“In old age, words escape me. If I wait patiently, they float up, and I recapture them (…) The quest for harmony of word and image has been my life. Sight loss is making the world like late Turners. While I still can, I hasten to testify.” And so does 87-year-old British director John Boorman in “Conclusions,” published in 2020 with a few more pages added last year in the paperback edition. 

The result is not a traditional autobiography, but rather a colorful collection of personal miscellanies taking the reader for an unvarnished walk down memory lane. An engaging storyteller, he often muses wistfully about his revisited past with a blunt lyrical perspective and wry sense of humor. He jokingly adds that this slim volume could have been titled “Confessions” or “Confusions.”

“Films have been my life, ruling it, and in some sense, ruining it,” he writes candidly. “I have been at their beck and call, always waiting, never able to make plans. My begging bowl has been held out for money to make them. I have wheedled actors, flattered financiers, lied about my intentions and concealed my artistic ambitions, and audiences have often rejected the final results. I have spent more time on films I have not made than on the ones I have because there are many reasons why a film should not be made.”

A rather disconcerting statement from a respected filmmaker with 17 feature-length films under his belt in a career started in 1961 and spanning 53 years. From his first American picture, the groundbreaking 1967 Point Blank to his last one, Queen and Country released in 2014, he has been a constantly wayward and eclectic director. Case in point with Zardoz, Leo the Last, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Beyond Rangoon, Hope and Glory, The Tiger’s Tail, The General…  All so different in genre, scope, resonance.

Born in 1933, he recalls growing up in suburban London, experiencing the Blitz during the war, leaving school at 16, his dream of becoming a writer, the stint in the army, how he found himself working in television, editing, and then making documentaries for the BBC. In 1965, he got his first movie directing break with Catch Us If You Can featuring the band Dave Clark Five who wanted to emulate Hard Day’s Night. “I never started out to be a film director, but one thing led to another.”

A year later, Boorman was in Hollywood making Point Blank with Lee Marvin, who played a man left for dead coming back to life, determined to recover his share of a heist. “It was a metaphor for Lee’s brutalization by the Pacific war which had affected him, and his attempt to recover his humanity. He was a great film actor, and a truth-seeker, however painful. The film was a pas de deux, he the brilliant dancer. I, the choreographer. He was also an alcoholic. Fame is a confirmation of identity, an escape from anonymity, but it seldom corresponds to who you are. Lee Marvin, however, was always Lee Marvin, a drunk recovering from the trauma of war.” They teamed up again next in Hell in the Pacific.

In 1972, Deliverance marked another milestone. Boorman wanted to cast Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. The studio thought the former was box-office poison and the latter was asking too much money. It made Burt Reynolds a star.

Boorman never forgot what his friend David Lean, (one of the three British directors of his personal Holy Trinity with Michael Powell and Carol Reed) told him once: “We all have failures. Try not to make a famous one!” For Boorman, The Exorcist II: The Heretic, certainly was in 1977. “An audience expecting more shocks and gore understandably felt cheated by my offering,” he admits. He had declined the original but let himself be convinced with the sequel, because “I was offered a large budget to make a fundamentally metaphysical film. I should have known better. I had all the resources of Hollywood at my disposal. I was able to get Ennio Morricone to do the score. It was the most expensive film that Warnes Bros. had ever made.”

It took him two years to recover from the scorn and ridicule to finally gather up his courage and launch into Excalibur, “which turned out to be even more difficult to make.”

Other films make for entertaining anecdotes as he describes the many exotic locations he went to: Rangoon, South Africa, Palau Island, Panama, the Xingu area in the Brazilian rainforest where he spent months living with an Amerindian tribe, Malaysia. All rewarding, and often spiritual adventures. He is grateful to have worked with actors like Sean Connery, John Hurt, Toshiro Mifune, Brendan Gleeson (one of his favorites), Jon Voight, a very young Daniel Radcliffe (for his first movie role in The Tailor of Panama), Liam Neeson, Patricia Arquette, Frances McDormand, Juliette Binoche (who impressed him with the depth of her research while making In My Country) and Samuel L. Jackson.

One of the purposes of “Confessions” for Boorman is to pass on to the next generation of filmmakers what he has learned about the craft, the joys and the agony of filmmaking. To benevolently share his knowledge and advice as a generous teacher on scriptwriting, preparation, casting, rehearsals, the shooting process, where to put the camera, how to treat actors (“They all need something different, but like children, they need love”), how to use music.

But he likes also to remind that “there is something absurd about taking this business of moviemaking seriously, sweating blood to make something so ephemeral. I once described it as inventing impossible problems and failing to solve them. Yet, it is the absurd that best describes our dance with chance as we dash through life, leaving the rags of time in our wake.”

His vision of the current state of cinema is rather gloomy. “The mainstream movies of today come with exaggerated sound effects, heavily amplified music and fast editing. It is overloaded with information and bludgeons the audience into submission.” He praises Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, Terrence Malick, Alejandro González Iñárritu, as filmmakers who constantly push boundaries, break rules and reinvent a unique grammar of cinema, therefore “extending the scope of movie possibilities.”

That reminds him of some of the legendary ones encountered over the years. Federico Fellini, told him “We are only half alive without a camera.” Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Pierre Melville, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, John Huston…  “I met Jimmy Stewart once,” he recalls. “I gushed about his brilliant performances. ‘If you think I am that good,’ he said tersely, ‘why haven’t you ever cast me?’”

A great admirer of D.W. Griffith, he still firmly believes that “in some ways, film was at its purest in the early silent era. Everything that has been added since – speech, color, stereo, CGI, 3D – has also taken something away. The attempt to approximate life is futile. Film is not life and never can be.” He deplores that “the mystique of movies has been lost as people watch them on their laptops and mobile phones.”

Into this tapestry of cinematic remembrance, he also weaves many stories of his kith and kin, friends and neighbors, famous visitors, three wives and seven children, and the heartbreak endured after the death of his cherished eldest daughter.

At the very twilight of his life, he ponders philosophically on his ‘progressive decrepitude’ and the ill-health that have recently plagued him.  “I contemplate choosing the moment to end it,” he confesses, before admitting he is not quite ready. “How to make an elegant, bloodless, noiseless exit that does not dismay my children?”

He lives alone now, in the eighteenth-century Protestant rectory bought in 1969 in Annamoe, about thirty kilometers south of Dublin. “I jealously guard my newfound solitude.” He likes to believe that he has finally come to peace with the fact that “I am a man I never had time to get to know.” 

A self-described lifelong observer of nature, he is constantly humbled by its beguiling mystery. He finds great solace in the many trees on his property and surroundings, in having watched them grow for so long. He names all their species and dedicates several moving poems to them, illustrated by his own drawings. He wonders:

Will they recall me, when I am gone,

A man who walked among them,

Who sought their wisdom,

Who wished them no harm?

“Conclusions” could be seen as a follow-up to his two previous volumes of memoir, “Adventure of a Suburban Boy” (2003) and “Money Into Light” (1985), but more elegiacally introspective and more engaged with a sense of mortality. He is too modest to speculate on his legacy as a man and as a filmmaker.

“The successes and failures, the stresses and struggles are the broken toys of time,” he opines penetratingly. “What remains are the moments of shared joy with those we love, of enlightened understanding between friends, affection between colleagues, of love given and received in all its forms, the aching love of children, the intimate love of lovers, and the grief of love lost as those we love are picked off one by one by the relentless cruelty of death.”