Written Interview: Michael Powell

You may remember Michael Powell, the British director. Well, he’s known as a director. In fact, he was a writer as well with 35 film and TV writing credits including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus , and The Red Shoes. Here is a previously unpublished interview with Powell from 1986, posted recently at Time Out London:

Although he made a string of British cinema classics — including ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and ‘The Red Shoes’ — director Michael Powell was for many years a somewhat neglected figure, until rediscovery on both sides of the Atlantic brought him back into the limelight at the start of the 1980s. In 1986, at the age of 81 and four years before his death in 1990, he issued the first volume of his autobiography ‘A Life in Movies’, and embarked on a UK book tour. Trevor Johnston spoke to the director on his Edinburgh stopover, but the interview remained unpublished until now, unearthed here to mark the impending fiftieth anniversary reissue of Powell’s most controversial work, ‘Peeping Tom’ — a film which damaged Powell’s career but which has experienced a sharp turnaround in critical opinion since Martin Scorsese led its revival in the late 1970s.

Trevor Johnston: What are your feelings on the career reappraisal that’s been going on for the past few years?

Michael Powell: ‘It’s been a slow and gradual process. I had a lot of enemies in the higher echelons of the British film industry and they used the initial reaction to “Peeping Tom” against me. A lot of people thought I was a pain in the neck, always wanting to do something new, sometimes proving them wrong — occasionally proving them right! But for a long time “Peeping Tom” made it impossible for me to get any film produced in England.’

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Do you see a dividing line between artist and filmmaker?
‘The cinema is my chosen art and I know more about the history of it than anyone — because I’m it! So my book is not a “film book” per se, but about my particular experiences as an artist in this medium — which involved a lot of films I wanted to make but couldn’t. I always regretted that I didn’t get to do “Ondine” with Audrey Hepburn, the fairy tale about the water nymph who falls in love with a knight. So that it’s a “film book” is only incidental. What matters is your art. You must remember that. If you’re an artist you can’t escape it.’

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But you’re still a great believer in collaboration, then?

‘It’s essential for the cinema. It’s a matter of life and death. The director doesn’t have to be responsible for the initial idea. His job is to get the best collaborators he possibly can and then suck their brains, take the money and put it up there on the screen, then leave the actors to take the brunt. They’re always in the front line, don’t forget that.’

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