Alan Parker
Sir Alan William Parker was an English film director, screenwriter and producer. His early career, beginning in his late teens, was spent as a copywriter and director of television advertisements. After about ten years of filming adverts, many of which won awards for creativity, he began screenwriting and directing films.
Parker was known for using a wide range of filmmaking styles and working in differing genres. He directed musicals, including Bugsy Malone, Fame, Pink Floyd – The Wall, The Commitments and Evita ; true-story dramas, including Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning, Come See the Paradise and Angela's Ashes ; family dramas, including Shoot the Moon, and horrors and thrillers including Angel Heart and The Life of David Gale.
Parker's films won nineteen BAFTA awards, ten Golden Globes and six Academy Awards. His film Birdy was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the Top Ten Films of 1984 and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. In 1984, Parker received the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to the film industry. He was active in both British cinema and American cinema, along with being a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain and lecturing at various film schools.
In 2000, Parker received the Royal Photographic Society Lumière Award for major achievement in cinematography, video or animation. In 2013, he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest honour the British Film Academy can give a filmmaker. Parker donated his personal archive to the British Film Institute's National Archive in 2015.
Early years and education
Parker was born on 14 February 1944 into a working-class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He grew up on a council estate in Islington, which always made it easy for him to remain "almost defiantly working-class in attitudes" said the British novelist and screenwriter Ray Connolly. Parker said that although he had his share of fun growing up, he always felt he was studying for his secondary school exams, while his friends were out having a good time. He had an "ordinary background" with no aspirations to become a film director, nor did anyone in his family have any desire to be involved in the film industry. The closest he ever came, he said, to anything related to films was learning photography, a hobby inspired by his uncles: "... that early introduction to photography is something I remember."Parker attended Dame Alice Owen's School, concentrating on science in his last year. He left school when he was 18 to work in the advertising field, hoping that the advertising industry might be a good way to meet girls.
Career
1962–1975: Early work and breakthrough
Parker's first job was office boy in the post room of Ogilvy & Mather an advertising agency in London. But more than anything, he said, he wanted to write, and would write essays and ads when he got home after work. His colleagues also encouraged him to write, which soon led him to a position as a copywriter in the company. Parker took jobs with different agencies over the next few years, having by then become proficient as a copywriter. One such agency was Collett Dickenson Pearce in London, where he first met the future producers David Puttnam and Alan Marshall, both of whom would later produce many of his films. Parker credited Puttnam with inspiring him and talking him into writing his first film script, Melody.By 1968, Parker had moved from copywriting to successfully directing numerous television advertisements. In 1970, he joined Marshall to establish a company to make advertisements. That company eventually became one of Britain's best commercial production houses, winning nearly every major national and international award open to it. Among their award-winning adverts were the UK Cinzano vermouth advertisement, and a Heineken advert which used 100 actors. Parker credited his years writing and directing adverts for his later success as a film director:
After writing the screenplay for the Waris Hussein film Melody in 1971, Parker shot his first fictional film titled No Hard Feelings in 1972, for which he wrote the script. The film is a bleak love story set against the Blitz in London during the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe bombed the city for 57 consecutive nights. Parker was born during one of those bombing raids, and said "the baby in that could well have been me". With no feature film directing experience, he could not find financial backing, and decided to risk using his own money and funds from mortgaging his house to cover the cost. The film impressed the BBC, which bought the film and showed it on television a few years later in 1976. The BBC producer Mark Shivas had, in the interim, also contracted Parker to direct The Evacuees, a Second World War story written by Jack Rosenthal which was shown as a Play for Today. The work was based on true events which involved the evacuation of school children from central Manchester. The Evacuees won a BAFTA for best TV drama and also an Emmy for best International Drama.
Parker next wrote and directed his first feature film, Bugsy Malone, a parody of early American gangster films and American musicals, but with only child actors. Parker's desire in making the film was to entertain both children and adults with a unique concept and style of film:
The film received eight British Academy Award nominations and five Awards, including two BAFTAs for Jodie Foster.
1978–1990: Subsequent success
Parker next directed Midnight Express, based on a true account by Billy Hayes about his incarceration and escape from a Turkish prison for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country. Parker made the film in order to do something radically different from Bugsy Malone, which would broaden his style of filmmaking. The script was written by Oliver Stone in his first screenplay, and won Stone his first Academy Award. The music was composed by Giorgio Moroder, who was also awarded his first Oscar for the film. Midnight Express established Parker as a "front rank director", as both he and the film were Oscar nominated. The success of that film also gave him the freedom from then on to direct films of his own choosing.Parker then directed Fame, which follows the lives of eight students through their years at the New York City's High School of Performing Arts. It was a huge box-office success and led to a television spin-off series of the same name. Parker stated that after doing a serious drama like Midnight Express, he wanted to do a film with music, but very different from typical musicals of the past. Having already done Bugsy Malone, he felt confident that he knew how to go about creating a musical where the songs emerge from real situations.
Actress Irene Cara recalled that "the nice thing about the way Alan works with everyone is that he allowed us to really feel like classmates." However, Parker was refused permission to use the actual school portrayed in the film because of the foul language in the screenplay.
Parker's next film was Shoot the Moon, the story of a marital break-up that takes place in Northern California. Parker calls it "the first grown-up film that I'd done". He again chose to direct a subject distinctly different from his previous film, explaining, "I really try to do different work. I think that by doing different work each time, it keeps you creatively fresher." He described the theme of the film being about "two people who can't live together but who also can't let go of one another. A story of fading love, senseless rage, and the inevitable bewildering betrayal in the eyes of the children." Its stars, Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, received Golden Globe nominations for their performances.
The film also had a personal significance for Parker, who said he was forced to examine his own marriage: "It was a painful film to make for me because there were echoes of my own life in it. It was about a breakup of a marriage, and the children in the story were quite close to my own children in age. Shoot the Moon was very, very close to my own life." He spent days with the writer Bo Goldman on developing a realistic story, and states that his marriage became "infinitely stronger" as a result of the film.
Also in 1982 Parker directed a film version of the Pink Floyd conceptual rock opera, The Wall, which starred Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof as the fictive rocker "Pink". Parker later described the filming as "one of the most miserable experiences of my creative life." Though not a major box office success, receiving lukewarm reviews from critics, the film has since become a cult classic amongst Pink Floyd fans.
Parker directed Birdy, starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. It recounts the story of two school friends who have returned from the Vietnam War but who were both psychologically and physically injured. Parker called it a "wonderful story" after having read the book by William Wharton. However, because of the nature of the story, he had no idea how to make it into a movie: "I didn't know if you could take the poetry of the book and make it cinematic poetry, or if an audience would actually want it."
The film became a critical success. Richard Schickel says that Parker had "transcended realism ... achieved his personal best", while Derek Malcolm considers Birdy to be Parker's "most mature and perhaps his best movie". The message of the film, writes critic Quentin Falk, is "joyously life-affirming", which he notes is common to much of Parker's work. He adds that Parker's films manage to achieve a blend of "strong story and elegant frame", a style which he says typically eludes other directors who rely too much on the purely visual.
Continuing to explore different genres, Parker made a film that bridged horror and thriller territory, Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet, and Robert De Niro. He later wrote that he was fascinated by its "fusion of two genres: the noir, Chandleresque detective novel and the supernatural." The film was a disappointment at the box office, and received mixed reviews at the time, but has since become a cult classic.
With Mississippi Burning, Parker received his second Oscar nomination for Best Director. The film is based on a true story about the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, and stars Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. Hackman was nominated for Best Actor, while the film was nominated for five other Oscars, including Best Picture. It won for Best Cinematography.
Despite commercial success, Mississippi Burning received considerable criticism for centering three white characters in a story about the civil rights movement. Parker later wrote, "Certainly, the two protagonists of Mississippi Burning are white. At that time the film would never have been made if they weren't." He tried to address this in his next movie, Come See the Paradise, about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Before and after making the film, he sought input from the community, agreeing to cast Japanese-American actress Tamlyn Tomita in the lead instead of a Chinese-American actress. However, the film ultimately faced similar criticism to Mississippi Burning, for focusing on a white character played by Dennis Quaid. As one woman who was born in the Gila River internment camp told the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, "My parents saw the movie and they said the camp scenes were authentic. It was interesting for me. I liked it." However, she added, "I would've preferred to see a Japanese actor in the role of Dennis Quaid."