So this is kind of an interesting, um, time to interview me because in three weeks time I’ll be 70.
I also have a, you know, life-threatening illness.
And so I’m, I’ve been in a really very reflective, um, stage of mind for the last year about, you know, whether, what have I achieved through my life, what have I actually done, did what I set out to do, had, did, did that work out?
I come from, I always say working class background, but I sort of misleading. ’cause my father, who was from extremely working class background, had earned enough money to buy a detached house in a very nice part of Leeds on a private estate, but we didn’t have much money. So I did a paper round to, so only, there’s only two times in my entire life and I’ve ever been motivated by money. So I got a pound a week for six days a week. And, uh, in the course of doing that, I, the milkman approached him and he said, oh, a, he said, you are quite good looking. You should be a model. And I went, what’s that? And he said, I’ve just bought shares in a model agency in, in Bradford. And he met up with my mom and dad and we went to see this model agency and they took me on and I, I did my one and only commercial, which was for a toy called Sailor Boy, which is for my friends find really amusing, the only commercial sailor boy for a camp. It was like a hair dryer that you used to blow these plastic boats around. But from doing that, I then did Grattan’s catalog and Kay’s catalog commercials. And I used to get three guineas a day, which was a huge amount of money. I became 14 and I thought maybe I can do this as a living. And I joined a local amateur operatic and dramatic society. And then for whatever reason, I was motivated a Yorkshire television, which was one of the five big ITV companies.
They started a number of agencies in leads and I joined one of them. And within a very short space of time, I found myself auditioning for something called the Winslow Boy, which was a, a play here in, in London’s West End. And I had to have tion lessons for it. And it was that extraordinary thing that I became a professional actor within six or eight months. It was all fluke how I got found out, what happened, the say. So the agent that I went with, she wanted 25 guineas a year to join her acting course. And we didn’t have that sort of money. And when you went on the acting course, she had this big war chart and it had lots of photographs of all these people on it. And it just so happened she had a space and she put my photograph on there and didn’t cost anything. And then she sent that big war chart down to Binky Beaumont, who was at the time the West End’s biggest theater producer. And they looked to all these people on it and they went, we wanna see him. And something about my face was right for it. So there was that fluke of it. And then the other thing is that they wanted me, the producer, the director. And so Terrence Rattigan, who was the writer, wanted me. And Kenneth Moore was a star, and he never really did. And um, I started on, I was the first one to start working on it, but then they found two other boys. And because of the licensing laws, we had to all take it in turns. And Kenneth Moore sadly turned out to be a major c**t, a really, really nasty man. And he didn’t like me because I went to a secondary modern school. Now, secondary modern school means you failed. You are 11 plus, you are not very bright. They had terrible two tier system, and the other boys all went to public school. You know, they’re very top private schools and he never liked me. And so I did the out of London tour and I never got to play it in the West End. And they told me it was because my voice was breaking. And I knew that was a lie. And I always thought that it was because Kenneth Moore thought I was a bad actor. And that, that the fluke of me being found and then the way that I was treated and he got rid of me. And it was only when my father died 29 years later that it was all down to the fact that I was common. And he never thought I got rid of my Yorkshire accent, which is ironic because I speak to you now, never having had an elocution lesson for, you know, 55 years since I stopped it there. And so I never thought of acting. I, I understood the precariousness of it and I was very fortunate I was successful.
But when you start young, all the other actors you work with, they say to you, David, you’re 14, you’re 15, you’re 16. Don’t take it seriously.
Luckily I started at the bottom having done these wonderful plays. I I did the Winslow Boy again on tour with Richard Todd, who was a man who was nominated for an Oscar and was a much bigger film star than Kenneth Moore. And he had no problem with my, with me or anything about me. But I then went to Harrogate in Rep and I learned everything from the bottom. But I was so acutely aware that people would say, it’s not really a profession that you can take seriously. And everybody gave me examples of people that had been very good in things and couldn’t get work. For instance, there was an actor who was truly brilliant every just before me about 5, 6, 7 years before me. He was in Oliver Twist, which was in the same theater as the Winslow Boy. And everybody said, there’s this brilliant actor, absolutely the best art for Dodger ever, but now he’s grown up and he can’t get any work. And I said, what’s his name? And they said, Phil Collins. And I said, what’s he gonna do? And he said, well, he really wants to be an actor, but nobody will employ him. So he is gonna start a band. And, um, Phil Collins became very successful.
But, so it’s a sort of everything in this business. Everybody goes in it with a set idea of what it is. The, the advice I’ve been given by a great many actors is find another job and do that the same time as acting. And, and so many actors I know have a second job during the late seventies and eighties and nineties, that second job became voiceovers. That became huge. Mary Margolis, who’s a very good friend, and she was only like quarter of a million pounds in like the eighties. She was like the number one woman for doing it. But I never got into that and producing became the thing I thought I would want to do. And I optioned a book called Porter House Blue, which I thought would be brilliant. And I, I failed miserably to make it. I lost all my money I’d made as an actor and I did very well as an actor. And eventually got made as a television series and it won lots of BAFTA awards and it starred David, Jason and Ian Richardson.
And I’d got Donald Pleasence and Denholm Elliot, but I just couldn’t get it off the ground. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I became quite by accident the first ever independent producer to work with the BBC. And it was on a, a film, a television film of Virginia Walls to the lighthouse. And I was originally going to play one of three parts. And when the BBC found out, ’cause I I played some nice parts of him. So I, I played the lead in something that Mike Newell had directed and Ian McEwen had written, it was the first thing he’d ever written for the screen, which I got, I got 75 pounds for doing and 125 pounds for in expenses. That’s 200 pounds. It was a week’s work, it was a very, very good play. But that’s how, and even even then, 75 pounds, it was, I think the national average wage at the time was probably 50, 60 quid a week, something. So you never got that much as an actor. So I was going to play one of the parts and the BBC said, oh, I said, that’s why you’re doing it. I said, no, no, I really want to be a producer. And so I decided not to do it. And we cast an unknown actor I’ve never heard of since called Kenneth Branagh and the part, and, uh, I never thought about acting a gay. And if anything, that was my, my big mistake. And it’s funny how it turns out, I mean, I I was a useless producer. I think I have an instinct about what will work absolutely with Porter House Blue. I had the right idea with to the Lighthouse, which was somebody else’s project, but I found it and ran with it. But to be a successful producer, you have to be absolutely totally ruthless. You have to lie and you have to lie all the time. You have to lie to investors. You have to believe they’re going to get their money back. And this is the truth that nobody ever discusses. Most films will never get their money back. And it’s a terrible realization. And it took me 25 years to really face up to that. And, you know, I’ve distributed now well over a hundred films and just two or three of them have got their money back. And two of them happened to be my films. And they were made for so little. So that’s why there’s an awful, you know, France and Germany and Scandinavia and things. They, they have big subsidized and there’s not only subsidized schemes on a government level, you get support in France. Every third thing film, I think that goes into a French multiplex has to be French. Here. It’s not the case. And everything that’s shown, every French film shown in the French cinema is bought by two different broadcasters for decent money. So it’s a very healthy society.
So it was a, you know, it took me a long time to realize, but you, you have to lie. And I never could. I did once I did a film with Lenny Henry and Pete Postlethwaite which was a television film, and somebody I knew had sold his company for 70 million in Yorkshire, he put up a hundred thousand for it. And he lost every single penny. But, and I felt really guilty about that. And o only towards the end of his life did I find that he was able to offset that against profits in another area. I’ve always loved the business, but I’ve found it very difficult to make a living. And it, it was constantly looking at ways of what to do. And I always wanted to get into documentary because I came from drama. Nobody would take me seriously.
The biggest mistake I made of my life was not continuing acting. People like Mike Newell, who I worked with in John Irving, who went on to be very successful directors, when I would bump into them in the street of somewhere and they would say to me, David, why did you stop acting? But if I’d put the energies and efforts into acting that I put into producing distribution, I, I would’ve gone on more. And I turned down some really brilliant parts, the best television director that this country’s ever produced called Alan Clark. And Alan wanted to me to be in something called Bar with David Bowie. And he insisted I go and have a meeting. He’d offered me a job years before and I couldn’t do it. It it liked what I did. And I had a meeting at the BBC and I said, Alan, I don’t want to do it. And nobody’s taking me seriously as a producer, that was a huge mistake. A I would’ve worked with David Bowie and might have got to know him, and who knows, I could’ve got him for a film, but he was also bloody good production with this brilliant director. And I realized after about 10 years that I’d made a big mistake and I tried to get back to acting and I couldn’t. So after 10 years had gone by, I was desperate to try and find something. And I was doing like the thing that Anthony Hopkins directing for me, Dylan Thomas returned Journey. It was a really bonkers production. And we made the whole thing for 48,000 pounds. And, you know, and I got three grand and Tony got three grand and my fellow producer got three grand and it wasn’t a way to make a living. And so I drifted as I was lost looking for things to do, and I realized I didn’t have what it made to be a type producer. I didn’t have that ruthless, nasty streak. And so I became quite good at distribution and I started distributing my own films. I did distributed a documentary on me called James Herriot’s Yorkshire, which was very successful financially.
And I thought, oh, I know all about distribution now. And I didn’t, I was an idiot. I thought I knew it all. And I never had a film as successful of that, that grossed about 15 times its budget that was on video, the old video. But you have to pay the, the store take 50% of the money and the replication and you had to pay VAT and all of that. But the investors and everybody that worked on it, we all got it, went into profit.
I I raised the money. It took me four years to raise the money. Nobody believed it would be a success. And I, I was very fortunate that Christopher Timothy, who’d played James Herriot in the television series, was my business partner on it. And Chris worked really hard to make it happen. But we, we invented this whole new market of sort of special interest video. It became the very first one. And I remember when I went to Chris and I went to see WH Smith’s in Swindon and they said, it’s fantastic what you are doing, but you should know David and Chris ’cause they knew we were using some of our own money that we’re going to give you an order for 200 copies and we don’t think it’s going to sell. We, we said, if you are very, very lucky, if you are really lucky, it’ll sell 5,000 units. But they didn’t understand the market. And I’d spent four years understanding the market and I, I knew it would sell to tourists. I had a man that sold walking sticks and maps and he was going to distribute it. He was gonna take it around all these cafes, um, little news agents, gift shops and things. We sold 9,000 in the first week and we sold 22,000 in the first month. And we couldn’t replicate enough if, if I released it in October. And by Christmas it had all sold because it became a perfect Christmas present. And Chris and I, this is, this is being absolutely honest, if I’m being really, really honest, I bet 50% of the people that got that for Christmas never watched it. It was just a present called James Herriot’s Yorkshire showing lovely Yorkshire. But that then set off an industry. And lots of other people wanted me to replicate that and do it, and I wouldn’t. And they made like John Betjeman’s Britain and the Lakeland Poets and Hardy’s Wessex and Smiths spent a fortune doing this not understanding why ours was a success, because it was based on a bestselling book, which was based on a bestselling television series. And I had the star of the television series. So all those elements came together and they couldn’t understand that. They just thought anything would sell. So I got really, it was hard work, but it was also lucky. But I thought that every video and later DVD that I would release would do even better than that. And I never had anything come close. Monty Python thing I did, I did a couple of Monty Python films and they did very well, but I had to borrow a lot of money in order to pay the advance. ’cause they wanted a lot of money and I gave them 50% of the income and I had to give 25% to the man that gave me the money. So although it did, well, I didn’t get that much money myself, but it, it established me. I’d taken two Monty Python films that nobody else thought would work. Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus, which were made in Germany, in German, and um, yeah, but, and the Pythons then, ’cause I became very friendly with Terry Gillam, you know, they then sold them. When I showed it worked and I cleared all the music rights. It took me about nine months to clear the music rights.
So time consuming. Once that was done, they then sold them to Sony for a shitload of money. And my rights were never long. I didn’t have a long enough. But it was good because it then I then went, I’m going to go into distribution.
If you want to be a filmmaker, you have to understand distribution and you have to understand international sales because only when you can master that, will you ever succeed As a filmmaker, you might get lucky and you might make a film and it might work and it might have distributors bidding for it. But I found very few people in these 56 years that have ever been like that.
Yesterday my film, the Marbles was released. It’s my fourth film as a director. So within 10 years I’d made four documentaries.
I’m making my fifth now. And I have to be absolutely honest. People look at me, they come to the talks I do and they meet me and they go, Dave, you very successful. You know my, my last film Getting Away With Murders, which was about an aspect of the Holocaust, no one had ever covered before. The Guardian voted off the 1,284 films, released new films in 2021, they vo voted it as the 17th best film in the uk. And by default it was their number one documentary.
So it beat Summer of Soul, which won the Oscar and a BAFTA.
I could not have done any of that. I could not be here tonight with my film playing in the marbles in this cinema. But for one reason is I’m the distributor.
I understand distribution, I understand marketing, I understand exhibition, I understand production, I understand how to make a film, put it together. I understand how to finance them. And only by, and it’s taken me all these years to learn all those skills that I’m now in a position that I can exploit that for my benefit. But my films don’t make money. But I still manage to make other films because I’ve now got to the position, partly because of my age and partly ’cause of my standing. I go out and find people who are interested in the subject that I’m doing and I say, give me your money. I don’t say invest, I say donate. And that takes an awful lot of time.
So I released an Irish film for almost 25 years. All I released were British in Irish funds. And again, nobody else in the whole history of the film industry has made that commitment to either British films or Irish funds. It was a really good film. It had won lots of awards, but it came out in what’s called an Indian summer. So it was this breathtaking in September and it was marvelous the weather. And people just didn’t go to the cinema ’cause everybody was in the parks. And that meant the box office was abysmal, not just at the, the Curzon cinema, but several other cinemas. So when I went to cinemas who were interested, they said, David, it’s performed really badly or not taking it. The sales agents who were selling it around the world, they went to try and place it. And people said, but it’s done really badly and we’re talking hundreds of pounds. And I’d spent the best part of 35,000 pounds on it. It’s a very, very, very brutal industry. And I get so upset now when I’ve had grown men and women crying because their film that they’ve spent five years on and they’re just instantly fallen. And there is a stupid assumption, which I had when I went into, it’s why I didn’t start producing theater. I had produced theater when I was an actor. And I thought, no, if you make a film and it doesn’t work, you’ve got an asset and you can sell it so the investors will be well off. I’ve realized that that’s the crock of s**t. And it only really works if the film is successful in the first place. And I, I gave back my entire library of over a hundred films some years ago that I distributed and gave it back to the filmmakers. ’cause I said, there is nothing I can do in this, in this industry. Now there is no ancillary market for b and c listed pictures. Really? People would buy hundreds of DVDs every year. I’ve got thousands in my house and in my loft and everywhere the shed, and I never look at them, but people, it’s that obsession we have as human beings. They wanted to own them. And I know that people were buying DVDs, I released them, they would never watch them. And it was a sort of crazy thing. And now it’s all online and that market’s gone. But the income you get from online has never covered the sort of income that you would get from Blockbuster as a rental or via WH Smith. So that it’s totally different. But, but the process of distribution is still the same. You have a film you have to convince, first of all, you’ve got to convince the exhibitor why are they, there’s 18 films coming out this week. You can only show seven films. Why mine? You’ve got to convince somebody to review it. And my documentary came out this week and I’ve got 12 very good reviews of, which includes the Financial Times and The Guardian. There’s another filmmaker, he’s also got a documentary coming out this week. He’s got three reviews and one of them is from The Guardian. That’s all he’s got. So I understand because I built up these relationships, but my last film got 40 odd reviews.
That was a much more serious subject. And the timing on that was better than the timing on this one. It’s about convincing people. That’s all distribution is you’ve, you’ve got to persuade them why this one. And so the marketing of that is similar, whether it’s on A DVD or it’s online or it’s getting someone to buy a ticket. It’s a really complex industry in many ways, but it’s also incredibly simple. I’ve got this can of baked beans, I’ve got this film, you know, with Ewan McGregor in it. Do you want it? You know, this is it. Without distribution in any industry, it doesn’t matter what it is without distribution, nobody knows about that product.
Now any film can get out there, there aren’t really the gatekeepers. You literally go to YouTube or Vimeo and you load it up and you say to people, I’ve got this. The problem is monetizing it and making people aware of it. I mean, there are just so many films, it’s staggering. Tubi, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch has access to 250,000 films and programs.
If that is the case, it is a staggering number. And that’s the problem. You’ve now got TOD, which is basically you get a penny or 1 cent every time somebody watches your film, you give it to Tubi, you give it to Amazon, you give it to Plex and Pluto and Roku and all these channels, there’s over 200 of them in America. They take it for nothing and they give you a pittance and you hope that somebody watches it. And I’ve got films out there and I’m getting p**s poor money in. And so what you discussed is true. There’s now more films available than ever before. The trouble is how are people ever going to find them? But Tvo is wonderful because you can be on 10 platforms in the same country all at the same time. But the the income is tiny. I’ve just had a statement, you know, I’ve got like 270 quid from, this is from America from, I think I’m on 14 different platforms. That was a big mistake my going that route.
What happened is, Guy Richie, Matthew Vaughn never having made a film, decided to make a film. They got the money from people they know and they made this film and it was hugely successful. And the guy, Richie married Madonna and he became a multimillionaire and they never look back. And that’s what everybody who makes a film, they think it’s gonna be really big like lock stock. They’re gonna marry a Madonna and they’re gonna be really famous and that’s it for the rest of their lives. But the trouble is, is that most of them don’t do it. And a lot of them blame themselves. And some of them have right to blame themselves. They’ve not listened to distributors, they’ve not listened to sales agents. They’ve made films they shouldn’t have made. But often it’s just fluke as to why a film works and it doesn’t. There’s a film I released in, I went name the Year because then you can find out what it was, but roughly 20 years ago. And it was an incredibly impressive young man. And he had raised a million pounds. He, I mean this man, he’s like 21. I’ve rarely met anybody that’s so dynamic and had such a personality. He had, he had all the right ideas except one I found first time filmmakers. They’re either idiots or they know what they don’t know. And he thought he knew it all. I would later find out that they made the script on the third draft. You should never do that. That the best film I ever distributed was Lenny Abramson’s. Adam and Paul and Lenny went on his fifth film, was nominated for an Oscar and Lenny spent 18 months perfecting that script. He was in no rush to make it. And they made it on the 27th draft. And it is a work of genius. And this young man just thought, well, I’m happy with it. He should have gone to somebody like Colin VAs. Colin is a top producer, works with Martin Scorsese. He came from Scripps. He has start. He, funny enough, he produced Madonna’s film that she directed. And you go to someone like him and you say, Colin, I want you to be an executive producer. I’m going to pay you 10,000 pounds a day for five days. I want them at the beginning of the film just before we start shooting at various different stages. And somebody like Colin would’ve jumped at it, you know, 10,000 pounds a day. You would’ve got his entire expertise.
So things he learned when he was producing Gangs of New York, he might have brought that into it. You would’ve got that. That’s what it did. But because this director was insecure, he didn’t want anybody like that. And the film is all right, that’s all it is. It’s all right. I wouldn’t have released it if I didn’t think it was good. And I sold it to a broadcaster.
And the broadcaster, it paid the least amount of money I’ve ever licensed to film for. And that director and those two producers have never done another film. The the writer hasn’t done another film. And it’s a classic case of thinking you know, everything and not, not being aware of what you don’t know.
I’m almost 70 and being in the business for 56 years, I still don’t know very much. I had no training to be an actor. I had no training to be a producer, no training to be a distributor. I never learned from anyone else. No, I’ve never been on a writing course on a screenwriter. I’d never read a book about screenwriting. And I certainly never had any training to be a director. Everything I’ve learned on the job, and that’s really the stupid way to go because it’s you, you spend so much time doing it. And I was with Don McVey, who’s my DOP once, and he was doing something, I can’t remember what it was, we’re filming abroad. And he said, you don’t know that. And I said, no. He said, you are a director and you’re a producer and you don’t know that. And I said, yes, I don’t know it. He said, I can’t believe it. You don’t know that. He said, why don’t you know that? I said, because I’ve never needed to know it before and I’m employing you. And you know that. He said, but aren’t you embarrassed? And I said, why Amm? I embarrassed. I said, I’m now learning it from you. It’s gonna help me. What’s it to be embarrassed by? I’ve done all these things that he would’ve never said that himself, that I don’t know this. He would be afraid of looking like an idiot. But what does it matter? And the only piece of advice, and it’s for anybody watching this, I remember this that I’ve ever had, I got to know John Schlesinger. He’s the director of my favorite British film of all time, which is Billy Liar, which resonates with me because it’s very like my story in a way. And I got to know John before my wife did, but my wife worked with him five times. And we loved John and we spent time with him. And my kids loved him. He had a, with the money he made from far from the Mading crowd, he bought this huge house in the country and it was called Strawberry Hole, the House. But John called it strawberry bum hole. And my children used to love this. And we’d go down and state there, he was doing cold comfort farm, this television movie. And my wife’s costume designer had Miriam Margolyes and Kate Beckinsale, Joanna Lumley and Ian McKellen at Eileen Atkins, all this incredible cast. And John found out that I’d dropped Amy at Twikenham studios. So he said, oh, do get David to come and see me. I want to chat to him. So I said, oh, well, okay, I’ll go there. And he is doing a scene with Eileen Atkins and Mary Marleys whipping up this mge. And they did the scene once and then they wanted to do it again. So they had to whip up the mge and get it ready. So it was about 15 minutes while the props, people sorted this out. And John was asking all sorts of gossipy question, who’s f*****g who darling? And uh, yeah, what, what’s going on in there with all you young people? And uh, you know, it’s who, who’s a c**t now? And all that sort of nonsense. And after a bit we’d sort of exhorted this, but there was still time and I was a bit uncomfortable. So I said to John, I dunno why I said this. ’cause I, I, at this stage, I’d never thought about directing. I I got into directing purely by accident. He is uncanny how it happened. And I said, John, I said, is there a secret to directing? And he roared with laughter at this huge great laughter. And he said, of course not. And then he said, actually there is, he said, there is, he said, at least 50% of being a good director is choosing the right people in every department, every actor. He said, always choose the right least he said, and then you let them get on with what they do, you don’t interfere. And he said, if they have a suggestion, you listen to it. You don’t ever not listen. You take them seriously. You take them aside and say, please tell me it, and if you don’t like it, you don’t use it. If you like it, you use it. And then he told me this film he made called Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman and, um, Laurence Olivier and John died many years ago now, but he said the grit came up to him and he said, um, I’m a Schlesinger. I’ve got this idea. Do you might have said no, tell me the idea. And he said, do this, do that, do that. And John went, fat is brilliant, right? Everyone, we’re doing this. This is what we’re gonna do. And John said, when the film came out, whenever people talked to him about that film, he said, at some point in the conversation, they remember this scene, how brilliant it was. And he said, it wasn’t my idea. Everybody thinks it was me. It was the grip’s idea. I’m going back to the man, the young man who had the million pounds to make the, that was his mistake. He didn’t listen to other people. He didn’t get more experienced people involved. Because more experienced people help you. Nobody wants to make a band film. They want to make your film the best they can. And I, I listen to people all the time. I mean, I, because I come from the theater and it, it sometimes drives me mad. I believe in arid core where everybody works together. And it does sometimes do my head in when people are going, oh Dave, you should do this, you should do that. And I’m going, look, I’ve already said I don’t know how to do that. And they carry on. But that’s, that’s the rules I’ve set. So I have to listen to them. And you know, sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes I find they’re right when it was too late, I’m watching the film and going, oh my God, they were right. I should have done that. A problem that a lot of actors have is that directors and producers don’t understand their process.
And I think it’s really important that if you are serious about being a director, even a producer, but a director, you need to go to the theater. You need to understand how an actor works out the arc of their character.
So it’s brilliant in the theater because you start at the beginning and you go to the middle, there’s an interval and then you go to the end. So you work all that out in rehearsal, even in small companies, theater companies, you have sort of two weeks rehearsal. If you’re a national theater, you could have eight weeks rehearsal. And most actors never get to rehearse very much on film. So to have a, a director who understands that, they’ll be insecure about it. Even the biggest actors, Anthony Hopkins, uh, who I helped, I mean, I gave him his chance to be director. So he and I had these extraordinary conversations about the problems he has working with, uh, directors and how they don’t understand the process.
So having done lots of things, I mean the, the great thing with Rep as an acting a SM, so I swept the stage and I, you know, painted the scenery and I had small parts and I bought the fruit and vegetables for, you know, a scene that you needed. Fresh fruit and vegetables. I did all of that. So it’s an incredibly, uh, wonderful learning process. And Harrogate was small knit community. I mean, ironically there were 47 people in the company. Now you probably have, it was very well funded. You know, if, if Harrogate has a theatre at all now probably be lucky to have 10 or 12. But it was, so we had three companies and there were three different directors on the move all the time. And we had people like Martin Shaw there and Tony Robinson, uh, would come up and do things. And John Challis, who is in a series called, um, only Fools and horses and lots of people that would go on to do great things. Um, and there’s something about doing theater. So when I directed my first film, which ironically was called the first film, proving the World’s first film was shot in Leeds in Yorkshire, for those who don’t know where it is. And I have a joke ending and everybody on the film that the DOP producers on it, the editor, everyone said, David, this is a terrible, it’s terrible.
So it comes and the credits start and then it happens. And I said, no, it’s going to get a laugh. I said, David, David is embarrassing. I mean a couple of people really tried to talk me out of it. And when it had its premier in Edinburgh, the full audience, it got a big laugh. And in most of the cinemas that it played in, it got a laugh. And those who they said, but how did you know that? How did you know? I said, because I was an actor, because I’ve been in the theater, you instinctively know what’s going to be funny and what isn’t. I’ve finished the Marbles with a MAF like that. Miriam Margolyes has a line, and in the cinema it gets a laugh. And the worry is, I know that people probably won’t laugh when they see it on television or on online or something. And I think probably with the other one, but I was making it for the cinema and I thought, well, I’ll keep it in for the cinema. So you need to learn all the time. You need to be a sponge. And if you look at anything, whether it’s science, film, you know, the catering industry, hoteliers, you know, whatever it is, transport is that any new way of working, any new concept comes from young people on the whole. And that’s a young person’s strength.
And you just need to combine that with experience and wisdom. So that’s why if I could have gone back to when that young man raised a million pounds and he’d come and ask my advice, I would’ve said Surround yourself. You come up with your ideas and you talk them with your team and you work it out together. And so somebody like a Colin Vaines or if he’d had a more experienced DOP or costume designer, whatever, it would’ve, it would’ve made for a better film. It, it’s everything. One does is experience. And, and I love it that I’m still learning and I learn from young people all the time. I learn from people of all ages. But, um, I, I think it’s when you close your mind off the, the people get to sort of in their forties, you think, I don’t need to learn anymore. I’ve learned it. And that’s when you close down.
The marbles has obviously taken me five years to make, and that’s all down to the money. It’s my putting the case why the path of marbles should be returned to Greece. They were stolen over 200 years ago and have been in the British Museum, which is very near this cinema. It’s YM so b’s the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden have taken it because it’s just a stones throw away.
And um, that’s opened. And in the course of making the marbles, I discovered I had stage four bowel cancer, which was a major bolt outta the blue. And I knew instantly I was gonna make a film. But the prognosis was bleak. I needed to know that. I mean, it looked as if I was gonna die fairly soon. Um, and I didn’t want to make it, you know, old man has bowel cancer. That didn’t interest me at all. And when I realized, so six, seven months had gone by and I thought, well, may, uh, you know, the chemotherapy’s doing well for a while, I’ll start making the film.
But I, when I had my very first chemo on the day I was sat there and there was a young man who’s 42, very fit looking. He was had shorts on and a t-shirt.
And he was with his wife and I was with my wife.
And, uh, my wife doesn’t come anymore, you know, but she was a bit bored ’cause I’m sat there having all this stuff pumped into me and she wanted to go and chat, or not. She did. And she came back and she didn’t say anything. And then when he left, she then told me and she said, well, he lives near us. He has the same oncologist as you. She said, he’s 42 years old. He, like you has stage four bowel cancer. Her, his wife is a senior nurse and he has either two or three children, I can’t remember.
And um, it’s terrible. You have no symptoms, no symptoms whatsoever.
And I thought, I cried. I actually cried. I thought this young man 42.
Um, and I thought, there’s my film I’d already researched and I found that bowel cancer or colon cancer, as they call it in many countries, is on the rise in people under 50. And I thought, that’s my film. I can use my experience to get into this story and people can see the treatment I’m having. But the story is, why is it rising on the young? And people are ignoring young people with their symptoms.
And then about six, eight months had gone by and I was with Dr. Murphy, my oncologist, and I said, look, you know, this man really gave me the idea. And I said, look, is this betraying patient confidentiality because I really would like to film him?
And uh, she said, well, no, she said, because he died three months after you met him.
And so that, that is the whole thrust of my film about what can be done. I mean, there’s, there’s the people are still making mistakes. I very much in the film, I, I want people to take control of their own health in a way that I didn’t, I have, I want to make this film, which I will give away free and I want people to see it. I mean that there is cancer in the young is going to become, you know, epidemic, particularly bowel cancer. But it, it’s seriously on the rise. So I actually think it’s probably the most important film I’m gonna make because all it needs is a few people to watch it and say, actually I’ve got those symptoms. I didn’t realize that. And they go and see their doctor and their doctor goes, actually this is bowel cancer, but it’s a stage one. I’m stage four. There is no cure for stage four. Stage one. We can cure it. And I thought that’s a fantastic opportunity as a filmmaker, I want it to be out there. People going, I’ve got bowel cancer, or I think I’ve got bowel cancer. And then the film will come up after doing a search and they can go, oh, maybe I’ll watch this. And they may watch 15 minutes and they’ll go, nah, I’ve not got it. Or they may can continue watching. I also want it for people who are living with people with cancer. And it’s already in my lifetime, it’s just grown. I mean, I’m calling the film one in two because at the moment, one in two people alive today in the first world are going to get cancer. That’s a given. And 30 years ago it was no where near that number. And I’ve got some people, they won’t say this on camera, but they’re saying to me off the record that if it carries on by a 20 40, 20 45, 20 50, not that far away, most people watching this will be alive. It will be one in one. So I consider this to be really important and it’s good ’cause I can bring my skills and I’ve shown it to two different bowel cancer charities and they’re both really very impressed with it. But it’s the gps, I’ve got a young woman in it. She was 19 when she got the symptoms. She, she was one year an adult, just one year. And they’re say, oh, got bowel cancer. It only affects people over 50. Don’t be silly. She had 13 tests over a three year period. And finally at the age of 22, they realized it was bowel cancer. By then it was stage three. Luckily they’ve caught it. They’ve had to save her eggs. This is a young woman who wants children who now has all these problems because her doctor said, you can’t get bowel cancer at 19. And other doctors and other experts said, yeah, we’re not even gonna test you for it. And because she’s under 40, she couldn’t have a colonoscopy. I mean, she comes from a very poor background, so they didn’t have the money to pay for it. So that is a film that most people will never watch, but for some people they will.
And for some smaller number, it might actually save their life.
So that, for me is a really good way of putting my skills to good use. And on that note, I better go.
