John Boorman is bloodied, but unbowed. The 74-year-old London-born director of classics such as Deliverance and Excalibur has been savaged in Ireland for his satirical portrayal of the country in The Tiger’s Tail ( reviewed on page 16). Here Boorman, resident in Ireland for nearly 35 years, depicts the Emerald Isle as a decadent Sodom and Begorrah defined by rampant greed, binge drinking, street violence, suicide, racism and glaring social inequality. Naturally, the natives were none too pleased when the movie opened in November, and Boorman was vilified.

“I was surprised by the sensitivity of the reaction,” he says, on this occasion safely ensconced in a hotel room in Central London. “All these issues – the binge drinking, traffic jams, collapsing health service and teenage suicides – were being discussed in the press at the time. But somehow when you put them on the big screen it has a different effect. People felt that modern Ireland was a great success story and so they thought, perhaps, that the film was unfair.”

Boorman has never shied away from controversy. In fact, he says that his outlook seems to be getting more pointedly political with age – recent films such as Beyond Rangoon (1995) dealt with repression in Burma, while Country of My Skull (2004) explored the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. “I find it hard nowadays to make anything that doesn’t have a political context,” he says. “Maybe I’m just an angry old man.” If truth be told, it was never plain sailing for Boorman. A former journalist and documentary film-maker for the BBC, he graduated to big-screen movie-making thanks to his friendship with the Hollywood heavyweight Lee Marvin. When MGM balked at the incessant flashbacks, flashforwards and confusing narrative chicanery in Boorman’s groundbreaking thriller Point Blank (1967), it was Marvin, then a white-hot Oscar winner, who protected his beleaguered director.

Boorman also butted heads, this time with the Warner Bros brass, when it came to making Deliverance (1972). He had chosen Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando to star but the studio refused to pay the notoriously unreliable Brando’s fee. Undaunted, the director hired the then relative unknowns Burt Reynolds and Jon Voigt and transformed them overnight into marquee names. “The picture was a tremendous struggle to make,” says Boorman. “But then it opened, it became a monster hit, and it took everyone by surprise.”

These days, he says, making studio movies is even more tortuous, especially if you have any artistic or independent sensibilities. His last big-budget Hollywood movie was the successful Pierce Brosnan spy flick, The Tailor of Panama(2001). And it was, he says, agony. “It was constantly bogged down with bureaucracy, and that has an eroding effect. The studio is on top of you, restricting what you can do. It becomes very difficult to function.”

Similarly, he says that, having worked with raw-power dynamos such as Marvin, Voigt, Sean Connery and Richard Burton, he finds it hard to get excited by today’s pampered superstar actors. “When I look at the current crop of stars I ask myself, ‘Do I want to work with any of those people?’ ” he says. “Not many of them.”

In the meantime, he says – and notwithstanding the fact that his long-gestating epic about the emperor Hadrian is now in pre-production – he’d rather get on with smaller projects. “I think that I don’t really have any more dragons left to slay,” he says. “I’ve done it all, you know? I could quite happily make a film for very little money that nobody sees at all.”

He’s not solely defined by his profession, he says. He’s a father and a grandfather and a “planter of trees” in the gardens of his house in Co Wicklow, which he bought in the early 1970s to get away from the “depressing negativity” of England and the insanity of Hollywood.

Even so, he continues to be inspired by the power of movies, and by film-makers such as the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, still making critically acclaimed movies at the age of 98. Does this mean that he wakes up impressed by the notion that he’s still an active film-maker with something to say? Boorman chuckles. “These days I wake up and I’m impressed by the fact that I can climb out of bed unaided.”

Boorman’s milestones

Point Blank (1967) Boorman’s Hollywood debut featured Lee Marvin as a taciturn avenger out to reclaim $93,000 from back-stabbing mobsters. Arty, violent, and deliberately trippy.

Deliverance (1972) The movie that launched a thousand stag nights (“Squeal like a pig!” etc). Deliverance, about a canoeing trip that goes badly awry, instantly established Boorman as a heavyweight director.

The General (1998) The first of four films that teamed Boorman and the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was a Cannes award-winning depiction of the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill. Jon Voigt, of Deliverance, co-starred.

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