Where were you before you joined the BFI Production Board?

I was at the BBC. I was making music and arts documentaries for the BBC. I'd been there for 13 years, and I'd been directing for at least 10 of those. And I knew Mamoun, through a friend of mine called Peter West, who was a very fine editor. And Mamoun called me up one day and said "I'm leaving, and I think I want you to be my successor." I must have gone to the Board, there must have been an appointment procedure. I don't really remember it at all, other than that Mamoun said "I want you to take the job over, but I want you to do it entirely your way. A promise, I have to say, he didn't keep. It's very difficult for people as impassioned and possessed by their work as Mamoun was and is, to let it go and you have decided to leave something. But anyway, it was through a personal contact with Mamoun. I was completely astonished.

Why do you think he asked you, who had a TV background, to become the new Head of Production?

Obviously he thought I was capable. I think he had the idea, rightly or wrongly, that I was going to be somebody who could organise, and hold things together. I tended then to give out an aura of self-confidence, largely illusory, as most auras of self-confidence are. And of course he knew I was extremely passionate about film. I had spent most of my early 20s in the National Film Theatre, and I was a complete freak for movies. So that helped. I was part of a circle of people who were very much associated with each other: Mamoun, Peter West, Bill Douglas, Robert Vas, and Lindsay Anderson was the eminence grise. They all were very passionate, in terms of film somewhat puritanical. Realism was the god, and they spat at the name of Michael Powell. That was the kind of conventional wisdom.

The other reason why Mamoun was interested in me was that I had done a series for BBC 2 called The Movies, which was basically a set of interviews with directors, Renoir, Ford, Nicholas Ray, Sternberg… It was made in 1967, we made about 20 or 30 programmes, each half-an-hour. Film programmes then were probably just as witless as they are now. We didn't have Jonathan Ross but we had Bill Crandy (?), and it was basically the latest releases. Now what would happen would be that a director would pass through London, publicising his latest film, and they'd give us a short shift. But as soon as they discovered that you actually knew their work, they flowered. Between us – there were two other directors – Nicholas Garnham and Mike Dibb – we would do Welles, Mankiewicz, Jo Losey… This was the first time that kind of approach had ever been done on British television. It was a very crude forerunner of the Kermode-Cousins type of programme which now happens, and indeed the kind of stuff you get on DVD now. I know that we under spent - our budget was £600-700 per programme. I found myself towards the end of the first season with a surplus, and I gave it to Kevin Brownlow. I commissioned Kevin to make a film about Abel Gance, called The Charm of Dynamite. And my Head of department went completely crazy. "I've never heard of either Gance or Brownlow, you can't do that". I said "well, I've done it, and he's got the money now". And a year or two later out came the film. And the same Head of department said "but you didn't tell me that this man was a master". I said "if I had you wouldn't have believed me anyway". So it was a good time at the BBC then. You could do things with a certain amount of freedom. And nobody ever controlled what we wanted to do. So that was there, in the back of various people's minds that was kind of connected.

What did you know about the BFI and the Production Board before you were appointed?

I knew quite a bit about its products because various friends of mine were working on them. Kevin was busy on Winstanley, which is probably the only contemporary-made archive film that ever existed. Peter West was trying to edit Bill Douglas' trilogy and was having a very difficult time because Bill was a notoriously difficult and wilful director. So I heard quite a lot of what was going on. I knew to a degree what the product was. I didn't know much about the structure of the Production Board, I didn't know too much about how it was set up. Maybe had I known a bit more about how it was set up, I would have been a bit more careful about I went into it.

What attracted you to the job?

The simple thing is I wanted a change. I'd made about 65 programmes at the BBC, I thought it was time to do something else. It was only the first of two occasions in my life when I thought, "well I might run something and exert a bit of influence". The second was running a series called Omnibus on the BBC, which I did for 3 years after the BFI. And then I'd had enough, because I realised I only really liked directing. My experiences at the BFI, and dealing with sabotages of committees had cleared that feeling out of me very well. But I didn't know much about the structure. But I learnt about it very quickly.

Could you describe the staff, facilities and equipment at the Production unit?

Our offices were in Lower Marsh, the equipment was fairly ancient, and obviously all film-based. Tape was an un-editable commodity in those days. Non-linear editing did not exist on tape. And the people whom I met there were the people you mentioned to me in your letter. The rock was always Nita. Nita was one of those people who is paid as a secretary and does everything else as well. She was wonderful. She was a stunning person in every respect. In a way she ran the office. She was Jeeves to my Bertie Wooster. What I discovered was that there were people there who were working and had been working on films for months and months. There was no time limit on how long people could work on a film. It seemed to me that that presented quite serious problems. It meant that people were often working for as little as £15 a week, and they were going on and on an on editing. Secondly, it seemed that if an aspect of the BFI Production Board was preparing people for the world of cinema, it's not a place where you do have endless editing time. There is a third problem, which is that after a certain period, you can go on changing a film, and it's reached a certain plateau, and all you're doing it is changing it, not making it better. And people became terribly bogged down in their projects. There were projects which were being edited for 18, 20 months. And they were not getting any better. That I found very worrying in fact.

Apologies to Cedric, I can hardly remember him at all. I do remember Peter Sainsbury, who came in quite soon after me as my assistant. He said to me when I left, "thank you for never being a boss and never making me an assistant". His job was, as I remember it, to go to funding bodies, to attend meetings, to do many of the things that there wasn't the time for, or which I was visibly unqualified for. He was very good. Many people didn't get on with his version of the Production Board that came after me. But I thought he was excellent.

There were also people who, even though they weren't on the staff, were always there. A very good cameraman, Peter Harvey, who was the other half of Nita, for example.

The equipment was very basic, but it was there, and people could use it, and they could work at anytime of the day or night and at the weekends, so there were certain advantages, but in working terms and working conditions, a lot of problems which I don't think ever got sorted out.

I suppose that, because film-makers were using the facilities in the evening and at weekends, your job was a 24/7 one?

It could have been.

Did you spend a lot of time with the film-makers in the editing room, or shooting the films?

Editing sometimes, but never shooting. I always think that executive producers, which is what I was, should not impose themselves on location and make suggestions. That doesn't help. The weakness of the position was that you had no power, in two directions. As Head of the Production Board, you were the Secretary of the Executive Committee, who effectively made all the decisions as to what would be made and what would not be made. My job was to filter, to take the 50 or so scripts that had arrived in 2 or 3 months and reduce it to about 8 or 9. So in a sense I did have some choice. The Committee would then decide. What I found difficult was that people, having got their grant to make a film, made their film, and they might say "have a look at it and say what you think", and you might have some thought about it, and I don't remember anyone ever being desperately rude or combative. But they might say "fine", but they didn't have to take your opinion at al, so although you were an executive producer, you were an executive producer who has no influence on what happens. I can remember one film that I was involved with, by Horace Ové, called Pressure. We had a viewing of it, I said "well, it's about half-an hour too long in my view". It was running about 2 hours 35 mins. I thought dream sequence in it did nothing to hold the film up. And Horace, with whom I got on very well, immediately said "Well, you don't understand Black people. You've got no idea of Black people's rhythm." Perhaps he was right. All I know is when the film came out, it was shown in some festival, back he came asking for a grant to reduce it by about half an hour! It was eventually cut down and, I think, shown on television. It was a curious situation that you could sit and watch a film with somebody, make a suggestion and they'd say no. and that was it. I had no influence at all on most of the films that took place there. I could help to course them to happen, and with certain notable examples I did, like with Juvenile Liaisons. That was absolutely mine and Peter Sainsbury's. Of course it was a scandal and the BFI behaved in a very, very cowardly way about it. And it was never properly shown. I never had much influence on the film but I'm very glad that it was made. And I pushed. It is one of the things I began to learn. But perhaps I didn't learn fast enough. You have a Committee who have the power, and somehow you have to stir them in certain directions and make them choose things that you want them to choose. It's a bit like magicians or card manipulators. "Take a card, take any card" but he's actually giving you that one. We began to learn. I remember a film that was made about the IRA. Behind the Lines, actually. I think we gave a completion grant to the film. And I got them to accept it. And later, several members of the Committee said "we can't do that! The British Film Institute can't support a film that supports the IRA". I said "well, the film doesn't support the IRA as it happens, but it is a documentary about how they do it and what they think. And I remember my chairman being completely astonished. He had sat there all the way through it. So that's what you learn. You learn that you have to push people in the right direction.

But the pre-selection process must have given you quite a lot of power… The short-listing was more or less all yours, wasn't it?

Yes, it gave you a certain amount of power. People could object to not being on the short-list, and ask to be considered anyway, which did sometimes happen. But you're right, it was my job to reduce it, because none of the people on the Committee had the time or energy to read all those scripts, especially when there were so many dreadful ones. It put me off reading for three years. I don't think I read a book for three years after that. I read so many lousy scripts… And I remember one. It was an adaptation of a book by a nineteenth-century novelist called ??. The book was called "Harold the Last of the Saxon Kings". The opening scene said "we are at the end of London Bridge. Harold and fifty of his knights are crossing towards the camera." Forget it. The London Bridge of that time doesn't exist. We can't do fifty knights, or one actually. We can't do a costume. That's it. So sometimes you've got the clue quite early on. But you have to be very careful in these situations, that you don't become blasé, or cynical after four pages. That, in my view, was one of the problems that we faced with the Committee. The Committee worked unpaid, out of pro bono, and you have to give them credit for it. But one of the problems is that if you don't feel like getting committed one day, you're not committed. And I would sometimes say to the Committee you have to give me a better answer, because I have to go back to this film-maker and say "you're not getting a grant because… I had to give him a decent reason. There was a certain amount of amateurism on the Committee. And that was very difficult. To get people to concentrate and to be really cogent about why they did or did not like something.

Do you think it was a strength to have a Committee consisting of people with very different backgrounds and interests?

I don't think so. It is an old English tradition. So many compromises are down… "Shouldn't we have a quota system whereby experimental film has eleven percent of the budget? But you can't do that. You have to do it on the quality of the work. That's assuming that any of us could offer a judgement on some of the work coming out of the London Film-makers Co-op. It was difficult if Malcolm LeGrice was there. He was a film-maker, and he was making a judgement on people with whom he was working. That's difficult.

In a way he was their representative.

Absolutely. And a very good one too. He was very good at explaining to baffled realist film-makers and authors what they were doing, what the Film Co-op was doing. He was an extremely good explainer and analyser of what was happening in this particular kind of film. They didn't always have the patience to listen to him, but nobody can say that experimental film was under-represented.
To go back to your question, I think that each person who comes to the Production Board as its so-called head comes with an agenda. Mamoun's agenda, as I recall it, was this was going to be the core from which a new British fictional film industry was going to emerge. And therefore, he would seek to influence the people who put in applications and the Board to follow that line. And I think that's absolutely right. It won't work with you being a kind of studio head and saying "I'm going to have this kind of film" with no executive committee. I think that obviously won't work because people point out very quickly that you are disposing of State funds in an entirely personal way. So Mamoun did want to expand the fictional base of British film.

What was your position?

I came in from television and documentary. Television was very much looked down upon by most people at the BFI. It was not something that we would much discuss. Narrative fictional cinema was 'it". If you look at various BFI catalogues, there are 73 pages of fictional films, and 7 pages in which it says "documentaries, animation and other short subjects". I had the feeling, with the funds that were being available, that it was madness to attempt a revival of the British feature industry with a hundred thousand pounds a year, which had to be divided between six or seven projects. It's not going to happen. And I thought in any case, if the BFI's job or the Production Board's job was not only to find new or young film-makers but also to reflect the country in which we lived, then you could not ignore documentary cinema. I guess that what I said was "well I'm going to bring in documentary." And we did. And some of our most successful things were in fact documentary films. Not all, but some. I knew from my own experience that you can make money go a considerable distance further if you're not paying for make-up, costumes or actors! Probably, Juvenile Liaisons was one of the cheaper films that we made, as well as being a very interesting one. In a way, what I was saying was "come on, we've got to take into consideration documentary. The problem with documentary, is that it is largely a television-based experience and has been since the 1950s. Cinema documentary more or less died out at the end of the war because the medium in which it could exist disappeared. And therefore television was the natural place for it, as it was for certain kinds of drama. One other thing that I find very difficult to cope with is that some of the directors would not have their film shown on television. I remember one in fact, rather a good film called A Private Enterprise, directed by Peter Smith. He was offered a week at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill I think. At the same time the BBC offered to show it on a Saturday night. And Peter – he probably thinks differently now – said "I didn't make this film to be shown on television". I said "well, you did make it to be seen. You get perhaps, if you'll lucky, 3,500 people over the week in the Gate cinema, and even on a bad night with Morecombe and Wise on the other side, you'll get 200,000. Is that not what it's about?". "No, no, it's about cinema". I can't remember whether it was or wasn't shown immediately, it was eventually shown. But I found that very depressing, because the main basis is to have an idea and get it across. The medium does not matter as much. Do we have to, for example, say that only the feature films of Ken Loach are worth thinking about, when in fact a lot of his early work came through the medium of television and sometimes not recorded on film at all.
So I wanted to increase the proportion of documentaries, which meant that I had to decrease the proportion of fictional films, for which I was not very popular. I do understand the difficulty of handing a job to somebody, and saying "I'm not going to interfere, you're just going to get on with it" but then finding it very different, because you watch the organisation going in a direction which you think is disastrous, and not what you wanted at all. And I think that was a problem for Mamoun. He would come in at the weekends, I would come back on a Monday and find a film that I'd seen on Friday looking completely different. "What's happened? – Well we worked on it over the weekend, and Mamoun came in. – Actually, this should be cleared with me, I wouldn't have stopped him coming in, clearly not. But I felt undermined by that.

Did he do that with a film he'd actually initiated himself?

Yes, and I had no objection with that, provided I know it's happening. A film for which I might have said "Yes, I think you 're there", would suddenly not be there, and another three weeks would take place in the cutting room. Because the cost s were so low, people would go on editing their films. The convolutions of the Bill Douglas trilogy – you would need to talk to Peter West about that – it went on for years.

Anyway, my changes were to offer a basis whereby documentary film-makers, who also need help and need a place in which to develop themselves, could have a chance to do something… People like Karlin, Broomfield, Churchill…

Let's go back to the Board and yourself. What was your relationship with the Board's chairman?

Michael Relph was a very amiable man… and I've almost said everything now. He belonged to that version of the British film industry that had grown up in the war years at Ealing. They were very nice, and they liked nice lunches… Their concern with the making of films was very approximate. Poor fellows. They had no idea who the new people were. My job as I understand it was at least once a month to take Michael out to lunch and to explain how far we'd got on various projects, and keep him up-to-date with things, which I did. But he was not an influential chairman, nor was he, in my view, a very strong chairman. And he didn't help particularly in running the Committee. He was a rather sleepy chairman, and without an interventionist chairman, I found myself underpowered with the Committee. So that was difficult. And our position vis-à-vis each other was very difficult to define. What kind of power did I have in relationship to him? If I had to say in one sentence what the difficulties were, they were more or less always to do with a very hazy and rather easy-going attitude towards how the structures of the BFI were working or could be worked, which led to endless problems and misunderstandings, and also a very poor definition of where power and responsibilities lay.

Did you have allies and enemies on the Committee?

Of course!

Were they always the same ones?

No. It was very capricious, or at least it felt that way. Somebody who had been fairly helpful in a meeting, wouldn't be necessarily helpful at the next meeting. But I had very few real allies or enemies. You know when you watch the Late Night Review, that was how the meetings were. The members are very intelligent people with very clear – no, not very clear, but very voluble ideas. But for the selecting of films to be made, you have to be very much more precise. And when the shit hits the fan, you have to be able to say, "right, we made the film for this particular reason". As I said earlier, the completion money that was given to this IRA film had been voted through the Committee, it couldn't have been otherwise. And all of them claimed that they weren't there at the time! "Did we do that?". That's not very professional.

Did you use of discretionary authority to spend a small amount of money to complete a film?

I didn't use it that much because most of the problems were hugely in excess of the amount authorised. And on other occasions, as for example the Horace Ové film, I was extremely reluctant to hand him £500 more when he had rejected the advice in the first place. And it had to go through various people at Dean Street. I think one should say in parenthesis that unfortunately my time there coincided with a huge papal schism between the liberal libertarians on one side, who were Leslie Hardcastle, Penelope Houston, and others, and the ideologues – Colin McArthur and so on. They would spend hours and hours fighting with one another. Of course I found myself in the middle. I found that sometimes the opinions of someone like Penelope were typical film-goers' opinions. Nothing wrong with them, but they are insufficiently built up. And equally, on the other side, it would be almost impenetrable because of the ideology.

So did this reorganisation of the BFI, and of departments like the FAS, have a direct impact on the Production Board?

It was causing quite a lot of problems. One of them was whether the BFI would dictate films that went out to regional cinemas, that only in a certain line would be sent out. And of course in those days there is still the Academy cinema, and the Paris Pullman, who ran nice films for nice people… The latest Bergman, the latest Fellini or whatever. Which is what a lot of people living outside London wanted their Regional Film Theatre to do. Not unreasonably. In fact, when I worked in Glasgow, I could see a wonderful selection of movies there. The ideologues were very honest people, but they had no capacity to be loved. Absolutely none. And sometimes, it's not always right to be right. And I've seen defeats snatched out of the jaws of victory so often in that situation. It became very tedious. It's one of the reasons why I decided to stop. After all I was only there 15 months, which is not very long. And before the first year was over I thought this is not for me.

What frustration in particular made you leave?

There was a series of frustrations. First of all I thought that I had an executive committee who made their decisions, I wouldn't say haphazardly, but without much rationale. That's why I was in some respects sympathetic to the ideologues who at least had a reason why they would support this rather than the other. And it was not based on personal taste. I couldn't get to terms with that. I wasn't impressed by the then director of the BFI, which I thought was weak, and it was kind of John Majorish. And the director of the BFI was a nice man, but he was on the tale of the dog. And that was frustrating. And of course I missed film-making. I had taken a job pro-bono, I thought this is something important to do, and you can make something happen. I didn't think I made much happen at all. I thought I'd hardly begun. And so I went back to the BBC and I did make things happen there. I think I was the wrong person for the job, because my in-house political skills were poor.

What do you mean by this?

I was not good at persuading people or knowing what was going on, understanding what was going on. Peter Sainsbury was much better at that. Peter was I think absolutely ideal in my view, for the job. I was very happy when he took it over. Not only because it released me, but because I thought he was the right man, and I still do. I know he wasn't very popular with some people. The secretary of the Production Board is never popular. If what you want is popularity then don't take the job. But Peter really knew the BFI. His whole life was in there. I was like a visiting lecturer. My whole life was not there. My whole life had previously been 10 years of making documentaries, and subsequently another 30 years of doing that. So it was a kind of interlude for me. For Peter, as I see it, that was his world. He worked in the world of funding, of committees, of manipulation of resource (in the best sense of course).

But he didn't really know the BFI better then you, did he? He arrived at the same time as you, and was actually working at the BBC before that.

But it's actually a matter of character. I thought he was the right man for the job. By then end of the first year I was saying to him over lunches in La Barca, "this job is going to be yours in very quick time, but I'm simply not enjoying it, I'm not therefore good at it, and I'm letting everybody down. I'm letting film-makers down, because I'm not providing a strong enough leadership or presence for their need." I may have disagreed with Mamoun, and I did, and I do, and I think he's still trying to do the same thing at the NFS, and he's still not succeeding, and I wasn't happy about the backstairs stuff that went on, he really had a kind of mission. The mission might have failed, but that's not quite the point. He had a mission, so people could sign up and march behind his flag. I thought there were a few people who could march behind mine, but I don't think it was as well defined. Therefore Mamoun was a better man for the job than I was. And subsequently Peter Sainsbury was, because he could operate the system. The politics and tensions of the BFI. At least something I understood about the BFI is that the BFI is always at war with itself. The names may change but the battles go on.

After you left, did you keep an interest in the Production Board?

I deliberately cut myself off completely. I told Peter that I was going to do that. I was not going to come anywhere near it. I might pop in and say hello and have a cup of tea, but what he was going to do with it was his business. Anyway, I had a full time job running the Omnibus series. I was also recovering from hepatitis, which knocked me out for 6 months. I'm glad that Peter had a free run at it. It was as if I had died or gone away. Occasionally I might buy a film from the BFI for showing on Omnibus or something like that, but not very often. Because of course at that time also the Arts Council had a film unit which in a sense was making films that were a bit more suitable to the kind of television I was commanding at the time.

What did you think of Peter being on the side of the ideologues in his first few years as Head of Production?

I expected him to be an ideologue, and that's one of the things I thought was necessary. You needed to have a kind of agenda, which he did, and an intellectually very well supported agenda.

To go back to your time at the Production Board, what was you position regarding the film-making groups, whether political or avant-garde?

What I found interesting is that there were certain overlaps in that. The Berwick Street group were political. But they were also very adventurous in formal and stylistic terms. I loved that. I've been a modernist all my life, in music and the arts. That's what interest me. I was therefore fascinated by their formal inventions… Mark Karlin for example. And we gave completion money to Night Cleaners
Part 2. I was fascinated by that and indeed I learnt a lot from it. After I went back to the BBC, I made a film which was a very political film about a composer, Luigi Nono who was a staunch member of the Italian Communist Party. I made the film with the help of Mark and his people there, using some of the techniques they had used. I was a magpie in that respect. Partly because of my background, I found most of the documentary groups more interesting in what they proposed, not only in their subject matter, but also the way that people were attempting to move the medium forward. It wasn't like you could make either an avant-garde film or a political film. You could do both at the same time. And anything that looked like that I was for. Every time you do something as a director, you think "no, I didn't get it". The fact that we never make a perfect film, never, is the reason why we go on making them. Now these people were, in my view, really pushing at things. They were not spectacular. One of the other factors which was beginning to creep in, was a commercial idea. Namely that the fiction films should be showable in the cinema and would have a kind of life. 25 years ago, I was kind of bothered by that. I thought we had money to give new or young film-makers a chance, and also for them to spread themselves a bit and try things out. Some of that would be a complete disaster, perhaps even a majority of them would be a complete disaster, that didn't seem to be the matter. We had a grant which was not tied to what we get back from the box-office. Nothing that we got back from the box-office, even the budgets of £10,000 pounds, was ever going to be recouped into the film, and probably didn't come to the Production Board anyway. So there was a sort of tendency, at Contemporary Films, Gala Films, the people who ran the Gate, they were good people, but they were looking for product. I hated the word product. I wanted to see people have the chance to make some kinds of film. That's what I was interested in. And I think one of the frustrations for me was that I didn't feel after a year and a quarter that I had moved forward more than a couple of inches. It was like being on the Somme in 1916 and 1917. We'd exchanged endless salvos, there was a lot of mud and a great any dead bodies, but we hadn't moved. And I didn't think we'd ever move, not with me anyway. So the best thing was to jump off.

When you look at the list of films that were initiated while you were the Head of Production, it seems to reflect one of the most adventurous and experimental periods of the Production Board's history.

I must say you've made my day. I'm really happy to hear that, because we all spend a lot of our lives thinking we're achieving nothing. And just occasionally, somebody comes and says "well actually, you didn't achieve nothing. You achieved a but more than that." All I can say is that I didn't get a strong enough sense that I was making progress. One other thing which I found very difficult was that there were certain rather splendid and eccentric films that were being made – the Douglas trilogy, Winstanley, A Private Enterprise. But there were some truly awful ones, inspired by the Godardian film grammar of the 60s. With the greatest respect to Mamoun, I didn't think we were there to give a kind of cheap imitation of a film industry that has never had any kind of native lifeblood. The French industry did have it. The British film industry has always been parasite, just like Blair is a parasite of Bush. I didn't recognise that Mamoun said was there. I couldn't see it. He was very proud, and rightly so, of Winstanley. One of the things you have to ask yourself is that if you make Winsltanley, or if you make Douglas' biographical trilogy, I wonder what you're going to do next. If you look at the world of literature, there are people who have one book inside them. It might be a wonderful book. And it could be A la Recherche du temps perdu. Or you might have something inside you that you want to express. It doesn't mean you are a writer. It means you wrote a book and I think there are filmmakers who have something inside them, something passionate, desperate, to get out. Once Bill had achieved his trilogy, in a sense his life's work was over. With Kevin, having made Winstanley, he never made another film. He went back into the world in which he is probably wonderfully qualified and informed, which is the world of the archive. So in certain respects, in my view, these were Mamoun's leading cards, you played the cards but then you didn't have any more on you hand. For two reasons: one, because a lot people had one film inside them, and secondly, there wasn't the funds to say "right, what are we going to do next year?". One of the best thing about working in television in the Seventies and Eighties, and working in the Nineties in Germany, is having a producer who says "fine, what are you going to do next year?". It's wonderful. But it something that couldn't happen then, in a way. The Committee would say "we gave him a grant 4 years ago, we can't give him another one now".

It did occasionally happen though, especially in the late 70s and 80s…Look at Greenaway, Davies, Jarman…

When you think about it, having named those directors, this is a tribute to Peter Sainsbury and to the Board he manipulated. Instead of making a series of films which are in some measure copies, or imitations of Lindsay Anderson – Lindsay was a huge influence, and not always a good one – he created the British art-house cinema of Great Britain in the 80s. I am a great admirer of Terence Davies'. I have a slightly unjustifiable pride that I was involved in the very first film, and I hope supported him, because he was desperately nervous.

I would like to go back to your views on supporting the aesthetic avant-garde. Did you think it is something the Production Board should have supported, even though the Arts Council had money to spend on this kind of cinema?

It would have been possible had we sat down – the Arts Council's Film Committee and our Committee, like Spain and Portugal in the in the 16th century. "OK, you do that and we'll do this". We never did get to that.

Why?

I think there was some power play there. But the Arts Council was itself divided between whether it should make arts documentaries or experimental films. And they tried to do both. But yes, I did think it was our job in so far as we were not necessarily constrained by commercial considerations, to support and give a chance to new ideas. The ideas themselves might be obscure, they might be models and uneloquent, but in order for them to develop they needed to be experimented. You cannot develop as a film-maker without doing it. The doing of it is going to take you from position A and, however advanced or not advanced a film-maker you are, it's going to take you to the next stage. And if you look at people like Jarman, it develops in quite a remarkable way in its scope and ambition. Unless there is a start, it's not going to happen. Also, it is interesting that film-makers often start from a position of experiment and later settle into a situation where the experiments have added a certain twist or flavour to the slightly more conventional film-making. There are certain Greenaway films which do that.

But in the mid-1970s you agreed to support structuralist film-makers – Gidal, Dunford, Welsby, Sinden – who were not really interested in joining the film industry and in making narrative features…

Oh yes, and that was a conscious decision, as far as I could get a Committee to support them. One of the advantages of avant-garde work is that absolutely nobody understands it, from a patron's point of view. There's a certain 'tokenism'. I remember conversations where people said, "I don't understand a bloody thing". But if you say that filmmaker can make a film for £1,500 and it's 10 minutes long, it's fine. Because most committees and artistic organisations are reactionary by nature. I don't see how else it can be.

It is probably one of the inner contradictions of the Production Board, especially in the 1970s.

Indeed. There were certainly people on the Committee – most of them were film-makers or writers who had a body of work behind them – who had as much chance of understanding the LeGrice type film as my father. There were all kinds of manipulations to do that. If the film was not obscure, people would argue endlessly about it. I think it's one of the problems British criticism has. They get hung up on discussing the content of the film, when actually that's something you should be handing to the film-maker, and say "how are you going to do it?".

To change the subject again, one of the big debates going on at the time was whether the Production Board should give capital grants to film groups. What was your position?

My position was that we should. Giving someone the budget to make a film is all very well, but if they have no premises, or no editing machine, or no camera.

Except the other position was that the film-makers could use the BFI's production unit to edit their film, and that therefore the money given to groups could be used to purchase equipment for the unit.

But a lot of film-makers, like at the Berwick Street Collective, did not want to work at the BFI. Their whole aesthetics was based on having their own place, their own specialised equipment. My feeling was, as I remember it, that we should support capital grants.

In the end you give one significant capital grant to the London Film-Makers' Coop in July 1975.

And I'm very glad we did. But one thing that seems to have changed, significantly for the better, is that you can set yourself up with adequate film-making facilities and editing for £5,000. And what can be done with DV… I shot my last film for the BBC on DV. So at least that has changed.

Was one of your frustrations, because it seemed to be everybody else's, the handling of the distribution of the films by the BFI?

Yes. But I don't remember doing anything other than moan about it. But it was very inefficient. Aspects of the BFI in those days were unbelievably Eastern European, with bureaucratic and Byzantine methods. It was very difficult. I know we complained bitterly about it. And we were constantly at it. I think there were plans to lease it out to a distributor.

Sainsbury eventually hired someone to do the job.

For the better. It is as simple as that. There you have an example of why I thought Sainsbury was very good. He identified something that had nothing immediately to do with the aesthetics, but where there was a problem. Films were disappearing onto a shelf.

Did you ever discuss the question of distribution with the film-makers themselves? And did you ever go to festivals to represent the films there?

No, I never went to a single festival, because with the money that was available it seemed to me that the filmmakers ought to go. Not up to a bloody departmental head to do that. But people did have very considerable ideas of where they wanted their films to be shown. Sometimes well outside the possibilities of what we could do.
For me there was a mirage that a narrative film could, by the only fact that it was a narrative film, have the same trajectory than any narrative film. It could go to a festival, it could open, it could get reviews. And a lot of the time that was horribly proved wrong. There was this kind of notion – this is where I part company from Mamoun – that there can be the BFI as a kind of 'mini-me' (like in Austin Power) of the film industry. But it can't be. It won't work like that, because there isn't enough to make it work. I think the independent cinema was always dying on its feet, even by the mid-seventies. Already by then it was moribund. There was a period, long gone now, when Channel Four and Alan Fountain had a whole remit to show films of a fairly extreme nature. Which is what needed to be done. I'm not in love with the cinema, either as a building or as an independent art. I love films and I don't care where they're shown, and long as I can see them. They were trying to revive a body that was in terminal decline. It's making things for a world that doesn't really exists. My feeling was that not only was Mamoun, for the most principled idealistic reasons, trying to revive an industry of film-making that was, by the end of the 1960s, running out of steam. He was trying to resurrect, or to continue, the notions of the Free Cinema that happened in the late 50s. And it didn't happen. And the places were they could be shown were ceasing to exist also. It's no good making an IMAX film for a place that has no IMAX.

You are talking about the narrative features, but it was also true for the more experimental ones.

Yes, but one of the interesting things now, is that if you go to Tate Modern, their rooms are full of films like this, on a loop. That's where they should be.

The Production Board and the National Film School. Why weren't there more links between the two, even though Colin Young was on the Committee? Do you think it was a good thing?

It is interesting is that they didn't come to us. Maybe they didn't need to. Maybe they weren't encouraged to by Colin Young, who was a curiously elusive character. He was a powerful man, but was one of the people who, at crucial moments, was not to be found when you needed his support. I think it would have been very sensible to be more open to them. Having said that, they had their own resources to make films. And I think the National Film School is more likely to produce possible recruits for the film industry than the Production Board, because it's very much a career-orientated course. People are looking to become film-makers. Now that was never clearly defined at the BFI.

That leads me to my last, and possibly most crucial question: what was the long-term objective of the Production Board? And do you think it evolved?

I don’t believe there was a long-term objective. I don't think anyone thought it through. Certainly not the Committee, who would have many different views upon it. It's the kind of question that everyone asks at film courses and art colleges. What's this for? It seemed to me that the Production Board should give somebody the chance to say something. And what he wanted to say could have been as powerful and personal as Bill Douglas, as wrapped up in history and the history of the cinema as Kevin Brownlow. Or he could be a whole range of things. I see it not as a charity organisation, but as another aspect of the Welfare state.

And do you think it succeeded in this task? Do you think British film culture would have been worse off without it in the 1970s?

Oh yes. I don't think it was well enough off as it was, but it was the least worst solution. It was in no respect perfect or satisfactory, but there was a situation where certain things could be done, certain people could get an opportunity to do something which could change their lives. For me that was much more interesting than festivals, distribution, or continuing the great realist tradition. All those were subsequent priorities to the main thing which was to free people to do something on film.

Before we met today, how did you look back on that experience?

I hadn't thought about it for a long time. When I received you questions, the wheels of memory began to turn… And there are things I remembered talking to you, that I didn't think I remembered. It's like when you meet someone you haven't seen for 30 years. You couldn't describe what they look like, but you recognise them the minute you see them. And the experience of talking about it with you was a really stimulating experience for me. When you have a career in film and TV, you tend to move on. Film and TV ignore their own past.

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