Where to begin with John Boorman

John Boorman was always ambitious. Getting his start making films for the BBC’s Documentary Unit, the ‘suburban boy’ was running that department by age 29; then, having directed just one feature, the antic Dave Clark Five vehicle Catch Us if You Can (1965), he shortly after headed to Hollywood. There, he would make films that have been declared both among the very best and the very worst.

Throughout his career, Boorman has been wilfully unexpected. In his hands, something as commercial-sounding as a Lee Marvin crime thriller becomes unsettlingly existential, while what could have been a straightforward sequel to a blockbuster horror instead eschews scares altogether, in favour of a sci-fi-inflected tale of good versus evil.

“Sometimes it works, and comes together, and sometimes it doesn’t,” is how Boorman once summed up his bold approach. So restlessly experimental that it can be tricky to find a stylistic throughline in his work, Boorman has nonetheless realised many of his particular visions inside the studio system – and occasionally even found an eager audience for them.

One of the major box office hits of its year, and an Oscar nominee for best picture and best director, Deliverance (1972) remains paradoxically both Boorman’s most popular film and his toughest. A touchstone survival picture in which four ‘city boys’ (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) take a trip in Georgia wilderness on the verge of being dammed, Deliverance gives Boorman a violent, elemental platform to explore what has been a career-long interest in nature and traditional notions of heroism.

Deliverance’s pivot from buddy movie into backwoods horror – unsurprising though it is, given the air of menace choking the film from the start – tests its four lead characters in unexpected ways. While Voight’s mild-mannered Ed proves himself against the locals who terrorise the group, Reynolds’ macho outdoorsman Lewis finds himself as much at the mercy of the wilderness as his ill-prepared friends. A crystallisation of Boorman’s conflicted view of nature, Deliverance is simultaneously in awe of the natural world and fearful of what dangers might lurk deep within it.

Boorman made just two films with actor Lee Marvin over two years, but the brief creative union resulted in some of the finest work by either man. First came Point Blank (1967), a sparse sunshine noir set across coastal California, where the relentless Walker (Marvin) seeks out his stolen $93,000 and the besuited goons who took it. A disorienting blend of schematic colour, impressionistic editing and sudden violence, the film elicits similarly experimental work from its star, with Marvin playing Walker as an emotionless, near-silent wraith singularly driven by a need to exact revenge.

Marvin gives a more human performance in Hell in the Pacific (1968), a primal two-hander between Marvin and Toshiro Mifune as, respectively, an American pilot and a Japanese soldier stranded on a Pacific island during the Second World War. Conceived by Boorman as a silent movie in sound, the film has its two increasingly wild castaways speak infrequently and in their own languages, with them communicating – and Boorman telling the story – largely through action and gesture.

Boorman and Marvin never worked together again after Hell in the Pacific, but their relationship would inform the documentary Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait by John Boorman (1998), the director’s study of a physical, instinctive film actor and his warm-hearted tribute to a man who became a lifelong friend. Such was their bond that Boorman made Marvin godfather to his son Charley, himself a lead of one of the director’s most enchanting pictures, 1985’s The Emerald Forest. Starring Powers Boothe as an American engineer scouting the Amazon for the son (Charley Boorman) taken by an indigenous tribe 10 years earlier, in The Emerald Forest as in Deliverance Boorman’s jungle is at once magnetic and indifferent – for the son a paradise, for the father a humid, forbidding mystery.

Brought to Ireland to carry out post-production on his ultra-stylised curio Leo the Last (1970), Boorman soon relocated there permanently, and subsequently made the country central to several of his movies. Unspoiled rural Ireland provided verdant, misty vistas for Zardoz (1974) and Excalibur (1981), the latter a visually magnificent, highly ambitious (and more than a little hammy) crack at distilling all of Arthurian lore down to a single feature-length film.

Boorman has also made two films about recent Irish history, 1998’s comic bio The General and 2006’s economic drama The Tiger’s Tail. Brendan Gleeson, star of four of Boorman’s last five films (including 2001’s fleet John le Carré adaptation The Tailor of Panama), gives a winning early lead performance in The General, as Dublin’s folk hero thief Martin Cahill. Cahill is another of Boorman’s rulebreaking underdogs with a propensity for violence, the director’s sympathy for the rebel extending even to the very man who burgled his County Wicklow home in 1981.

Long before Ireland became an adopted home, Boorman spent his formative years growing up in suburban England, a period that inspired his most personal film. An episodic account of the director’s childhood in London during the Blitz, Hope and Glory (1987) stars Sebastian Rice-Edwards as Boorman analogue Bill Rowan, through whose eyes the bombed-out capital becomes a playground. Boorman’s second film to bring him Oscar nominations for best picture and best director, Hope and Glory is a joyous cine-memoir with the kind of exacting period detail that could only come from somebody who lived it. For a continuation of the story, see 2014’s Queen and Country, Boorman’s last film to date and a charming B-side following 18-year-old Bill (Callum Turner) through his military service.

Once you’ve enjoyed the consensus choices for Boorman’s best films, you might want to try a pair of more divisive ones. A departure from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) in tone and arguably even genre, Boorman’s sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) reveals Regan (Linda Blair) to be telekinetic, with her psychic powers drawing out demon Pazuzu to torment her once again. Friedkin called The Heretic “as bad as seeing a traffic accident in the street”, while critics including Mark Kermode have since declared it among the worst films ever made. Still, it’s an unquestionably brave attempt at something new, and while Boorman himself thinks little of it, count no less than Pauline Kael and Martin Scorsese among those who consider Exorcist II to be superior to the original.

Then there’s Zardoz. Given a blank cheque following the enormous success of Deliverance, Boorman decided to make a future parable about the haves and have-nots on 23rd century Earth, featuring giant floating stone heads, a commune of kinky immortal elites and Sean Connery as a mankini-sporting gunslinger. An utterly individual mid-70s time capsule, Zardoz is the biggest swing from a director who’s always endeavoured to be original. Striking in moments, baffling in others, it’s entirely impossible to forget.