John Boorman: turning money into light

There’s reason to celebrate this week. John Boorman, the great director of Point Blank, Deliverance and Arthurian epic Excalibur, has a new film out. Even more reason to celebrate is that it’s a sequel to one of his very best movies: Hope & Glory, Boorman’s autobiographical account of the Blitz. What makes that 1987 film so joyous is that the focus is not the horrors of wartime London, but the pleasures it brought to Billy Rowan (a stand-in for the adolescent Boorman) and the women in his life (his feisty mother, his vivacious older sister). To give you the idea of its tone, the film ends with a schoolyard of kids in ecstatic revelry as a stray Nazi bomb has demolished their school. “Thank you, Adolf!” screams one of Billy's pals.

The followup, Queen & Country, takes place a decade later, with Bill (played by newcomer Callum Turner) now a strapping 18-year-old conscripted into military service. The Korean War is raging, but, like Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H., the enemy is not communism, it’s the hierarchy of army life. Instead of battling the Red Army, Bill and his best friend (Caleb Landry Jones) take on the brutalism and inhumanity they receive at the hands of their superiors, who include their pedantic and possibly shell-shocked commanding officer (David Thewlis), and a supercilious Major (Richard E. Grant), who wearily referees their squabble.

At a recent preview screening at Manchester’s HOME, the 82-year-old filmmaker spoke eloquently on why he wanted to mine his own memories and bring them to the screen once again. “Looking back at [the 50s] 60 years on, it seemed to me a real turning point. Lots of things were happening, or not happening. The older soldiers were still caught up in imperial Britain and Empire, and we younger ones could see that was all over, and that Britain was going to be quite different in the future.”

Callum Turner and Brían F. O'Byrne in Queen & Country (image: Curzon Film World)

Things come to a head in the film when Jones’s character pinches Thewlis’ beloved clock. This battle of wills seems particularly frivolous, like a plot stolen from The Phil Silvers Show, but as Nigel Andrews notes in his review over at the Financial Times, these “acts of prankishness become mini-heroic as ‘time’ is literally stolen.” These young lads are being robbed of their formative years by an institution that, like Boorman says, hasn’t cottoned on to the changing winds; Britannia no longer rules the wave, and its young men are no longer willing to sacrifice their lives to boost the ego of (the newly crowned) queen and country. Bill's rebellions may seem small, but they have an aggregate effect. “Every scene should be doing more than one thing; it should resonate in more than one way, or preferably in two or three ways. I think what I was pleased about with this film is that it has a very simple surface, it’s not showy in any way. All the themes are subsumed, they come to you after you see the film, and that’s what you try and do.”

A withering Empire wasn’t the only wind of change in the 1950s. “The other thing that was happening was the 1947 education act, which was the first time that every child learned a bit about music and art,” explains Boorman. “Up until then, you either went to grammar school at the age of 11, or you learned a craft. Those kids who went to those secondary modern schools grew up to be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and part of the art explosion of the 60s. And that contributed to huge changes. We, most of us really, wished the changes had gone further. If only they had had the courage to abolish the public schools – we wouldn’t have had to have Cameron as prime minister.”

Boorman was part of this explosion of creative young Brits, emerging in the swinging 60s with Catch Us If You Can, in which Boorman tries to do for the Dave Clark Five what Richard Lester did for the Beatles with A Hard Day’s Night. He made his biggest mark across the Atlantic, however, with 1967's glorious hardboiled crime picture Point Blank. File it with Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success and Alex Cox's Repo Man as the most potent American films from an askance British point-of-view. Marrying the elliptical editing of Alain Resnais with the widescreen architectural grace of Michelangelo Antonioni, Point Blank, along with Bonnie and Clyde (both were released in the same week) and The Graduate, marked the first ripple of a wave that became the great renaissance of American cinema in the 1970s.

Lee Marvin in 1967’s Point Blank

Boorman has said in previous interviews that it would be impossible for him to make a film like Point Blank or 1972's Deliverance now because he made them “from a state of grace.” He expands on this theory during the Q&A:

“First films or second films work very well because they’re made out of ignorance. A young director will blunder into a film and try and pull things off that are very unwise, yet they sometimes work.” As a filmmaker gets older, he reckons, a conservatism creeps in. “You can foresee all the problems and you tend to self-censor yourself,” Boorman explains. “You think, ‘I won’t do that because it’ll take an extra day of shooting and it would be dependent on the weather, so it’s better to set that scene indoors.’ So you are, perhaps, reducing your film. It’s about ambition, it’s about being reckless, trying things.”

Getting older is not all bad though: “I think the more experienced you get, the more you have a grip on the whole process of making a film. You can reach another level of knowledge and expertise that replaces that reckless sense of grace that you had as a young director.”

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“Writing a film is much more like writing a poem than writing a novel” – John Boorman

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It wasn’t just Boorman’s reckless ambition that made Point Blank such a triumph. Getting Hollywood hardman Lee Marvin onside – he plays the film’s dazed and bloodthirsty protagonist – also helped. “He was wonderful,” says Boorman of his leading man. “The way I developed the story, it was very close to his own life. He’d been in the army as an 18-year-old, and he was a sniper, and he’d shot a lot of Japanese soldiers, and he was brutalised by it. Acting for him was, in a way, an attempt to somehow regain his humanity. So when I developed this story he connected with it very much because it was a metaphor for his own life, this man who’s shot, left for dead – and he searches for this money, which is a metaphor for his life, his humanity. He knew how difficult it was going to be for me to make it how I wanted to make it, so he called a meeting with the head of the studio and the producers and reminded them that he had script and cast approval in his contract. And then he said, ‘I defer those approvals to John.’ And then he just turned around and walked out. They were horrified that this young English director had complete control over their movie.”

Boorman belongs to that small lineage of British filmmakers who rejected the move towards social realism that emerged during the British new wave of the 60s. Like his friends Nic Roeg (Don't Look Now) and Ken Russell (The Devils), his cinema is the antithesis of this kitchen sink style. “Writing a film is much more like writing a poem than writing a novel, because it’s so much about what you leave out.” And when the filmmaker most associated with this style is brought up, Boorman doesn't mince his words. “Ken Loach, of course, represents that strand of British cinema which is naturalism. I always despised that really, because the idea that a film can be naturalistic is ridiculous. The more you try and make it real the less real it becomes. It’s a parallel world and it’s metaphor, and that’s the best way of looking at it.”

Will Queen & Country prove his swan song? Boorman’s skeptical about his prospects of getting another film in the can. “I’m 82. It takes three years to make a film, so if I made another film I’d be back here in three years time talking to you about it – and I’d be 85, and probably dead.” We’re more optimistic. Booman’s feet may be shot (he gingerly walks with a cane), but his passion for cinema seems far from diminished. “I once described filmmaking as the process of inventing impossible problems for yourself, and failing to solve them. I also described it as turning money into light. You take sets, and actors and a lot of money, and turn it into light flickering on a wall. I think that when a film is great it’s almost like alchemy: you're changing money not just into light, but into spirit, and that’s when film is at its apex.”

We hope the great man has a few more opportunities to work his magic.

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