Latest Posts. Other films he designed include Casablanca , Oklahoma! Here is a condensed digest of that conversation, edited for clarity. What was your reaction? I had never heard of him. HtN : I would say you have! So you had never heard of Orry-Kelly before the film was pitched to you. Could you describe your research process? GA: It was a challenge. So the first thing I asked was, how did he do that? So we went to [his hometown] Kiama, and they have a little historical society with a very passionate historian, who had that photo [used in the film] of a very young Orry.
She knew who Orry-Kelly was β a hero from their town! She gave us background on what life was like there in the s. So that became, for Katherine Thomson β the writer β and I, like our quest.
If only we could find it, we could hear what he really thought, behind the scenes, about the actors, and maybe what he thought about Cary.
And we literally started a search, which took us about two years, and we had actually given up, when we found it, in the end, in a completely random moment. Did you, yourself, read it, and is that what fueled most of the research that we see on screen? GA: Well, we nearly made the movie without it, but when we read it, we said, we got him right.
So that was fantastic. There were bits [of dialogue in the reenactments] where we took little liberties, but the scene, for instance, where Cary came to him, and Orry thought that he was going to patch up the friendship, is completely from the memoir. So there were definitely little pieces that we took from the memoir that were real things that Orry said.
