Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 41

AUGUST 24 2003 The Sunday Telegraph arts.telegraph.co.uk REVIEW 5 PHOTOGRAPH: COLIN McPHERSON Even as a child, I felt reality was very In life as in art, the film director John Boorman loves to play God. He talks to Catherine The big picture man John Boorman His best work has attempted to give his life shape: 'It was good to go back and rewrite history, to say the things you wished you'd said. Sometimes imagination works better than memory' 'Unless I'm really suffering when make a film, I feel I'm selling it short' film? "Oh yes, and the clearer you are about the film you want to make, the more disappointing it is to make it. It always falls short, though sometimes an actor will do something that makes it more than you'd hoped for. And yet there's also the fact that you never find out what a film is really about until you've made it.

And I still love that process of discovery." The script he's fixing his hopes on now is called Broken Dream. "It'd be quite a good film to make as your last because it's about the end of the world." But would he ever want to embark on a film knowing it's to be his swansong? "Well, I'm 70. The last must be approaching fast." Still, isn't there a sense in which the only perfect film is an unmade Simulacrum Victorian Tiled Path Study, 1994, by the Boyle Family Strangely enough, these one-to-one models of ruts, tide-marks on the beach, London roadsides and German slagheaps function just like good paintings do. They have composition, balance, drama so much so that one becomes a little suspicious as to just how random that selection process really is. Chance technique a favourite with Dadaists and Surrealists is often helped out in practice with a little judicious editing.

If the Boyles throw their frame and get a duff slice of slag heap, do they try again? This we are not told. Another funny Arts John Boorman ran the nation which you suspect might quite like to do it'd look a greener, for a start. Rather like County Wicklow, perhaps, where the 70- year-old director now lives with his second wife and a handful of children. There would doubtless be rainforests and prairies, probably an Amazonian river thundering through the middle. Rednecks and knights would roam free.

But despite Boorman's devotion to all things Camelot, there'd be no king. "I'm a devout republican," he smiles, a gentle jumble of silver hair and newfangled trainers. "I hate the House of Lords. I wish they'd abolished all the public schools after the war. That might have saved the country.

I'd root out the Catholic Church, too. In fact, all three desert religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Look at the mess they've made. Nature fills that place in my heart. If you go to the jungle, you can almost see creation taking place.

It's a monumental, fundamental thing. Violent, hostile and beautiful. That's what I like." Rainforests aside, the most important feature of Boorman's new Britain would be its complete dissimilarity to the neat avenues of Carshalton, Surrey, where he grew up. It was during his commuterbelt childhood that Boorman developed a deep distaste for suburbia. He loathed what he saw as its petty snobberies and hankered after wider horizons, finding them in myths, and abroad.

His first films included Point Blank and Deliverance, two studies of savage America which have achieved iconic status. Then came Hell in the Pacific, Excalibur, The General more badlands and bloodshed. In Hope and Glory, the only film he's set where he was born, he showered the semis with bombs. Now Boorman's written an autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, and flown over from Ireland to promote it at the Edinburgh book festival. We're sharing a cab from Glasgow airport, and Boorman a slight figure, head-totoe in baggy blues seems a little uncertain about how it's turned out.

He speaks slowly, precisely, weighing up his answers before giving them an airing. "I did like the writing. But my main impulse was fear. Both my parents had dementia and I wanted to get it this down while I still could." Was it cathartic? "To an extent. I ended with the breakdown of my first marriage and it was good to talk about that.

But my time since then felt too raw and recent. I hoped once I'd written it, I'd see some sort of shape to my life. But I didn't. It's just chance. I thought perhaps I could contain my life, in a sense make it into a movie.

But it refused to comply." It hasn't always been so uncooperative. Boorman's backstory has often found its way onto the screen. Point Blank, Where Heart Is, even Exorcist I1: The Heretic all drew on elements in his past. Most famously Hope and Glory, Boorman's chronicle of his childhood in the Blitz, combines fact and fiction to brilliant effect. "It was good to go back and rewrite history, to say the things you wished you'd said.

Sometimes imagination works better than memory. I made up a few scenes between my sister and the Canadian lover she had at the time. And when she read the script, she asked me how I knew about them!" So does he like playing God? "To an extent, who wouldn't? Even as a child I felt reality was very messy, I was attracted to the idea of control. I'm probably quite controlling in my relationships. I like to know everything that's going on in my children's lives and I expect them to ask my advice, which they do.

I like to feel I can see where they're going and put them right if need be. I can make changes to the script." oorman is a very tidy man. Of making, all the it's the aspects of editing film- he enjoys most. When he reconstructed his old street for Hope and Glory, he made sure that he straightened out the kink in the middle. He's even taken to redrafting his dreams.

"I went to this dream symposium in Texas and met the author of a book about how to control them. It takes an awful lot of concentration but eventually I succeeded. I used to dream about going down a deep well, at the bottom of which was something terrifying. I'd start. descending, then wake up in terror.

So one night decided that I knew I was dreaming so it couldn't hurt me. And when I got down there it was just my father sneering at me." Does he still have the dream? "Never. It vanished. But most just go of their own accord. I used to dream that I couldn't move the camera, that the actors were always going out of shot.

But the more you make films, the less you worry about that." Boorman no longer frets about the technicalities, but he's increasingly concerned about the picture. His artistic Holy Grail has, as yet, eluded him. Years ago it could have been Lord of the Rings, but the funding dried up. More recently The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Rudyard Kipling's Kim looked like possibilities, but the same thing happened. And Boorman's still, unbelievably, to win an Oscar, despite being nominated five times and twice bagging Best Director at Cannes.

The ground beneath th our feet Art Martin Boyle Family Julian Schnabel odern art is not band though dwindling of rubbish, a benighted curmudgeons still occasionally aver that it is. It is certainly true, however, that an awful lot of art has been fashioned out of rubbish which is a rather different thing. Recycling garbage is the grand themes of the art of our times; just as it is of economic and environmental debate. More evidence of this obsession with detritus is provided by the retrospective exhibition by the Boyle Family that is currently at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (until November 9). The Boyles Mark Boyle, his wife Joan Hills, and latterly their children Sebastian and Georgia started out in fairly conventional modernist fashion by making works of art out of unconsidered trifles they found lying around.

A fairly typical early piece, Norland Road Study (Red Lino and White Stiletto) 1964, is made up of one old shoe, an empty tin of Tango, a trowel, some bits of torn-up lino- His latest project is Truth, a postApartheid drama starring Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson. He's pleased with the end result, but it sounds like a bumpy ride. "Actors are all different," he says carefully. "It's like when you have your first child, you have a theory about how to handle them.

Then you have your second child and you have to modify that theory. And when you've had three or four has had seven Katrine, Charley, Daisy, Lola, Lee, Lili-Mae and the eldest, Telsche, who died of cancer in you abandon the theory altogether. "It's the same with actors. They confound you. Juliette is very serious and prepared, but when the camera's rolling she has a sort of out-of-body experience, and doesn't quite know what's going to come out of her character.

Samuel L. Jackson on the other hand is very sharp but always in control. And it can be difficult bringing actors so different together. In this case they were very tolerant. "Not so, say, Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds in Deliverance.

Just too different. I remember one scene where they both had to be very out of breath. Jon had to be given a -minute warning so he could run round and work sweat. Burt was given a 30-second warning so he could spritz his face." Truth is the first time Boorman has cast a female lead. Why the delay? "I think because I'm only just starting to understand women.

But it was a great pleasure, and Juliette was quite brilliant. There's always an element of hostility between an actor and director, a man being told what to do by another man. Sam Jackson would always refuse every time I asked him to do something on the set. We would argue. He would walk away.

But if I told him in his heroic effort to obliterate the personal aspect of art "So far as I can be sure," Mark Boyle has said of the Family's work, "there is nothing of me in there." But the paradox is that the result is eccentrically personal, and also characteristic of its times. In the future, historians will be able to look at one of their perfect records of a section of decaying gutter, and say "Very late-20thcentury the Boyles have tried unsuccessfully to exorcise personality from their art, Julian Schnabel, the American painter whose work is on show at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Gardens, has nothing much but personality going for him. That is, many would say, he has no talent, no conventional skill, no subject and no obvious place in art history. He is as close as you can get in the art-world context to being famous for being famous which is of course the normal condition of many contemporary celebrities. In fact, that be the only interesting thing about Schnabel.

He roared into art world prominence in 1979 with a series of tradepaintings executed on broken pottery. What his work had then is what the three paintings in the first room at Inverleith House still have: an edgy energy and unabashed egotism. If he is bad, it is not in an inconspicuous manner in which a European artist might be bad. He is bad on an epic, American scale. These three pictures apparently executed on the backs of gigantic self-service restaurant trays look like heads painted by a slightly demented child with a broom, then partially erased with the same implement.

These are the most impressive pieces in the show. They have a frenetic feel a little like the work of Schnabel's late friend Basquiat who couldn't paint trailer he was fine he just felt it was a loss of face in front of other people. That's not the case with a woman. You can say, 'Oh, that was really With most actors you have to say, 'Perhaps there's another way of doing this "It's hard for them, they can get hostile if they're pushed. But that's also what they love, it's why people make movies.

Generally we live rather comfortable lives and never discover our limits. Unless I'm really suffering, or at least giving the film every fibre of my being, feel I'm selling it short." True to his word, Boorman will be up at seven tomorrow to continue post-production. Does he ever relax? "I swim every day in my river. And I tend to my trees oak, ash, birch, hornbeam. But my weeping willows were a mistake, I had to trim them back." Even outside the editing suite it seems Boorman is lost without a pair of shears.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy (Faber) is available for £18 £2.25 Call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222. either, in any conventional way, but had an electric attack. Much of the rest consists of blown- photographs taken by Schnabel of himself, his house, his dogs and his children. These are quite nice shots but really only fill out the celebrity lifestyle of an artist who is famous for being famous. Schnabel has been shot at by innumerable critics.

As he has said, his career is a bit like that scene in The Godfather where a character says, take five shots at me. And in the end he's still standing. In that respect, he's much like our modern Jeffrey Archer-style celebrities. So in a funny way he's the representative artist of our times. leum, plus a few other oddments.

This is a collage in the hallowed tradition of Kurt Schwitters, the German who was making poetic compositions from the discarded industrial society as early as the 1920s. Many others followed his example including the American Robert Rauschenberg and the Swiss Jean Tingueley before the Boyles came along. However they pushed the concept a little further. It was intrinsic to Schwitters' attitude that any object no matter neglected and tawdry it might appear an ticket, a piece of broken wood had its own interest and visual appeal. It could take its place in a work of art.

The Boyles went one step further. Was it necessary for an artist to select and arrange these things? Perhaps any combination of stuff, exactly, as you found it, lying around on the ground, would be just as interesting and beautiful. To that end they came up with a radical way of working. First they throw a dart at a map (on show in the exhibition, dotted holes). Then they get a larger- plan of the zone indicated, throw another dart at that, and so on until they have pinpointed a precise location for instance, a slag heap in Germany.

Then they go there, throw a frame on the ground, and the work of art will be an exact simulacrum of whatever lies in that oblong stones, pavement, mud, litter. It is a method that is intended to eliminate the personality of the artist as completely as possible. And another radical step in this case there was not one artist but four functioning as a single entity. Since the Boyles started out in the 1960s, art duos have become quite commonplace Gilbert George, Langlands and Bell, the Chapmans. But an art quartet stretching over two generations is still pretty extraordinary.

As is frequently the case with radical art, the Boyles' levels of skill but a work requires very high, kind that would be recognisable to Giotto or Augustus John. The way in which they mimic the varied surfaces they randomly come across sand, tarmac, broken tile, corrugated roof is astounding. Not even the most curmudgeonly curmudgeon could complain that these pictures don't resemble their subjects. They look so astonishingly like their subjects as to be utterly identical same scale, same textures, in some cases same materials. Only some of the tarmac and kerbsides, apparently moulded in fibreglass, seem a little fake and shiny.

But that's being picky. These are the ultimate realist landscapes. It's just that they are of a subject the ground beneath our feet to which we normally don't pay any attention at all. And that they are placed on a gallery wall like Pissarro or a Poussin. Sophisticated Intelligent Sexy THE Erotic Print Society's new catalogue is just like its and best of all, it's FREE.

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