'Anywhere good to eat in Keswick?'
Last updated 13:44, Tuesday, 08 April 2008
He worked in Hollywood and in Britain with the biggest stars of the day – Marlon Brando, Charles Bronson, Oliver Reed, Burt Lancaster, Sophia Loren, Christopher Walken, Roger Moore, John Cleese, Anthony Hopkins . . .
He has won awards and in the 1970s he transformed film-making.
Despite his stellar celluloid career spanning 34 films, Michael Winner is now better known to many for his car insurance adverts: “calm down dear, it’s only an advert...” and his name-dripping (there are too many mentioned to be drops) restaurant review column for The Sunday Times.
Outspoken, louder and larger-than-life, this week his Rolls Royce will nose its way through the narrow streets of Keswick for his appearance at the town’s Film Festival.
And it is through food that he has his fondest, and oldest, memory of Keswick. “Do you know anywhere good to eat in Keswick?” is one of his opening lines in a typically lively conversation that was almost entirely one-way traffic.
“I came up in 1957. I was making a documentary film about ghosts and I had lunch there.
“I can’t remember where or what, but I remember keeping the menu for a long time because the food was so good and so cheap!”
Despite his friendship with controversial film director Ken Russell, who used to live in the shadow of Skiddaw, Winner has not been a frequent visitor to the county and last returned five years ago, when he stayed at Sharrow Bay on the shores of Ullswater.
“I’ve known Ken a hundred years, but I never visited him.
“The festival organisers invited me and I decided to come because I have not been for a while. The last time was five years ago.
“I will be giving a talk, which is more of a stand-up comedy act.
“I gave it earlier this year at Oxford Union and it went very well.
“I give a little talk, then there is a question and answer session.”
He is bringing three films from his private collection with him: The Jokers, Hannibal Brooks and Death Wish.
The 72-year-old is best known for his films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At one point in the 1970s he and Russell were the British film industry.
It was at this time that he hopped the Atlantic, directing acclaimed westerns Lawman and Chato’s Land, moody drama The Nightcomers (featuring Brando) and the thrillers Scorpio and The Mechanic.
But it is for the raw vigilante story of Death Wish that he is best known for, starring Charles Bronson as the vengeful husband of a women who is murdered and whose daughter is raped by a street gang. It traces how he transforms from a mild-mannered architect into a cold-blooded killer as he hunts down those responsible for the crimes.
The graphic film’s gritty edge and use of location pre-empted the work of Martin Scorcese.
It touched a raw nerve in America and in the UK when it was released in 1974 and was responsible for a host of imitations and sequels (two of them directed by Winner).
While Death Wish is his best-known movie, it’s an earlier film that keeps his office most busy.
“We get more letters and emails about Hannibal Brooks than anything else,” he shouts down the line from his London mansion.
“It is not available on DVD or VHS and people keep asking how to get hold of it.
“Unfortunately it is nothing to do with me, but I think someone is trying to release it.”
He is just as concerned at plans to remake two of his other movies – Death Wish and The Mechanic – featuring Sylvester Stallone in both Charles Bronson anti-hero roles.
Stallone has already disastrously remade the iconic British movie Get Carter and winner fears his two films could get the same rough treatment.
“I like him, he’s a nice person and a charming man, but he’s quite wrong for Death Wish,” he sighs.
And the veteran movie-maker’s views on the British film industry are only a little more flattering.
“I started making films in 1956/57 and the British industry has not changed one iota.
“We always had some very talented people who, from time to time made some very good films and less frequently made some very successful films.
“We have got talented people who make some drivel that not many see. Occasionally there will be a decent film by Richard Curtis.
“On the whole, British directors and producers tend to want to make a film with a message. Profit is a dirty word. What keeps us going is the big special effects movies which could be made anywhere.”
It has been a long time since the writer/producer/director/bon viveur has watched a film in a cinema.
Instead, he settles down to watch the latest releases in the cinema of his Holland Park mansion.
“I don’t go to the pictures because I have an 8ft man who eats crisps constantly who always sits in front of me.”
As a member of the Association of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is sent all the movies nominated for the Oscars.
This year he voted for the acclaimed No Country for Old Men as Best Motion Picture and Daniel Day Lewis as Best Actor.
“That was a barnstorming performance,” he says. “My best friend in showbusiness was Marlon Brando and he was one of the quietest actors. Daniel Day-Lewis is the opposite.”
Winner’s most recent Sunday Times column featured his trip to Majorca with Sir Michael Caine for Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s 60th birthday party, but he started hob-nobbing with celebrities as a teenager.
While he was still at a Quaker boarding school he interviewed stars such as Louis Armstrong and Laurence Olivier for a column syndicated in 30 local papers.
He worked as a journalist and film critic in Fleet Street before moving into films full-time in 1956 where he was part of a new wave of youngsters writing and making documentaries, comedy shorts and pop films – the forerunners of the music video.
His breakthrough movie was the 1967 comedy crime whodunnit The Jokers starring Michael Crawford and Oliver Reed.
Two years later came Hannibal Brooks, a World War Two prisoner of War escape film with a difference.
A touching comedy, it features Reed fleeing over the Alps to Switzerland with an elephant, helped by American Michael J Pollard and won Winner the attention of Hollywood.
The director made “eight or nine” films with the hard-drinking, fun-loving Reed spanning 25 years and has fond and vivid memories of filming in Austria with his friend.
“He was wonderful, the only thing is, you can’t stay in the same hotel as him. Every night he changed hotels because he would upset the management.
“He would get drunk and pee on the Austrian flag and shout ‘heil Hitler’.
“But he was the most wonderful human being, kind and gentle.
“I did not cry at my father’s funeral, I did not cry at my mother’s funeral, but I wept my eyes out at his.”
Reed was also in the last feature film Winner directed - Parting Shots in 1998 – a comedy revenge thriller with echoes of Death Wish as a photographer with only a few weeks left to live tries to get even with everyone who has treated him badly.
Keswick festival co-ordinator Ann Martin is looking forward to the director’s appearance and said: “He is an icon.
“He was a major figure in British films, Brando and Bronson were his friends and he has worked with all the big names.
“He is at the other end of the spectrum to Ken Loach, who was our guest last year. We thought it would be interesting to hear about his years in films and he was very enthusiastic to come.”
- The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks will both be screened at The Alhambra Cinema, Keswick, on Friday, followed by a short Q&A session with the director at 4.25pm.
Michael Winner’s talk: My Life in the Movies and Other Places will be at The Theatre By The Lake on Saturday, at 3pm, followed by a screening of Death Wish at 5.30pm.
Tickets for the talk and for individual films are priced £5 for adults, £3 for concessions.
A pass for the four-day festival, from Thursday, costs £40 for adults, £21 for concessions and £32 for Keswick Film Club members.
