Ken Russell: A Bit of a Devil

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Action! Music!

ROMANTIC MUSIC PLAYS

This programme contains some strong language

STRIDENT MUSIC PLAYS

EXPLOSIONS

HE LAUGHS

The film director Ken Russell, who died last year at the age of 84,

was certainly the most colourful character in British cinema

and one of the most controversial.

Ken was an original

with an ability to infuriate and enchant in equal measure.

He cut his teeth making arts documentaries for the BBC...

..before finding international success on the big screen.

-Goodbye, little boy!

-Bye.

Impudent hag.

This is the Troubadour cafe in Earls Court.

In the late '50s and '60s, it was a Russell bolt hole,

a place to plot and scheme.

The Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell who came here

was perhaps the most breathtakingly flamboyant director

that Britain would ever produce.

I am the saviour of the British film industry.

A genius.

Unique.

Are they ready, Tony?

-Yes, they're all ready.

-Stand by, then.

I thought he was brilliant. I thought he was inspired.

I thought he was crazy,

and, for me, he was just wonderful.

His television work was brilliant and regarded as groundbreaking and revolutionary

and demonstrated just what an extraordinary art form television could be.

In the early '70s, Ken Russell was unstoppable...

..the first and only British film director

to have three hit movies showing simultaneously in London's West End.

This intensely creative period

kicked off with The Music Lovers in 1970.

Russell's ninth film, about a classical composer,

explored the life of Tchaikovsky with characteristic visual panache.

The next year, The Devils, his most incendiary work,

provoked national outrage, fuelling his reputation for controversy

with its combination of sex and religion.

Completing the hat trick was The Boy Friend,

starring '60s fashion icon Twiggy,

Russell's tribute to the MGM musicals of his youth.

All this came on the back of his breakthrough film, Women In Love.

His 1969 adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel

earned two Academy Award nominations

and a Best Actress Oscar for leading lady Glenda Jackson.

And who is Gudrun?

Well, in a Norse myth, Gudrun was a sinner who murdered her husband.

Will you live up to that?

Which would you prefer me to live up to, Mr Crich,

the sinner or the murderer?

'He came onto the set,'

and it was like a great big klieg light had gone on.

That was that energy, that powerful energy.

And he expected everybody else to be in the same state.

He would shoot and he would shoot,

and you only knew he'd got it when he'd say, "OK, I've got it."

There was never any kind of, "Oh, that was marvellous",

or, "That was terrible", or nothing like that, ever.

Well, you see, we know hardly anyone here.

-We're almost complete strangers.

-Oh.

Oh, I'll see to it that you're set up with...a few acquaintances.

Oh, you know what I mean. Can't we go over there and explore?

But Russell would employ his own shorthand

when it came to directing actors.

It was Ken who told me about his method of directing Oliver Reed,

which was the "one to ten" method.

So it would be, "Do you want a five, a six, a ten? A two?"

You handle it, though, pretty well.

-"Pretty well"?

-Yes. We both row like water spiders.

'"Give me a five.'

"No, bring it down, actually. Four's better."

And you'd get what he meant!

And he never gave you a note. I mean, he would say,

"Oh, it's all a bit too hmmm... It needs a bit more rrrrragh!"

It may be over between us.

But it's not finished.

The director's approach to this very literary exploration of love and sex

would always prioritise the visual.

I still remember that kiss in Women In Love,

where the camera's sort of inside the two faces,

and it's seared into my brain.

I thought, "This is a guy using camera and imagery

"in a way that nobody else is doing."

It was as if the world had turned sideways, and slowly these faces came together

in a way that I had never seen before.

It was like a new element had been added

to the vocabulary of cinema in one shot.

And that is why Ken is a hero!

The great thing about Ken Russell's films is that you look at them

and you think, "God, how on earth did he achieve that?"

The most famous, of course,

is the sequence between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed,

when they wrestle naked.

Women In Love is set in the 1920s,

but Russell exploits the newly permissive '60s

to see what he can get away with.

They're furious with each other,

because they're jealous about each other's relationship with a woman.

The sequence has a homoerotic feeling,

it has that sense of jealousy.

And it's beautifully lit.

It's almost lit just with the fire that's there.

Ken wasn't one of these people

that observed the scene from a theatrical perspective.

He very definitely, very cinematically organised the scene,

and that is a brilliant example of it.

Was it...

too much for you?

No.

MARK KERMODE: Even when he was doing adaptations of novels, DH Lawrence,

it seemed that he was thinking, first and foremost, visually.

He was somebody who thought with his eyes,

and that goes right back to the fact that he was a stills photographer.

Russell's career behind the camera begins in the early '50s

as a freelance photographer.

Many of the images from that time were believed lost.

But a chance discovery at a photo agency

reunited the director with his early work.

The only Russell we'd heard of in this area was THE Ken Russell,

so I telephoned him and I said,

"Well, I think I've got a lot of photographs

"taken by you in the 1950s,

"of the pogo-stick people in Hyde Park,

"people on penny-farthing bicycles,"

and suddenly I heard this immense cry of delight

as he shouted out to his wife,

"Lizey, Lizey, this guy's got all my old photographs! This is fantastic!"

I particularly love this image.

It was taken on the bomb sites

that were a complete feature of 1950s Britain, London in particular.

He did a series on the teddy girls,

which no-one else has really captured in the same way.

"They were pretty scary," he said.

When he saw it, he said, "Oh, that's a good one."

This is a ballerina friend of his in the '50s, Frances Pidgeon.

He was doing 101 uses of a hip bath.

In the series called Hyde Park Criminals,

Russell parades his fondness for poking fun at authority.

Ken took the bylaws of Hyde Park and what you weren't allowed to do.

You weren't allowed to break or sort china,

so here he has someone with a hammer walloping a teapot.

And you also weren't allowed to dance.

This is the couple that ran the Troubadour cafe, actually.

When you look at his stills photography,

what you see is the birth of the compositional art,

and there's one beautiful photograph

of a policeman on a pogo stick

chasing a robber.

You look at that, and the key to that,

beyond the comic, beyond the strange, beyond the surreal,

is the compositional perfection of it.

Ken Russell's love affair with images began in his childhood.

In 1989, he lampooned his early life

in this South Bank Show documentary,

casting his toddler son as his older self.

I was born in Southampton on July 3rd 1927

and christened Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell.

Russell's parents didn't have the happiest of marriages,

and the young Ken found refuge in movies.

But it was classical music which would transform his life.

When he first heard classical music, he was overwhelmed by it.

He tells a story about hearing it on the radio,

getting on his bicycle, going down to the record shop,

saying, "I need this music."

They gave him it, he took it back home,

he put it on the gramophone player in his house in Southampton

and, according to Ken,

he threw off all his clothes and danced naked around the room.

And I said, "Well, why?" He said, "Well, why wouldn't you?"

What he remembered most about his background

was going to the pictures, getting a projector,

his own projector, when he was fairly young,

taking films on loan, spooling them through and putting records on

so that the music went with these silent films.

That's where it started.

As Ken was entering his 30s,

the BBC was pioneering a new age of television.

Monitor was its first regular arts programme.

And it was here that Russell the aspiring film director

set his sights.

Monitor was a brilliant arts programme.

BBC Two and BBC One and ITV were the only three channels,

and I would literally make sure I planned my entire week

around going to see, every week, whatever Monitor showed.

Good evening, the return of Monitor.

Monitor was run by the legendary broadcaster, Huw Wheldon.

He was the British film school and I wanted a teacher.

And he taught film, though he knew nothing about film,

in a way that I don't think anyone else in the world could do it,

except maybe Eisenstein or Orson Welles.

Russell, the stills photographer,

was now experimenting with amateur films.

And it was his 1958 short, Amelia And The Angel,

which would open the door to the BBC.

Amelia and the Angel was about a girl whose wings break.

A miracle puts it back together again.

It was a charming film but Huw latched onto that.

Huw knew he wanted somebody with a poetic view of life

and that is why he brought Ken in.

Ken seems to come almost out of thin air.

He had been a ballet dancer in Sweden, he had been in the Navy.

He'd had some sort of breakdown. He'd been a photographer.

And when Huw was looking for the next film director, Huw picked Ken.

It was a very strange choice.

For Ken to come into this environment,

quite a lot of university Oxbridge-educated people,

he was a bit of an outsider, wasn't he?

Ken always argued that we were toffs because we had degrees

and he had a degree in life.

He was already 32 when he joined.

Most of my verse is about London and Cornwall.

His first assignment was a short film on the poetry of John Betjeman.

Russell was thinking and looking differently right from the start.

It may seem quite conventional

but it was absolutely new to have a poet

on camera speaking his poems or taking you to the places

which had inspired him, a railway station in a city,

a public tennis court.

Oh! Would I were her racket press'd With hard excitement to her breast

And swished into the sunlit air Arm-high above her tousled hair

And banged against the bounding ball "Oh! Plung!"

My tauten'd strings would call, "Oh! Plung!

"My darling, break my strings For you I will do brilliant things."

We hadn't done poetry like that on television before.

He had a vision, pictures in his head.

Most of us have scripts in our head. We had words.

Ken came with scripts which were pictures and with soundtracks

because he loved music. He brought so much music to me

and I warmed to him enormously because that was my background too.

Our programme tonight consists of one single film

that we made about four young artists.

Ken Russell was tuned in to the emerging ideas of the '60s,

approaching documentary making with a singular eye.

In Pop Goes The Easel, the lives and inspirations of four young artists

are filtered through the director's imagination.

Reimagining the lives of great artists would become

Ken Russell's trademark.

In 1962, he pushed Wheldon to allow him to go one step further

and use actors to portray the life of the composer Edward Elgar.

The result was sensational.

Elgar was born in 1857 in the shadow of the hills

which would influence his music all through his life.

There was little enough in his circumstances to suggest

the future Sir Edward Elgar, master of the King's music.

Nobody, nobody used an actor as a composer before Ken did.

Nobody dared to do it or thought of doing it, it was contrary

to BBC practice, probably something in the Charter that forbids it!

It was so out of line

it could only have come from someone who was a complete outsider.

He grew up in Worcester, a stuffy enough place in those days,

a place for the rich and well-to-do and the Elgars were neither.

Huw Wheldon said it's a rags-to-riches story,

it's good in that respect but that's nothing new,

a rags-to-riches story. He said, "What else is central to his life?"

I said, "Well, he said that he walks the Malvern Hills

"and the wind on the Malvern Hills, the trees on the Malvern,

"the aspect of it was the essence of his music."

So, in a sense, Malvern Hills are the backbone to his musical life.

He said, that's the story! The Malvern Hills are the star.

He put in an actor and put him on a bike

and suddenly you saw Elgar the young man full of doubts

and uncertainties, full of hesitations about how

he might, in some way or other, find his place as a maker of music.

I personally love it because it was shot in my back garden.

We needed to watch Elgar with his friends, young men

serenading their girlfriends and we shot it from my kitchen window

looking down in Hammersmith Grove, a few yards from Lime Grove.

To be 18 years of age and watch Elgar for the first time,

images of that that stick in your brain for ever.

And I think as a young British filmmaker

we were not inspired, really, by what was happening in the cinema,

so it was extraordinary that the very best things happening on film

were on television at that moment.

He arranged it so that through the window

he could see Worcester Cathedral and the Malvern Hills beyond.

There he lay for hour after hour, listening to recordings of his music

and, according to his own account, drifting through his memories

in search of those moments and people

and places that had brought him happiness and fulfilment.

If one's looking for Ken in one of his characters

it would be the young Elgar.

Lower-middle-class, Catholic,

talented and misunderstood.

That comes through so strongly in that bio-documentary that you feel,

yeah, this is the young Ken Russell talking about himself.

Was Huw his mentor or the person...?

What was the relationship with Huw, do you think?

I think Ken found the perfect mentor,

somebody that knew about narrative drive and wouldn't hesitate

to tell him what to do and cherished him.

They worked together very well.

There was sometimes blood on the walls in the cutting rooms but they were close.

It was a good relationship for both of them.

He made the Debussy film, which is when he discovered Oliver Reed

and put this fantastic brooding presence onto the screen.

And the script for that was not by Ken himself

but by a young person called Melvyn Bragg.

He wasn't a great guy to work for, bad-tempered

and he kept forgetting things and saying you'd forgotten things!

He looked like a young Friar Tuck.

He was sort of almost a precious bauble inside Monitor.

He said very little, he drank very little,

the only thing he really talked about passionately was music.

He was always about music. Or films, of course.

Oliver Reed plays the troubled Frenchman with a complicated private life.

But it was Claude Debussy's music which was Russell's real obsession.

We talked about which sequences we would do,

all the blocking out was to music.

What are we going to do about La Mer?

And then there's this piece of music,

what will we do about Apres Midi? What about that?

The structure of it was to do with the bits of music he wanted to film.

The Debussy film follows a director

and his cast as they make a biography of the composer.

-That's Debussy, over there.

-Oh, aye.

This scene is when Debussy is in his early 20s,

long before he came to England.

This film-within-a-film device allows Russell to explore

the conflicts within Debussy.

-What's that?

-It's Debussy.

-Does anybody want to shake to Debussy?

This is supposed to be a party. We're supposed to be enjoying ourselves, aren't we?

Ken Russell changed the way we look at the makers of music.

Before Ken, there was this idea of the great composer,

who was a cardinal figure, who received the divine sound

from some celestial height

and presented it in some mysterious way to the world.

Then along came Ken, and in his very particular way,

he showed them as the human beings they were.

It was along this road, Fenby, that I contemplated all my finest works.

The Delius film is a drama of a man who is dying of syphilis

and who can't write or even read and he wants to get his music in his head out.

He uses a young man called Eric Fenby to do this for him.

Ken grasps the visual and the dramatic side of it.

I think it's Ken's most satisfying work in many ways.

Now then, Fenby, where were we from yesterday? Cellos and basses.

Yes, I think it should be an A, cellos and basses.

Good, get your violins a C sharp.

Yes, play it.

-Yes, and the violas, what have you got?

-I've nothing.

Better get a B flat there.

Yes, yes, play it like that! A little excitement.

Delius blew me away, again this very delicate relationship between

his amanuensis and I thought, isn't that fantastic?

The music was at the heart of everything.

So, I think he let the music lead him.

As Delius is carried to the top of a mountain to see his last sunset,

Russell eloquently underscores the scene with the composer's

Song Of The High Hills.

He was in his filmmaking using music in a sense as the fountain,

the spring, from which it all came.

He came with musical concepts which he turned into celluloid

and soundtrack.

And then suddenly they all drifted away

and there was the most glorious sunset.

Ken was a disrupter.

And he loved those disruptive moments

and that's what happens in the Delius film when Percy Grainger bursts in.

He is Australian, he is weird. He is widely energetic.

He is sadomasochistic.

He has appalling personal practices.

Ken knows this and he's coming into the life of this invalid...

elderly composer and, obviously, he's going to take the roof off.

-Who is it?

-That was Percy Grainger. Sometimes he's a fool!

'Whether Grainger did that or not, it's absolutely Ken, isn't it?'

All of a sudden, in the middle of this film, which was going

its own sweet, melancholy, thoughtful way, there was this little "Phweugh!" went out.

A little firework went off.

Have you brought your arrangement for The Song Of The High Hills?

-Yes, I've brought it.

-Well, you can play it to me tonight,

if we ever get back.

Ha-ha-ha-ha!

Russell's BBC films brought classical music

to a wider audience...

..and helped resurrect the reputations of Elgar and Delius.

But in 1970, his next film would damage its subject

and outrage even his most ardent fans.

Omnibus now presents a new film by Ken Russell,

Dance Of The Seven Veils.

It's been described as a harsh and, at times, violent caricature

of the life of the composer, Richard Strauss.

This is a personal interpretation by Ken Russell of certain real

and many imaginary events in the composer's life.

'He took great liberties with the historical truth.

'In some cases, he went unacceptably over the top,

'portraying him, if not exactly as a Nazi,'

then as a very close collaborator with the Nazi regime,

was...pretty much outrageous.

Poor old Richard Strauss, he did go on working in Nazi Germany,

but he wasn't a Nazi.

He didn't jump up and conduct on their behest,

like certain other musicians did.

Heil, Hitler!

The Dance Of The Seven Veils so incensed the Strauss family

that they withdrew future rights from the BBC

to the composer's music, in an attempt to kill off the film.

That's better.

KEN: I can still show the film, but not with Richard Strauss' music.

so I have shown clips of the film, with Johann Strauss' music. What's in a name?

Johann, Richard.

And I'm a bit of a devil.

It was like throwing petrol on top of a fire, with Ken.

His work more and more incendiary because of it.

I think that, although Ken always said the criticism didn't affect him, I think it did.

By the fag end of the Swinging '60s,

it was becoming increasingly obvious

that Russell's future lay with feature films.

The debacle of The Dance Of The Seven Veils would be the last Omnibus

he would direct for the BBC.

The next time Ken appeared on the programme, he would be the subject.

As he huddled here at the Troubador with his unofficial leading man, Oliver Reed,

there was an undeniable air of expectancy

about what Ken would do next.

-Confess! Confess!

-OK.

Then he'll go away, like that. Ready? Go.

Confess! Confess!

That's it! Perfect.

'The Devils was a full-frontal assault

'on the Roman Catholic Church. It involved'

discussing the essential madness that lies at the heart

of a single-sex community which is gripped by a spiritual idea.

It was a huge challenge and Ken did it full frontal

and no holds barred.

And did it, in a sense, to invite a hysterical reaction,

which would then confirm the work that he had made.

If Russell had proven himself unafraid of controversy,

the Devils would test his mettle to the full.

On the surface, a historical film dealing with

the scapegoating of a priest, against a background of sexual hysteria in 17th-century France,

Russell viewed his adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun

as a deeply serious work.

KEN: The film, basically, is about politics

and the collision between the individual and the state

and who survives.

And throughout history, it has always been the state that survives

and the individual's gone under.

Every time there is a so-called nationalist revival,

it means one thing -

somebody is trying to seize control of the entire country.

The significance of our walls is that we are self governing!

CHEERING

Richelieu, he deceives the King!

What Ken Russell saw it as was a story about brainwashing,

a story about hysteria, a story about false idols,

and this, again, is a theme that recurs throughout his work.

What is this place?

The Convent of St Ursula - a place you have defiled.

Do what must be done.

God forgive them.

'I thought it was Oliver Reed's greatest performance. It's an extraordinary performance.'

In a sense, he put Ollie in the middle of this madness,

Ken Russell madness - all the great and bad, everything about it -

and Ollie was just this thing that carried you right through it,

with dignity and I thought, "They're a good team, those two."

For the love of Jesus Christ, if you wish to destroy me, then destroy me.

Accuse me of exposing political chicanery and evils of the state and I would plead guilty.

But what man can face the arraignments of the idiocy of youth?

The Devils topped the UK box office, but only after the censors

had shorn the film of its most shocking moments.

'The BBFC, famously, when they first saw a cut of it,'

did consider banning it outright.

I love The Devils. I think it's pivotal in his work.

It was a film that upset the most people.

It is so courageous, so brave,

so fearless. It's everything that Ken was at that moment in time.

It's at the height of his powers and probably the height of his excess.

You are also guilty of treason!

You are unrepentant heretics!

His films kept being successful. Even when they were outrageous, they kept being successful.

So, he was the main man.

He said to me, "I don't care if they love my films or hate them, as long as they don't go off

"and make a cup of tea in the middle of one!"

Britain's most successful, and notorious, director

was about to shock the public yet again -

by making a feelgood musical.

KEN: 'I never want to do another violent film ever again, which is why I'm doing The Boy Friend next,

'with Twiggy. Pure escapism. Just fun.'

The rest worked well.

KEN: 'Of all the people I've worked with,'

she comes nearer than anything to perfection in someone I've ever met.

Action!

One, two, three, four...

Music!

SCREAMING

'It's a very different Ken Russell film,'

so that's... It's quite a sweet film, actually.

# I don't claim that I am psychic... #

Russell's homage to the Busby Berkeley musicals of his childhood,

stars Twiggy as the stage hand who becomes the leading lady.

# ..my dear... #

It was so fun, and was so joyous and I thought, "Ah, wonderful."

Visually, I love it when Christopher Gable and I are dancing

on the huge record. That was quite scary, actually,

because when you got on it,

it was going quite fast and when you started to dance, you kind of

felt yourself being pulled backwards. It was quite weird and I had this

beautiful white, floaty chiffon dress. It's just very beautiful.

The visuals are everything to him.

He would spend hours polishing a floor before a shot.

Look at the floors in The Boy Friend. He'd have made the best housecleaner in the world!

HE LAUGHS

The Boy Friend, you see, is probably the only family film he's ever made.

And it's quite a joyous film. It's full of music, which he loved.

I think he found it great fun to do.

Ken would come on and pirouette round the set,

but really good pirouettes, he was brilliant, cos he trained as a ballet dancer!

# That certain thing called

# The Boy Friend. #

APPLAUSE

One of the things that Ken Russell did was, he wasn't necessarily

looking for actors, he was looking for people who embodied the thing that he wanted,

so that's one reason he worked well with rock stars.

The Boyfriend earned Twiggy two Golden Globe awards,

but Russell's most commercially successful film ever

came about through an unlikely collaboration.

# Ever since I was a young boy I've played the silver ball

# From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all

# But I ain't seen nothing like him in any amusement hall

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball! #

'We were all huge Ken Russell fans,'

as most people of our generation were from his TV work.

It was like, "Wow! Ken Russell and Tommy could really work."

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball! #

'I didn't think any more of it until I got the word down the pipe

'that he wanted me to play Tommy. I'd never done any acting. I said to him, "Are you sure I can do this?"

And he said, "Yeah, course you can. You know how to sing it.

"You DO sing it. You'll be a perfect Tommy."

Pete Townshend's rock opera about the deaf, dumb and blind boy

who becomes a cult figure provided the perfect vehicle

for Ken Russell's vivid imagination.

My first morning on the set with Ken was in a bath of what started to be

very tepid, yellow water.

# ..on the bath... #

And Paul Nicholas, playing Cousin Kevin, was ducking me under this water for, like, three hours,

by which time the water was freezing cold!

And I thought, "Well, this is interesting."

'Then the next scene, I'm laid on an ironing board,

'being ironed and they are putting smoke in to replicate the steam

'and Ken's going, "More smoke, more smoke,"

while Paul Nicholas runs up and down my back with an iron

and keeps smacking me in the head!

So that was my first day's filming with Ken, basically.

After that, he was dragging me around by my hair and I thought,

"This is not quite what I thought filming was going to be."

It was a testament to his international reputation

that Russell was able to cast Hollywood actors Jack Nicholson

and Ann-Margret alongside his regular collaborator, Oliver Reed.

# His eyes react to light The dials detect it

# He hears but cannot answer to your call... #

The reason that the stellar cast were willing to work with him

was not only because it's The Who and is going to be a huge rock hit,

but because Ken Russell is actually probably more of a pull than The Who are.

He is the rock star of film-makers, at that point.

He was just part of that world. It was all around him.

He seemed to dance with that world, he loved pop stars.

He loved the whole thing, and I think that's...

He may be the best British film director representing the '60s,

but he never made it take place in the '60s.

He made it take place in other centuries, other places.

# I'm free!

# Ooh, I'm free! #

The fascinating thing with Tommy is that, in many ways,

it kind of lays the template for what we think of as the modern rock video.

When you watch it now, it does sometimes look like a collection of rock videos put end to end.

Tommy was definitely the forerunner of MTV, there's no doubt about that.

The way he cut Tommy together, it's direct early MTV,

you know, eight years before MTV happened.

Unfazed by the rigours of filming Tommy,

Daltrey teamed up again with Russell for a decidedly camp and rocky take

on the life of 19th century composer, Franz Liszt.

It was a long way from Huw Wheldon and Monitor.

He sets the scene with a metronome.

Then it goes to Franz Liszt, with a breast in each hand,

caressing a nipple, in time with the metronome.

The thing with Lisztomania is, it establishes at the very beginning

this is not a boring, historical romp.

Lisztomania is playing to the audience that saw Tommy.

Imagine that, right.

Yeah, you just saw Tommy, here's a film about Liszt. Off you go!

Franz Liszt! Franz Liszt!

Franz Liszt! Franz Liszt!

Franz Liszt! Franz Liszt!

Well, he portrayed Franz Liszt as the first rock star, which is an actual fact.

He was worshiped as Elton John and Elvis were worshiped, you know,

as The Who were worshiped in the early days.

He would ride around Vienna and St Petersburg

and huge crowds of people would turn out to see him

and women would lay at his feet.

With no-one to rein in his excesses,

Russell indulged his fertile imagination to the full.

The eight-foot penis in Lisztomania, with the six chorus girls.

HE LAUGHS

I did have my doubts.

It's almost like Russell is pastiching himself,

don't make the mistake of thinking he didn't know that.

Lisztomania, to some extent, was a kind of turning point

because Lisztomania was, I think, the point at which some people lost patience with what they perceived

to be Ken's, you know, extravagance.

In 1980, Ken travelled to Hollywood to work inside the studio system for the first time.

Made for Warner Brothers and starring William Hurt,

the hallucinogenic Altered States would be his first sci-fi movie.

Altered States is a Hollywood movie with somebody else's script,

but it's more contained and it's not Ken all over the place.

The fireworks have been pulled back into something really tight,

really extraordinary, great performances,

and the effects were just perfect, I thought.

SCREAMING

There's a very important sequence in Altered States,

in which the William Hurt character goes into this long rambling speech about what he's searching for.

He says, I'm searching for the original self, the true self.

I think that that true self, that original self, that first self,

is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate.

And I'm going to find the fucker.

And that was pretty much what Russell was doing all the way through his work.

He was looking for that real, tangible, living human soul.

FIREWORKS EXPLODE

But at the point when Russell needed a sure-fire hit,

the film failed to deliver.

Worse still, the director and the Hollywood studio couldn't work together.

I think he was too impish for Hollywood, he just loved causing trouble.

I understand that because you go to Hollywood and it's like you're in Babylon.

This is the enemy out there, this is everything we've learned to hate.

There's two ways of approaching it, you either genuflect,

make a career, or you cause trouble.

I'm sure he caused trouble.

Back in Britain, the indefatigable Russell decided to embrace the music video,

making lucrative promos for his old Tommy star, Elton John.

Let's have a rehearsal, then.

Here we go... And, playback!

It's so enjoyable.

Music and movement and pictures

and the whole scene.

The thing about it, nowadays you get far more freedom in music videos than features

because the concept is usually left to the director.

# Poor Nikita is the other side... #

They want imagination and in cinema, they want less and less of it

and more and more talkies and less and less pictures and exuberance.

When I met Ken in the mid-80s, he'd already crashed and burned.

He couldn't get funding for feature films.

He couldn't get the BBC or ITV to back his documentaries.

So he'd gone out looking for work as a director of opera,

and he was directing an opera at the Vienna State Opera.

It was absolutely hilarious and excruciating.

The cast kept dropping out, the conductor dropped out, every day was another crisis.

I used to go into the Opera House and meet the interim director,

who would greet me with these tears in his eyes, and saying,

"What is he doing to my Opera House?"

Ken declared, to anybody who would listen,

"I don't speak a word of German or read a note of music,"

just the sort of thing they want to hear in Vienna.

At one point he asked the Faust to urinate in the font.

The singer was Italian, he was Catholic, he was outraged, he walked out.

And through it all, there shone a certain integrity

of Ken doing it his way, without reference to any tradition

or anything other that putting on what he thought was a good show,

which would reflect the essence of Faust as composed by Gouneau.

And when the audience booed him on the opening night,

Ken turned round at them and presented his buttocks.

Now, 25 years later, I keep hearing from people in Vienna,

about the legendary Faust that Ken Russell staged.

The latter end of his career,

the work became a parody of his earlier work.

He himself became this eccentric, larger than life figure.

When Russell did get money for feature films in the '80s

he makes no concessions to good taste

and seems increasingly to relish the camp and the kitsch.

Yes, I'm home!

When he sent me the script, I must confess

I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be funny or serious,

and it was so outlandish.

I met him and remember saying, "Ken, is this supposed to be a comedy?"

He laughed and said, "Of course it's a bloody comedy, what did you think it was?"

I was dressed as the high priestess, the Layer of the White Worm, the worm-snake woman,

with full blue body make-up, a skull cap and fangs

and literally thinking, "I shall never work again!"

And Ken with a megaphone going, "More rape! More pillage!"

And Wagner blaring out of two speakers on the set.

And I just thought, "This is so Ken Russell."

A scene with a boy scout and a bath, I seem to remember, which was very, very funny.

Wherever there's death, there's a rebirth.

And to our God, ever mightier...

DOORBELL RINGS

Shit!

And just as I'm getting down to business with the boy scout and the bath,

the doorbell rings and it's Hugh Grant.

SHE LAUGHS

Good evening, what can I do for you?

Forgive me for dropping in like this,

but, er, you're not in the book.

The British media were just completely confused.

You know, venal and this is dreadful, rubbish, crap stuff.

The great joy of Ken Russell's career is that he never thought,

"Oh, I know, let's rein it in a little bit.

"Let's take our foot off a bit." When he was confronted with that sort of thing

his answer to put his foot on the pedal and go pell mell the other way.

That's why he ended up making movies in his garage.

Ken Russell entered the new millennium and his 70s, showing no signs of slowing down.

Only now, his movies, shot largely on video, were smaller

and his studio was his back garden.

Honestly, Alan, I mean, anybody who delivered the post, would say,

"Can you come back tomorrow because I'm doing a film about such and such."

He'd turn up and he'd say, "Would you mind putting those clothes on?

"Just a second, can you... can you say these lines?"

And he'd just keep making films.

He carried on because actually saying, "Action and cut,"

was something he couldn't live without.

My image of Ken in his later life, is one of a happy man.

Although he wasn't in the big world any more,

he had, after all, made a very big mark in the world of cinema.

# Oh, you gave to me

# Now I'll give to you

# No words can you say

# How I feel... #

I heard from him literally four weeks before he died.

He called me up and asked me to play the Mad Hatter, in Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, how could I say no?

His enthusiasm for the project was absolutely infectious.

It was just a few words. It was still bubbly Ken.

Ken was like a big, naughty schoolboy,

playing with his toys and breaking the rules and getting away with it.

I loved that about him.

He wasn't frightened of anything. He would just go for it.

Forget about the bits that didn't work, it was the bits that did that was extraordinary.

Nobody was even close to it.

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