Lives in Writing by David Lodge Page B

Lee Marvin on your roof?’ (He did know.) In 1968 he teamed up with Marvin again to make the aptly named
Hell in the Pacific
, about an American airman and a Japanese naval officer who are washed up together on a tiny desert island in the war. Almost everything that can go wrong with a film went wrong in making this one and Boorman’s account is a classic of movie disaster stories.
    Hell in the Pacific
was not a success at the box office, and neither was its off-beat, experimental successor,
Leo the Last
, though it won the Best Director prize at Cannes. Boorman was approached about making
The Lord of the Rings
, and did a lot of work on it, but the project, like so many film projects, fell through. (He pays a generous tribute to Peter Jackson’s eventual realisation of the story.) Boorman’s directorial career was beginning to languish: he badly needed a real hit. At this crucial moment he was asked by Warners to consider a novel by James Dickey that they had under option, called
Deliverance.
‘I read the novel with mounting excitement. I knew how to do it.’ Of course he did! It was all about a river. Four men take a canoe trip down a fast-moving river in a valley soon to be flooded to make a dam that will provide the electricity for their suburban homes. What starts out as a light-hearted adventure turns into a grim struggle for survival, as the group experiences first the pitiless power of the river and its rapids, and then the malevolence of the ‘mountain people’ who inhabit the valley’s heights. One of the party is drowned, another seriously injured, a third famously sodomised, and the fourth only survives by killing a man with a crossbow. Dickey, who had himself written a script, and retained some right to interfere in the making of the film, meant to celebrate this action as an assertion of manhood; Boorman wanted to end on a more ambiguous note, with the survivor haunted by his deed. Boorman won, but endured some awkward moments with the absurdly pompous Dickey in the process.
    Warner were nervous about the prospects of a movie with no woman in it, but it was nominated for three Academy Awards (best film, best director and best editing) and the theme music alone, a simple duet for guitar and banjo conceived by Boorman, earned enough money to put the film into profit. Boorman was now a hot director. He was offered
The Exorcist
, but found the subject repellent and turned it down. Instead he made a didactic fantasy of his own called
Zardoz
, set in a future when developments in medicine have given men and women immortality. In lieu of a fee he took a share of the profits, of which there were none.
Zardoz
flopped. So did his next film,
The Heretic
, intended to be a kind of benign sequel to
The Exorcist
, which infuriated the earlier film’s fans, and pleased nobody else. Boorman quotes Pauline Kael against himself: ‘It’s . . . another in the long history of movie-makers’ king-size follies. There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgement.’ Again Boorman’s career was threatened with eclipse, and again he rescued it, this time with
Excalibur.
Though many critics were and continue to be sniffy about that film, it drew enthusiastic audiences world-wide.
    And that has been the pattern of Boorman’s career as a director – always experimenting, always ambitious, always courting disaster, never afraid of going ‘over the top’. He frequently paid the price of failure for his ambition, but invariably bounced back. His imagination thrives on difficulties. He once defined film-making as ‘inventing impossible problems for yourself and then failing to solve them’. Many of his films have involved extreme physical risk, discomfort and danger for himself. The reason why the white-water sequences in
Deliverance
are so heart-stoppingly exciting and immediate is that the director himself spent many hours before and during the shoot immersed in the raging