"I reached the point of thinking there were no more masterpieces to discover, until I saw I Know Where I'm Going!" - Martin Scorsese

Curated by Jason Forrest

Total Runtime: 1:31:22

(1945)

I Know Where I'm Going! is a 1945 romance film by the British-based film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It stars Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey, and features Pamela Brown, Finlay Currie and Petula Clark in her fourth film appearance.

The original story and the whole screenplay were written in less than a week. Pressburger said it just flowed naturally.

The film was shot in black and white while Powell and Pressburger were waiting for Technicolor film to begin making their next film, A Matter of Life and Death (colour film was in short supply in wartime Britain). It was the second and last collaboration between the co-directors and cinematographer Erwin Hillier (who shot the entire film without using a light meter).

From various topographical references and a map briefly shown in the film, it is clear that the Isle of Kiloran is based on Colonsay. The name Kiloran was borrowed from one of Colonsay's bays, Kiloran Bay. The heroine of the film is trying to get to Kiloran (Colonsay), but nobody ever gets there. No footage was shot on Colonsay.

One of the most complex scenes is the small boat battling through the Corryvreckan whirlpool. This was a clever combination of footage shot at Corryvreckan between the Hebridean islands of Scarba and Jura and the Gray Dogs (Bealach a'Choin Ghlais) between Scarba and Lunga.

There are some long distance shots looking down over the area, shot from one of the islands.
There are some middle distance and close-up shots that were made from a small boat with a hand-held camera.
There were some model shots, done in the tank at the studio. These had gelatin added to the water so that it would hold its shape better and would look better when scaled up. Usually the way that waves break and the size of water drops is a give-away for model shots done in a tank.
Then there were also the close-up shots of the people in the boat. These were all done in the studio, with a boat on gimbals being rocked in all directions by some hefty studio hands while other studio hands threw buckets of water at them. These were filmed with the shots made from the boat with the hand-held camera projected behind them.
Even then, there was further trickery where they joined together some of the long and middle distance shots with those made in the tank in a single frame.

Roger Livesey was not able to travel to Scotland, as he was performing in a West End play, The Banbury Nose by Peter Ustinov, so all of his scenes were shot in the studio at Denham and a double was used in all of his scenes shot in Scotland. These shots were then mixed so that the same scene would often have a middle distance shot of the double and then a closeup of Livesey or a shot of the double's back and then a shot showing Livesey's face.

John Laurie was the choreographer and arranger for the ceilidh sequences. The puirt a beul "Macaphee"was performed by Boyd Steven, Maxwell Kennedy and Jean Houston of the Glasgow Orpheus Choir.

Other music heard in the film is either traditional Scottish and Irish songs or original music composed for the film by Allan Gray.

Movie - I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

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