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The film-maker on Gerard Depardieu’s snoring, Burt Reynolds’s sexual skills and why boxset TV is disappointing
“I am a man I never had time to get to know,” announces the film-maker John Boorman, director of Point Blank (1967) and Deliverance (1972), halfway through this not-quite memoir. “I suspected he was a fraud, a liar, full of hollow passion, best kept locked away.” It’s a pensive, unexpectedly self-chastening admission in a section titled “Solitude”. Mulling a little longer, he adds: “I can’t say I like him, but since it is just the two of us, we are learning to get along. I have even found it possible to forgive him. He no longer embarrasses me, nor do I feel the need to apologise for him.”
Why, one wonders, would Boorman ever have been embarrassed by himself? Born in Carshalton, south London in 1933, he left school at 16 and worked for a dry-cleaners, but was soon writing essays for the Manchester Guardian and as a critic for BBC Radio’s Under-Twenty Review show. During national service the lectures he gave to Korea-bound troops on the background to the war inspired one of them, Labour MP Ian Mikardo’s son, to declare he couldn’t serve in such an immoral struggle. Boorman was arrested and charged with “seducing a soldier from the course of his duty”, only for the court martial against him to be dropped when it became clear that the chief source for his seditious propaganda was the Times. Continue reading...