Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A film director who learned his craft at the BBC, achieving fame with Point Blank and later films including Deliverance and Hope and Glory.
On the island
Eight records
...it somehow expresses their sort of verve and joy and the kind of giddy gracefulness of those wonderful ladies who are my mother and my aunts.
...it fascinates me that every day, for hundreds of years, the choir sings these songs of praise, and this music bounces against those stone walls, and somehow expresses for me the spiritual and the material, the stone... and the music colliding, the mystery of life is inherent in that somehow.
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92: II. AllegrettoFavourite
It represents for me the sadness that all things pass and... Whether it's an intimation of the beauty that is to come in the next life, or whether it is the sadness of what we of the beauty we leave behind, I don't know.
Ástor Piazzolla and the New Tango Quintet
So I want to have one of his pieces, a tango, and I want to dance alone on the beach... Proving that it doesn't necessarily take two to tango.
...it is, I think, one of the most spiritual pieces of music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:08Had you nursed the idea of making Hope and Glory for years? Was it one of those very personal projects that you couldn't do until you were established?
Yes, I always wanted to do it and finally I thought that the time had come, you know, to...
Presenter asks
5:47You really were fairly surrounded by women as a little boy. Did you enjoy that, or did you feel oppressed by all that femaleness?
I always felt very comfortable in the presence of women. In fact, I suppose perhaps what happened when I grew older was that I became uncomfortable with men I mean, with men alone. You know, when I was in the army and at school ... in the absence of women always felt I felt disturbing.
Presenter asks
8:47Despite the fact that you were evacuated to grandparents in Shepperton, you didn't go to work in the film studios there when you left school. Why not? Wouldn't they have you?
Well, I wanted to and my best friend and I, we both wanted to be Clapper Boys, you know, because going to the movies was what we most liked doing and and there were people around there who were working at the studios. So that's what we thought we'd try and do. So we both applied ... And he got a job as a cup of boy and they turned me down.
The keepsakes
The book
C. G. Jung
It deals with a great deal with his theory of the unconscious and about dreaming. And it seemed to me that if you're going to live on a desert island, you should develop your dream life because you can have a vivid dream life full of richness and masses of people, and you can meet up with all sorts of situations. And We tend to, I think, underrate and undervalue dreaming, and I'd become very interested in the notion of recovering one's dreams and re recalling them, so I would that's what I'd do, and he would help me.
The luxury
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
18:32You've been quoted as saying that film making is the process of inventing impossible challenges for oneself and failing to solve them. What exactly do you mean by that?
When we write a script and devise a film, we are just setting ourselves these problems. I mean, they are ... enormous uh if you're making a a big picture in difficult circumstances with ... Whatever it may be. We're always at our wits' end ... struggling with uh not quite enough money and uh always trying to stretch it and get more out of it and ... We complain. But of course these are problems are s uh are self-induced wounds, if you like, because uh we invent these very problems and and and we make them so difficult for ourselves that we can't solve them.
Presenter asks
24:32Your own work has been very much a family affair over the years. But now that you, after thirty five years of marriage to one woman, have begun a new domestic existence with a new partner and a brand new baby daughter, these are huge changes as you enter your seventh decade. Are you finding happiness?
I'm facing them with fortitude ... courage and conviction. ... Yes, I mean, as far as we we can, you know. ... If that's what we're looking for. ... I've never looked for it, but um I I am finding some. It's a byproduct of other things.
Presenter asks
30:50You have one pet project, don't you, John Boorman, which you rewrite every now and then, but which so far you haven't found a backer for. It's called Broken Dream. How important is it to you that it should be made?
It's a matter of minor importance to the world at large. It does mean quite a lot to me.
“And she said, Well, it's it's quite good as far as it goes she said, But I personally I prefer a good thriller.”
“David Lean said to me when he was dying, he said, I I hope I'll get over this ... Cancer and I want to make thi I wanna make this film 'cause I I feel I'm ... and he was now over eighty. He said, I feel I'm just beginning to get the hang of it.”
“The trouble is, I'm even more unhappy not making movies than I am making them.”
“I walked out on Pretty Woman, for instance. ... I felt great when I came out of it, you know. I I felt terrible while I was in there watching it.”
“They don't want my bag of tricks. I feel like Merlin, an old wizard who finds himself in a materialistic world where there's no place for magic. Yes, I must have been quite depressed when I wrote that.”
“...if you're going to live on a desert island, you should develop your dream life because you can have a vivid dream life full of richness and masses of people, and you can meet up with all sorts of situations.”