ArtWorks Scotland
Sunday, August 14 at 10pm on BBC Two Scotland
What do film-makers Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, Andrew "Trainspotting" Macdonald, "Dawn of the Dead" director George A Romero, Stephen Frears, Nic Roeg, Bertrand Tavernier and Sir Alan Parker have in common? They all appear in ArtWorks Scotland discussing why they admire the work of Michael Powell, - for many Britain's greatest director.
On the 100th anniversary of his birth and as the Edinburgh International Film Festival celebrates his work with a major retrospective in August, Artworks opens a new season of programmes by inviting these film-makers to share their thoughts on what it is that defines Michael's Powell magic. Powell himself credits his scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger with defining his films: "My whole work in films would have been quite different if I hadn't met Emeric when I did. It was a beautiful mind that I responded to. He didn't have to be Hungarian or English or anything."
Says Bertrand Tavernier: "Powell and Pressburger wrote women's characters which were 30 years in advance of their time. They were really not only unique in the British cinema, absolutely unique.... . Not only that but the love, the love story, is full of reality. Of sex. You feel that he was a director who was in love with women"
The Red Shoes from 1947 is perhaps Powell's best known film. For many film-makers the Powell achievements were about technical innovation. Sir Alan Parker tells ArtWorks: "It must have been wonderful to watch. You know, you come out of the war, the whole experience. Everything was drab, the movies were in the main black and white - even the good ones - suddenly they saw that beautiful theatrical colour, must have been a great experience... They are extraordinary achievements, when you think that the old Technicolour camera was about the size of an old Ford Cortina. And to use it with such finesse I think was quite wonderful."
On the same film, the Australian Director Baz Luhrmann (director of Moulin Rouge) says that after watching The Red Shoes he developed "a great passion for this heightened cinema, this cinema of the artificial, so The Red Shoes became this grand influence on Moulin Rouge."
And it's not just mainstream film-makers who admire Powell. George Romero, Zombie horror director of such classics as "Night of the Living Dead" fell in love with Powell's The Tales of Hoffmann. "I was completely drawn into it even at age eleven. And particularly the fantasy elements: the vampiric nature of Juliet and the mechanical doll, and tearing the doll apart and all those characters that Helpmann played, you know and taking the masks off, things that just knocked me out, you know."
Realist British director Stephen Frears likes the film Powell made without Pressburger. Peeping Tom, made in 1960. Peeping Tom was the film that finished Powell's career in Britain. But for the emerging British realist directors, - including Frears - Peeping Tom was something special: "It's such an original idea and so brilliantly executed. I remember it being very frightening on a very simple entertaining level. The man sees himself, photographs himself killing people. Very modern, very firm, very solid."
The programme is narrated by Peter Capaldi and directed is Simon Pitts.
