We’re really pleased with how Otley turned out. Dick Clement’s director’s commentary is one of the best I’ve heard in ages (his recall of the film’s production is superb given that it started shooting a full half-century ago), and it’s crammed with stories that I imagine haven’t been told much before because he’s never been interviewed about Otley in this kind of depth until now.
And while Ian La Frenais opted not to be on the commentary track (I suspect he felt that he wasn’t as involved with the day-to-day production as was Clement), he was happy enough to give an on-camera interview about it - and the full-on Clement/La Frenais double act is preserved in an audio recording of a career-spanning BFI Southbank interview from 2008 that runs almost as long as the feature.
We had a couple of slight hitches elsewhere - although we announced and scheduled a Freddie Jones interview, it turned out that he couldn’t remember the first thing about Otley, so we reluctantly had to drop it. And Tom Courtenay’s memory of it wasn’t that much better, but he decided to go for it nonetheless, bless him - and it’s not as though there isn’t an absolute ton of stuff about the production in the other extras, so it doesn’t really matter: it’s just great having him on camera.
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