David Puttnam

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

David Puttnam0:29

Our Castaway this week is an Oscar-winning producer of British films, David Putnam. David, is music important to you?

Presenter0:37

Well, it's been fundamental. I mean, uh, I can think of a dozen times during my life where it's uh propped me up emotionally and uh once or twice even financially I think.

David Puttnam0:44

Do you have a say in the music for films, or do you appoint

Presenter0:48

Uh

David Puttnam0:48

Uh

Presenter0:49

Yeah.

David Puttnam0:49

A music director who does it all.

Presenter0:51

No, I have a very fortunately it's one of the categories that falls within the kind of purview of the producer and and always has done. So I have a substantial say primarily in the choice of composer and style, you know, stylistic choice. Uh obviously at a certain point you hand over to the composer. In the old days when you really had to go into a studio, you know, when the composer had composed, you had no idea other than maybe a few tinkled notes on a piano what you were going to hear. And it was always terrifying to be faced with sixty or a hundred musicians and hear it for the very first time. Now fortunately with electronic music you can get a very clear idea of what you let yourself in for.

David Puttnam0:51

No, how

Presenter1:21

Uh

David Puttnam1:21

How important to you as a producer?

Presenter1:24

Is the music in a film? It can't be overstated. I think there are three critical creative elements that go into a great movie. One, of course, is the screenplay. The other is the visual content, the responsibility of the director, within which I would catch up the acting performances. And the third, emotional content, is the music. I saw Chariots of Fire without music, and I can tell you that it made an awful lot of difference.

Presenter1:46

Have you a big collection of disks yourself? Yes, huge. Ridiculously uh large. It's kind of an obsession. It's got nothing to do with rational approach to living.

David Puttnam1:52

I do find it very hard to cut that collection down to eight for a desert island.

Presenter1:56

It was quite seriously, I think one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do in my life, because I just kept changing my mind, as you probably realize.

David Puttnam2:02

Well, it's gonna be too late from now on.

Presenter2:04

That's six or eight. Put Well I thought we'd kick off with something that is a perfect piece of music and it sums up uh everything I think music can be and should be. It's the Beethoven Violin Concerto, indeed.

David Puttnam3:14

An excerpt from the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrigan with Anne Sophie Mute as soloist.

David Puttnam3:24

Are you a Londoner, David? Yes, born in Dragda. Your father was a well-known press photographer.

Presenter3:29

Yes, he was. A remarkable man, I mean, a marvellous man, and he worked for many years at Associated Press. I was their sort of star photographer during the thirties. And then, during the war, was a war cameraman, assigned at one point to the King. Had a most wonderful life, travelled all over the world. Did you go to the pictures a lot when you were young? It it started late. Uh, first time I went to the cinema, I think I was seven or maybe even eight years old. But from the age of sort of eleven onwards, I became pretty obsessive. Those days, I could walk to three or maybe four different cinemas from my house in the north of London. And uh nowadays, of course, all four of those cinemas are gone, sadly. So in any given week, I had at least three films available to me.

David Puttnam4:05

Did you identify a bit with the movies because your father was a a photographer?

Presenter4:11

Yes, I think to an extent, and it only came to me uh much later in life, the degree to which that was true, there was no such thing in our house as a photograph. There was a good photograph and a bad photograph and a well cropped photograph and a poorly cropped photograph. So I think over the breakfast table, from as soon as my dad came back from the army in 1945, there was a debate. I was never allowed to just say, well, they get to an interesting photograph. So there was a kind of qualitative factor built into everything that was visual.

David Puttnam4:30

Yes.

David Puttnam4:32

Built into

David Puttnam4:33

There was a girl named Patsy at your school. It was a co-educational school. And she's still around. She's still around.

Presenter4:36

Yeah.

Presenter4:38

She's still around.

David Puttnam4:40

Yeah.

Presenter4:40

Yes, I met Patsy. I was uh fifteen and she was twelve. She came from Greycoat Hospital. She was a kind of import, a late import into the school. And I noticed her particularly because she had a different colour uniform to all the other girls. So you started to take her to the movies? Started to take her to the movies when I got her. How old were you when you left school? I was sixteen, almost seventeen.

David Puttnam4:58

Did you get school certainly?

Presenter5:00

Yeah.

David Puttnam5:00

Yeah

Presenter5:00

Yes, I got my I got my G C's and left promptly afterwards.

David Puttnam5:03

And then

Presenter5:04

When you left, did you immediately lay siege to Water Street? No, I wanted to. I would have loved to have done, but uh Water Street was inaccessible to me for two reasons. Physically, the studios were in a part of London that I couldn't get to, or certainly couldn't get to to start at eight thirty. And secondly, it was a highly nepotistic industry, the film industry, and I didn't have that type of uh family clout.

Presenter5:23

So, um I became a messenger, initially in a publishing house and then eventually in an advertising agency.

David Puttnam5:28

Well, we've got you started. In the beginnings of your career, let's have your second record.

Presenter5:32

It's an Elvis Presley record. Elvis Presley had a tremendous impact on my life because when I was studying for my O-level, sort of in 1957 I guess, I remember vividly Gene Metcalfe on Two-Way Family Favourites introducing Elvis Presley, getting his name wrong if I remember rightly, and suggesting that he was singing from the bottom of a well. But when I heard, it was Heartbreak Hotel, when I heard it, it was the very first time I'd heard music which was different from my parents' music, quite singularly different. And whereas I think I could have easily drifted into being a bank clerk or gone into insurance, I realised there was another world out there that was worth exploring. So it kind of coalesced with my movie dreams. It was a sort of an interesting moment for me. So I owe Elvis and he's been very important in my life. I think he had the most magnificent voice. I also, when sifting through the records, felt that I wanted some connection with God on my island, preferably a fairly singular connection. So all in all I chose this particular record which I love a great deal.

Speaker 46:27

Then sing to my song I saved God to thee how great the Lord

David Puttnam6:58

Elvis Presley.

David Puttnam6:59

So David, a messenger, all over London.

Presenter7:02

All over London. Yes, I got to know London like the back of my hand. How were you going? On a bicycle, a motorbike? Oh, it depended on the urgency of the job. If you were terribly lucky and something that was amazingly urgent, you were allowed to take a taxi. But normally we used the tube. The principal interest, I think, for about a year was I must have been a very competitive person because I used to time myself. It was often the same run down to the block makers from the advertising agencies. And I bought a little sort of stopwatch and I would race as fast as I could out of the messenger department and try and break last week's record down to Swains the Block Makers or whoever else it was. You kept me going. You had ambition. Oh, immense ambition. So you were quickly promoted from being a messenger boy. Well, of course, it's one of the most ridiculous things that people do that this agency had got this most superb messenger boy, without doubt the best messenger boy in London. They then made the classic mistake of promoting me out of the messenger department. To do what? No, a remarkable thing happened. It was right at the beginning of the 60s, and a decision was made to allow one of the OICs, someone from the messenger department, to join what was then termed the graduate trainee scheme. I don't know if it was to frighten the graduates or what the thinking was behind it. But I was, as I say, plucked out as being the fastest messenger, plucked out of the messenger department and put on the graduate trainee scheme. And then you.

David Puttnam7:28

You can

David Puttnam7:31

Same thing.

Speaker 17:45

I then

Speaker 47:46

Yeah.

Speaker 17:46

Uh

Speaker 47:57

Yeah.

David Puttnam8:06

You became eventually an account executive, which is a very important job indeed. You look after the clients.

Presenter8:12

Yes, absolutely. I fell upwards for a couple of years and and ended up as an account executive at a wonderful agency just started called Collegiate Dickinson-Pierce. Now you quit from advertising on a matter of principle. Well, there were two problems. Uh I think maybe I I also beat the SAC by a matter of of months. But I was in a situation where it was very clear that to move onwards I was going to have to handle cigarettes and cigarette advertising. And I've never smoked. I don't.

Speaker 48:33

Yeah.

Presenter8:35

Approver smoking. I hate it, as a matter of fact. I didn't want to vlog cigarettes. And there was another interesting argument I got into, which was whether we had any right to interfere on the quality or design of our clients' products, or whether we should just sell what they gave us. So it was.

Presenter8:49

A place where I'd been terribly happy, had some very, very happy years. Acrimony was beginning to creep in, and I just thought the time had come to move on. What were you doing after advertising? I had to earn some money, and the film industry still seemed a long way off, and I became a photographer's agent, because from my father I knew a fair bit about photography.

Presenter9:05

Within the advertising industry I'd got to know a lot of photographers and it was something I knew and it was a sort of barren field. No one was doing that. I think in fairness it was a fairly cynical exercise. I mean I did it to earn some money and to keep me going while my eye was on very much on the ball of getting into the the film industry. How were you setting about that? Were you doing treatments? Were you finding stories? I encouraged the friends of mine who I'd worked with in advertising and people I've worked with in my own group to moonlight. So I was in the outside world struggling to earn a living and they wrote in the evenings and Alan Parker, thank goodness was very determined and had his own ideas about coming into the film industry. So Alan in the evenings on his kitchen table wrote a film which was based to an extent on the way in which I had met Patsy and on various experiences in his own childhood and it was just a triangular love story for twelve year old kids. You got the money? Much more bad than my judgment. That's a long story which we'd have to tell. From America. I mean a total flute, Roy, which would keep the audience, I'm afraid, bored for several hours. You have to believe me, it was the most extraordinary piece of luck.

Speaker 49:48

I'm gonna t

Speaker 49:52

Yeah.

David Puttnam10:00

Several hours.

David Puttnam10:03

Well, we've got you on the brink there, so let's break off your third

Presenter10:03

Go ahead.

Presenter10:06

Third record.

Presenter10:07

When I initially was in advertising, I had slightly longer hair than was normal, and I wore slightly odder clothes than were regarded as entirely normal. And this held me back, actually, at one point, until along came the Beatles in nineteen sixty two. And almost overnight, from being an oddity for whom maybe there wasn't room in the advertising industry, I became synonymous with everything that was exciting, vigorous, and forward-looking. And my career did an amazing turnaround. So I owe the Beatles a very great deal. I have immense affection for them. I think they've had a lot to do with my life, just in in terms of sheer pleasure and as in terms of good, solid, creative work.

David Puttnam10:41

So which number do you represent them by?

Presenter10:42

Well, it it could be any of any one of a dozen, but in the end I remember being very uh excited by um All My Loving, so I I I went for that, but it could have been any one of a dozen.

Speaker 410:51

Close your eyes and I'll kiss you. Tomorrow I'll miss you. Remember, I'll always be true.

Speaker 411:03

And then while I'm away, I'll write home every day And I'll send all my love to you

David Puttnam11:16

The Beatles, All My Loving.

Presenter11:18

So

David Puttnam11:18

Yeah.

Presenter11:18

Your first hook

David Puttnam11:19

Boop.

Presenter11:19

Update.

David Puttnam11:19

Evidently. Yeah.

Presenter11:20

The very first film, as I say, was called Melody, written by Alan Parker while he was still at the advertising agency. Who was in it? Mark Lester and Jack Wilde, who'd just had an enormous success in Oliver. A young girl called Tracy Hyde who we found. And a score by a relatively unknown group at that time called the Bee Gees. Um so it was a what's called in the show business world a package. And by combination of enormous amount of luck and a fair bit of determination over a period of two years, we managed to raise a not particularly large sum of money with which to make the film. And um as I say it was based on my own experiences of the pain of being in love aged twelve to fifteen and the fact that that pain is every bit as real as adults pain.

David Puttnam11:36

Here

David Puttnam11:40

Yeah.

Speaker 111:49

Yes.

David Puttnam12:00

Was it reasonably successful? It got its money back.

Presenter12:02

Yes, absolutely. It was enormously critically successful in America and made no money at all. It was critically derided in this country and did modestly well. And is almost to this day the biggest grossing small film that ever hit Japan and the Far East. Oh, God. And it made and exactly the Japanese are obviously people with excellent taste. It made a great deal of money there and certainly kept my partner Sandy Lieberson and I going for several years.

David Puttnam12:14

Oh god.

David Puttnam12:22

You were finding your feet, you were exploring, working hard, you were knocking out about four films a year.

Presenter12:28

And you know, the strike rate wasn't bad. I I'm still very proud of that, I'll be the day. I think the Stardust is a film with many qualities. And for the budget we had and uh the problems we had making it, the first one I worked on with Ken Russell, Marla, I liked very much indeed. You did several with Ken Russell. Yes, uh Marla was the one that uh still stands out as being a a really worthwhile venture.

Speaker 412:33

Yeah.

David Puttnam12:40

I like

David Puttnam12:48

Let's break for your fourth record at this time.

Presenter12:50

Right, well this is very much tied up with the film melody, the very first film, and Patsy and those years th the cusp of just leaving school. I've got an incredible affection for Buddy Holly. I often wonder what he would have been capable of had he lived beyond the age of what, twenty one I think when he died. There are a dozen songs that uh I'm immensely fond of, but this one sums up that particularly uh painful romantic period of my life. It's True Love Ways.

David Puttnam12:50

Right, but this

Speaker 413:13

Sometimes we'll sigh Sometimes we'll cry And we'll know why Just you and I know true love why

David Puttnam13:34

Buddy Holly, true love ways.

David Puttnam13:37

About five years, David, learning the job, experimenting, making all sorts of films. Then a movie that got you a lot of attention.

David Puttnam13:45

A film played entirely by children.

Presenter13:48

Where did you get this idea? I didn't. I mean, it goes right the way back to this extraordinary group of people I worked with in advertising. Literally within the same room and on the same corridor. I had Alan Parker working as a copywriter.

Speaker 414:00

Hmm.

Presenter14:00

As a colleague, Charles Saatchi, who did pretty well after making the decision to stay in advertising, working as another copywriter, we had Ridley Scott briefly was with the agency, and another man called Jeffrey Kirkland, who is now a tremendously famous production designer of films in Hollywood. We all worked cheek by gel. Often I think these stories sound like fabrications when they're told in hindsight, but it was an extraordinary period and we were very lucky we were working at a very vigorous and exciting place and being encouraged by a man called Colin Millward to do good work. You know, his stance were very high. And Alan had decided that he definitely wanted to be a feature film director. He had become a very successful director of television commercials.

Presenter14:34

And we because of our advertising background, we realized that to launch him on the market we needed, as it were, a product.

Presenter14:40

Uh so Bugsy really was conceived as a product. How could we make a glamorous, good-looking musical? I badly wanted to make a musical, I think Alan felt similarly. And Bugsy was conceived as a product.

David Puttnam14:50

Yeah.

Presenter14:50

Uh

David Puttnam14:50

Maximal

Presenter14:51

Baximelan

David Puttnam14:51

Whose story was it?

Presenter14:52

Alan Parkers entirely he would forgive me for saying I'm sure I mean it was not so much a story, it was a theft of about a dozen movies but a genuinely original conception, a wonderful score by uh Paul Williams, who worked with us on it, and uh an entirely joyous experience. An old fashioned American gangster story of the thirties played by twelve year old kid. Well you can imagine the incredulity when I was trying to sell it.

David Puttnam15:16

But it was a great success and it enabled you to stop messing about. You could start serious filmmaking.

Presenter15:22

People started phoning us instead of us phoning them.

David Puttnam15:24

Right. And you may

Presenter15:26

You made an excellent film, The Duelists. That was entirely your project? Yes, well again, what actually happened was we ran Bugsy Malone at Cannes. It was an immense success. And the American financier manager David Picker loved Bugsy Malone and actually said to me as we walked out of the cinema, Hey, this kid Parker's really good. You're going to need more of them. And I said, Well, matter of fact, I have. And I started telling him about Ridley Scott and that I'd been working with Ridley for some while on developing some projects. And by l the following lunchtime, Ridley jumped on a plane, came down, and we made a deal, which eventually became The Duelists, at lunch the day after the um opening night of Bugsy Malone. But uh a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of love went into making the film and I'm to this day immensely proud of it.

David Puttnam16:02

But even with that behind you, things didn't get all that easy. You had to go to the United States next to

Presenter16:09

Yes, because all of that period of my career was being funded entirely by the courtesy obviously, the National Westminster Bank.

Presenter16:15

And there was a point that quite clearly this couldn't go on.

Presenter16:18

I sat down one day and worked out. I think with their help that if I worked jolly hard for the rest of my life I could just about pay the interest on my overdraft. So uh with a little genuine, benign encouragement from them, the family and I went off to the United States for two years, signed a contract with an American company. You made a movie called Midnight Express. Yes, that was an immense piece of of luck.

Presenter16:36

I was approached with the book by the man who owned the rights of Michael Peter Cooper, and at the same time someone else had approached Alan Parker from Columbia Pictures with the book. And we managed to play a terrific game, which is, you know, I'd do it if he would, and he said he'd do it if I would, and we sort of bid ourselves up that way. And so I literally, within days of arriving in the United States, I was off to Malta with Alan and Alan Marshall, our colleague, to make Midnight Express. The story was said in Turkey, but Turkey. There was nowhere in the world that we were going to shoot within a million miles of Turkey. So Malta had to do. Did the movie do well? Tremendously well. It was our first absolutely solid worldwide commercial success. And I think probably was the basis, certainly the basis of me being able to raise the money for Charites of Fire Later.

David Puttnam16:59

Historically.

David Puttnam17:01

But

David Puttnam17:17

You had no desire to set up in in Hollywood.

Presenter17:19

No, none at all. I liked it enormously. I think it was a very good period of my life. I learnt a great deal. We signed on for two years and I left on the dot.

David Puttnam17:26

And it was while you were in Hollywood that you discovered the idea for Chariot Sophia.

Presenter17:26

And it was

Presenter17:30

Yes. We're living in a rented house and I was ill and um

Presenter17:35

I hunted around this house for something to read, and the man was a yachting fanatic. Every single book was something to do with yachting, and I know nothing at all about yachting. And I found the official history of the Olympic Games in the library and started to read it. And I was so ill I got to 1924. And I read about this extraordinary incident, Verit Little refusing to run in the 100 metres. And I xeroxed the page, had discussions before that with Colin Welland about working together, I liked Colin's writing, sent it to London. The Amateur Athletic Association were very good to us and loaned us all of their scrapbooks of the period. And armed with those, an advertisement which Colin placed in the Times, which brought us some letters from people who had run in those particular games and had memories of the games, we cobbled together an original screenplay.

David Puttnam18:16

This basic thing about Eddick Little, he was a very religious man, and he would not run a heat.

Presenter18:21

He wouldn't run the heats of the Olympic Games on the Sunday. We took a little romantic license with it. He in fact knew several months before the Games that uh this was going to happen and arranged to run in the two hundred meters. Within the context of our film, because you require drama, we had him discover only as he was boarding the boat. We compressed time, that was all. We'll talk more about.

David Puttnam18:21

Wouldn't

David Puttnam18:27

Yeah.

David Puttnam18:39

Chariots are fire in a minute. Let's have record number five.

Presenter18:42

Right. What comes back to um Alan Parker, Bugsy Malone, desperate desire to make a musical. Where did that come from? I think what happened was the very first movie I ever went to was uh Pinocchio.

Presenter18:53

And I just remember, I think I was age seven, maybe eight, sitting down and falling in love with cinema, falling in love with the entire experience. And I think I n I've never fallen out of love with cinema from that very moment. And the song that opens Pinocchio is When You Wish Upon a Star, which to me wonderfully sums up my job as I see it, the world in which I'm allowed to live a lot of my life. And I also happen to think it's one of the prettiest songs ever written, and uh this version of it always brings a tear to my heart.

Speaker 419:19

Like a boat out of the blue

Speaker 419:24

Faith steps in and sees you through

Speaker 419:32

What you

Speaker 419:35

A star.

Speaker 419:39

You're doing

David Puttnam19:50

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR FROM PINOCHIO, SUNG BY CLIFE EDWARDS. So Chariots of Fire about a Jewish athlete with a bit of an inferiority thing and this muscular Christian with very religious ideas that may seem a bit bigoted.

David Puttnam20:06

A new director, you like using you

Presenter20:09

Yes, partly because I believe in

Presenter20:13

Talented people being given opportunities and if they have the energy and and a little bit of luck being able to take advantage of them. Also, the pressure on a director, once he's got any kind of a reputation, is to be to a greater or lesser extent an auteur, to run his own show. And I can well understand that a director at a certain point in his career wouldn't want old Putnam either interfering or or getting in the way. Directors earlier in their careers seem more prepared to accept a partnership, the notion of a partnership making a film. And I've been lucky in that respect, and because I do develop my own material or my own projects for the most part, I

Speaker 120:37

Uh

Presenter20:43

want that kind of vote. I'm not asking for control, but I do want a vote. No stars. No, I don't feel that they're relevant to the type of work that I'm interested in pursuing.

David Puttnam20:52

Yeah.

Presenter20:52

Uh

David Puttnam20:52

As these things

Presenter20:53

Was it an expensive picture? It cost six million dollars, which in American terms is a kind of median to modest price. Uh in terms of value for money I think it was pretty remarkable. What was your first intimation that you had a real winner?

Presenter21:04

I think we all loved the film when we finished it and uh I do remember one of the very very early rough cut screenings turning round and seeing some pretty hard bitten chaps crying and I thought well that can't be all bad. I mean we've obviously got through to some people I didn't really necessarily expect to get through to. Then I think for a long period, even after the release of the film we thought we had a kind of success to steam and maybe the film would make its money back and and be rather respectable. It then broke out in a most extraordinary way. You see even after we opened at the Odeon Haymarket the third week suddenly the film exploded. The first two weeks was very iffy. I mean I remember really biting my nails. Likewise in America we opened very honourably. But it was uh three, four, five weeks into its run that suddenly it gathered momentum. Now that actually is a tremendously good sign. It means what you're getting is referral business. It means it's a it's a word of mouth movie. And we have a expression of films whether or not a film has legs. The idea of a film running with legs I suppose has a certain uh has a certain symbolic importance. But the film just ran and ran and ran, the film itself. I don't think anyone I don't know I've never met anyone and I have to include myself that thought that the film would be one quarter as successful as it r as it uh eventually.

Speaker 121:52

Yes.

David Puttnam22:10

How many askers did it get?

Presenter22:11

Uh we ended up with I think I've conveniently forgotten four I think. Four. Record number six. Record number six. I do believe that the most c civilizing human being that's ever inhabited this planet, probably, was Mozart. He's brought me more pleasure, more peace and contentment than than anybody else. I arbitrarily, in the end, decided on the uh clarinet concerto. I think it's very beautiful. And uh the clarinet's an instrument I'm very fond of. And uh

Presenter22:39

I could listen to it uh over and over, which I suppose is the final criteria.

David Puttnam23:44

Part of the second movement of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Jack Brimer as soloist.

David Puttnam23:54

So you had this enormous success with Chariot Sofar. You had already lined up your next movie, so this made no difference to what was to follow.

Presenter24:03

No, and I think that was an immense piece of luck. I'd been working for, I think at that point, two years with Bill Forsyth on Local Hero, or what came to be Local Hero. We had failed to raise the money for it, and in fact, it's it sounds a bit of r romanticism, but it's true. We had half the money from my colleagues at Goldcrest. And when that evening, there was an evening of the British Academy Award, Bill won the Best Screenplay Award for Gregory's Girl, and I went up and got the Best Picture Award for Chariots of Fire, on my way back to the table. I was stopped at the Goldcrest table, and they very sweetly said, Look, enough messing around, you get on with making the film and we'll fund it, and we'll worry about what happens afterwards. It was a man called James Lee, another man called Jake Evats. Happily, it worked out for them, worked out for us. So I found myself within days, literally days of winning the Academy Award, in a field in Scotland, trying to persuade a farmer to move his sheep ten yards to the left. And I think that was a sufficiently humbling experience and brought me right back down to earth quickly.

David Puttnam24:56

Well, since then what? The killing fields.

Presenter24:58

That's a new one. Well, Killingfields is brand new. I've been working on it since October 1979, when I originally bid on the rights to a story I found in a magazine. Two years working on the screenplay with a writer called Bruce Robinson, and then a further two years making the film with a marvellous director, Roland Joffey. At the end of it, we've got a film that I'm incredibly proud of. I mean, it's hard for me to talk about the picture, because I'm sort of bursting with pride. I think it's a remarkable film. It's the first time I've had the opportunity to do a film with a kind of symphonic structure and an operatic scale. I don't just mean in money, I mean actually in emotional terms. I'm pleased as punch and fit to burst. It's a big one. It's a big one.

David Puttnam24:58

That's a new one.

Speaker 125:16

We've

David Puttnam25:37

and Cal, which I've seen an excellent new film about present day Northern Ireland. The film struck me as being very well balanced.

Presenter25:45

I think it is. To an extent, it's a plague on both your houses. It's also Romeo and Juliet. It's the tragedy of people caught up in an impossible situation. But I feel strongly that the film's morality is correct, that its politics are correct, and I hope very much that people will go and see it. Not just in commercial terms, because I think it's a moving picture and and helps to understand the depth of the problem and the impact of the problem on ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives.

Speaker 125:53

Yeah.

Speaker 425:53

Hmm.

Speaker 125:53

Uh

David Puttnam26:08

Now a producer has to pull all the strings and pull the whole thing together. And above all, he has to raise the money. Now most of us at one time or another have to get some money together to buy a house, to open a shop, to to do whatever, and we need a few thousand pounds. Now you need a few million.

Presenter26:24

Yeah.

David Puttnam26:24

Uh

Presenter26:24

Mm-hmm.

David Puttnam26:24

How do you set about that?

Presenter26:26

There is no one way. I mean I think all you can do is use your own basic instincts and character as your kind of reference point. I think it's silly for an abullion person to try and raise money in a doer manner and ridiculous for a doer person to try and raise money in an abullient manner. So I think first of all you start off with who are you? What are your most uh saleable characteristics and work to those. Also coming out of advertising, it was the most extraordinary piece of luck that I drifted into advertising instead of into the film industry. Because the great thing about advertising and being a young man in advertising, you do learn reality.

Presenter26:53

We do learn that really there's not a lot of point in sitting looking out of the window wishing.

Presenter26:58

and that it's really about getting out on the street and and doing it.

Presenter27:01

And I've always tried to tailor

Presenter27:02

my dreams to some notion of someone else's reality. And as I see it, I have to offer a film that appears in some way, shape or form to be a bargain, either creative bargain or a financial bargain.

Speaker 427:12

Hmm.

Presenter27:12

And, um, I happen to enjoy that. A lot of people, I suppose, despise it or hate it. Sometimes it's emotionally uh

Presenter27:20

Hurtful. I mean, you know, there's a lot of rejection. But every writer's adjusted to that. But the wheeling and dealing you enjoy. In a way, I don't begrudge it. I accept that it's part and parcel of the job. And Lord knows I'm incredibly well rewarded in terms of the end product. I mean, I get to do a job which most people would wish to do as a hobby. And if the price I have to pay is some wheeling and some dealing and some pain and disappointment, it seems to me a very fair price to pay. Record number seven. I feel very British. I believe I'm part of a, I like to think anyway, I'm part of an ongoing British cultural heritage. For me, the most significant and important piece of work done in this century by anyone in this country is Elgar's Cello Concerto. I think it's a legitimate masterpiece. I think it will live forever. And I think it would be difficult for me to think of a painting or a film for that matter or any other piece of work which will live and have as many resonances as this particular piece of music. And I I adore it.

Speaker 127:22

Yeah.

Speaker 127:36

And it's

Speaker 428:16

Uh

David Puttnam29:11

Part of the first movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto.

David Puttnam29:15

Jacqueline Dupre.

David Puttnam29:16

How would you look after yourself on this desert island? Are are you a practical man? Could you build

Presenter29:22

Yeah.

David Puttnam29:22

Blah.

Presenter29:22

With difficulty, yes. I'm not a a a very practical man, but I am a resourceful person and I'm a very determined person, and I'm sure at the end having had several failures, I mean it'll fall down a great number of times, but eventually with some string string skills.

David Puttnam29:33

What are you going to be? Done any fishing?

Presenter29:35

No, I'd like to fish. I live on a river in the country. I'm very lucky. And my son is an excellent fisherman, and probably too good, because he makes me feel inadequate, and that's why I'm never prepared to fish anywhere near him.

David Puttnam29:43

Try to escape.

Presenter29:45

Yes, I would miss human beings. I like them a lot. Record number eight.

David Puttnam29:49

Your last

Presenter29:50

I feel that one of the most significant factors uh of living on this desert island is that I'll have a fifty fifty chance probably of watching a red glow in the sky and knowing that the world has finally gone potty and blown itself up, which will give me sort of fifteen or twenty minutes to consider how we've reached that point and how very very very stupid we are. I'd like a piece of music to play the world out and probably I'd be playing myself out as well. And I love most of the Mullah Symphonies, not all. I'm particularly fond of the Ninth Symphony, and I think the conclusion of the Ninth Symphony is the most eloquent way in which the world could end.

David Puttnam31:25

The closing passage of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

David Puttnam31:31

If you could take only one disk of your eight, David, which would it be?

Presenter31:35

Well, it's the question I've been avoiding asking myself until this second, because I thought it probably should be a snap decision. On balance, probably the very first one we played, the Beethoven violin concerto, because I think it's sort of perfect. It's got everything, it's got several different moods. And if I had to resort to one disc, I guess that's the one I could play the most often.

David Puttnam31:50

And you're allowed to take one luxury to the island, one object of no practical use whatever.

Presenter31:55

Right. It's very simple. It took me a long time to work it out, but it's very simple. I figure I'd spend a lot of time sleeping. I like to sleep comfortably. I would take a magnificent goose-down pillow.

David Puttnam32:03

Right.

Presenter32:04

A new album

David Puttnam32:04

A mattress as well, why not? And one book. You already have the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter32:11

I was worrying terribly about getting bored or ha feeling I've read the same novel six or seven times over, so I opted in the end for a fairly new set of books, in fact, The Wisden Anthology of Cricket, edited by Benny Greene. It's in four volumes and I think it would keep me going for a long time. Lot of statistics and all that. A lot of statistics, and I figured if I did get rescued and the world didn't blow itself up, I could always come back and and be Leslie Welsh the memory man.

David Puttnam32:32

Right. And thank you, David Putnam, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Pleasure for having me. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 132:45

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.