Nick Steer’s memories of the Manchester City documentary

Well, as I said, I had originally come in and my interest was documentary. But the kind of opportunities for that weren’t as great, I found. As I became more experienced in doing drama, I did really enjoy that. It was more challenging, because there’s documentary and documentary, really. A lot of what was classed as documentary was little more than talking heads, which is not terribly interesting as a sound person. So the sort of documentaries that I was interested in was more the cinema verité type, and there wasn’t an awful lot of that going on. Although, as I said, I worked with Peter Carr quite a bit and his stuff was… in terms of getting the sound was much more challenging, and also more interesting in a way. So we did the Manchester City film, which I still think is a great, great film. And they managed to get this amazing sort of access into the dressing room and into the boardroom at Manchester City, which I think Paul Doherty had sort of arranged, and David Drury, who had been a film editor, produced it and he managed to keep that door open, which, was quite an achievement, because all hell was breaking loose at City at the time. They were firing Malcolm Allison, who was the manager, and then looking for a new manager, and the team wasn’t doing well. So there was all sorts of things going on, and we were behind the scenes on all of that. When things are going so badly, it’s unusual to be able to carry on shooting, which we managed to do.

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