Boorman by name

John Boorman: driven from his days as a young director

5 April 2012

One night film star Lee Marvin went to dinner at a beachside restaurant overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica. Among those with him was the English director of two of Marvin's movies, John Boorman.

For some reason Boorman said something to upset Marvin, and by the time they left the restaurant Marvin was hopelessly drunk and in a violent mood. So rather than risk a drunk driving the party the few miles up the coast to Marvin's Malibu home, Boorman snatched the car keys and sat in the driving seat.

Marvin's response was to climb on to the roof of the car. Reasoning that the night air would soon sober Marvin up, Boorman eventually began to drive slowly back along the Pacific Coast Highway, with the film star still straddled on the top.

Sure enough he was quickly spotted, and, with a howl of sirens and flashing lights, a police patrol ordered them to stop. 'Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?' said the patrolman.

Most autobiographies about film making are stuffed with such stories of the surreal, the insane and the excess of Hollywood, but this is one of only a few funny incidents recounted by Boorman, whose experiences seem to have embittered rather than amused him.

But then, reading between the lines, it does seem that Boorman, a man of no little ambition, went looking for aggravation from the day he went into the film industry.

If he did he'd probably blame it on his upbringing during and after the war in Carshalton on the London outskirts.

Rather sadly, he was always embarrassed by his semi-detached origins, and he seems to have taken a long time to realise that those who mocked the semi, people such as John Betjeman, were just jumped-up little snobs.

Sometimes, however, and especially in the British film industry, a chip on a shoulder can do wonders for a career, and after leaving school with modest qualifications he forged a path to Hollywood by way of television.

His first movie was merry Sixties tripe for the Dave Clark Five, Catch Us If You Can. He wasn't very proud of it, seeing himself as something of an intellectual, and he had little time for Dave Clark, but it led to Point Blank, his first Hollywood film and his first with Marvin, then at the height of his fame.

From then on his course was set. Seeming almost to prefer metaphor over story he embarked upon a series of difficult-togetfunded movies.

There was Hell In The Pacific, in Japanese and English, during which he discovered his Japanese-star Toshiro Mifune (who spoke no English) was working from a different script from Marvin; a portentous sci-fi piece called Zardoz with Sean Connery; and the critically slaughtered Exorcist II: The Heretic with Richard Burton.

Much more successful was Deliverance in which he hoped to star Marlon Brando, who told him that Michael Winner was the director with whom he'd most enjoyed working.

Naturally astonished to hear this, Boorman asked how that could be, to which Brando explained that when they met Winner said to him: 'Mr Brando, you are a great actor. I am not a great director. So please do whatever you like.' Such a modest guy, that Michael Winner.

In the end Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight appeared in Deliverance which reignited both of their careers.

There was success, too, with Boorman's Arthurian legend film Excalibur, the anthropological Emerald Forest and his autobiographical Hope And Glory.

Rather unsportingly, however, he seems to suggest he was robbed of some Oscars for Hope And Glory after there'd been a change of management at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood and the incoming team didn't promote it well enough. Who knows?

Obviously he's had success, but equally obviously he seems to feel he's deserved more, complaining that he and all directors fritter away their lives on films they fail to make.

This is obviously true. But then, with some of the subjects he's thought would make successful movies, he's never exactly made it easy for himself.

Which is why Hope And Glory, always seems the most atypical of his work.

Telling the story of the British at war and touching on his mother's affair with his father's best friend, something of which he had been subconsciously aware of through his childhood, it was virtually a return to the domestic TV dimensions with which he started his career.

This is an interesting book about a talented man who has gone his own way. But it is not a happy book. And one can understand the frustration when, after years of trying and failing to make Lord Of The Rings it was finally made in New Zealand by a different director with such outstanding success.

For some reason Boorman ends his autobiography in the late Eighties, as though he had become exhausted with the task of telling his own story, so four of his more recent films are not even discussed.

While his marriage to Christel, who was loyally bringing up their children as his ambition lead him around the world, is quietly dissolved without much explanation.

For movie buffs Adventures Of A Suburban Boy provides a useful commentary on most of Boorman's work, how and why his films came to be made, and made in the way they were.

But, along the way, he doesn't half whinge a lot.

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