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Andrew Mollo and I celebrated 20 years of working together in 1976. It was a gratifying, if sobering moment. We had started with It Happened Here and finished with Winstanley, and that was all. Just two titles – meagre return for all those years of investment. But it was not for want of trying. Immediately after we had dubbed It Happened Here and checked the combined print, we began to think of our next project. We naively expected that the men who ran the picture business would be only too glad to finance two young filmmakers who had proved their ability by writing, producing and directing a 96-minute feature film for a mere £7,000.

But we rapidly learned that the film industry did not welcome such idiosyncrasy. Had we spent seven million, we should have been warmly embraced, for we would thus have been a conduit to the source of the money. And in the surreal thought-processes of the film industry, a producer who sets out to make a film for seven million and succeeds is less of a producer than one who overspends by a hundred per cent. The first is forgotten. The second is the producer of a 14 million pound production. Once you have proved you can spend that sort of money, your next budget will be proportionately higher.

United Artists bought It Happened Here (hereafter IHH) from Woodfall Films, who part-financed it, for £10,000. Theoretically, that should have given us all our production costs back plus a modest profit. In fact, the overall cost of the film rose simply because it had been sold. Sebastian Shaw, the actor who played Dr Fletcher, had agreed to work for a nominal sum, unless the film was sold, in which case he had to be paid his full fee. Perfectly reasonable. The same went for Woodfall’s accountants and solicitors. By the time they had been paid off, the budget was nearer £12,000, which meant we were already in the red.

George ‘Bud’ Ornstein, head of United Artists in Great Britain, had covered himself with glory over Tom Jones. This Woodfall epic had been directed by Tony Richardson in an eccentric style which the United Artists board did not appreciate. Baffled, they invited their secretaries and telephone girls and other representatives of the youthful, cinema-going public and ran it to them. They loved it. Ornstein, fuelled by their enthusiasm, supported the film, gave it a full publicity campaign and booked it into the London Pavilion, where it ran for a year. The profits were enormous, but Tony Richardson ensured that the money reached those whose efforts had deserved it. I have a poor memory for figures, but one series sticks in my mind. Susannah York, the female lead, was offered 2.5 per cent and her agent, Al Parker, turned it down in favour of an outright payment. This was sensible advice, for none of Woodfall’s earlier films had been box-office sensations (except, perhaps, for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) and 2.5 per cent of nothing is still nothing. The outright payment amounted to a couple of thousand but in accepting it she sacrificed something like £17,000.

The success of Tom Jones gave Ornstein enormous prestige. United Artists now trusted his decisions implicitly. The picture came out in 1963. IHH was ready in 1964, and it came to Ornstein’s attention by the same route – Woodfall, Tony Richardson, Oscar Lewenstein etc. Unhesitatingly, aided by a good review in Variety, Ornstein accepted it for UA release.

United Artists sank the picture, and from the strictly commercial point of view they had every right to do so. Ornstein left the company, joined Harry Saltzman on the James Bond pictures, and that should have been the last we ever had to do with him.

But the film business, particularly in Britain, is not very large, and although the cast changes quite frequently, the action takes place in a very small area of London. It is inevitable that one encounters the same faces playing different parts in the same show.

I am a film historian. At the end of IHH, I had made a swift trip to New York and had begun a series of interviews with silent film stars. I left George Fisher, the sound editor, struggling with all the tracks; upon my return we dubbed the film.

Some months later, after we had almost concluded a deal with the Academy Cinema and Connoisseur Films, Andrew and I were summoned to a London hotel to meet George Ornstein. The very day that the United Artists people had viewed the film, I called at their Wardour Street offices. An American was talking to one of the secretaries and said he had just seen a picture.

‘One of ours?’

‘I hope not. I didn’t like it. It was called It Happened Here.’

When Andrew and I arrived at the hotel, the door was opened by this same American. His name was Walter Boxer. We were introduced to George Ornstein, an ebullient and amusing man, disarmingly frank (we learned later) and while our tastes were unlikely to coincide, he had a genuine enthusiasm for pictures. He was American and had, I think, been born and brought up in Los Angeles. He once told me that he had been turned on to films by a friend of his, an assistant in a casting office in the thirties, who would lead the hopeful – and invariably beautiful – young girls from the casting office to a nearby hotel where he and George had set up an ‘office’. With such a background, it was inevitable he would become a producer. Producers are not a breed I care for, but Bud Ornstein was one of the more likeable varieties.

During the conversation, I mentioned my trip to America and my interest in silent films, and Ornstein revealed that his wife was Mary Pickford’s niece. If I would like to meet Mary Pickford, he would fix it for me. Ah, said I, but she lives in Hollywood and I can only afford to travel as far as New York.

Oscar Lewenstein said if that was the case, Woodfall would finance my trip from New York to Hollywood and back. Ornstein said he would write to Pickfair, Mary Pickford’s residence in Beverly Hills. Poor Andrew didn’t get much out of this display of generosity – Lewenstein joked that he would have to find him a battlefield – but in any case, he was due to leave for Spain to act as military adviser on Dr Zhivago.

In New York, I met the main controllers of the United Artists empire: David Picker, a young, handsome executive who showered me with theatre tickets, and Arnold Picker, an older, more aggressive character, who demanded to know how I would handle the exploitation and, when I told him, took immense pleasure in telling me what an idiot I was.

I reached Hollywood, and in ten days of furious interviewing, I talked to 26 people, including Buster Keaton.

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I had never heard of Gerrard Winstanley. I knew virtually nothing about the Civil War, beyond a childhood reading of Children of the New Forest, a Cavaliers and Roundhead yarn by Captain Marryatt. The first time I saw the name was in a paperback novel called Comrade Jacob. Miles Halliwell, an old friend of the Mollos who had played a small part in It Happened Here, had given it to Andrew and recommended it for a film. Andrew had passed it, with a pile of other books, to Oscar Lewenstein, the Woodfall producer, who, sympathetic to our plight, had occasionally passed us scripts. One was called The Knack. We couldn’t imagine how this stage play could be converted into a picture. Andrew went so far as to say he did not believe it would benefit from being made into a film. The next time we visited Woodfall, we met Dick Lester, coming down the narrow stairs, clutching the same script. With a great many changes, he converted it into a smash hit which won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. In any case, outstanding as it was, it was not a film we could have made.

Comrade Jacob appealed to Oscar Lewenstein. It had therefore better appeal to me, suggested Andrew. I opened it and began reading:

‘The General was tired of war, yet war had made him what he was, and in its absence he wandered into labyrinths of uncertainty...’

Promising! The opening paragraphs described the journey of General Fairfax and his troopers to St George’s Hill. The author, David Caute, was clearly a historian with a rich, almost rococo style in dealing with this austere, Puritan period. On the following page, another hint of the story:

‘It was hardly a month since he had received these peasant leaders at his headquarters at Hounslow. They had refused to remove their hats, but he clung to the reins of his temper, admonishing them gently, respecting their religious beliefs, but warning them that in digging up the common land they were breaking the law, and that it must stop. Their long, involved dissertation about Jacob and Esau and the Norman Yoke he had endured patiently, well knowing how the poor people had suffered in the wars. Fairfax was no tyrant.’

The characters, the political background, had been sketched in my head in the first couple of pages. Now came the clinching element – the atmosphere:

‘An ugly hump, this is St George’s Hill. Dismounted, cursing their feeble mission, beset with doubts, the soldiers began to pick their way up the endless vales and ridges of the hill. Through the tall elms, oaks and beeches the steady rain fell, gradually eating through the layers of their clothing. Pattering on the heather, denying the spring, whispering in these dark silent spaces of shadow like all the ghosts of the wars, it drowned their footsteps.’

That paragraph sold me. If the rest of the book contained such beautifully evocative writing then surely it would be possible to make an equally beautiful and evocative film...

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