‘Films should feel like dreaming’

Roger Lewis enjoys a pithy memoir by John Boorman, eccentric director of Point Blank and Deliverance

YCONCLUSIONS by John Boorman 256pp, Faber, £20, ebook £15.59

ears ago, I talked with John Boorman about adapting my Anthony Burgess biography for the screen. The story of Manchester schoolmaster John Wilson, voyaging from a soggy, monochrome, post-war England to reinvent himself in the colour and light of the Malayan jungle, becoming the novelist who went on to write A Clockwork Orange: it would have been an ideal project for this great director, who is the cinematic poet of emerald forests, rivers, rain, moss and dripping leaves. Alas, it was not to be.

As Boorman, who is now 87, says without rancour in this fine volume of reminiscences, “I have spent more time on films I have not made than on the ones I have.” While we were never to see his version of Rocky (“I found it ridiculously sentimental”) or The Lord of the Rings (“the costs frightened United Artists away”), let alone his update of the

Orpheus legend, at least we can relish the films he did make: Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur and Hope and Glory.

After the generation of film directors headed by Carol Reed, Michael Powell and David Lean, the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell and Boorman, who pushed cinema away from documentary realism, preferring fantasy, hallucination. Films, says Boorman, should be “closer to dreaming than waking” and in his best work he can create a haunting, trance-like mood, where the securities of civilisation slip away – as in Hell in the Pacific, with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, warriors duelling alone on a desert island (“Impossible direct Mifune. Only point him, like a missile,” advised the director Akira Kurosawa); or the feral Deep South in Deliverance; or the mythical Camelot in Excalibur; and so forth.

In these autumnal recollections, Boorman flashes back to the beginning of his career, putting coins in the gas meter and going to interview studio technicians for the radio – the gaffers, best-boys, focus-pullers and clapper-loaders. He eagerly watched classic films at the National Film Theatre, and “I got a job as a trainee assistant film editor at the newly-established television company, ITN.” Within a year he was a fully-fledged editor, before branching out as a director. “What a revolution it was, conjuring our stories and dreams on to celluloid and projecting them on a screen.”

It all sounds enviably easy back then, getting remunerative work. (Today there is a plethora of film schools, to whom Boorman gives talks, churning out a glut of would-be Fellinis, all of them ending up, somewhat defeated, taking wedding photographs.) Having made the feature Catch Us If You Can in the West Country in 1965, with pop group the Dave Clark Five, Boorman found himself in Hollywood and was offered the script of Point Blank. “I decided to shoot each scene highlighting a single colour, moving through the spectrum from greys and blues up to the final scene in dark red. This unity gave power to the scenes.

Too many colours drench the retina and dissipate the impact.”

Boorman must have been careful not to mention this abstract and ingenious idea out loud to any actual producer. Discussing the “stresses and struggles” of working in America, he has the usual horror stories about philistine moguls, who flinch from and weed out originality, and “whose fear of failure is much greater than their desire for success”.

Nevertheless, despite half a century of coping with casts who lack chemistry, mutinous crews, truculent cameramen, unpredictable weather and escalating (or disappearing) budgets, Boorman has loved the cinema with a passion.

He retains particular affection and respect for larger-than-life tough guys, like Marvin, who climbed on car roofs and refused to budge, not even when racing along

A traffic cop asked: ‘Sir, are you aware you have Lee Marvin on the luggage rack?’

SCIENCE AND THE GOOD by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky 312pp, Yale, £14.99

This study of the long, chequered history of science’s unsuccessful attempts to calibrate a moral compass is a closely argued, always accessible riposte to those who think scientific study can explain, improve or even supersede morality.