John Boorman

John Boorman.

John Boorman was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 11 September 2003. His interviewer was John Hurt; the actor took the lead role in Two Nudes Bathing, the acclaimed comedy short that screened before this interview.

John Boorman is one of Britain's most distinguished film-makers, responsible for classics like Deliverance and, more recently, The General. To coincide with the publication of his memoirs, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, the bfi was very pleased to welcome John back to the NFT to discuss his life and career.

Interview © BFI 2003

This is the way to make movies!

Geoff Andrew: Hello, I'm Geoff Andrew, programmer of the NFT. I'd like to welcome you to what I think will be a very special evening. We've had some very interesting film-makers here recently. Last week we had Victor Erice, who I always think of as a visionary film-maker. We don't necessarily have that many visionary film-makers in Britain but I think John Boorman would be included in that small list, so we are particularly pleased to welcome him here this evening. First, we are going to show a film, Two Nudes Bathing [US, 1995]. Then, we are delighted to have John Hurt as the interviewer. We wanted him to do it for a variety of reasons which will become apparent during the interview, I'm sure. Thank you, John, for agreeing to do this. Before we start with Two Nudes Bathing I'd like to welcome John Boorman to say a few words about the film.

John Boorman: Thank you. This little film is only half an hour long. I made it for Showtime, the cable network in America. I was asked, along with several other directors, to make a film about a painting and I chose this painting. It's a painting that hangs in the Louvre and it's very well known - two girls in a bathtub and one girl is holding the nipples of the other. I'm sure you've all seen it. It's anonymous. Nobody knows who painted it, what the history of it is and why they were in this extraordinary pose. We just know that it's the school of Fontainebleu. So I wrote a script explaining how this picture came about. I just completely invented it. Shortly before I shot it - and John Hurt is in the film, as you'll see - I got cold feet, so I sent it off to the expert on the school of Fontainebleu at the Louvre. I said, 'Look, I've invented this [story of the painting]. Is there any more information that you know about it that would make nonsense of what I've written?' He wrote back and said, 'Nobody knows anything about this painting and your script is as good an explanation as any other I've seen.' That's the film. I hope you enjoy it.

[screening of Two Nudes Bathing. John Boorman and John Hurt to stage]

JB: Yes, we had some fun there. But this happens in life also, doesn't it, John? We connect, don't we?

John Hurt: Yes, yes.

JB: Neither of us is complete on our own but together we somehow make up a total human being.

JH: I was very interested when you said that I was conducting the interview this evening. I thought, we'll have to have some fun with that notion because I've never done an interview before, and the last person I would want to do it with is my friend - as an interview, but a chat is fine.

JB: And he didn't have time to read my book, which is what we're supposed to be talking about...

JH: ... and the reason for that is because the BBC has decided to cut off its nose to spite its face and do a three-hour long piece on Alan Clarke in four weeks.

JB: And you're playing Alan Clarke.

JH: And I'm playing Alan Clarke. I'm doing my best. I don't know who is playing anybody else in it yet, and we start shooting next week. I don't know the schedule, what to learn, what not to learn. It's a little bit near the wire, even for me.

JB: Well, when we made Two Nudes Bathing, John was going through a difficult period at the time. I sent John the script but he didn't respond. I eventually called him up and said, 'John, do you want to do this or what?' and he said, 'Well, it's a bit embarrassing because I lost the script.' I said, 'Well, we start next week!' It was the same situation as he's in now. So he said, 'Look, of course I'll do it, don't worry.' So I sent him another script and his ticket, as he had to go to Paris and get a train from the Gare du Nord up to...

JH: ... Oh, don't ask me. I made it at the time...

JB: ... to Anjur. At the last moment he'd left his passport at Gareth Brown's house, so he rushed off to get the passport and left the script behind. He was planning to read the script and learn it on the plane and train, but obviously he couldn't, so he decided to drink instead. So when he arrived I went to meet him at the train station. Somehow he'd managed to get on the right train. He'd gone to the airport and bought himself another ticket because he'd left his ticket behind, and he'd managed to get there and he got on the right train and he arrived...

JH: Don't let fantasy get the best of you, John. There wasn't any problem getting on the train whatsoever, even the right one.

JB: He must have told the people in his compartment where he was heading, but he fell asleep. The train came in, people got out, people got on, and as the train started to pull out, the door was flung open and this creature fell onto the platform. Some nice people threw his case out after him.

We got back to the Chateau where we were shooting and staying, and we started shooting the following morning. John came down the following morning and, at this point, he hadn't read the script and didn't know the name of the person he was playing - worse off than with Alan Clarke.

JH: I knew he was called 'le comte'...

JB: yes, 'le comte'... So he said to me, 'John, what do I have to say in the first shot?' I said, 'Well, these two lines,' so we shot that one. Seamus Deasy - who is over there [in the audience] - was the cameraman. We then got onto the next shot and it was three or four more lines and we went on like this. At the end of the morning John said, 'This is the way to make movies! All this bullshit of rehearsals... '

JH: Oh true, true.

JB: He shot for three days, then he went back. I don't think he even remembered having been there. And some months later he was awarded the Best Dramatic Actor prize in the Cable Ace Awards and went off and collected it! He's absolutely brilliant to work with. He took all my awful lines and made them sound good.

JH: They're not awful lines but, anyway, one of the major reasons we're here is because [of the publication of Adventures of a Suburban Boy]. I know for a fact that John has been writing this book for some years. It's a brilliantly put-together piece of John's memoirs and I think you are going to read a piece, aren't you?

JB: Yes, I'm going to read a piece.

JH: That's the extent of my interview.

Everythin' in that book happened to me!

JB: This is a bit about Deliverance. The novel on which the film is based is written by the poet James Dickey, who is a very extraordinary man. I went to Columbus, Georgia to see him where he lived, and I had Charles Orme, my production manager, with me. We went in and we talked and we drank quite a lot. He [Dickey] took me aside and said to me, 'Ah'm gonna tell ya somethin' I never told a living soul... ' - the accent's not that good, but anyway -

JH: Depends where he comes from...

JB: He said, 'Everythin' in that book happened to me!' I thought, my god, he was sodomised, he killed someone and concealed the body. I was shattered. So he made me promise not to tell a living soul. As we left the house I couldn't wait to tell someone so I said to Charles Orme, 'Charles, you've no idea what Dickey told me' and he said, 'Yes, he told me the same thing.'

So anyway, we started rehearsals in this country club, up in the hills in the Appalachians.

Reads extract from Adventures of a Suburban Boy

"Dickey arrived at the Country Club in a spanking new powder blue Toyota jeep with Maxines 1 and 2 (that was his wife and his mother-in-law, they are both called Maxine) and a sensitive son. Dickey found the bar, claimed it and draped himself across it. I asked him to sit in at a reading of the script. Those fierce eyes burned holes in the actors. It was very tense. They squirmed and sweated and kept their eyes down on the text.

That night in the bar he called them to him one by one. 'Drew, come here, boy.' 'Bobby, get your ass over here.' He got each of them to swear an oath that they would never tell a soul that everything in that book ... etc.

Burt was seething, waiting for his call. 'Lewis, I want to talk to you.' Burt ignored him. He was summoned again. Dickey waited, then drew himself up and went over to Burt. He leaned over him. 'Lewis, didn't you hear me calling?'

'My name's Burt. I answer to Lewis when I'm playing him.' Dickey smiled approvingly. 'That's good. That's Lewis talking. Don't mess with Lewis. No one - and I include Brando, we could have had him, you know - no one could play him better than you. You are Lewis.'

I began rehearsals. Dickey sat in. The actors were intimidated. We talked about the text, the scenes, the characterisations. It was awkward. No one would commit, take a risk. I took Dickey aside. I said the actors needed to explore their roles and his presence was inhibiting them. I invited him to come in at the end of each day and we would review progress with him. The rehearsals progressed. We would see Dickey through the window pacing outside, waiting for the appointed hour. He would burst in with a statement. 'Do any of you know, really know, how good this is? It's better than good!' or 'Ed, I'm going to tell you something important. When Lewis breaks his leg, you have to become Lewis. Become him.' His tone was emphatic. He heavily italicised key words. In his letters too. How did that lean prose, that incisive poetry come out of this shambling, bombastic, hyperbolic man? He fascinated me, his knowingness, the theatricality, those eyes, the voice, the accent. I decided to cast him as the Sheriff, a man with a weary knowledge of the depths of the human soul. He was delighted and it gave him a function, a connection.

Despite this arrangement, the situation deteriorated as the first day of shooting came closer. Dickey plagued the cast and crew in the evenings. Burt was ready to explode and he was also getting impatient with Voight. Jon wanted to analyse every scene, every gesture, every nuance. He had lost his acting nerve and by examining all possibilities it delayed the need to make choices, to commit. His first approach to a scene was always brilliant, astonishing. Because it came easily, he didn't trust it. He would worry it to death and my task was to coax him back to his original response, but the high intelligence he brought to his probing was always valuable. Burt hated rehearsals. His approach was to look for a trick, a bit of business to get him through each scene. When Jon and I pressed him to examine his emotions, he became uncomfortable and hostile. Or funny. He could deflect anything serious with his wit. Burt and Jon were a good match. As Jon forced Burt to think a little deeper, so Burt pushed Jon into being more spontaneous. Burt continued to focus his insecurities on to Dickey's looming presence. He and Ned Beatty urged me to send him away. Ronnie Cox had fallen under Jim's spell and was against him leaving. Jon could see both sides. It exactly reflected the attitude of their characters in the ethical debate following the killing of the mountain man, as to whether they should go to the police or cover up the crime. To complete the analogy, Jim was beginning to behave like the mountain man, getting ever drunker and more objectionable. I had to do something. I told the actors I would talk to Dickey. I left the rehearsal room and went to the bar where Jim was having his pre-lunch drink. The barman took me aside and whispered urgently, 'I think you should know what Mr Dickey just told me.' 'It all happened to him?' I said. He looked startled, then a sheepish grin. Of course, he should have known.

I told Jim we were all inhibited by his presence. It was going to be a tough shoot. I needed a high level of concentration from everyone. He had to trust me to do justice to his book, but I needed to be left alone.

'I want you to leave, Jim. Go home and come back to play the Sheriff.'

'If I go, I ain't coming back,' he said. 'Get yourself another boy.'

I insisted that he play the Sheriff. I knew his heart was set on it.

'By then they'll all be into their roles and more secure,' I said.

He drew himself up. There was a dangerous look in his eye. I thought he was going to hit me.

'You're just an opportunistic Englishman.' It felt like a written, rather than a spoken line, and I guessed he had put it in a letter to someone. A long pause, then, 'If I'm leaving, I want to say goodbye to the boys.'

We walked in silence to the rehearsal room. The actors looked up anxiously as we entered. Jim glared down at them.

'It appears,' he italicised, 'that my presence would be most efficacious by its absence.' He let that sink in for a long moment, turned on his heel and left. Burt looked perplexed. 'Does that mean he's going or staying?' You could never be sure with Burt whether he was being dumb or acting dumb. His deprecation of self finely balanced his macho posturing. On the last day of shooting Burt said, 'I was in this movie under false pretences.'

'Why do you say that?'

'I can't act. I was just faking it.' "

[End of extract]

JH: Great, John.

JB: Over to you.

Somebody passed me a note in Greek...

JH: What am I going to do? I haven't got anything to read. I'll have to sight-read it. No, that's terrific, John. The bits that I've read - and I haven't got that far - are marvellous as well. Now, really, there ought to be something to be said if I'm going to interview you. I know that you've been making a film in South Africa. Would you like to talk about that?

JB: Well, I've been making this film based upon a book called Country of my Skull by the Afrikaaner poetess Antjie Krog. She covered the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that were set up by Mandela at the end of Apartheid to try to heal the wounds. Juliette Binoche plays the character of this Afrikaaner woman poet and Samuel Jackson plays a Washington Post journalist who goes over to cover the hearings. Their relationship echoes what is going on inside the hearings. I'm editing it at the moment.

JH: And is it in a state of near-completion?

JB: It's getting closer, yes.

JH: It's the sort of thing interviewers say, isn't it? It doesn't mean anything at all. 'It's in a state of near-completion, yes, yes... '

JB: Shall we ask them [i.e. the audience for questions]?

JH: Yes, let's open the house to questions. That's easier.

Geoff Andrew: I'll get things rolling. Two Nudes Bathing. Is the painter the director, the father the producer and the two girls the cast?

(Pause)

JH: Over to you, John.

JH: Oh yes, of course...

GA: Is it an analogy of film-making?

JB: Well, yes, that was a thought.

JH: Oh, that occurred to you, did it?

JB: Well no, it didn't at the time, but I'm just making it...

JH: You see, I didn't have the script so it didn't occur to me.

JB: There have been a lot of films about painters and painting, and this is one of them. What was interesting about the film for me was that everything was in tiny nuances in the painting. It was all a little raise of an eyebrow or a glance. We had enormous fun making the film in that chateau. We had a tiny crew and I had developed certain techniques. One [technique] was how to shoot a film without a continuity girl/woman and [another was] how to dispense with assistant directors. Every night we went to this little restaurant and the whole cast and crew sat at the same table, which is the ideal number for a cast and crew. Don't have any more than you can seat at a single table and you'll have great fun.

JH: Joking apart, when I said, 'This is the way to make films,' that's really what I meant. It's getting rid of all the rubbish that surrounds the making of a film which isn't necessary, and it takes all that fake authority from all those people who are basically sergeants. Because the fact is that artists, on the whole, are pretty responsible. If you ask them to be there at a certain time, they'll be there at a certain time. I don't think it's necessary to have all that army of people around you, and that was what was so wonderful about [Two Nudes Bathing]. Admittedly, it was a small film and you wouldn't do that on a great big action film or anything like that. But even if you're making a film for seven weeks - which is small - you don't need all the paraphernalia which goes with it. So that's what I meant.

Q1: I heard you on [the radio with] Libby Purvis yesterday morning. You were talking about your origins as a film-maker, starting in England and going to the BBC, then going to America and the differences between them, escaping the class system and so on. Could you talk a little bit about that? You do have a career that has spanned both sides of the Atlantic, commerce and art. Also, could you tell us that story about Lee Marvin at Venice Beach - it was very funny.

JB: Well, yes, I was fortunate. I trained as a film editor when commercial television was starting up and anyone could get a job there, even me. Then I went to the BBC and I started directing documentaries, and then the BBC expanded into BBC 2, which was supposed to be an experimental channel. By that time I was making substantial documentaries, so they asked me to make an experimental thing. I did a film about a young couple, six half-hours and each one had a different style. One was sort of fantasy, one was sort of acted, one was about a party. [In the] the final one, she was pregnant. The whole thing was made in the last three months of her pregnancy, so the final film started with her going to the hospital and ended with the birth. During the hours of her labour I had nine cameras out in Bristol - which is where they lived - filming everything that was happening at that time. She had two twin girls. I just bumped into them the other day and they are forty years old. They looked exactly like their mother and they were delighted that they had this record of what happened in this place of their birth. So I was very fortunate. I started to dramatise my films and then I started to get offers to make movies. My career was very progressive in that way. Then I made this film with the Dave Clark Five [Catch Us If You Can, GB, 1965] which was pretty awful but -

Audience member: It's great!

JB: - but there were people in America who liked it including Pauline Kael, who praised it enormously. Consequently I began to get offers to go to Hollywood and so I went out, and it was immensely liberating for me. At that time the BBC was so snobby and I hadn't got a university degree. I remember a programme board, where you sit around and discuss the programmes, and somebody passed me a note in Greek - you know, as a put-down. When I went to America I suddenly realised just how class-ridden and mean-spirited this country was at that time, and it was so liberating to be in America. Over there [in the audience] is sitting Bob Chartoff who produced Point Blank [US, 1967] and it was fantastic. Everything was possible suddenly, and everything was positive. But, unfortunately, after a year or two in Los Angeles I ran away... and came back.

All you had to say was how good the rewrite is going to be

JB: Lee Marvin. Okay. Before we started shooting the film [Point Blank], we went to dinner at Jack's on the beach at Venice Pier and Lee got very drunk. We went in his Chrysler station wagon, which he always drove, [with] my wife and his girlfriend - ghastly woman, that's the one who later sued him for the palimony. So, anyway, we came out about two in the morning and Lee was very drunk. I said, 'Let me drive' but no, he wouldn't give me the keys. We struggled for the keys and eventually I got them from him and I got in. Now he had to find some face-saving device so as not to give way to me, so he climbed onto the roof. I thought, well, I'll drive slowly down to the pier, maybe the air would sober him up. I got down to the pier and I stopped. I said 'Come on, Lee. Get in the car' and he said 'Grrr, fuck off'. There was nothing much about [in the way of] traffic, so I drove very slowly down Pacific Coast Highway towards where he lived. Suddenly there was a siren. The police pulled me over. The cop came over and he loosened his holster. He looked at me and he looked up at the roof and he said, 'Do you know you've got Lee Marvin on your roof... ?'

Q2: (Paul Gambuccini): While we're talking about Point Blank, the last time I saw you at the London film-makers' Awards, you were quite upset that Mel Gibson was basically remaking it. I think now we are at a sufficient distance to know that that film [Payback, US, 1999] is not a classic. Are you smugly satisfied?

JB: Well, I'll tell you a story about that. When the word came that he [Mel Gibson] was making this film called Payback, which was a remake of Point Blank... When I met Lee Marvin [prior to filming Point Blank], he was given this script and so was I. We met with one of the producers, Judd Bernard, and we sat down to lunch. Lee, who never had any small talk, said 'What do you think of this script?' I said, 'Well, its full of clichés, its terrible.' He said, 'Let me express it better for you - it's a piece a shit.' And Judd was sitting there, kicking me under the table. I said, 'Well, the character is interesting... ' and I bumbled along a little bit. Lee got up and left and Judd said to me, 'I get you in a room with a major star and you fuck it up! Never demean your material. All you had to say was how good the rewrite is going to be.' He said, 'You've gotta call him and try and make up' so eventually I called him and we met again. We met several times and I expanded several times on how good the rewrite was going to be. Finally one night, about two in the morning, we're up in this apartment that he rented in London. He was shooting The Dirty Dozen at the time. We were both fairly drunk but he picked up the script and said, 'Okay, I'll make this flick with you' - he always called them 'flicks' - 'on one condition', and he threw the script out of the window. It was a typical Marvin gesture. He would always find a visual metaphor for something. Out of the window it went and it fluttered down two or three stories into the gutter, where it belonged. And I can only assume a very young Mel Gibson was passing... Actually when I was going around America promoting The General, I told this story a number of times because people would ask me about it. I got this call from Mel Gibson: 'John, you've gotta stop telling this story. The studio is getting worried.' But I didn't stop.

Q3: What is your taste in movies? What kind of cinema do you like?

JB: I love blockbusters made from cartoons (pause). Yeah, I hate them. No, I'm an inveterate cinema-goer and I see whatever is around. What did I see last? Swimming Pool [Francois Ozon, FR/GB, 2003] I liked a lot. I like the Coen Brothers movies, and I'm looking forward to seeing Kill Bill, the [new] Tarantino.

Q4: It seems to me that you were making films in Hollywood at a time when there was a [sense of] freedom and adventure that's no longer present in this time of big studio blockbusters. What has it been like to watch that change in America?

JB: Well, I think that most of the films I made from the Hollywood studios I couldn't get made today because things have changed tremendously. At that time in the late '60s and the '70s the studio bosses were still smarting from the effects of television and they didn't know what to make. All the great Hollywood directors were getting old - Wyler and Ford, Billy Wilder, Huston. And they [the studios] didn't know what to make and they didn't know how to deal with the effect of television, so the director was king. They thought, well, these young directors must know what the audience wants. So we had enormous freedom, the director was the king. In retrospect, you realise it ended with Star Wars [George Lucas, US, 1977] - Star Wars came along and the studios saw that the mass audience is really the 14-year-old boys who want to see action pictures. And what's happening now... I just wrote a piece in The Guardian a few days ago about blockbusters, because these blockbusters now are so expensive [with] massive special effects. They are costing over a hundred million dollars to make and the studios can't afford to make them and they can't afford to stop making them. They cost 30 or 40 million dollars to market them, TV advertising, and they need a name in there to give the audience a connection, so that's 20 million dollars for an actor. [Take] The Hulk [Ang Lee, US, 2003] - Industrial Light and Magic charged the studio something like 45 million dollars to make the creature, the Hulk. These are put out with more and more prints in America, two or three thousand, four thousand prints, which pushes everything else out of the way. And the kinds of films that we were making in those days are pushed into the margins. We have to try to survive at the edge of things in this art ghetto, in the twilight zone. [In] America now, if you are making a film independently and you are raising the finance through pre-sales - going to each territory and getting them to put up some money -you can get less money from America now than you can from Portugal, because the market in America for these pictures that have to live in those mean streets is so small. So it's a very depressing situation, really, [with] the studios now. Where they used to do 20-25 movies a year, they are now doing 10 or 12. [They're] putting all their money into the blockbusters and they've nothing left to spend on poor creatures like me.

JH: Or me.

Q4: The duelling banjos scene in Deliverance - was that originally scripted or was it an afterthought at the end of the film?

JB: Actually, it's a traditional piece, the 'Duelling Banjos'. Nobody knows who composed it. It really just emerged out of banjo players trying to best each other. Jim Dickey introduced me to it along with a lot of other stuff from the hills there, and so it was absolutely scripted in. It's that scene when they first arrive up there in the hills and Drew plays this duelling with the retarded boy. The interesting thing [is] I thought I'd use the theme throughout the film. Warners were beating me up over the budget because they didn't see the film as being a big grosser. They wanted the film to be made for a very low budget so, for instance, I didn't have an art director on that picture. I pared everything down as far as I could but it still wasn't enough. So since I was going to use 'Duelling Banjos' as a theme, I decided to take out of the budget the orchestra and the composer and simply get two guys in to record variations on that theme of duelling banjos, and that became the whole score. I was up there in the Appalachians and I said, 'Who's the greatest banjo picker, because that's the guy I want?' They said 'Eric Weisberg. You know, this Jew from New York.' I said, 'What?' They said, 'Yeah, we listen to him all day on the radio.' Eric Weisberg had never been to the Appalachians. He'd learned it from listening to country stations and he was fantastic, you know. That was the story of 'Duelling Banjos'.

This is Hollywood. There is no honour!

Q5: I want to ask about Hell in the Pacific [US, 1968]. You said you wanted to make it as two films where the English-speaking people would understand one role and the Japanese people would understand the other role. How did you do it for other audiences?

JB: Well, this is a very painful subject. I had two writers working on it: an American writer to do the American side - the Lee Marvin side - and a Japanese writer, Shinobu Hashimoto, to do the Japanese side of the thing. We worked on the script and were constantly translating back and forth. It was very slow and arduous process. To truncate this story - which is a very long and painful story, even 35 years later I still feel the wounds - Shinobu Hashimoto worked for Kurosawa. He's one of the writers of Rashomon [JP, 1950], for instance. As we were going through this process he said to me, 'Look, can I go away for a couple of weeks on my own?' He wanted to go to Las Vegas - he was a big gambler - and do a draft on my own, so I said okay. He went off and came back, and we translated it. He didn't change the scenes - they were all exactly the way they were - but he'd changed the whole tone. He'd made [Toshiro] Mifune this kind of buffoon, rather like the character he plays in The Seven Samurai [Shichinin no samurai, JP, 1954]. So I read it and said, 'Shinobu, this is completely wrong. This isn't what we want at all.' Well, either mischievously or by accident, that was the version he gave to Mifune. So when we came to the first day of shooting, there's Mifune acting this buffoon. I said it was wrong. I had to correct him in the presence of his Japanese crew, [which was] utterly humiliating for him because he prided himself on preparing totally and he knew the script, every word of it. So I told him how and what I wanted done, but he did exactly the same. He wouldn't alter one iota. I had to stop shooting and go back to the ship we were living on. It was a Japanese crew with a Chinese ship - can you imagine how volatile this was? We [Mifune and I] talked and got drunk all evening and eventually he came around to how I wanted it and we shot the scene. Start the next scene - it was exactly the same problem. It was absolute murder. This went on and on. We got further and further behind, more and more over budget and over schedule. Eventually I had an accident on the reef and I got coral poisoning on my leg. It got infected and I almost lost it. And the producers, who were awful people, were fed up with me because I couldn't handle Mifune and I was getting so far behind schedule. They came over and they said to Mifune, 'You'll be glad to hear we're going to replace Boorman because he's sick and who knows when he'll be right, and any case you don't get on with him. [Mifune] said 'Yes, that's true. I don't.' They said, 'In fact, you hate him, don't you?' He said, 'Yes, I really hate him.' So they said, 'Well, you'll be delighted to hear we're going to get another director.' Mifune said, 'Well, I couldn't agree to that.' They said, 'Why not?' He said, 'Because we went to the tea house in Tokyo and we toasted in sake and I agreed to do the film with him. It's a matter of honour.' So the producer said, 'This is Hollywood. There is no honour!' But he refused and he saved me. When I started back shooting again, I thought we were going to be friends now, [but] it was exactly the same, nothing changed. I nearly gave up making movies it was so awful. And then I didn't see him for years and I was in Munich and he had a restaurant there - called 'Mifune'. It was a Japanese restaurant, as you may imagine. I went there with three people [and] at the end of the meal I asked for the bill and they said, 'No charge. We have a list of people, if they come in they don't have to pay' - so at least I got a meal out of him.

Q6: I went to the preview of [Country of My Skull] last night, which I thought was sensational. I really was moved. But my question is about these [audience] questionnaires and how they work. On the list, it says [name] the three scenes you like most and the three scenes you do not like. The problem is that if they see a film that disturbs them they might put that in the list of scenes they do not like. How do you judge? I think it's very difficult for the audience to judge why they like and don't like something. How do questionnaires work, and do they work?

JH: I think what you're saying is, should you be influenced by market research or should you have the bravery to put in front of [the audience] what you think it should be?

JB: Well, the American studios now - going back to the whole blockbusters thing - they have to put so much money into marketing a film that they do these previews in order to find out if the film is going to work or not. They have these scores where you rate it 'excellent', 'very good', 'good', 'fair' or 'poor'. You need to get 70 or 80 per cent in the top two brackets, otherwise the film is not going to be a success, they say. Then there's another thing which is very important - 'would you recommend this to your friends?' But these previews that the studios do tend to be self-fulfilling, because if the film gets bad scores they don't spend any money on the marketing, which means that people don't hear the film exists, so it doesn't make any money. But the opposite, unfortunately, doesn't work either. If you get wonderful scores on the movie, very often it completely fails. So they are of limited value. But you always learn something from it, often a very simple thing. For example, if there's a laugh at the end of a scene it can sometimes swamp the first line from the incoming scene, so the audience misses a line or two and it loses the thread of what the scene is about. You can then extend it a little bit to give space for the laugh, so that has a value. As long as you don't allow yourself to be totally influenced by those screenings, I think they have a value.

Q7: One of your films that deserves a wider screening is Leo the Last [US/GB, 1969]. I think it's only been shown twice since it was made. I wonder if you've got any anecdotes you'd like to share with us about that?

JB: Mastroianni - he was extraordinary. I had a great privilege to work with him. The film didn't do very well, except in France where we actually got a Best Directors Award in Cannes. What can I say? What was your question about it?

JH: Some anecdotes - it's when we met...

JB: Yes, we did, didn't we? - 1969...

JH: That's quite a funny anecdote...

JB: I had lunch with Mastroianni in Paris just before he died. He was walking on a stick, and this little girl of about 15 or 16 came over and asked for his autograph. 'You know,' he said, 'when I was young these girls would come for my autograph and they'd always say, "It's for my sister." Funny how they always say it's for somebody else. The years went by and the girls still came looking for my autograph, but then they'd say, "It's for my mother." He said to this little girl, 'I suppose this is for your grandmother.' He was an extraordinary man.

A riposte to the The Exorcist

Q8: Could you say something about the different endings of Exorcist II The Heretic [US, 1977] ?

JB: Another wound you want to open up. After I had made Deliverance, Warners said to me, there's a book that's just come out, it's a massive hit, would you give us a quick reading and tell us if you'd like to make a film of it? That was The Exorcist. I read the book and I was horrified by it. I said to John Calley, who was running Warners then, 'Look, I don't want to make this. I have daughters. This will be a film about torturing a child.' Which indeed it was. Later on, a man called William Goodhartwrote a three-page treatment for a sequel, and I was fascinated by it because it was about goodness. It was like a riposte to The Exorcist, rather than a sequel, and I foolishly agreed to make it. I remember Kubrick saying to me at the time, 'There's only one way to do it. Just give them more gore than last time.' I didn't give them any gore. And the audiences were understandably annoyed at this. When the picture opened, people were tearing the seats up and throwing them at the screen, demanding their money back. It was one of the biggest disasters, [but] you always think you can solve these problems, so I re-cut the ending. We took the prints out of the theatres during the day and cut the actual prints. Every day I did half a dozen. People were helping me and we were changing these prints and putting them back into the theatres. It didn't make any difference at all. Of course, I couldn't bear to look at it or even think about it for years. And some years later I saw it and I was surprised to find it was actually quite an interesting movie.

Q9: You've had quite a lot of bad experiences with your films, as any film-maker does. Is there a film for you where it has it all come together?

JB: Well, like I was talking about, making Two Nudes Bathing was an unalloyed joy. I think the process is what fascinates me, the intensity of the relationships with the actors. I understand that feeling at my age, you know. I can go on a set now without feeling any anxiety about being in control and understanding everything I need to understand. That's a wonderful feeling, but it takes a long time. I used to have this anxiety dream every night while I was shooting films: the actors would move but the camera was locked, it couldn't follow the action. I don't have that any more.

Q10: Is there a film you are proudest of and [to John Hurt] is there a performance you are most proud of?

JH: Well, I've often been asked that question and there's really only one answer. I have lots of films that are particularly favoured in my mind, but I would answer it probably the same way that Jack Nicholson would answer it. He always says Easy Rider was his favourite film because it altered the perception of both the public and the profession as far as he was concerned. I would have to say on the same level as that, that my favourite film - and it was an enormously pleasurable film to make -was The Naked Civil Servant [Jack Gold, GB, 1975], made for television. It changed my life and, at the same time, I think it was a rather marvellous piece. And it was enormously pleasurable to make.

JB: I think we were together in the street once and a woman went 'Ahh, it's the Elephant Man.'

JH: Yes, yes.

JB: There was a wonderful headline in the News of the World when John's marriage broke up. It said, 'Elephant Man Packs Trunk'.

JH: I have to say, even I had to laugh at that one.

Q11: [to JB] You haven't answered your question...

JB: I think that I'm very fond of Hope and Glory [GB, 1987] because it was a film about my own family and childhood, so I have a great fondness about that. I remember I was in Cannes one year and I was talking to Billy Wilder, who had just made what turned out to be his last film, Buddy Buddy [US, 1981]. I said, 'How's the new film, Billy? He said, 'John, for us our movies are like our children. When you have a kid, you hope he's going to grow up to be Einstein but sometimes they turn out to be congenital idiots... ' So I'm very fond of my 'congenital idiots', the ones that didn't make it really, [such as] Zardoz [GB, 1973] and Leo the Last.

Q12: You started your career making documentaries. What do you think of documentaries today and, in particular, techniques like dramatic reconstruction?

JB: One of the problems when you are making documentaries is the element of fake which takes away from their veracity. There was this argument about cinema verité and hidden camera. I did all that stuff, and also that kind of reconstruction. So you're always on delicate, shaky ground with documentaries. I gave up making documentaries because I found I couldn't get close enough to people. And if you did get close enough to them, it could be damaging for them to expose themselves too much. So I came to the end of it really. I love watching documentaries and they have a place, clearly.

Robert Chartoff: I don't want to ask a question. I just want to tell you, John, I've been gifted with your friendship for about 35 years and I think I've never enjoyed your presence more than in the last two hours.

JH: I think that, given that I'm supposed to be running this show, that has to be the end. I just want to say, I think John has a wonderful book and I've enjoyed the evening enormously. I hope you have. Thank you, John.

Last Updated: 10 Oct 2007