Boorman first began by working as a drycleaner and journalist in the late 1950s. He ran the newsrooms at Southern Television in Southampton and Dover before moving into TV documentary filmmaking, eventually becoming the head of the BBC's Bristol-based Documentary Unit in 1962.
Capturing the interest of producer David Deutsch, he was offered the chance to direct a film aimed at repeating the success of A Hard Day's Night (directed by Richard Lester in 1964): Catch Us If You Can (1965) is about competing pop group Dave Clark Five. While not as successful commercially as Lester's film, it drew good reviews from distinguished critics such as Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell and smoothed Boorman's way into the film industry. Boorman was drawn to Hollywood for the opportunity to make larger-scale cinema and in Point Blank (1967), a powerful interpretation of a Richard Stark novel, brought a stranger's vision to the decaying fortress of Alcatraz and the proto-hippy world of San Francisco. Lee Marvin gave the then-unknown director his full support, telling MGM he deferred all his approvals on the project to Boorman.
Boorman usually represented Kent but he seems to have relocated to Essex c.1790 and played in Essex county cricket teams. He was a very useful bowler, probably medium-fast, and believed to have been a left-handed batsman. He generally fielded at point. His occupation was farmer.
John Boorman made 61 known first-class appearances from 1772 until 1793.
"What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so."
"I was just following orders."
"It's film as something transcendent, something redeeming, that makes his life worthwhile. It's a tremendously life-affirming film. And yet it's about not making a film. It's a wonderful paradox that you get a great film about someone failing to make a film."
"[Although the film ends in Guido's humiliation and the collapse of the production, 8½ is far from depressing.] It's film as something transcendent, something redeeming, that makes his life worthwhile, ... It's a tremendously life-affirming film. And yet it's about not making a film. It's a wonderful paradox that you get a great film about someone failing to make a film."
"I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures."
"I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa's crew."
"There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important."
"All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived."
"It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film."
"I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with."
"You can't get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor."
"When actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting."
HollieRichardson...Phil Harrison ... HR ... PH ... John Boorman’s dark action adventure adopts the slasher horror template of urban types fighting for their lives against backwoods folk, squeezing high levels of tension from perilous rapids and unknowable foes ... .
"You ask yourself the question ... The cities change ... Jordan follows his childhood in north Dublin, surrounded by both faith and superstition, through to his work with John Boorman on Excalibur, and onto the films he both directed and frequently wrote.
John Boorman’s dark action adventure adopts the slasher horror template of urban types fighting for their lives against backwoods folk, squeezing high levels of tension from perilous rapids and unknowable foes.
Americans have all sorts of ways of learning about the Blitz from movies, chief among them John Boorman’s exuberant 1987Hope and Glory, a memoir film about Boorman’s own boyhood ...
Today we know it now as England’s “keep calm and carry on” mind-set, within which director John Boorman memorably found domestic comedy for his 1987 film about that time, “Hope and Glory.” But in ...
It’s a groaningly obvious dig at the movie’s themes ... Oct ... Scene from Rumours ... It feels almost strange for such a farcical movie to have the kind of scenery that wouldn’t be out of place in John Boorman’s Excalibur (minus the giant brain) ... .
Steve McQueen’s weighty wartime drama starring Saoirse Ronan opens the London Film Festival. The bombs are falling on London, as the title of Steve McQueen’s drama for AppleTV+ indicates ...John Boorman’s is a hard act to follow, even 40 years on ... Score ... .
In all likelihood, Jill Fraser is a name that won’t ring many bells ... She created the sound design and electronic effects for John Boorman’s infamous 1974 sci-fi flick Zardoz ... She scored countless TV advertisements for the biggest brands ... ....
His turn as Roop, the charming, waggish sanitation worker who woos Diahann Carroll in the marvelous 1974 romance Claudine, and his dual role as a scientist and a fever version of an African shaman in John Boorman’s wackadoodle Exorcist II... .
Even if theatre was the end goal, she admits that she “fell in love with cinema working with John Boorman and Brian De Palma, these incredible film-makers who I grew up with.” Those films, ...
(This project feels particularly indebted to Snyder’s north star, John Boorman’s “Excalibur.”) There was originally an animated spinoff of Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” planned for Netflix.
Not to be confused with John Boorman’s 1972 canoeing-trip-gone-awry classic, The Deliverance is a subpar exorcism movie that’s all the more depressing for being directed by Lee Daniels, whose ...
I certainly have at least a dozen times watched a group of boisterous boys with a shilling or nickel in their pocket (the young Spielberg, the young John Boorman) throwing Jujubes around and knocking ...
