English movie director John Boorman (b. 1933), the main guest of Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival 2009, met the representatives of media thursday afternoon in a press conference at Hotel Sodankylä. Boorman talked to the media about themes such as possibilities of digital filmmaking, political correctness of contemporary movie and his newest film project on Roman emperor Hadrian.

Boorman...


...on digital film-making:
"I'm all in favor of digital filmmaking. I have no nostalgia towards the old ways. I've suffered too much in my life because of films that are developed badly in the labs or scratched during transformation, or because the quality of the print in cinema is below standards. Nowadays filmmakers have more control over colour and density of the picture and they can add some technical details to the screen which weren't possible in older days."

...on his upcoming movie project:
"I'm preparing a film about emperor Hadrian. The shooting begins next January, which barely gives me enough time to work on the project. The movie is inspired by a book called 'Memoirs of Hadrian' by Marguerite Yourcenar, where the old emperor writes to his successor, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian was quite an enlightened figure. Before his time, Rome had been expanding very rapidly and he wanted to pull back instead of conquering more areas because he felt the Empire couldn't be controlled. He was an inspirational person; an aesthete, a poet, a musician and an artist, who happened to reign during a time of great changes."

...on the most important qualities of a filmmaker:
"You have to have a lot of determination, because filmmaking is very difficult. You have to persuade a lot of people so that you can get the money. Jean-Luc Godard said to me once, that a person has to be young and stupid when he makes his first movie, because it keeps getting more and more difficult. When you're not too experienced, you don't know about all the hazards and you just might stagger through them."

...on cinema as a 'universal language':
"When I was young, I was fascinated by silent cinema and origins of filmmaking. From 1912 to 1916, D.W. Griffith and his companions basically developed the grammar or contemporary film, like close-ups and reverse close-ups between two people having a conversation. I was in Brazil once shooting a film in the middle of wilderness and I tried to explain the chairman of a local tribe, what movie actually was. When I explained him that in movie I am able to move from one place to another in a blink of an eye, the chairman said to me that 'that sounds like the kind of things I do when I'm in a trance.' D.W. Griffith once said, that he thought film was the 'universal language' which was able to bring the world together. It's a fascinating thought that the first filmmakers unconciously developed something that reminisced an experience of trance."

...on 'Lord of the Rings':
"Back in the late 1960's, United Artists had the rights for Lord of the Rings and they asked me if I was interested in directing the film. I worked on the script for many months while trying to develop special effects needed for the film. Months passed and finally United Artists ran out of money, and then the production was dumped. I approached Disney and several other companies with the script but we never managed to get it done. J.R.R. Tolkien had asked me if it was a live action movie or an animation film and when I said it's going to be live action, he said to me that he had a nightmare about an horrible animation film based on his book - a few years later, Ralph Bakshi made that true, but Tolkien didn't live to see it. I must say I'm happy that I never got to do the film, because Peter Jackson did marvelous job with the three films he made and I couldn't have done it better."

...on Lee Marvin:
"Lee went to the army at a very young age, he was probably 17 or 18 at the time. Lee went to the Pacific war and fought through a number of islands as a sniper. He was truly traumatized by the brutality of war and because he had major problems in settling into society after war, he began acting. He was opposed and horrified by violence, but never held back from doing violent scenes. It was kind of a catharsis for him. Lee was a very sensitive person and when he was acting in these war movies, there was something erupting from his past."

...on political correctness in cinema:
"When I made 'Tailor of Panama', we had a visit from an executive of our production company who gave as a lecture about seism, agism and all kinds of things we weren't allowed to do. It seems that today you can't even show a man lighting a cigar in your film, because someone might be upset because of it. I've heard that there is some kind of a legal process going on with every third movie Columbia Pictures makes nowadays because of these issues. When referring to the opening scene of 'The Deliverance', I'm not sure if the portrayal of the banjo playing hillbilly is politically correct, but I feel that I just portrayed what I had really seen... in a kind of a turned down version."