OSCAR-winning cinematographer Billy Williams, who in a career spanning five decades, worked on some of the most iconic British films of the late 20th century, will be in Hay-on Wye to talk about two of them as part of the Festival of British Cinema.

It’s a career that also brought him a clutch of lifetime achievement awards, numerous nominations and, most recently, a special BAFTA tribute for his work on films including Women in Love, Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Gandhi and On Golden Pond. “It was the best job in the world,” he agrees. “From the variety of situations you find yourself in, working with people with so many different skills and learning from them, and collaborating with many different departments to make a film. The whole process of telling a story with the camera to create visual images that will connect with the audience, and working on a film set with a crew who are all there to do their best for you, and working with a director to choose how you will shoot a scene and to be involved with the actors who bring so much to the scenario. It’s just a wonderful job.

"It’s also meant that I’ve travelled to many parts of the world, worked with many different nationalities and been fortunate to have had such a good time.

Although Billy doesn’t have a favourite film among the many he’s worked on, he does admit that “the most satisfying film was Gandhi - because of the story and working with Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley, both of whom were inspiring to work with.”

Did he ever want to move into the director’s chair? “I never wanted to be a director,” he says, adding: “I worked for a while in commercials and directed a few as well as photographing them. But it’s not where I wanted to be going. I’d spent all my working life behind a camera and the best directors are those that have been actors - they have a better understanding of actors and scripts. My background wasn’t the best to be able to do that. I could work out the technicalities of shooting on film with a camera but I had no experience of getting the best from actors."

The challenge for a cinematographer is always to get the best shot, capture the director’s vision on film, and one of the scariest moments of Billy’s career came when he was working on On Golden Pond, starring Katherine Hepburn and a pair of Fondas – Henry and Jane. “There is a scene which takes place at dusk,” Billy explains. “Katherine Keburn goes out to look for Henry Fonda and the young boy who’ve been stranded in themiddle of the lake. It had to be done at what we call the magic hour, which is actually a window of just a few minutes to get it right. The original idea was for Katherine Hepburn to go out in a boat and draw up beside Henry Fonda and have a conversation. But we had a script conference and she said that instead of staying on the boat, ‘why don’t I take off my coat and dive in’. And that’s what we did. When I saw the film in New York, the audience stood up and cheered – it was the dramatic highlight of the movie.

But it had made it much more complicated for me because I knew we would only get one take. It was pretty scary, but everything went perfectly."

Of course, today, the majority of film is shot digitally, a change that came after Billy retired, but one that he feels ambivalent about: “The British Society of Cinematographers hosted a seminar recently discussing the difference in discipline between shooting on film and digital. With film, the director cuts the camera when everyone’s happy, and the scene is printed and they move on. Now there’s a tendency not to cut the camera, but just to keep shooting and doing more takes.

“At this seminar, there was a film editor of many years’ experience, who said that the cutting rooms are becoming overwhelmed with material. If it’s a digital production, there can be three or four times as much material to see, and everything has to be checked.

"I don’t think it’s good for discipline on set," says Billy. "I worked once with the cinematographer Guy Green, who became a director, photographing two films for him. For the first, we had a scene, we shot the scene, take one. ‘Is that alright for everybody,’ he asked. ‘Print. Next set up.’ That really puts people on their toes, and I think it’s a tremendous way to start.”

Having started out making training films and documentaries, the first feature Bill worked on was 1965’s San Ferry Ann: “It was a black and white film, the only one I made in black and white, with no dialogue. But it was a lot of fun and starred Barbara Windsor and a lot of the Carry on team.

He went on to work on films that have come to be seen as representing a golden Age of British cinema, during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “A lot of adventurous films were made,” he says. “Like Women in Love and Sunday Bloody Sunday. After the French Nouvelle Vague, we had an English new wave, making films about social issues and family relationships. These films were made with many cinematographers who had come out of documentaries. I think perhaps we brought a spirit of adventure."

and working on location. In the 60s and 70s more films were made on real locations and as film stock became faster and lighting equipment lighter, you didn’t have to carry so much. So you got much more realism in the magnificient country homes you could then shoot in (budget allowing) than you could from building the set in the studio.