Director John Boorman: The last of the steely Brits

He has been turning money into light - to paraphrase John Boorman's own words to describe the alchemical process of making movies - for more than 40 years. In that time, the veteran British director, writer, producer and self-archivist has made 21 films, including unalloyed classics such as Point Blank, Deliverance and Hope and Glory, along with some forgettable failures like Zardoz and Beyond Rangoon. He may be an erratic talent, but he is one of British cinema's true visionaries, and who has also written some of the most elegant, insightful essays on the alluring, brutal, egotistical world of movies and their makers.

Yet Boorman slips unnoticed though the foyer of the hotel where we meet. A slight, silver-haired, 74-year-old, Boorman shakes a greeting with his left hand and looks a little fragile as he sits in the hotel's bustling bar, gingerly nursing his right wrist, which he sprained badly at his home south of Dublin. But despite the injury he is on lively, articulate, self-effacing form.

The Tiger's Tail, his latest film, is a parable about his adopted homeland, centred around a soured prince-and-the-pauper tale of doppelgangers exchanging lives in the midst of the Irish Republic's raging "Celtic tiger" economic boom. "The title comes from the so-called economic miracle that took Ireland from poverty to wealth," says Boorman. "There's a moment when one of the characters says: 'We have the Celtic tiger by the tail; if we let go it's gonna turn and bite us in the arse.' That's what the film's about; being bitten in the arse by economics."

A survivor of the bright lights and hard knocks of the film business, he has constantly injected his concerns about society, the environment and the destruction of individualism into his work. With his new, disapproving, embittered comedy, he reflects his alarm at the encroaching tide of a modern, ultra-materialistic world.

At 74, he is already planning his next project, an adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's bestseller Memoirs of Hadrian, recreating the life of the Roman emperor. "It's a daunting prospect. The book is almost too good, but has some fascinating parallels with the present American empire," he says.

Daunting prospects are Boorman's speciality. One of the last of the steely British film-makers who played Hollywood at their own game, he is the closest, I imagine, that you could get to meeting his old, departed, friend, David Lean. The similarities are striking: the clipped English accent, the conservative appearance and dry wit, the old-school reserve disguising a mind boiling with epic cinematic visions. Born and raised in Surrey in 1933, Boorman's accent and reserve are still there, but his 38-year residency in Ireland has made its mark. He speaks softly but there are flashes of a tough, prickly side to Boorman, too. He was one of the few British directors to keep afloat in Tinseltown's shark-infested infinity pools.

The Tiger's Tail is a polemic against a cultural sea change in the new, wealthy, republic. It is his fourth film with Brendan Gleeson, who starred in his 1999 biopic of the iconoclastic Dublin gangland boss, Martin Cahill, who was allegedly assassinated by the IRA. After a series of flops, The General, one of a lengthy catalogue of Boorman "comebacks", won the Best Director award at Cannes. In the new film, Gleeson takes the double lead role of a ruthless property tycoon, Liam O'Leary, and his mysterious, homeless, doppelganger, who begins to take over his luxurious life.

Some Irish critics have derided Boorman's dystopian vision of a callous, ultra-materialistic Ireland. But he is used to criticism. Written off as a spent force in the late Seventies, he returned triumphant with 1981's Excalibur. With the exuberant retelling of the Arthurian legend, Boorman restored his reputation, as well as giving Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart their first movie roles. "My demise has been constantly exaggerated," he laughs. Indeed, when detractors once again consigned him to the cutting-room floor in the mid-Eighties he delivered Hope and Glory, a massive critical and commercial success based on his childhood.

The director has lived in Ireland since 1969 but was born in Surrey in 1933. His first film was Catch Us If You Can, in 1965, ostensibly a vehicle for the then hugely popular Dave Clarke Five. But Boorman, who had trained in BBC documentaries, made it into a strangely morbid take on the swinging Sixties' sensibilities. "I made this rather pessimistic journey through England in the Sixties and it wasn't what people expected of a pop movie. But Pauline Kael [The New Yorker's film critic] praised it inordinately, and that launched my career in America. That's how I got Point Blank."

Invited to Hollywood in 1967, he made Point Blank, with Lee Marvin as a wronged gangster; an implacable, inexorable anti-hero. Studio heads were perplexed when Boorman delivered a technically complex, non-linear narrative. But Marvin opened the door to an initially sceptical Hollywood, and the tortured ex-marine with a difficult reputation became Boorman's unlikely guardian angel. "He wasn't difficult at all," Boorman says. "When we were filming in Alcatraz, I kind of blanked out and couldn't think what to do next. Lee saw this and suddenly started roaring and staggering around and the production manager said: 'We can't carry on with him like this.' I managed to collect my thoughts. I signalled to Lee and he made this amazing recovery from drunkenness to sobriety and we continued to shoot. That's the kind of guy he was."

Now recognised as a masterpiece, Point Blank was the template for searching, fractured thrillers to come and Boorman and Marvin became firm friends. "Lee had big influence on the film from the start. I thought the original script was awful and he agreed," recalls Boorman. "He said, 'I'll do this picture on one condition,' and threw the script out the window."

After Point Blank, Boorman re-teamed with Marvin for Hell in the Pacific (1968), a story of an American marine and a Japanese soldier, played by Toshiro Mifune, stranded together on an island. The film struggled at the box office. But Boorman's next, Deliverance, was an international sensation, a jolting experience to this day, in which backwoodsmen terrorise four businessmen on a weekend canoe trip in South Georgia: a seminal reference-point for any back-to-nature drama of inner-city men looking for their primal self. In Deliverance, all they find is a brutalising ordeal ending in death and male rape.

"Warner had very little confidence in it and they kept cutting the budget down and down," says Boorman. "That's really how I came to use that banjo-music score, because I had to cut the orchestra and used duelling banjos all the way through. It worked very well, but it was through necessity."

He aims to carry on making films into his eighties, unpredictable, ambitious to the point of eccentricity, and stubbornly sticking to his visions. "The funny thing is, I just had a call from a major Hollywood studio about remaking The Tiger's Tail in America," says Boorman. "I said, it's a bit like burying the corpse before it's dead. Let the film come out before you remake it!

"I don't make the kind of films Hollywood wants now anyway. Mind you, I suppose I never did."

'The Tiger's Tail' opens on 8 June; 'Catch Us If You Can' is out on DVD this month

Interesting? Click here to explore further