fans as Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark.Kahler’s wonderfully imposing performance as the Nazi officer who helps Belloq search for the Ark is one of the many unforgettable supporting performances in Spielberg’s 1981 adventure. But there’s much more to his career than one film.In this episode, Wolf talks about his acting career, how he came to be cast in Raiders of the Lost Ark, working with Steven Spielberg and the cast, and his memories of making one of the most beloved adventure films ever made.It’s also a chance to revisit the making of Raiders from the perspective of someone who was actually there — and to hear stories from behind the scenes that you won’t find in the finished film.Wolf Kahler has appeared in numerous films and television productions, often playing German military characters, including The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission, The Bourne Identity, The Remains of the Day, Charlotte Gray, Wonder Woman and The Great Escaper.So, grab your hat, whip and favourite archaeological artefact, and join me for a conversation with Colonel Dietrich himself.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Brad Fiedel wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history, and he did it on a drum machine, a sequencer and a keyboard chained together with a computer ribbon cable, before MIDI was really a thing. The famous lurch in the rhythm is him hitting a button by hand and deciding the wobble was better than the fix. Years later Henry Mancini rang up wanting to record it with a big band, and the man writing the lead sheet couldn't work out the time signature.

There is a lot more to Brad than Terminator, and that's really what this conversation is about. He grew up inside his parents' school of the arts on Long Island, his dad a jazz musician, his mum a modern dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He spent years improvising live for dance classes, which turned out to be exactly the muscle a film composer needs, though nobody told him that at the time. He nearly signed to Columbia. He played keys for Hall and Oates in 1974 and jammed with the band that became the E Street Band. He was working with Arthur Miller and Vanessa Redgrave before James Cameron ever called.We get into temp tracks and why he never did his best work against one, when a scene is better off with no music at all, the direction Cameron gave him on the canal chase in T2, and the moment after the True Lies sessions when a small voice told him he was finished. These days his regular gig is writing musicals with first graders in Santa Barbara, and he's very clear that he gets as much out of it as they do.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Episode 152: John Goodson (Part 1)

John Goodson is a model maker and digital artist who spent more than three decades at ILM. His credits span The Rocketeer, Star Trek: First Contact, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Rogue One, and most recently The Mandalorian and Grogu. In this first of two episodes, I talk to John about his lifelong obsession with spacecraft and model-making, how he got to ILM, what the model shop was like at its peak, and the craft philosophy that has defined his career. In this episode:
Growing up obsessed with Lost in Space, Star Log, and the making-of books that shaped his ambitions
Writing letters to ILM at age 14 — and getting politely told to stop
How a childhood friendship and a homemade recreation of the Battle of Hoth eventually led to his first visit to ILM
The advice that sent him back to finish school — and why it was the right call
Getting hired for one week on Body Wars and spending the first three days hiding in the model shop hoping nobody would notice
What the ILM model shop culture was like at its peak, and what he absorbed from Bill George, Lorne Peterson, Larry Tan, and the rest of that team
The 18-foot Titanic model for Ghostbusters II and learning to just start building
The 33-foot Hindenburg for The Rocketeer — eight months of construction, a night shoot at a decommissioned Air Force base, kerosene running out of the holes, and a cherry picker at 25 feet
The pasta trick, pancake syrup, and other unexpected materials that found their way into ILM shots
Watching the digital wave arrive and feeling like parts of the machine were being taken away
The transition to digital model-making and eventually finding his footing with Mari
What it felt like to return to physical model-making for The Mandalorian — and what was hardest about working without the model shop around him
The mechanical language of spacecraft: why weathering works, what Star Crash got wrong, and the disposable camera exercise that taught a kit-bash class to see the real world differently
How the Razor Crest started as a 3D-printed assembly that couldn't survive construction — and what he did about it
Part two is coming soon...

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links