Rebel Director John Boorman

by Paula Hunt | Published February 1, 1999

Boorman became fascinated with Martin Cahill after reading Paul Williams' book, The General: Godfather of Crime. During his 20-year career, Cahill organized one of the world's greatest art thefts and masterminded a jewel heist that secured his fame as Ireland's most notorious criminal. He hated the Church, the police and the IRA. He lived simply, but in a menage a trois with his wife's sister (his headstone reads "Loving Husband of Frances and Tina"). His ability to elude conviction, his wit and outrageous disguises for his court appearances made him a favorite of the media and public before he was killed by an IRA hitman in 1994. Despite his repertoire of kidnapping, torture, bombing and cruelty, Boorman does find some of Cahill's qualities relatively admirable: his sense of honor among thieves, his iconoclasm, his loyalty to his family. Although he never met Cahill, Boorman created a way for their paths to cross cinematically: When Cahill steals a gold record during a robbery, he becomes angry when he discovers that it isn't made out of gold at all, but plastic. In 1981 robbers broke into Boorman's house and stole his gold record for "Dueling Banjos" from the Deliverance soundtrack.

In re-creating events that happened in the recent past, Boorman decided to shoot The General in black and white, a medium he calls "A parallel world that's somehow different." Because he produced the film, there was "No one to tell me I couldn't." Like many of Boorman's other films, The General is about the relationship between an outsider and a society. In Zardoz, for example, this insider/outsider relationship is represented by the primeval man Zed (Sean Connery) and the society of spiritual aesthetes that he intrudes upon. Hope and Glory, Beyond Rangoon, The Emerald Forest, Where the Heart is and, of course, Deliverance, are among Boorman's other films that deal with individuals displaced physically or emotionally.

Hope and Glory

The General reunites Boorman with his Deliverance star, Jon Voight, who portrays Inspector Ned Kenny, a kind of Javert to Cahill's Jean Valjean.

MM: Why did you insist on casting Brendan Gleeson as Cahill?

Point Blank

JB: First of all, Brendan bears a remarkable similarity to him, but also, he knows that whole milieu. He was a teacher and he taught in one of those very tough areas. He knows those characters. Plus the fact that he's just an extraordinary actor. I've seen him do so many diverse, extraordinary things that once I got him in my mind for him to play the part, I couldn't think of anybody else doing it.

MM: Why did you choose to shoot The General in black and white?

JB: Because this was about characters who are still around, and about very recent events, I wanted to give it a little distance. Black and white gives you that distance, and in a contradictory way, it somehow brings you closer to the characters. There's an intensity about it, about faces you don't find in color. Orson Welles said that black and white was the actor's friend.

MM: Did you start your career working in black and white?

JB: Yes, I did. I worked in black and white when I was working in television, and then my first feature was in black and white. I love black and white and I regret its passing. Black and white is much closer to the condition of dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was part of the great appeal of movies originally-there was this strange otherness.

Deliverance

Before making The Emerald Forest I was doing research and stayed with a tribe in the Amazon. It was very remote-actually undiscovered until 1947-and you still can't go there unless you have special permission. These people have never seen television or film and through an interpreter I was trying to describe to this shaman what I did, what a film was. I tried to tell him you would move from one place to another place instantly, you could see people in close up, and then you could go to another person a long ways away. He listened and, of course, his [profession] was to go into a trance and connect to the dreams, to the unconscious of his tribe, and connect them with their ancestors and the animals. And he said to me, 'Well, you do the same work that I do.'

MM: What was the impetus for The Emerald Forest?

JB: My passion is trees. I plant them, I grow them, I try to take care of them and I've planted 15,000 trees on my land in Ireland. The horror of modern logging is clear felling; the guys with bulldozers who rip out these trees and take out all the soil and allow it to be washed away by the rains. Curiously enough, when I was in Burma [making Beyond Rangoon] which is a very backward country because it's been repressed by the military, they still take out individual trees
with elephants.

MM: Do you think about what it's going to look like on television when you're shooting a film?

JB: To me, when a movie reaches video or television, it dies. I have no interest in seeing it.

MM: Because it's not the movie you made?

JB: That's right. I don't like the electronic screen.

The Emerald Forest

MM: Do you cut on film or on an Avid system?

JB: I used Avid on The General. I didn't much like it. I like to handle film. For me, it's not much of a problem, since I shoot very little film anyway. I have a plan and I never shoot masters anymore. I only storyboard sequences where there are special effects or comlex action sequences.

MM: How do you generally work?

JB: What I do is that at the beginning of each week, I give out a list of shots that we're going to shoot for the whole week. They are detailed so that what's involved with each shot is tracked: the lens that's going to be used in that shot, diagrams related to the light source and to the actors. Of course, I change things as I go along, but everybody knows what they have to do, so everything goes smoothly and quickly.

MM: Do you rehearse beforehand?

JB: I find that I rehearse a lot with the actors beforehand. I never come on the set and say, "Let's rehearse this scene, play around and see what happens." I say, "This is the first shot in the scene, you stand over there on that mark and you lean forward; as you say the second line you turn your head." I find actors like that because it gives them a structure. When actors know exactly what is expected of them, they feel completely secure and they're able to create within that framework. If their invention is good and they move outsidethe framework, that's fine, too.

MM: Have you always worked like this?

JB: Yes, but I've become more and more detailed. I learned something from Kurosawa (see MM #31-ed.) when I made Hell in the Pacific. I was working with his crew and they told me about his methods. Sometimes in the cutting room he regretted not getting more coverage. So he devised a plan: He had a camera operator, known as "The Monkey" because he could climb into any situation, who had a brief to shoot every scene. Kurosawa didn't want to know what he was shooting or even view it or even print it, because he didn't want to be deflected from his plan. Then, when he was in the cutting room and got stuck or needed something, he'd say "Print up monkey's stuff" and he'd pick something that was useful to just drop in. What he was trying to get was the balance between the absolutely detailed planning and the spontaneity.

MM: What brought you out to Hollywood and to making Point Blank?

JB: A meeting with Lee Marvin. He was shooting Dirty Dozen in London and a producer gave me this script and also gave it to him and we met. Lee asked me what I thought of the script and I said, "Well it's absolutely terrible." He said, "I agree, so what are we talking about?" So, we had a number of meetings and talked and talked and eventually he said, "I'll do this picture with you on one condition: that you throw the script out the window." So he committed to a conversation. That would never happen today. He had just won an Academy Award, he was hot. So I took this friend of mine, Alex Jacobs, and we sat down and wrote the script in three weeks. It was a Donald Westlake story about this man Walker who got involved in a crime and was betrayed by his friend and his wife and then went looking for them, looking for the money. It was very simple. It was all to do with style, really. Lee was very adventurous and very intelligent and was ready to do anything. He was fantastic.

MM: Is that why you worked with him again in Hell in the Pacific?

JB: Oh, yes. I wish I'd made more films with him.

MM: How much of the Deliverance script was you and how much was James Dickey?

JB: Well, Warners hired me to write the screenplay from the book. Then I collaborated with Dickey and wrote a draft and he revised that draft and we went back and forth with it.

MM: Did you enjoy collaborating with Dickey?

JB: Interestingly enough, we did the whole thing by correspondence, because whenever we met, Jim would get very drunk. In correspondence, he was wonderful. He wrote the most beautiful letters and made wonderful points about the screenplay and I'd write back to him and we had this tremendous relationship.

MM: You once said that you'd rather have an argument with James Dickey any day than a conversation with anyone else. Is that still true?

JB: [Laughs] He didn't understand the relationship between a film and a novel. Our big point of departure was he felt [it was important to show what was in] the first third of the book, where there's an account of these four men's lives, their families and their work, and that sense of dissatisfaction with their comfortable lives. It's a brilliant novel. I started the film with them arriving [at the river] and Dickey hated that because he thought we needed to establish them. My point was that when you cast these four characters, the audience knows who they are just by looking at them. I mean, nothing could have been more boring than seeing them sitting around with their families mooning away, looking out the window. Instead, you learn who they are in the course of the action, and that's what movies are about."

MM: You live in Ireland, but you're British?

JB: Yes, I mean I'm a quarter Irish.

MM: Do you still feel like you're an outsider?

JB: All the time, I'm glad to say. MM

SHARE THIS STORY Digg StumbleUpon Facebook Del.icio.us Reddit Yahoo

TAGS

COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT

POST A COMMENT

OUR PRIVACY POLICY | We will not publish or sell or share your email address or other personal information. Read more.

Name:
Email:
URL:

Type the word you see below:

Comment:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS

Home | Latest Headlines
Screenwriting | Producing | Directing | Acting | Cinematography | Editing | Distribution | Education | Festivals | Locations
Listings | Archives | HOP Interviews | Blogs | Forums | Contests | Subscriptions | Advertising

About | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact

© 2008 MovieMaker Magazine

Web site design by Hop Studios