John Boorman in 2001, for The Tailor of Panama
“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days to do one shot. It was just exhausting.” Later I spoke to Kubrick and I said, ‘Why do that many takes?’ He said, ‘Well, I try to exhaust the actors because once they’re really tired they stop acting’. I do think there is something in putting actors into an environment like the Amazon, or putting them into heat and humidity, that they respond to. It’s all about trying to integrate the actors and the environment.
So, why do you keep returning to this theme [alienation]? You have even written that you feel alienated from your own work. When you watch your films, you said, they seem like the work of a stranger.
I don’t want to psychoanalyse myself but I suppose if you look at my preface to the script of Hope and Glory, where I am talking about the lower middle-class suburbs around London, which grew up between the wars, they were completely alienating. These were people who had no past, no history, they were refugees from the Industrial Revolution who were coming into these sunny suburbs that were clean, and they threw off their past. They were strangers to themselves and they had this kind of foolish look about them of people who don’t know what to do or how to behave. I suppose that was the thing that I came out of. And I suppose that sense of not belonging to anything is what creates that sense of alienation. I also remember that when I was a kid and we lost our house – it was completely burnt, gone, everything – I felt a great sense of freedom. Since then I’ve always eschewed material possessions, I’ve never put value on them at all.
Would you say you portrayed Panama fairly and accurately in the [Tailor of Panama]?
The people in the poorer areas of Panama were wonderful. But there was a ghastly rich community who were just awful, awful people. These were the people running the banks and all the corruption, and they were some of the worst people I’ve met in my life. They all have bodyguards because everyone’s afraid of kidnapping. Basically there are two types of kidnapping in Panama. There’s the serious one where the Columbians come over and grab someone and bring him over to Columbia where they’re bought and sold. There’s a whole trade in this kind of kidnapping and the ransom’s usually around $2-3m. Then there’s the local guys who just look for $10,000, but you have to produce it within two hours otherwise they kill the victim. We always kept a lot of money in our pocket as we went round the place just in case, but we were left alone.
Returning to Deliverance, I watched it recently and felt that the film was an anxiety dream about how masculinity has been made monstrous by being repressed by civilisation. What did you want to say with the film?
The central idea of Deliverance was that you had this river that was a metaphor, a symbol, for life, and it’s flow had been stopped by the dam, which is probably the most aggressive act that can be levelled against nature. And what’s it for? It is to generate electricity for air-conditioners in Atlanta. So these men are responsible for that in a sense. There’s this notion that you have benevolent and malevolent sides of nature, and those… were the malevolent spirits of the forest who take revenge on these men for being responsible for the destruction of this place. It is fine when people talk about being in harmony with nature and finding a harmonious place within nature, but you have to recognise that just as there is a good and an evil side in men, so there is in nature.
What do you see resulting from the schism between man and nature?
I think that it leads to neurosis. If we’re not in touch with other living things on the planet – like animals and trees, the climate and the weather – if we lose touch with all of that, then I think it leads to lots of problems and neurosis. It is easy to forget that we are all a part of nature, and to set ourselves apart is incredibly dangerous.
Continued at: https://www.netribution.co.uk/features/interviews/2001/john_boorman/1.html
Stephen Applebaum died in February 2024. He was one of the UK’s foremost film interviewers, with interviews spanning from Beyonce and Al Gore to Michael Moore and George Clooney; Bill Murray and Terry Gilliam, to Vidal Sassoon and Paul Rusesabagina. He’s survived by his wife and two daughters.