John Boorman Films | John Boorman Filmography | John Boorman Biography | John Boorman Career | John Boorman Awards

"Film making is the process of turning money into light and then back into money again." John Boorman's neat epigram will probably haunt him for the rest of his filmmaking days, not simply because it is so tidy a formulation, but because the tensions it articulates have played such a prominent part in his own career.

Boorman has always been much concerned with the look of his films. In both Deliverance and Point Blank (shot, incidentally, in exquisite 'scope) he went to unusual lengths to control colour tones; Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic are remarkable for their pictorial inventiveness; the images of the Irish countryside in Excalibur and of the Brazilian rain forest in The Emerald Forest are carefully imbued with a luminous, almost magical quality; and the extraordinary street of housing built for Hope and Glory (one of the largest sets constructed in Britain since the heyday of the studio system) speaks volumes for Boorman's commitment to a cinema of distinctively visual qualities.

Boorman has certainly proven himself able to turn money into light. Turning it back into money, however, has not always proved so easy, and the commercial weakness of Zardoz and the near total box-office disaster of Exorcist II were no help to him in trying to develop his ambitious projects of the 1980s. After all, an Irish-based adaptation of Malory's Morte d'Arthur (Excalibur), a ?green? allegory scheduled for location filming in South America (Emerald Forest ), and an autobiographical evocation of his wartime childhood (Hope and Glory) are hardly the most obviously marketable ideas, even from a thoroughly bankable director. Yet sell them he did, and if The Emerald Forest doesn't come off as well as either Excalibur or Hope and Glory, two out of three is no mean record for an independent-minded filmmaker with a taste for startling visuals and unusual stories.

Boorman's is a high-risk approach. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong with a vengeance, and both Exorcist II and The Emerald Forest sacrifice narrative conviction in the cause of pictorial splendour and some risible metaphysics. But when his approach goes right, the results are sufficient to justify his reputation as one of the most courageous and imaginative filmmakers still working inthe commercial mainstream.

At its best (in Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory) Boorman's cinema is rich and subtle, his fascination with images matched by taut story-telling and a nice sense of the opacity of people's motives, his characters constantly made aware of the complex and unanticipated consequences of their actions. In many of his films, strong-willed individualists find themselves embroiled in a clash between established order and disorder, a context within which they appear as representative figures caught up in near mythical confrontations. In Hell in the Pacific, for instance, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune play two enemy soldiers stranded on an island. As they continue to conduct the war their roles become emblematic, and they play out the tensions between conditioned aggression and common humanity.

In Point Blank, perhaps Boorman's most elegantly realised film, the force for disorder is Walker (Lee Marvin), a man obsessed by what he considers to be his just desserts. Double-crossed in a robbery, he wants only his share of the spoils, a goal he pursues step by step up the hierarchy of a criminal syndicate. The film leaves us little choice but to identify with Walker who is, like Sean Connery in Zardoz, an absolute individualist, a man who cannot be restrained by the hierarchical order on which he impinges so forcefully.

Yet Point Blank somehow transcends the conventional morality of assertive individualism. Walker is ruthless and violent, certainly, but it is his symbolic force to which we respond. The movie creates a paradox in which this unlovely figure comes to represent a more human spirit than that embodied in the syndicate's bureaucratic order. As ever, Boorman provides no easy solutions. After much death and violence it emerges that Walker, too, has been manipulated. Sharing his perspective as we do, we are left with a pervasive sense of impotence in the face of larger impersonal forces.

Deliverance, too, shows us order and certainty revealed as precarious fabrications. It concerns four men on a canoe trip through the wilderness who are forced to recognise that their ideas about morality and their belief in the social niceties are ineffectual constructs in the face of adverse and unintelligible circumstances. After killing a man who had buggered one of their party at gunpoint, they find that the action leads them down a path of lies and death. ?There's no end to it,? one character observes, close to despair.

Excalibur, perhaps inevitably given its source in Arthurian myth, tells of the imposition of order onto chaos and of the terrible price to be paid when that order is not firmly based. Human frailty destroys Camelot when Arthur finds Guinevere and Lancelot asleep together in the forest; in another of Boorman's inspired cinematic images, Arthur plunges the sword Excalibur into the ground between them. The despairing Guinevere is left curled naked around the sword while the land falls into pestilence and war.

In these three films Boorman ensures that we appreciate how difficult it is to make judgments of good and evil, how tangled the threads of motivation can be. But he does so not only as a pessimistic observer of human failings; he also has hope. There is a lovely scene in Hope and Glory, his most romantic of films, when young Bill (Boorman himself, for the film is autobiographical) has the ?googly? explained to him by his father. When he realises what it involves (bowling a cricket ball so that it turns one way but with a bowling action that suggests that it will turn in the opposite direction) he is both horrified and fascinated. ?That's like telling fibs,? he says, a child's term for lying which is as accurate to the period as it is precise in its childish evocation of acceptable untruth. In Bill's (and Boorman's) world, people are forever telling fibs; like the googly, things are not always what they seem. But, also like the googly, that complexity can be a matter as much for celebration as for concern.?ANDREW TUDOR