When he came out of university, David Hinton was convinced he was going to be a writer. “I was living in London, living in a squat, very impoverished, trying to make some money from writing and I saw a job advertised for this new TV show,” he remembers how, in the late 1970s, he came to work as a researcher for the landmark arts programme, The South Bank Show, presented by author and personality Melvyn Bragg.
All these years later, partly as a result of connections made in those South Bank Show Days, Hinton has gone on to make the feature documentary Made In England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (which premiered this week to considerable acclaim as a Berlinale Special).
At the South Bank Show, Hinton was involved in films about everybody from rock star Little Richard to writer Alan Bennett. One of the shows he went on to direct was on Michael Powell (1905-1990), the English filmmaker who, by then, was being championed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brain De Palma and other young mavericks of 1970s US cinema.
As has been well chronicled, Powell had fallen on hard times after making his controversial 1960 horror thriller Peeping Tom but he and his old Hungarian-born collaborator Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988) had enjoyed a critical revival late in their lives. Their best-known movies like The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter Of Life And Death and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp were all rediscovered and acclaimed as masterpieces.
Hinton’s South Bank Show was broadcast to tie in with the publication of Powell’s autobiography, A Lifetime In Films.
“I loved the energy and spirit of the autobiography and so we tried to make a film that had a similar energy,” Hinton remembers.
Powell and Hinton struck up a strong rapport. “I was a heedless young man in those days but he was already an old guy in his 80s, but he was game for absolutely anything. I had him jumping in and out of boats and marching along the Pilgrim’s Way, all kinds of shenanigans.”
By then, Powell was married to Thelma Schoonmaker, editor of Martin Scorsese’s movies.
Made In England is narrated and executive-produced by Scorsese. In the documentary, the legendary US auteur recounts how he first discovered the work of Powell and Pressburger – and how he later became close friends with Powell.
“It was fantastic and inspiring because there is no living filmmaker that I admire more than Scorsese,” Hinton says of his partnership with the director of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. “Of course, a huge amount of what I have done in my career has been interpretative – collaborating with other artists. The film I made for the South Bank Show with Michael in the 80s was exactly like that.”
And, no, Hinton didn’t feel overshadowed by Scorsese. He saw his task as understanding what Scorsese wanted to say about Powell and Pressburger and then finding the best way “to make it work on screen.”
“It was very collaborative. Scorsese really put his heart and soul into the film. He had very strong ideas about how he wanted certain clips to be represented in the documentary. He actually did editing work with Thelma in New York while I was editing in London. Different versions of different sequences flew back and forth across the Atlantic.”
As part of his preparation. Hinton had already dug out everything he could find that Scorsese had ever said or written about Powell and Pressburger. There was a huge amount. Hinton shaped all this material into a draft script which he sent back to Scorsese. The American filmmaker went through the draft script in his usual painstaking and meticulous fashion. He then recorded the whole script voice only, before any filming had been done. This provided a road map for the editing.
There was less archive material available of Pressburger, the self-effacing writer, than of Powell, the flamboyant showman. However, Hinton and his team found various interviews with both of them: one done in Canada in the early 80s; one for the BBC’s flagship arts show Arena and then there was their joint appearance on BBC radio’s Desert island Discs. They tracked down some rare footage of Pressburger on a film set in Budapest in the 1930s. Contemporary Scottish filmmakers Andrew and Kevin Macdonald, Pressburger’s grandchildren, gave Hinton access to all the Pressburger materials at the BFI.
“Out of all these elements, we tried to give Emeric an appropriate presence in the film.”
Hinton knows the work of both Scorsese and Powell and Pressburger inside out. Nonetheless, even he was surprised by some of the connections Scorsese makes in the documentary. For instance, he certainly didn’t expect to discover that the ballet company impresario Lermontov in The Red Shoes was a direct influence on the vigilante played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
“But as soon as he made that comparison, I found it incredibly illuminating. He said both of these characters are outsiders, always on the edge of things, always looking, observing, listening…and always on the edge of exploding.”
The title ‘Made In England’ comes from a stamp used at the end of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales Of Hoffman (1951). “But that doesn’t mean at all that they’re English in any kind of conventional sense.”
Hinton points out that both Powell and Pressburger began their careers on the continent, Powell with silent movie great Rex Ingram in France and Pressburger in eastern Europe. “There is an Englishness [to their work] that is very unlike our conventional idea of English movies, but to me that is the richness of it.”
Hinton got to know Powell well and they stayed in touch after the South Bank Show. Both travelled to the Midnight Sun Festival in Finland together and Hinton still speaks fulsomely about the Sunday lunches Powell (“a great cook and a wonderful host”) sometimes made for him at his cottage in Gloucestershire.
“He was a thoroughly charming, funny and very delightful man,” Hinton remembers. “After we had done that South Bank Show, we hung out together quite a lot. He had recently married Thelma and so I became friends with Thelma too and she and I have stayed friends ever since. I feel this very long, strong connection with Michael.”
Ask Hinton what he hopes his documentary will achieve and he replies: “a huge amount of what we want to do is get young people interested in Powell and Pressburger movies…what everyone was celebrating about the recent Powell and Pressburger season at the BFI was how many young people turned up to see the films. It’s wonderful to think there is a new generation still interested in this stuff!”
Nick Varley and Matthew Wells are producers of Made In England. Financing came from BBC Film, and the National Lottery through Screen Scotland. Executive producers are Will Clarke, Charles S. Cohen, Olivia Harrison, Thomas Hoegh, Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker , Mark Thomas, Eva Yates and Claudia Yusef. Altitude will release the release across the UK from May 10. Earlier this week, streamer Mubi took multiple rights to the doc.
