Tag Archives: John Boorman

The time Robert Chartoff saved John Boorman’s bacon

15 Monday Jun 2015

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point blankProducer Robert Chartoff passed away last Wednesday, June 10, and left quite a legacy, nearly 40 films, a list that includes They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the Charles Bronson thriller The Mechanic, The Gambler (both 1974 and 2014 versions), Rocky, Raging Bull, and The Right Stuff. His first credit was on John Boorman’s classic revenge neo-noir Point Blank. It was the start of a lifelong friendship. The pair collaborated two more times on the director’s 1970 comedy drama Leo the Last and his 2004 drama In My Country.

Boorman also dedicated his last film, the recent Queen and Country, to his old pal. It wasn’t purely an act of sentiment, but an acknowledgement of Chartoff’s importance as a friend and collaborator, as well as a thank you. Without an act of kindness and generosity on Chartoff’s part, Queen and Country might not exist.

The subject came up during an interview with Boorman for a piece that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. Why the dedication? Why now, nearly 50 years since their first collaboration?

“Bob’s been a dear friend for 40 years and more,” Boorman said. “We see each regularly. We talk on the phone at least once a week. I’m very devoted to him.

“When I was trying to make this film, some of the money fell out at the last moment, about a week before we were supposed to start shooting. Bob asked me how I was doing and I said, ‘Oh, I’m a bit depressed. The money’s fallen out.’ He said, ‘How much?’ And I told him. The next day he put that money in my account. He saved the film. I’m glad to say that he’s got it back from Fox picture. He just sent it. He didn’t ask for a contract or anything. The money just appeared in my account.”

Condolences to Mr. Boorman on the loss of his friend. –Pam Grady

Lessons learned: John Boorman remembers “hell” in the Pacific

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Interviews

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hell 1While recently chatting with John Boorman about his latest (and perhaps final) film Queen and Country for a San Francisco Chronicle feature, the talk turned to Hell in the Pacific. Made in 1968, a year after the tense, striking, wholly inventive thriller Point Blank established him as a directing great, the World War II drama starred the earlier film’s lead Lee Marvin and iconic Japanese leading man Toshirô Mifune as enemy soldiers stranded together on a deserted South Pacific island. It was a fraught shoot. Boorman and Marvin experienced real terror shortly before filming commenced when a plane they were on nearly crashed into a volcano. The director cut his knee and it became badly infected. Mifune, an actor Boorman had admired in so many Akira Kurosawa films, refused to take direction.

Looking back on it, Boorman describes Hell in the Pacific, which was shot on the Pacific Ocean island of Palau, as a kind of teaching moment that began when he was in Tokyo working on the script and realized that that he did not have an ending that satisfied him. He saw Kurosawa and explained the problem. Did the legendary auteur have any ideas?

“He thought for a long time, then he said, ‘They meet a girl,” Boorman laughs. “I have to say there are moments when I wish I’d taken his advice.”

Even if Mifune had been more cooperative, Marvin hadn’t been working through the trauma of returning to the same area of the world where he’d fought (and nearly been killed) during World War II, and his leading men could actually understand each other’s language, Boorman realizes in retrospect that the shoot still would have been challenging. And it didn’t need to be.

“I shot it on a very, very remote island,” he says. “We lived on a ship and went to work on this beach every day in a tank landing craft. I could have shot it in Hawaii and lived in a comfortable hotel. I’m not as foolish as that anymore.

“Sadly, the lesson I learned there was don’t make it too hard for yourself.” –Pam Grady