Memoir: At the 40th Cannes Film Festival, John Boorman found himself standing in line with the great Billy Wilder. The pair were the first to arrive for a ceremony honouring previous Cannes award-winners, and were asked whether they minded waiting, writes Hugh Linehan
"Do I mind waiting?" Wilder responded. "I spent my life waiting. Waiting for the money, waiting for actors, waiting for the lighting, waiting for the sun to come out, waiting for the sun to go in. In 50 years of movie making, you know how long the camera was running? Maybe two weeks."
It's one of the many well-judged anecdotes which punctuate Boorman's memoir of a life in movies. Film directing is not a profession for the faint of heart, and it takes a remarkable talent and resilience to pursue it successfully over the course of an entire lifetime. Difficult enough for someone working within the heart of the Hollywood system, almost unimaginably so for an Irish-based Briton with a singular vision informed by pantheism, the Jungian unconscious and pre-Christian Celtic myth. Yet John Boorman has been directing feature films for almost 40 years now, hatching his plans in the Co Wicklow valley of Annamoe, then taking them to the smoggy hills of Los Angeles for that ever-elusive green light.
It all speaks of a remarkable doggedness, a faith in that singular vision, undimmed by the inevitable critical brickbats and financial disasters which are bound to occur over such a long film-making career.
But Boorman is also that rarest of specimens, a film-maker who can write beautifully and evocatively about his vocation and the struggles, compromises, disasters and triumphs which lie behind every film production. Money Into Light, his chronicle of the making of his 1980s eco-thriller, The Emerald Forest, ranks alongside Lillian Ross's Picture as one of the best books ever written about the making of a film. So Adventures of a Suburban Boy is one of the most eagerly anticipated books about film of this or any year.
At first, it reads like a conventional autobiography, with its meticulous recreation of a suburban childhood in wartime north London. Some of the story will be familiar to those who've seen Boorman's own Hope and Glory, but here it has a different purpose, establishing the foundation for the preoccupations and themes which were to resonate throughout his work: the reaction against suburban conformity, a fascination with the natural world (and in particular rivers) and a yearning for a pre-lapsarian culture which has been destroyed by Christianity and industrialisation. From the fractured noir of Point Blank to the elemental horrors of Deliverance and the medieval dreamscapes of Excalibur, the same archetypes recur.
This preoccupation with the mythic has at times taken Boorman's film-making into the realms of deep kitsch. But it's this very ambition, and willingness to risk sheer silliness, which raises him above the common herd.
Against himself, he quotes Pauline Kael's damning verdict on his high-style Exorcist sequel, The Heretic, as: "winged camp - a horror fairy tale gone wrong, another in the long history of movie-makers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgement - the first casualty of the movie-making obsession".
To which Boorman adds the rueful, typically practical and telling postscript that he also should have resisted the casting of the burnt-out Richard Burton in the central role. These relationships with his male leads, particularly Lee Marvin and Jon Voight, are often the most revealing. Boorman loves these troubled, self-destructive, guilt-ridden anti-heroes. If he, as he implies, aspires to the role of Merlin, then these are his Arthurs. Marvin, in particular, who worked so memorably on his breakthrough film, Point Blank, and on the underrated Hell in the Pacific, is a recurring presence throughout.
If there's a criticism to be made of Adventures of a Suburban Boy, it's that it could have been longer; we are rushed pell-mell through some of the films of the 1970s and 1980s. Fascinating though some of these are, the book is often at its best in its quieter moments of reflection and meditation.
As Boorman points out, there's an alternative universe out there of films which have never been made, scripts which have been toiled over for years, but which never reached the screen, projects which collapsed disastrously in pre-production. All those drafts, all those rejections, all that waiting. It's not surprising that a certain sadness hangs over the final chapters: friendships and relationships turn sour or are sundered in the heat of the creative process; old friends die off. How remarkable, then, that Adventures of a Suburban Boy is not the end of the story, finishing as it does in the early 1990s. Since then, Boorman has made four feature films, among them The General, the first to be set in his adopted homeland. He has plans for several others, he tells us, "work that would take me into my 80s". Merlin, it appears, is alive and well and living in Annamoe. And has written another essential book for anyone interested in the art, the graft and the magic of the film-making process.
Hugh Linehan is Entertainment Editor of The Irish Times
Adventures of a Suburban Boy. By John Boorman, Faber and Faber, 314 pp. £20