The Director – A One Shot Story

Back in 1988 I was trying out my new Mamiya C330s TLR camera loaded with Ilford XP1 film at the Pier Head in Liverpool.

I stumbled across a film crew on the roof terrace of a building close to the Mersey ferry terminal.

Interested I stayed around for a while to observe.
The scene they were filming was actually quite boring to watch.
There was a young girl alone by the rail of the terrance.
She was filmed by a large camera mounted on a rail track pushed along by an assistant.
I recall there were quite a few takes of that brief scene.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get close enough to get a decent shot of the action and as I only had a 12 shot roll I didn’t want to waste any film on long distance shots.

Looking back at the negatives I got just 11 shots from that roll of film.
I took four pictures on the day this being the fourth, the other three taken elsewhere around the Pier Head.

Once the filming stopped I observed the guy I presumed to be the director remove his cap, don a trilby and then take a seat on a nearby bench.

Being totally naive about street photography and not having the courage to ask if I could take his portrait, I just moved in as close as I dared and fired off the one shot.
The subject was totally unfazed by this, I don’t think he even looked up at me.

After I received the processed film back I still had no idea about what had been going on that day at the Pier Head. However, I came across a brief article in the Liverpool Echo that an Italian film crew had been to the city to film scenes for a movie called “Appuntamento a Liverpool”.

Many of you may know about the 1985 Heysel stadium disaster. There was a confrontation between the Liverpool and Juventus supporters just before kick off of the European Cup final. Tragically 39 people‍, mostly Italians and Juventus fans‍, were killed and 600 injured.

The film being shot was about Caterina a twenty-year-old girl from Cremona.
Her father died before her eyes in the disaster.
A British police inspector who was determined to bring to justice all those responsible summons her again, some years later, as an eyewitness as new elements have emerged.
Caterina recognises the murderer, a Liverpool taxi driver, but she prefers to remain silent as to track down the man in his hometown and take her revenge.

The film’s director, the subject of my one shot, is Marco Tullio Giordana who is also a screen writer. Appointment in Liverpool was his fourth film as a director.

From the metadata I can say that the camera was a Mamiya C330s with standard 80mm lens.
Ilford XP1 film which was lab processed then home rescanned in later years on an Epson V850 flatbed scanner using SilverFast software. The scan provided a negative Raw DNG which I then converted to a positive in Lightroom via Negative Lab Pro’s plugin.

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