Starting Out

I am often asked how I got started as a film director. My usual response is it was just bad luck. Here’s how it really happened.

I was born in 1946 in the West of England in a small village called Stonehouse nestled in the idylicCotswold hills. Unfortunately, Stonehouse for several years running was voted the ugliest village in the entire area, so not quite as idylic as one might have hoped.  My father was from a family of travelling players (actors in today’s parlance) whose history can be traced back to the eighteenth century. They were in a business known as “Fit Up Theatre” and would travel the country, first in horse drawn wagons, then trains, and finally, trucks. They set up their mobile theatre wherever they could: village green or church hall or even church. He started his acting career as a screaming baby on stage and ended it when war broke out in 1939. 

My mother came from Dover where her father was a chief steward on the cross channel ferries. I never met him before his death which was brought on, no doubt, by exhaustion. For some twenty years he had a second family across the Channel in the port of Boulogne, a fact his English wife only discovered at his funeral. Three days in Dover one week, three days in Boulogne the next, and presumably one day to get his story straight. I have or had a French aunt from that union whom I’ve never managed to trace.

My father became a commercial traveller after the war and invented a glue called Copydex. In fact, he really only re-invented it, as the sticky white stuff was already in existence when he went to work for a stationary supply company in London owned by an obese man called Mr Grossman. He made Jaba the Hut look positively athletic. My father started playing around with the rubber based glue that until then was only sold for sticking paper together. He soon realised it would also repair farmers’ canvas rick covers and edge fitted carpets a lot more easily than sewing either of them by hand. Under his guidance the stuff took off, and I spent much of my childhood at agricultural shows and Ideal Home Exhibitions around the country. The smell of diesel fumes mixed with cut grass and ammonia (the glue) still takes me back to my childhood and happy times.

Sadly, these happy times were not to last. I was thirteen when my dad fell over while getting out of the bath and ruptured what turned out to be a stomach ulcer. He was rushed to hospital in Gloucester where he was wrongly diagnosed as having had a heart attack. He died three days later from sepsis, bright yellow and bristling with tubes. I was with him a few hours before he died and have never really gotten over it. My mother was so upset that she didn’t go to his funeral and I was sent off to stay with a friend. To say that left me with some unfinished business would be an understatement, but that’s another story.

Sadly, for all the financial success that Copydex provided Mr Grossman very little of that trickled or even oozed down to my father. He died virtually bankrupt.  I had always wanted to be an actor like my father, but I was told by my mother in no uncertain terms that it was no way to earn a living. Why didn’t I become an auctioneer, she suggested. Better money and one can make up the dialogue as one goes along. I was tempted until my father suggested becoming a set designer, and a few months before he died I was accepted to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Being a year too young to start the course they suggested I go to art school and learn to draw. So I did. Well, more organising of drunken parties and stealing enamel signs from pub walls than learning to actually draw.

From there my life went in two directions - one practical and one artistic. With the help of someone who really can draw, an art  teacher called John Furnival, I learnt about climbing ladders in the dead of night to relieve pubs, garages, hardware shops and walls in general of their advertising. But his mentorship didn’t stop there. His ancient Bedford van loaded to the gunnels with rusty enamel signs and other purloined shop fittings, we regularly headed to London and the Portobello Road antiques market. I soon learned the art of selling these now rare and beautiful objects to the street dealers who in turn promptly sold them to Americans wishing to adorn the walls of their kitchens and toilets. At least they appreciated them as indeed I did for the funds they provided to get me through art school. 

Soon afterwards I started producing Kinetic Art and something oddly named Concrete Poetry. Again John Furnival was my guiding light. As a child I’d always loved making and fixing things from crude remote control systems using ex-military parts to the production of small bombs. I once managed to cripple our local village telephone exchange for several hours by inadvertently playing Elvis Presley’s “You Aint Nothing But a Hound Dog” on a continuous loop back through my hands free bedside speaker phone which I fashioned from the bombardier’s control panel of a scrapped war time Lancaster bomber. On the explosive front mixing weed killer with sugar, packing it into a tin can, and detonating it with the transformer from my model railway was high on my list of weekend pastimes. This pyrotechnic obsession was abruptly put on hold when my friend and I advertently summoned the local emergency services to the garden of my house which backed onto the main train line from London to Bristol. By detonating such a large devise our neighbours thought there’d been a train crash.

I was not long at art school before I started making what in reality were no more than big electromechanical toys and insisting they were important pieces of sculpture. The Concrete Poetry side of the business, for that is what it quickly became, really consisted of little more than covering various moving parts with letters and words. I still have no idea what emotion I was hoping to express, but for some reason the pieces proved rather popular. It was not long before I was exhibiting in London’s Institute of Contemporary Art alongside the likes of Yoko Ono, Takis, and Allen Ginsberg. I used to offer my sculptures in a limited range of pastel colours to sit comfortably in any suburban living room which, although frowned upon by my contemporaries, may have had something to do with my rapid and undeserved success.

By now I had decided that art with a capitol £ offered more career potential for a young man than theatre set design, so I applied to Central School of Art in London to join their sculpture department. In 1965 London was just becoming known as “Swinging London”. God knows why, because when I was dropped off in Nottinghill Gate by the kindly lorry driver who’d given me and my battered suitcase a lift from Cheltenham, there was nothing swinging about it. The place was still black with the grime from coal fires, and the days of the “great smog” were not long gone. There was nowhere to get a drink or a bite to eat passed 10:00 pm unless you were a member of one of the Soho drinking clubs, most of these run by the Maltese Mafia. If you could get anything to eat at any time of day or night it would have been a culinary road accident and may indeed have been road kill.

I remember that after art school parties we would often go to an all night taxi stand just over Battersea bridge for tea and hot meat pie. What kind of animal was utilized in the production of these pies was anyone’s guess. Luckily, we were all too drunk to care. On the first day at Central we were asked by the head of year if we all had somewhere to stay. I didn’t and so dutifully raised my hand. From across the room a very beautiful young woman with a very posh accent said I could rent a room with her if I liked. I did like, and so for the next year I lived with her and a cheerful Cockney girl who ran a button stall in the Portobello Road. The three of us crammed into a tiny, dingy flat in Powis Terrace - a whole street of mansion blocks owned by the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman.  It wasn’t long before we had a fight with one of his henchmen concerning the cost of the coin operated gas meters that were fitted in all the flats, and we were promptly thrown out. Caroline Coon and I, for that was the name of the posh spoken beauty, moved into a basement flat in Shepherd’s Bush. We needed some help with the rent, and I soon found myself sharing a bathroom with not just one beautiful woman but two. Marsha Hunt, a model and singer, joined  us.  Marsha, who is still a friend, first became known for her iconic roll in the London production of “Hair” and later dated (maybe choose a slightly less casual word? “lived with” for example, assuming she did, at least for a bit?) Mick Jagger with whom she has a daughter.

During this period I walked out of the sculpture course at Central after an argument with the head of the department. He wanted me to go back to clay modelling when I was already having one man shows around the city. I was pretty successful, but not actually very talented, so he really did me a favour in suggesting I find another calling. I then spent a long hot summer bumming around the US. With virtually no money I had any number of badly paid jobs: testing tranquillisers given to potential suicides, picking endless rows of cucmbers on the vast sun drenched fields near Freemont in Southern California, and, finally, a stint as a dresser for the famous Rockettes chorus line at Radio City Music Hall in New York. It didn’t really matter that I was badly paid for that.

Back to London where I got accepted into the film directing course at the Royal College of Art. I’d been using a bit of 8mm film in my kinetic sculptures - crude urban versions of military flight simulators - and now in my confident, some would justifiably say arrogant way, I’d decided to become a film director. So that’s what I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.