I remember in the first preparation days of the film, I said to him quite casually: “I suppose Heaven will be in colour and the Earth would be in black and white?”
He said: “No, the contrary”
And I said: “Why?”
He said: “Because everyone expects that.”
So he was going to do the opposite. That was typical of his nature, he was perverse to the extent that he liked to do anything that was different, I mean the ordinary was anathema to him.
Jack Cardiff discussing the reasoning behind director Michael Powell’s decision to film “The Other World” sequence in A Matter of Life and Death in black and white and the Earth sequence in technicolour.
