Lord Puttnam pays tribute to Alan Parker, who died on July 31, 2020

I first met Alan Parker sitting on a bench outside the office of Colin Millward, the Creative Director at the ad agency CDP. He was there for an interview. He was a bit younger than me and came across as almost unbearably confident – which never really left him.

He hit the ground running and started doing some seriously impressive work. I was working on accounts which were more aligned with Charles Saatchi but was able to take advantage of the enormous sense of competition that quickly arose between them as young copywriters. In my eyes they were both equally talented. In fact, I guess we were all incredibly competitive, which in turn drove us to do better and better work.

A short while later I left the company in the hope of finding a way into the film industry; but I didn’t know any script writers. With Charles’ encouragement I approached Alan, and on his kitchen table he wrote the screenplay for ‘Melody’, built around a number of Bee Gees songs to which I’d managed to acquire the rights. That was our first real ‘movie project’ together and miraculously it got made.

He was still working at the advertising agency when we shot the film, but he knew a little about the process as a result of directing pilot TV commercials in CDP’s basement. Alan had set the biggest scene on a school playing field, so he took a day off from the agency to watch the filming of what seemed to us a very large-scale sequence, involving over 300 children and their parents. By mid-morning he’d got a bit bored so I suggested he go off with the second unit cameraman and film one or two ‘sports day’ sequences. A few hours later he re-emerged hot and flustered saying, ‘sod advertising: this is what I’m going to do’. I think that was the day he irrevocably decided to become a movie director.

Eventually his earnings from commercials made it possible for him to direct a couple of shorts – in those days there was still a market for them. One was called Our Cissy, and the other was entitled Footsteps, both of which got released in cinemas. I showed them to Mark Shivas, a producer at the BBC, and not long afterwards Mark paired Alan with writer Jack Rosenthal to direct the TV drama ‘The Evacuees’. By then Alan had come to love the process of directing; He’d found his niche, and the job fitted his temperament perfectly.

We then worked for quite a while trying to set up ‘Bugsy Malone’ on which I was to serve as executive producer, but we’d found it incredibly difficult to get people to buy into the concept, largely because nothing like it had ever been attempted before. Actually, when you think about it in hindsight you couldn’t really blame the sceptics!

But we had a bit of luck. There was a new Chairman at Rank named Graham Dowson. He’d done an interview in the Evening Standard about the type of films he felt Rank should be making, and he might almost have been describing Bugsy. Armed with this I got into see him, pitched our project, and he agreed to put up half the money. Then, with Paul Williams on board as composer we got an advance for the soundtrack album.

We still didn’t have enough so Alan, very courageously, put in a significant chunk of his own money in order to build both sides of the street set at Pinewood. We had some dreadful rows in the process of closing our deal at Rank, one in particular with a Mr Robertson, their Company Secretary, who was being particularly pedantic.

Alan, who had no patience with that form of obstructionism, finally leant across the desk and grabbed Mr Robertson by the collar and tie, yanking him across his own desk. ‘The problem with the British film industry is people like you!’ he bellowed and threw the by then purple faced man back into his own chair. ‘There goes our money!’ I thought. But somehow we managed to survive that incident – along with any number of others!

Many years later Alan, along with Barbara Broccoli, pushed very hard to establish ‘First Light’ in Birmingham, a scheme to help young people make their first film and avoid them having to go through the early struggles that had so frustrated all of us. In fact Alan, Ridley [Scott] and I built up a hell of a lot of frustration with the obstacles we encountered in trying to get into an industry which at the time was a somewhat stuffy business, dominated by two types of people. One group were the filmmakers, most of whom seemed to be Oxbridge graduates. They were largely trainees from Granada or the BBC, and people like us – a bunch of commercial lowlifes coming from advertising – seemed almost an alien life form to them.

We were, however, huge beneficiaries of the creative atmosphere that had developed in the late sixties. Even a few years earlier it’s doubtful it would have been possible for us to make the breakthrough. But for Alan, those attitudes we came up against provoked a deep and abiding resentment. He found it all pretty unforgivable, certainly in those earlier years, and was later able to ridicule this peculiarity of the British Film industry in his brilliant documentary ‘A Turnip-Heads Guide to the British Film Industry.

I think it’s one of the reasons he always felt comfortable and more appreciated in France and the US. It may also be the reason why, later in his career, he put so much time and energy into trying to change British attitudes to commercial cinema. In an important sense I think Alan never stopped fighting those battles.

My approach has always been, if you want to beat them, join them: that’s why I joined the Union, and from there made the short switch into politics, in an attempt to bring about change from the inside. For years Alan preferred being outside, throwing stones. In a sense he always enjoyed throwing stones, that’s simply the way he preferred to operate. He worked on the assumption that most people in business and politics were malevolent, unhelpful and out to get you – unless you proved yourself quicker, sharper and braver than them. And for the most part he was.

On ‘Midnight Express’ we flirted with getting the bullet half a dozen times, largely because of things Alan simply wouldn’t go along with. Needless to say he was mostly right. Coming off Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express Alan had already developed the belief that if you really dug your heels in there was a good chance you’d end up with a better movie.

We ended up having hundreds, maybe thousands of meals together over a period of fifty five years and they’d inevitably consist of hysterical laughter, some minor squabbles, and at least one fundamental disagreement over a recent, and seeming irreconcilable aspect of our lives. Every meal was a rollercoaster, but looking back I wouldn’t have missed one of them. 

Working together became a slightly different matter. One evening on Midnight Express, we had a particularly serious argument and I chucked a bowl of cold pea soup in his face! We’d had numerous disagreements on the set, in the cutting room, and even in the dubbing theatre and there’s no doubt in my mind that the finished film was all the better for them.

However, it came to a point at which, if we were to go on working together, we would terminally fall out. Following a lunch in New York we agreed that I shouldn’t collaborate on Fame. The truth is he didn’t need me. I remember getting into a taxi with tears rolling down my face at the realization that I was leaving behind a really important part of my life. At the time it was incredibly painful, but it allowed us to get beyond argumentative competition and reach a point at which we simply wanted to be proud of each other – of the work we did and the manner in which we did it.

Without the inevitable tensions of working together our friendship was able to deepen – and to really a quite unusual extent. But in respect of the rest of the world Alan remained extremely competitive – maybe we both did!

In the latter part of his career, Alan developed a very fixed idea about his value as a director. He had reached his reputational zenith during an era in which films had become increasingly expensive to make. A few directors found themselves able to get their hands on almost everything they needed in order to complete their work exactly as they saw it; but when that changed Alan found it difficult to adjust.

He often talked of his deep admiration for Ken Loach, but I think there was also an ambivalence in that a part of him wanted to be Ken, but another part of him wanted to be regarded in the same light as Martin Scorsese. In trying to thread himself between those two quite distinct forms of cinema he found himself increasingly short of space. He often said: “What’s so special about Ken is that he’s all about why to make a film, whereas I’ve tended to fret about how.”

In the final analysis Alan was very much a film maker, to the extent that he never wanted to direct the same or even a similar film twice. He was offered a lot of money to do a follow-up to Bugsy Malone and we were also asked to do a sequel to Midnight Express but that was the last thing he was ever interested in. At one point it was suggested he might do a TV series of Fame, but he refused. He was even approached about the first Harry Potter film and turned it down. Those were two decisions he ruminated on a bit later in life! 

Alan was restless and eclectic, always wanting to take on new things. He sought to be as highly professional as any member of his crew, in fact to describe him as ‘the complete professional’ was probably the highest compliment you could offer.

I think it’s fair to say Alan and I genuinely loved each other. Our relationship transcended friendship. For me he was the brother I never had, and I like to think he felt the same. I’m finding it very hard to adjust to the fact that I won’t see him again. The very last text I received from him...we’d got cut off on a ‘Face Time’ call - he wrote “damn, damn, damn, we had so much left to talk about.”

As usual he was right.