John Boorman

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John Boorman was born on the 18th of January 1933 in Shepperton, Middlesex, the son of a pub landlord whose own father had made and lost several fortunes as an inventor. That genealogy of risk-taking and reinvention would shape a career unlike almost any other in British cinema. Boorman went on to direct 20 films over six decades, earn five Academy Award nominations, receive the BAFTA Fellowship in 2004, and accept a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in the 2022 New Year Honours. Yet none of those milestones quite captures what is genuinely strange and compelling about him. He once faced court-martial in the British Army, directed one of the most critically despised films ever made, and invented the Academy Award screener almost by accident. How does a man who failed the eleven-plus exam and worked as a dry-cleaner end up at the center of Hollywood? And how does the director of Deliverance, one of the most viscerally effective thrillers ever committed to celluloid, also be responsible for what many critics consider one of the worst films of all time?

• 2. From Army to BBC

  ›

  Boorman was conscripted into the British Army, where he served as a clerical instructor rather than a combat soldier. His time in the army was not without drama. He faced court-martial for what the charge described as "seducing a soldier from the course of his duty" by criticising the Korean War to his trainees. The case collapsed when Boorman produced The Times newspaper as the source of every comment he had made. After leaving the army, he worked as a dry-cleaner and then as a journalist before landing in broadcasting. He ran newsrooms at Southern Television in Southampton and Dover, steadily building experience before moving into documentary filmmaking. He eventually became head of the BBC's Bristol-based documentary unit. In 1963 he wrote and directed Six Days to Saturday, a documentary about Swindon Town, a club in England's second division, tracing a single week in the life of the professional football club. That film caught the attention of producer David Deutsch.

• 3. Breaking Into Film

  ›

  David Deutsch offered Boorman the chance to direct Catch Us If You Can in 1965, a film built around the Dave Clark Five and designed to repeat the commercial formula of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night. Commercially it fell short of that target, but it earned praise from critics including Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell. Their endorsements opened doors to Hollywood. Boorman arrived in California drawn by the ambition of making larger films than Britain then allowed him. Point Blank, released in 1967 and based on a novel by Richard Stark, a pen name of Donald E. Westlake, brought a genuinely foreign sensibility to the decaying structure of Alcatraz and the Los Angeles of the late 1960s. Lee Marvin, already a star, gave the unknown British director a significant vote of confidence. Marvin told Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that he deferred all his approvals on the project to Boorman. After Point Blank, the two men worked together again on Hell in the Pacific, a fable about two soldiers from opposing sides stranded on an island, with Toshiro Mifune as Marvin's counterpart. Boorman then returned to Britain and made Leo the Last in 1970, influenced by Federico Fellini and starring Fellini's regular collaborator Marcello Mastroianni. Leo the Last won Boorman the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.

• 4. Deliverance and Its Consequences

  ›

  Deliverance, released in 1972, was adapted from a novel by James Dickey and cast Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox, and Ned Beatty as four city men confronting danger during a whitewater-rafting trip through the Appalachian backwoods. It became Boorman's first genuine box office success and brought him Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as a Golden Globe nomination. The film was later inducted into the National Film Registry alongside Point Blank, the only two Boorman pictures to receive that distinction. The success of Deliverance emboldened Boorman in the years that followed. At the start of the 1970s he had corresponded with J. R. R. Tolkien about adapting The Lord of the Rings, though the project proved too costly to mount. Elements of that unrealised work eventually surfaced in Excalibur. Boorman's next major project, Zardoz in 1974, starred Sean Connery in a post-apocalyptic science fiction story set in the 23rd century, where society divides into two incompatible worlds. The film's director commentary describes the "Zardoz world" as being on a collision course with an "effete" immortal society. The gold record awarded to Boorman for the Deliverance score was later stolen from his home by Martin Cahill, the Dublin criminal whose life Boorman would eventually turn into the film The General.

• 5. The Exorcist Disaster

  ›

  Boorman's selection as director of Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977 surprised the film industry, given that he had already told John Calley, the head of Warner Brothers, that he would have been happy if Calley had not produced the original Exorcist either. The screenplay he inherited, written by Broadway playwright William Goodhart, interested Boorman precisely because of its intellectual ambition. It drew on the theology of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, the Catholic thinker whose work proposed that biological evolution was the first step in a divine plan culminating in humanity. Boorman found it compelling. Despite his rewriting throughout the shoot, the finished film struck audiences and critics as incomprehensible. Released in June 1977, it was a critical catastrophe, though it performed moderately at the box office. William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel The Exorcist, publicly denounced Boorman, as did William Friedkin, director of the original film. Boorman later acknowledged that his approach had been a mistake. The Heretic is regularly cited not merely as the worst entry in the Exorcist series but as one of the worst films ever made.

• 6. Excalibur and Ireland

  ›

  Excalibur, released in 1981, was Boorman's dream project, a retelling of the Arthurian legend drawn from Le Morte D'Arthur. He cast Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren despite their protests; the two actors disliked each other intensely, and Boorman felt their mutual antagonism would deepen their performances. The production was based in Ireland, where Boorman had made his home, and employed all of his children in various acting and crew roles, a pattern he returned to across later films. Excalibur was one of the first films produced by Orion Films and earned a moderate return. It was followed in 1985 by The Emerald Forest, in which Boorman cast his son Charley as an eco-warrior in a rainforest adventure. Rospo Pallenberg's original screenplay was later adapted into a book by author Robert Holdstock. Because the film's distributor was in financial difficulty that year, The Emerald Forest received no traditional awards campaign for the 1985 Academy Awards. Boorman responded by making VHS copies available at no charge to Academy members through video rental stores in the Los Angeles area. The film earned no nominations, but the practice Boorman started did not disappear. By the 2010s, more than a million Oscar screeners were being mailed to Academy members every year.

• 7. Hope, Glory, and The General

  ›

  Hope and Glory, released in 1987 and produced by Goldcrest Films with Hollywood financing, was the most personal film Boorman had made. It was a retelling of his own childhood in London during the Blitz, and it became a box office hit in the United States. It brought him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay, as well as BAFTA and Golden Globe recognition. His daughter Telsche co-wrote the screenplay for his 1990 comedy Where the Heart Is, a film that proved a major commercial failure. Telsche died of ovarian cancer in 1996 at the age of 36. When his friend David Lean died in 1991, Boorman was approached to take over Lean's long-planned adaptation of Nostromo, but that production also collapsed. The General, released in 1998, brought Boorman a second Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was a biography of Martin Cahill, a figure Boorman described as a glamorous but mysterious criminal in Dublin, killed by what appeared to be the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In 2004, Boorman returned to Cannes as part of a different project: he sent the sequel to Hope and Glory, Queen and Country, to the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2014 festival after shooting in Shepperton and Romania in autumn 2013.

• 8. A Life in Many Forms

  ›

  Boorman settled in Annamoe, County Wicklow, close to the Glendalough twin lakes, and lived there for many years before putting the property up for sale in 2022 to move to Surrey, where his son Charley lived. Charley Boorman had become known to a wide audience through a televised motorbike journey with actor Ewan McGregor across Europe, Central Asia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and the Midwest United States in 2004. His daughter Katrine, who played Igrayne in Excalibur, built her acting career in France. Boorman participated in the Arts in Marrakech Festival in 2007 and 2009, and in November 2012 he served as president of the main competition jury at the International Film Festival of Marrakech. In 2016, his debut novel, Crime of Passion, was published by Liberties Press of Dublin, with a French-language edition following from Marest in 2017. He had long worked on a fictional account of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, written as a letter from a dying Hadrian to his successor, a project he was developing at the same time a remake of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz under his direction was announced in August 2009. As of 2024, Boorman was attached to an animated project called The Honey Wars, with a cast that included Jamie Lee Curtis, Vanessa Kirby, Patrick Stewart, Brendan Gleeson, Richard E. Grant, and Jon Voight.