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David Puttnam: ‘The Irish invented immigration and went through every single form of the immigrant experience’

Partly because the film-maker and former peer so often praises Ireland, and partly because he is genuinely likable, the West Cork resident has for many become Ireland’s favourite Englishman

David Puttnam, June 3rd, 2024, pictured in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

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Mark Hennessy
Sun Jun 16 2024 - 06:00

David Puttnam is late, and he does not like to be late. Scheduled to be in the Westbury off Dublin’s Grafton Street, the 83-year-old Englishman finds himself, instead, stuck on a train near Hazelhatch in Kildare.

He emails promptly to say, “Sorry about this,” followed by another message later to give a new likely arrival time. “The train in front caught fire!”, he writes. Once in the hotel, he apologises again, profusely.

It is an old-fashioned courtesy from the London-born but very much west Cork-living Puttnam, one not always necessarily shared by people who have won Oscars, run Hollywood film production companies, or sat in the House of Lords.

Puttnam and his wife of 63 years, Patsy, have lived full-time in a beautifully restored property overlooking the Ilen river between Skibbereen and Baltimore since 2019, though it was an ever more frequently used holiday home from Easter 1990 onwards.

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Partly because he so often praises Ireland, and partly because he is genuinely likable, Puttnam has for many become Ireland’s favourite Englishman, a role shared, perhaps, with fellow west Cork-based actor Jeremy Irons.

[ ‘I’ll tell you what - there are no queues like this in England’ - David Puttnam becomes an Irish citizen ]

Next Thursday, he features in a documentary, David Puttnam: The Long Way Home, by Edel O’Mahony, to be shown on RTÉ One at 10.15pm. In it he reflects on marriage, loss, an extraordinary career, and becoming an Irish citizen.

He also reflects on memories of his father, Leonard, who died suddenly in 1981 “just before Chariots of Fire came out”, though, if anything, the connection between father and son has strengthened rather than weakened with the passage of time.

“I had, not consciously, I hope, used him as an example of what a good life could look like. My dad was a good man,” says Puttnam, searching for sugar as he pours out a cup of tea. The tinkle of the teaspoon partly hides the catch in his voice as he says “a good man”.

“My dad was unusual. He would reduce every conversation to the notion of what’s fair. He used the word ‘fair’ all the time. And he really did believe that it existed, that you could find ‘fair’.

“Well, as I’m sure you would agree, ‘fair’ has almost gone out of the f**king lexicon now,” says Puttnam, who served in the House of Lords as a Labour peer from 1997 until he resigned in 2021, in line with his previously expressed arguments that peers should step down at 80.

His father, a British army photographer in the second World War, was the only man evacuated twice from the Dunkirk beaches in 1940 because he was sent back to capture images of triumph – not the disaster shown in his first rolls of film.

“He had real images the first time, but they were depressing, so somebody sent him back – probably Churchill. This was an evacuation. The second lot of images show guys with mugs of tea, grinning. Those were the only ones ever used.

“They chopped the rest,” Puttnam says. “I was somewhat in awe of him. He photographed commando raids. Imagine being a cameraman on that – you’re the only one without a gun.”

If the documentary reveals the tenderness in his relationship with his father, it reveals, too, the difficulties Puttnam – born at the height of the Blitz in February 1941 – had with his Jewish mother, Rose.

He was the brother I never had. I’d have killed for him. I miss him terribly, really terribly

—  David Puttnam on late film director Alan Parker

“My mother and I rowed, she wasn’t easy. She was a Tory. She would read the Daily Mail every day. And we’d have arguments about what she was reading, and the crap that she was absorbing. That was difficult. “Could I have been a better son? Yes, without doubt. Should I have seen her more? Yes. But the truth is, the absolute honest truth is, if I’d sat at her bedside, I have no idea what we would’ve talked about,” Puttnam tells the documentary.

Throughout, there are insights into the importance of relationships between men that have lain at the heart of his films, from Scottish villagers in Local Hero to the Memphis Belle B17 crew.

Just one woman has had a central role in one of his films, Helen Mirren in 1984′s Cal, in which she plays the wife of a murdered RUC officer who falls in love with a much younger man, one partly responsible for her husband’s killing.

Praising Edel O’Mahony for seizing on the point, Puttnam says he had “inadvertently revealed” himself in his films – something that he has realised more with the passage of the years than he did when he was making them.

“I didn’t understand the thread that runs them, this male thing. Other than Helen Mirren, it is all about guys, and it is about guys because when you are looking at a script, you are looking for certainty.

“I know what men’s friendships are, I know what men say to each other. I have no idea what women say to each other, not a clue. It would be ludicrous for me to be editing a script with two women talking.”

The depth of his relationships is evident yet again when he speaks of his friend of decades, Alan Parker, who directed Midnight Express, Fame and The Commitments, plus a slew of others.

Parker was responsible for getting Puttnam into movies, pressuring him to write a film script when they both worked in advertising, while Puttnam, in turn, pressured Parker to become a director.

“He was the brother I never had,” he tells the documentary about Parker, who died of a heart attack aged 76 in 2020 after a lengthy illness, “I’d have killed for him. I miss him terribly, really terribly,”

“We were talking and we lost the signal, and he sent me a text that said, ‘Damn, damn, damn, we had so much more to talk about’. And that was it, he died the next day,” Puttnam goes on, the pain etched on his face.

No conversation with Puttnam can happen without him talking about his deep love of west Cork, and Ireland, his despair about the land of his birth in the wake of Brexit, and his undimmed passion for his wife, Patsy.

Sometimes, one could be forgiven for thinking that Puttnam is too generous in his praise of all things Irish, but it is not an unqualified verdict, even though he errs on the side of generosity wherever possible.

“Skibbereen is my community, I live among them,” he says. “I see all the good that is around, so I tend to try to ignore the bad. What is the bad? The bad is the kind of rather pathetic parish pump politics that takes place.

“The fact [is] we’ve got some councillors who I think are useless, beyond useless, actually,” says the always softly spoken Puttnam with more than just a touch of firmness in his tone, speaking just before the local elections were held.

For a few minutes, the conversation drifts on to Brexit, the damage it did and “the lies” that were told “to my face” in the House of Lords by those who wanted to bring it about – people who were “pig ignorant” about the consequences. He chose that phrase because he could not say “liars” in the chamber.

Then he returns to the west Cork councillors he criticises: “I just have to try and shut my eyes to them, because I’ve seen uselessness at a much, much higher level,” he chuckles loudly. “These guys just don’t even figure in terms of the uselessness I have seen.”

The local battle to stop a factory making nurdles – the pellets that are the first step in making anything plastic – still rankles, especially since some still bemoan the loss of 10 jobs over the undoubted environmental damage from this activity that would have cost more jobs.

The land of his birth now often hankers after the so-called ”glory days” of empire, but Ireland’s experience of colonisation – one unknown to most British peoples, he admits – has, instead, left a situation where people constantly search for ways to get around the system, he suggests.

Dubbing the habit as “workarounds”, Puttnam borrows the phrase “if not strong, one must be cute”, and the habit brings costs that are harmful to society, he argues: “So, it becomes instinctual,” he says.

“Some of the time it can create an atmosphere of...” and here he pauses for more than a few seconds, uncomfortable with a rare word of public criticism for his adopted home, “an atmosphere of insincerity.” He says the words regretfully.

Pointing to the recent Stardust inquiry, for example, he said he had wondered how it could possibly have taken so long for the families of the victims to be publicly vindicated and for the owner of the building, Edward Butterly, to have faced censure.

He has little time – no time, actually – for those seeking to make political gains in Ireland on the back of anti-immigration language: “Look at what [Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK] is doing. He’s playing the race card, that’s what he is doing.

I accuse Britain of being unempathetic, I don’t think Ireland is unempathetic. I have so many examples of people in West Cork who are utterly remarkable, doing utterly remarkable things

“It is so easy to pull that toilet chain, it’s scarily easy. All you’ve got to do is hit certain buttons. Farage hits them, Trump hits them,” he says, noting the efforts in the run-up June elections to exploit the issue.

Unhappy about the drift in language about immigration, Puttnam says: “The Irish invented immigration, invented the immigrant, and went through every single form of the immigrant experience, certainly in the United States.”

He reserves a particular dislike for west Cork Independent Ireland TD Michael Collins, who has been strongly vocal about immigration and was recently quoted by the Southern Star calling for the chemical castration of rapists.

[ David Puttnam: ‘I feel no sense of identity for the country I grew up in ’ ]

“People don’t seem to have any sense of the road you’re going down there. That road has only got one ending. There’s no soft landing,” says Puttnam, who believes nevertheless that Collins will “romp home” in the next general election.

“I accuse Britain of being unempathetic, I don’t think Ireland is unempathetic. I have so many examples of people in west Cork who are utterly remarkable, doing utterly remarkable things.

“So, it is there in us. And I do say ‘us’ now. I just sometimes think that we let ourselves down because of our belief in the ‘workaround’, in not pushing for high standards sometimes.”

But his grumbles are outweighed by his passion for west Cork, his pride in being granted Irish citizenship – the pledge of allegiance where he swore fidelity to the Irish nation – his loyalty to the State no cheap act for a man for whom words matter.

In a documentary that slowly and gently unwinds, Puttnam manages to take pride in a life and career of extraordinary success without sounding boastful, always grateful for the blessings life has bestowed upon him.

“I think if I’d been smart enough to have a vision of my life 50 years ago, it probably wouldn’t have been a million miles away from the life we are living,” he says, “but this is, this feels to me like the best, the best part.”

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