'I sat there goggle-eyed and hero-worshipping'

I first met Humphrey Jennings during the Second World War, when I was 19. I had been taken on by Flying Training Command in 1943 and put into the RAF film unit. This was based at Pinewood studios, and so was Humphrey. I was a private at that time, and mad about movies, and he was working on a number of films. I remember two of them in particular: Listen to Britain and A Diary For Timothy

	Still from Listen to Britain. View this clip. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

Humphrey really came across as somebody who wanted to make a film because he had something to say. He wanted to express a view and an attitude. Along with other documentary-film-makers, he was a pioneer. He developed the idea of placing real people in their circumstances, experiencing their experiences, and filming it so that, although it could be edited, the film was still in large measure their creation.

It was revolutionary because British cinema at that time was mainly the filming of theatre. Many films were like Aldwych farces - eight actors standing in a row speaking lines, with no action. Nothing to do with cinema as we know it now. Hardly any editing, and of course the style of performance was theatrical and it was therefore unreal, exaggerated, almost caricatured. So people like Humphrey, who were very socially conscious and believed in cinema as the art form of the 20th century, were determined to use it to say what they wanted to say.

Still from Fires Were Started. View a clip from Fires Were Started. You'll need the Real plug-in, download it here.

Because such talented people made documentary films about reality, it affected the style of acting of many postwar films. In my opinion they, more than anybody else, were responsible for taking film acting into the contemporary world. In no small measure, they shaped what British cinema became after the war, with a reality and a truth, and a commitment and a passion which were scarcely known before. Fires Were Started was an ordinary commercial movie, and very successful too - it reached many people.

I remember Humphrey's excitement and pleasure in pointing something out to me as I sat there goggle-eyed and hero-worshipping this man. And I found even the primitive technology of the cutting room absolutely magical. He was a sweet - an awful silly word to use - but he was a sweet man. Passionate about what he did, he was never condescending. He accepted me as an enthusiast, as a kid who knew damn all but who was passionate about this medium.

	Humphrey Jennings, 1942 © Lee Miller Archive

Humphrey was very thin, and he had a parting and straight white hair that always stuck out. Whenever he left the cutting room, he would plaster it down with his hands. He was an amusing man; witty but not very gregarious. Most of the time when I saw him, he was actually working. I have a physical image of him with his bowed shoulders, hunched over a machine. And I remember his pipe of course.

He worked with Stewart McAllister on Listen to Britain, and it was a revelation to me that those two people could work perfectly together even though their roles - the one director, the other editor - were so different. But they worked as one: whatever ideas came in were reciprocated both ways. I think Humphrey had a great regard for his editor because he was a damn clever editor himself.

I admire Listen to Britain because, although he used reality and real people in real circumstances, he also understood that synchronised sound was not necessarily most effective or most poignant. In other words, he started to use sound and music in a way that was innovative.

Still from A Diary for Timothy

In A Diary for Timothy, there was both reality and 'entertainment': he brought entertainment to documentary style and documentary style to entertainment, and that was rare. I was in such awe of this man and of the poignancy and economy with which he portrayed an atmosphere, a period, an incident, which reverberated either in one's eardrums or on one's retina. He was able to understand the basic importance or emotional content of one moment, which he assembled in editing. If you want to know what Britain was like in the 1940s, what we put up with and what our motivations were, go and see one of his films.

I remained a huge fan of Humphrey, and I knew he painted. I bought a lot of his paintings at auction. Mine include The Allotment, The Silent Village, The Tenement and The Dole Queue. They are sociological paintings, an indictment of what he saw. In the same way that his films were very socially conscious, so were his paintings. There is a very pastel feeling about many of them, English light, northern. They are not flamboyant pictures. They're quiet but have a very real statement to make. I have two in my study and I like looking at them very much.

Lord Attenborough has had a long and distinguished career spanning more than five decades, as an actor (Brighton Rock, 1947; Jurassic Park, 1993) and film-maker (Oh What a Lovely War!, 1969; Gandhi, 1982; Cry Freedom, 1987).

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