Sir Alan Parker HARDtalk

millions of users under the age of Now on BBC News it is time for

HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk. My guess to

today is one of Britain's most experienced and successful film

directors. -- guest. He is so Alan Parker. It is hard to find another

film-maker who can make feet -- match the range of his work. Alan

Parker never cared much for film critics and has always held strong

views on the future of the film industry. But in this digital age,

our movies at as essential to our courtyard as they used to be.

Welcome to HARDtalk. Good to be here. You had pretty much spend all

your life steeped in the movies. Are you areas excited by films and

film-making today as you ever work? -- as excited. Overall, no. There

is nothing more exciting than going to the movies and seeing something

that is fantastic. And when that happens, it is the most beautiful,

wonderful experience. Those experiences are getting more and

more rare. Do you think that is because movies are not as good, or

the place they have in your life is different? A little bit of both.

When I was making a film per year, and spending most of my life on

location, you do not really know what is going on in the outside

world. You start to live a life in order to make films about life, so

you look at it a bit differently. Film has changed drastically since

I started, with regards... it is ultimately dominated by it American

cinema, escapism and digital effects. It is the not kind of

political film-making that I sort of enjoy. Not that I have always

made a serious or political films, but I always thought that films

meant something and could affect people's lives and now they don't.

I want to latch on to some of those thoughts. At the very beginning, I

want to go back to you as a boy, growing up as a working-class kid

in north London, in an age of austerity after the Second World

War, in Britain. What did the cinema mean to you as a kid? Why

did it seem so attractive? It was basically all we had been much that

the television was pretty horrible even if you had one. The first

thing that I saw on television, Coronation Street. The first time

that people realised that everyone else had television. Going to the

cinema was the place where we could go. We see a different world. From

whatever country of the film might have been about, predominantly

American cinema, and British film, but it was a magical place in the

dark. I cannot think of anything in my childhood that actually excited

me more than going to the movies. place to dream. It gets you away

from the life that you are living, being brought up in a council flat,

it showed you a different kind of world. Immediately after the war,

when I grew up, much of London had been bombed so severely, everywhere

was bomb sites. They were boarded up and you were not allowed to go

inside. There was nothing more exciting for a kit... there was an

old cinema that had been bombed and it was our favoured place. We used

to go and sit in the seats. There was no screen, in fact there was no

war at the end of the room. became a key to that went to the

movies and crowd your mates at school to re-enact some of the

fight scenes. I'm thinking of the epic moments in your movies that

came later. It started when you were a child, the desire to do the

crowd scenes. I did not know at the time. We had been to see a film

called... I came back to the school, and I divided the entire school

into Romans and hunts. I did not say action, but I gave the order

for everybody to charge. And I got into terrible trouble. The word the

Cecil B De mayo of Islington. 10. I want to discuss the Ritz you

had in Moving Image, in advertising. -- the roots. A very number of

successful British designers came out of advertising, when television

advertising was really taking off. Do you think you learned a lot

about how to tell a story, Hawk and audience? Certainly. It could only

last a maximum of 60 seconds so it is very different. But you kind of

learn that every single moment matters. It is something that you

learn from commercials. But for us it was our film school. It was a

very depressed a film industry. I made a commercial every week for a

good few weeks, myself and people like Ridley Scott. It was the

beginnings of commercials in this country. It was very exciting, and

experimental time. We learned a great deal from that. You need a

lot of arrogance to be a film director. Your first film was no

small undertaking, Bugsy Malone. It was quite a dramatic departure for

a movie. It was a mock again and Chicago movie, but cast with kids

and for entertainment. -- Anand. Pretty risky. Did you think you

could pull it off? Other people may have said I was. I said that

directing is a crash course in megalomania. You. In a direction

and people run in that direction. And sometimes it is the right

direction and sometimes it is the wrong direction. It was a totally

pragmatic exercise. I had written a lot of British screenplays which I

could not get made because of the depressed film industry. I thought

I would write an American movie. I was sitting in the cinema in

Islington, I would see loads and loads of American movies. That is

what Bugsy Malone is. It is a pastiche of all the movies, or

watching American gangster films, American musical films and I have

used to being together. Because I had children at the time, I passed

all the children. You know it is really difficult to do. Including

stars like Jodie Foster. Was it clear to you that some of the

children you cast were going to be brilliant actors. Some of them,

definitely. Jodie was 12 and she had more movies than I had. If I

got sick she could have easily taking over. She told me how to do

certain things. She was head and shoulders above everyone else.

is what fascinates me. You set out your stall with a fantastically

successful entertaining movie, but some of the movies that you are

most identified with, they are pretty grim, a sort of dirty

realist, hard to watch in a way. I'm thinking of Midnight Express.

Maybe Mississippi burden as well. There is pretty graphic violence in

them. The stories are about bad men doing bad things and suffering the

consequences. Were those movies direct to your heart than the

entertainment movies? -- closer to your heart. When you go back to the

beginning, I did Bugsy Malone to get started, and it was quite

successful. American studios started to offer me things.

Midnight Express was one of those. I did not think that Bugsy Malone

represented to I was as a person or a film-maker. So I reacted against

that. In Midnight Express. The moment that I did that, critics

like to put you into pigeon holes, and suddenly... I continued into

always choose to do different things. By doing different things,

it kept me fraiche and to get the work of regional. Because too many

film-makers, and the director makes 20 versions of the same film

through their career, and I have always wanted to do different

things. The serious work is usually a reaction. You said earlier in

this conversation that you did not like the effect of corporate

America, commercialised cinema making, what that has had on UK

film-making. Does that mean in the end, you believe that movies should

have a message? I think they should be about something. When you have

seen it, you should not forget it the moment you leave the cinema.

They call it car park movies. People stand around in the car park

discussing what they had seen. It should not be totally frivolous.

There is room for all kinds of film, but I think that cinema at the

moment is dominated by the lighter fare, and the more serious movies

are not so obvious. I want to talk to in detail about Mississippi

burning. It raises some issues that have become very relevant with the

fury over the veracity of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's movie

about the hunt and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Remembering back to Mrs

CP, there was a great deal of controversy about the way you

presented it. -- Mississippi. It was about three civil rights

campaigners who were murdered in the Deep South by group likes clan

members. In retrospect, you think the criticism that you

misrepresented the nature of the civil rights movement was fair?

do not. What was interesting, I was making a film about racism in the

United States. Every single time you switch on the TV, there was a

person discussing the movie in order to discuss racism. You were

going into territory that was so sensitive, so important to the US,

long before Barack Obama and some of the achievements that we say

today have been achieved. You knew it was a live issue. I am looking

at some of the critics. J quite in Time magazine, he said that your

version of history was so distorted, it amounts to a cinematic lynching.

Powerful words. I R. They are stupid words as well. The film is

not that. In the film, why didn't you focus much more on the way in

which African Americans were leading the civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, for example. There is an entire film industry.

There are people who give you money to make films. At the time, if the

two heroes of that story had been black and not white, the film would

not have been made at that moment in time. Maybe it shouldn't have

been made. It is a very powerful film that would have allowed lots

of other films to be made on the same subject. I cannot tell the

entire story of the American civil rights in two hours. It is about

two white detectives going down to Mississippi and solving a crime.

Why it if it was a misrepresentation? It is not. And

it is a movie. It is not journalism. It is based on a true story.

Doesn't that confuse The Audience? It comes to a head in Zero Dark

Thirty, where they begin with the movie with some real audio from

9/11, which tells you something about the commitment from this film

about veracity, real events and the inside account, but then it turns

out there is a huge dispute of how much truth is in the movie. I did

not make that young. You should be asking Kathryn Bigelow. The problem

with Mississippi burning, everyone thought of it as more important

than it actually was. It was one movie. It lasted two hours and six

minutes and it is not the entire story of the black American civil

rights struggle. There have been wonderful documentaries that went

on for 20 hours of television time to tell that story. Mine is a

dramatic story that an American If you had presented the movie with

two black protagonists, it would never have been made. As that point

in time. Can do make it now?You could. One July to?I wouldn't want

to be make anything I had already done. The importance of Mississippi

burning was to allow 20 of the films to be made on the similar

subject matter. It was the first one and therefore if I could allow

other films to be made, then I am very proud of that. In a way, what

I want to talk about has already come up in the conversation. I

sense the passion that you feel that your Moody was misunderstood.

You have always had a complex relationship with the critics. You

once said they suck because they would love to be doing what you do.

Is that really how you feel about them? When you start out as a young

film-maker, which was probably when I said that, when you're 40 you

don't have the same feelings. The thing is that you think your film

is the only film that people are criticising. If you look at all the

great films in history, they were criticised at some point. We have

to put up with critics not just in the UK, but in the US as well.

Every single country has film critics. There will be a lot of

people who don't like what you do. As an artist you cannot be pushed

out of the direction you're going in. It seems sometimes you will

almost pushed off track. I don't know if it was personal for you.

Pauline Cail, for example, you said of her, she destroyed careers with

a straightforwardness and cruelty. Is it really true? She really did.

She was a very cruel woman. When she died, so many people turned up

at the funeral not out of respect, just to make sure she was dead. I

think film makers truly hated her. Don't you think, when you say that,

you come across as a very thin- skinned artist? The absolute right

of any person, including a professional critic, is to go to a

movie and not like it. There is a line, though. There is in line

between doing what you just said and actually being cruel and

vicious. What she did was to allow the popularity of that kind of

criticism, which was unpleasant and did lead to a lot of film-makers

not getting another job. She was influencing not just the studios

but also the other film-makers and critics. In the end I think there

is a line that no true artist should be worried about what other

people are saying about their work because a custard pie comes with

the job. You spent the best part of a decade, until quite recently,

chairing the UK Film Council and making a lot of noise about the

need for the film industry in this country to be an international hub.

To get the right levels of investment and ambition to turn it

into a really international force. The UK film council was then

disbanded by the Government. This Government. How damaging to believe

that was? I think it was a petulant political act. I'm terribly biased

because I put a lot of time and effort into helping the creation of

the Film Council. The Film Council was undoubtedly the best and most

efficient support organisation the film industry ever had in this

country and led to a decade of stability and growth. When you set

out he did say it is time we recognise that our industry's

obsession with public funding for production is taking us nowhere.

is the thought that if you just rely on that. The film industry

would not exist, the indigenous British film industry would not

exist. The European film industry would not exist without public

subsidy. There is no doubt about that. To think that is the only way

we should look to getting films financed is what I was arguing for.

How does the film industry in Britain, in Europe, right now cope

with the fact that the balance of market power in the movie industry

seems to be moving very rapidly Eastwood. Jono very soon is going

to be the second biggest movie market in the world. -- China. We

see directors cutting films just for the Chinese market. That is

terrible. Do not object to that as a journalist? It is not for me to

comment on what directors are doing. I'll ask you what you think of

James Cameron editing the film and are saying it is an important

market. To in his case it was taking it nudity. Political

censorship, more sensitive -- moral censorship, is it? For him it was a

question of taking out some nudity. Do you think artistic values are

being compromised? I am appalled that anyone cut one friend of my

work as a director. In any country. I am very critical of the system.

For them to recut i n n, as they just did in order for it to be

accepted in China, to get the film into the market - the American film

industry is about money and would regard anything in order to get

more money. They do it in order to get their hands on the Chinese

money. As a film-maker and as a writer and as a director, I am

appalled that you should cut your work because of 40 party members

who choose which films are shown in China. We have talked about China,

what about the huge growth in alternative visual art forms, if

you can call them that? I'm thinking of the video games, for

example. According to the latest figures, $56 billion worth of video

games industry in 2011. It is getting bigger much -- much bigger

every year. It is extraordinary.Is it a threat to the movie industry?

I don't know what threat means. In the end it is the audience that is

telling you. Would you have in cinema, in American cinema,

probably is that you have this confluence of the video game and

the special effects. It doesn't necessarily lead to good, fresh,

creative work. It is a different way to communicate to people and it

is the audience who are telling us it is what they want. I must say,

as we talk, the more I get a sense of your frustration of where the

movie business is right now and the sorts of movies being made. I want

to quote you the words of Stephen so the bird, he is thinking aloud

about whether he wants to make another movie. He said, you have

people in this business who don't know movies, who don't watch movies

for pieces -- pleasure, and they are the ones who are deciding which

movie they are going to allow you to make. Is that reflective of

you're feeling? I agree totally. Stephen also said another thing,

which was, when you get to a certain age doing what we do, we

are expected to beat film directors until we die. He said that there is

nothing worse than a really great sports player getting a little too

wild and not playing too well. It is better to retire when you are at

the best of what you can do. I share his thoughts entirely.

you still write screenplays. You still have a very active artistic

life. Are you saying you will not make another movie? I won't say

that. I usually find reasons -- find reasons not to do them. I

don't know why that is. I have written a number of screenplays

that haven't been made, but I have made them in my head. I have an

entire film festival in my head. A pretty good one too. It is hard

making films. I always say, here we are up to my knees in Mississippi

mud and making a film that got a number of Oscars and fantastic plot

its, and all you can find is somewhat uncritical thing. You

think, is it worth it? All that hard work and that's all you are