by Ray Connolly
July 1973
Alan Parker
In making his film No Hard Feelings, director Alan Parker broke the one fundamental rule of film making: he paid for it out of his own money. It cost him £30,000.
He made it as a pilot for a proposed series of six television films — ‘Stories of the Blitz’ — but so far both the London commercial television stations have, after enthusing about the quality of the film, turned it down — one of them only after several months of planning to show it.
Understandably Parker, one of the top television commercial directors, is a bit chagrined. But he isn’t giving up: ‘I didn’t make the film to make an enormous amount of money, but to show that I could direct something of that length,’ he says. No Hard Feelings runs for fifty-two minutes.
‘Until I did it I wasn’t able to impress anyone with what I could do. You can’t impress people by showing them a roll of fifteen award-winning commercials. But at the same time, although money wasn’t my primary objective, I want to get back the money I invested in it. It was hard earned.’
Alan Parker was brought up in a council flat in Islington. ‘It was just an ordinary working-class family,’ he says. ‘I suppose I was quite bright, but because I went to a very science-biased school, I took physics and pure and applied mathematics in the sixth form, although I wasn’t at all interested in them nor very good at them. I passed my exams because I was quite clever at learning things.
‘But instead of going to university I joined an advertising agency when I was nineteen. I’d seen a play on the telly about advertising and there were millions of girls in it and I thought I’d like that.
‘My first job was in the dispatch department. It was quite a long time before I began meeting any ladies. It was quite difficult to get acclimatised at first. If you’re trained to go to university and then don’t, you find that you’re two or three years behind. So I was pushed in with a lot of boys of fifteen and sixteen.’
During the next five years he moved about various agencies, doing all kinds of different jobs like ‘copy forwarding’ and ‘traffic control’. (They have very fancy names for very mundane jobs in advertising,’ he says.)
He started off in a tiny agency where he learned to do virtually every job there was which was good training, despite the fact that he was only earning seven pounds a week. Then as he gathered more experience his pay increased — to £10 a week.
‘I joined a bigger agency just after that and when the bloke asked me how much I wanted I said “thirteen”, meaning £13 a week. But when my pay packet came I realised that he’d though I meant £1300 a year. I couldn’t believe it.
‘At first I wasn’t allowed to be a copywriter, but they encouraged me to write advertisements in the evening. So in the day I’d be doing my ordinary job, and then at night I’d be up until two in the morning writing the copy.’
Eventually he joined a big agency where he was encouraged to make pilot commercials in the basement of the building.
‘I was allowed to make them, but they couldn’t put them on the air because they weren’t made with a full union crew, so they’d have to make them all over again using a professional director. But eventually I decided that the commercials that were being shown were worse than the ones I was making as pilots, so I decided to start doing it myself.’
That was five years ago. Last year the Alan Parker Film Company, in its third year of business, had a turnover of more than £300,000.
‘We’re a very tiny company. Just me, a producer and two girls. Using my own name for the title of the company wasn’t just because I’m an egomaniac but because, as I had something of a reputation, it was important to keep the name.
‘As you know, every geezer you see in Wardour Street has a dirty script under his arm, so who was going to listen to me when I said I wanted to make a film? Maybe it isn’t as brilliant a film as I think it is, but I know it’s a good, straight-forward piece of filmmaking and story telling.’
His attempts to get it shown on television have so far been depressing, despite the fact that everyone who has seen it has been very impressed.
At first Thames Television were interested, and said that although they didn’t want six (which would cost in the region of £240,000) they were keen to show the first one and a couple of others. Parker was delighted, but then after a few months his excitement evaporated when finally Thames came back and told him that they didn’t want the two others — and finally that they weren’t going to buy the original film either.
London Weekend Television were approached next, said they liked it, but then after a week decided not to buy it.
The trouble lies, I would imagine, in the cost. An hour of film for television costs something like £50,000 but a videotape recording is much cheaper.
At the moment Parker’s slice-of-life commercials are highly fashionable and his work is to be seen nightly on television. He was, for instance, responsible for the phrase ‘Nice one, Cyril,’ when it was used in one of his advertisements about Wonderloaf. And he’s won many awards for his work on products like Birds Eye Beefburgers (one of them based on a twenties-style speakeasy with mobsters, and another about a man who drinks a green liquid instead of milk and turns into a monster). At the moment his commercial for Volkswagen, with the big fat man and the children, is being shown constantly.
He wants to move into feature films next, although he knows that there is less money in it. ‘It seems to be a logical extension for me. I’m very fashionable at the moment in commercials, but I might not be in five years’ time.’
His film No Hard Feelings is a love story about the effect of the Blitz on a young man. Three years ago he wrote the script of a film called Melody, which won him an award in Japan, but he would rather direct than write. Only as a director does he have final control over his work.
‘I sometimes think I must have been out of my mind to have used all my own money on the film. But I saw it as an investment in my future,’ he says.
‘Now the fact that I haven’t got rid of it makes me look a right twit. But it wasn’t done as any kind of ego-trip. I could have bought a Rolls-Royce with the money or a villa in the South of France, but I preferred to do this, because although our commercials are considered the best of their kind and have won millions of awards, they’re really not relevant to serious film or serious drama because they don’t last longer than thirty seconds.
‘I’m totally a film man,’ says Parker. ‘I would no more think of directing a performance on tape than I would want to direct a play on the stage. It’s so different.’
Now Parker, twenty-nine, lives in Fulham with his wife and three children. A fourth is expected in January.
‘When I go back to Islington I don’t get any feelings of nostalgia,’ he says. ‘It just terrifies me to see all the other kids I was at school with who are still there. And I think why have I been able to get out of it? At which point of my life did the change come? I wasn’t that much brighter than them. I’ve been enormously lucky.’
POSTSCRIPT This piece was really written to help try to sell No Hard Feelings for Alan Parker. It worked. The BBC eventually bought the film and Parker began his career as a film director. Since then he has made Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame, Shoot The Moot and The Wall, won lots of prizes and accumulated heaps and heaps of money. At the time of writing he has temporarily turned his back on film making and is enjoying a year’s sabbatical, devoting his time to reading and amusing his friends with a weekly cartoon in the magazine Screen International. A collection of his cartoons, all about the film industry, has recently been published in book form.
July 1973
Don McCullin
For nine years Don McCullin has acted as the Sunday needle in the side of all those living the comfortable and safe life. His photographs of famine, war, pestilence and misery have greeted us in the Sunday Times as regularly as deprivation and massacre have come to those whom McCullin has made his life’s study.
A
s British photo-journalists go (he doesn’t care for the term photographer and he gets embarrassed when someone calls him a journalist), he is easily the most acclaimed in his field and has won virtually every award there is to win. ‘You could say I’m addicted to war,’ he says wryly, without a trace of a smile.
He is a flatly serious man and his stories of war sound like the synopses for a list of Hammer horror films. He doesn’t enjoy telling them, but when pressed he’ll open up, without excitement, but rather with a kind of dull acceptance of the way things are. In a sense I suspect he’s in danger of becoming punch-drunk by all the terrible things he’s seen and his impotence to do anything about it.
Just a few weeks ago he was in Africa taking pictures of the famine. Before that he was in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Belfast, Biafra, several times in Vietnam, the Congo and Cyprus. And he knows that if a war broke out tomorrow he would do everything in his power to get to it. ‘My wife has never tried to stop me,’ he says gratefully.
The effect a single still photograph can have is quite different from that of a piece of newsreel. Everyone in the world must have seen the live TV film of Bobby Kennedy being shot in that kitchen in Los Angeles, but it’s the single shot of his head lying in a pool of blood which was on the cover of every newspaper and magazine that we remember most. I think the frozen frame sums up the human condition far more accurately and emotively than any rush of newsreel.
McCullin agrees. He says: ‘Newsreel fills the hungry stomach of television. When something is going by quickly it doesn’t give you a chance to hold it in your mind, but when people can see a single frame they can look and consider it for much longer and get to think about what it really means.
‘On television something immediately follows, frame follows frame, item follows item and programme follows programme, so that the original image is gradually nudged out of your consciousness.
McCullin’s entry into journalism was hardly easy. Born in a small room behind King’s Cross Station, he was evacuated to a series of homes during the war, but eventually returned to live with his family in a two-room basement flat in Finsbury Park.
‘My father was a street trader, but he was invalided all his life because he had a weak chest and a lot of asthma, so my mother was the forceful one in the family. She used to dish out the clouts while my dad would be coughing his heart out. We all slept together in the same room. That basement was the old man’s living grave, because with it being so damp it was really bad for his chest.
‘I didn’t have it worse than thousands of other people but I think that that kind of upbringing laid the foundations for my career, because when I see poor people now I know what they feel like because I know what it’s like to feel poor and helpless. And whenever I take pictures of poverty and tragedy, I’m always going to do something on people who bomb and starve children, because that’s the area I’m mostly interested in. And when I do, I’m not going to pull my punches. I don’t care whether people are horrified or not. What worries me is that after nine years I’m not sure that anybody really cares all that much.’
In 1948 when he was thirteen he won a scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts, because it was recognised that he might have some talent in that direction.
‘I was very interested in drawing at the time, and my dad used to let me paint on the walls at home. I used to pin a paper to the wall, but I’d always paint over the edges of it on to the wallpaper. He never was annoyed. He would just sit there and pose for me.
‘I was fifteen when the old man died and it was really a kick in the balls for me. I can remember it to this day. He was about forty, in the Archway Hospital, and it was a miserable February night. The hospital sent a bobby round, as they did in those days, to tell my mum to get up to the hospital quickly and I can remember all the muffled sounds of coming tragedy.
‘Me and my younger brother were ushered into the house next door while my mum went to the hospital, and I remember that to take my mind off it, they gave me a whole pile of National Geographic magazines to look through. And I’ve still got those magazines to this day…’
The result of his father’s death meant that he had to leave school and went to work for a year in a restaurant car on British Railways until he had to leave, having stuck a knife in his hand. All through his teens he was a generally wayward lad, he thinks, throwing bricks through shop windows and pinching sweets and catapulting things at cinema screens.
‘Basically I come from a cunning background and I think I’ve made quite a lot of capital out of it. My reactions are totally different from those of someone who has been to a good school and whose background embraced them so totally that it often stripped them of any kind of protection against tragedy.
‘I’ve seen newspapermen I respected — and from whom I’ve learnt a lot — have to walk away from tragedy and horror because they can’t face it.
‘But even though I was a tearaway as a boy I was always determined not to end up in the social bog that drags so many people down from that environment. And because of my relations with the other boys in the area I became a photographer.’
That wasn’t in fact until he was twenty-three. In the meantime he joined the Royal Air Force for National Service, where he learned to take aerial photographs for maps and then came out and bummed around from one job to the other for three years, taking pictures in his spare time.
Then one night a policeman was killed in a gang fight near where he lived and suddenly Fleet Street was interested in any pictures of these boys that were available. McCullin had some fascinating ones, taken mainly on building sites, and they were bought by the Observer. At the time he’d actually pawned his camera to buy a motorbike, but his mother got it out of hock for him.
Then another three years went by, as he began to learn about photography, during which time he got married (he now has three children) and spent much of his time signing on at the Labour Exchange.
When the Berlin Wall went up, he seized his opportunity, rushed over and began to take pictures, sending them back to the Observer. The result was that they offered him a contract.
‘I used that because I wanted to draw attention to myself,’ he says. ‘I’d been doing some freelance work in England, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life covering demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. There seemed to me to be openings all over the world for me, but you couldn’t expect the average press photographer to go out and risk his life.’
Why him then?
‘I suppose I saw it as an opportunity to get my name under pictures — pictures that meant something, not just fashion or advertising.’
After Berlin he was sent to Cyprus and found himself right in the middle of the battle for Limassol.
‘The whole thing was tailor-made for me. Just what I’d been waiting for. There were bullets flying everywhere, but all I could think of was that I was the only photographer in there getting any of the pictures.’
It was in Cyprus that he saw his first man shot dead.
‘Now, whenever I go anywhere,’ he says, ‘I try to make myself look smaller, because when people are suffering the way I’ve seen people suffer, you’ve got to get right down so that people don’t even notice you. But when one of their people dies they are so morally outraged and shocked they want to share it with you. They want you to see what has been done, so that you can tell what it’s like.’
Some people have criticised him because he earns more money than the average press photographer and because he owns a beautiful house in Hertfordshire. His answer is that he supposes he can be criticised because he makes a living out of other people’s miseries, but there isn’t any money in the world which can compensate for the chance that he might lose a leg or an arm, or his life.
And he’s lost many, many friends who were also photographers, hit by a mortar shell or a bullet.
‘Anyway, you know that there isn’t that much money in newspapers anyway. I admit I’m no angel and sometimes I wonder if it�
��s right that I should live in such a lovely house. And I do get exhausted from seeing so much suffering. I suppose I could be accused of being mentally unbalanced for pursuing it, but I don’t need anyone to psychoanalyse me. I’m constantly aware of what people can accuse me of.’
Considering that virtually every time he goes on a job abroad he’s taking his life in his hands, he views his future with phlegmatic calm.
‘I’ve been lying with my face down in the mud many times, with soldiers being shot all around and I’ve been praying “Please God, don’t let me die here,” but you get too involved to be frightened all the time. And also you begin to know the signs, so that you can tell whether mortars are going out or coming in.’
He remains totally neutral in his approach, never taking political sides of any kind. How can you take political sides when the people who are being killed may be three-year-old children who have never made a political gesture in their lives, he asks.
He’s seen so many atrocities and seen so many people butchered and murdered that he’s actually lost count and finds difficulty in recounting his worst moment. There was, for instance, the time when he was with Biafran soldiers behind enemy lines in Nigeria and two prisoners were taken.
‘The commander ordered his troops to kill them, but the soldiers didn’t want to. They were embarrassed to kill them and the Nigerians were begging and crying to be saved. That was terrible. I was with a French photographer at the time who’s since been killed in Cambodia. But then a little way down the road we saw a woman on fire and another soldier beating the driver of a jeep to death.’