Robert Murphy
Robert Murphy - Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University - on his experience of researching a comprehensive resource on film directors in Britain and Ireland:
"Between 2001 and 2006 I worked on a project which eventually emerged as Directors in British and Irish Cinema; a reference guide . This involved researching and writing about over a thousand directors from Birt Acres to Jonathan Glazer, most of them British but including a considerable number of European exiles (particularly from the 1930s) and a few prestigious Americans who had made their home in Britain. Admittedly I had sixty contributors and two associate editors to help me (I am eternally indebted to Geoff Brown for compiling the dauntingly long filmographies of silent film directors), but I nevertheless spent a very considerable amount of time in the BFI National Library checking biographical and filmographic information, and feel a debt of gratitude to the staff (and the resources) of the library.
"The idea was to be as comprehensive as possible and not exclude directors on a quality basis. This meant that, as well as getting lumbered with the really bad directors, I was often searching for scraps of information to fill out the almost inevitably sketchy entries contributors had managed to compile on very obscure figures."
Robert Murphy is Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University.
He is currently editing a 3rd edition of The British Cinema Book for the BFI, and is writing a book on British Film Noir. His works include:
- Sixties British Cinema (BFI,1992)
- British Cinema of the 90s (BFI, 2000) [ed.]
- British Cinema and the Second World War (Continuum, 2000)
- Directors in British and Irish Cinema (BFI, 2006) [ed.]
