Let's kick this interview off by talking about the very early days
of your career in the film business: I've read somewhere that you already
worked as an assistant director on the TV show The Avengers at the
tender age of 16 - so do talk about your first steps in the industry for a
bit, and about your experiences on The Avengers?
I
was thrilled to get the job with The Avengers, I was about 16 or 17 and
had already worked as a runner and a third AD on a couple of films, Penthouse and
Up the Junction, both directed by Peter Collinson, and I had
worked summer jobs as an assistant projectionist, very junior
assistant editor, more of a pos cutter to satisfy the censor and also
about a year as a general dogsbody with a fancy title for a company
that had contracts for various other companies such at ATV, the BBC
and
the Ministry of Defence, making training films, sports documentaries,
and general information shorts. It was terrific on the job training
for me and fitted into what my family demanded of me, that I should know
everyone's job fairly well soI could do my own job properly. Because of
that I ended up doing every job in the film industry except make up and
hair and the craft positions, which I would have been hopeless at. When I got to
The Avengers I was interviewed for the job and they asked me what
didI want pay-wise, and I was still very dumb and related it to my
previous lowly position and not whatI was being asked to do, soI said £14
per week and you've never seen a man say yes so fast. He nearly shook my
hand off! Little did I realise that the other third assistants were
getting double my basic. But I worked my butt off and was always in the
studio first and left last, so before the end of the first month I was
earning a fortune in overtime, so much so that the union guys, who were
very strong in those days, pegged my hours for the benefit of the other
workers and filled out my overtime sheet without me ever seeing it or
making a claim. I was earning so much thatI didn't have time to spend it
and then some guys arrived from New York and warned me that I was earning
at the same level as the producer and banned me from coming in so early
and told me to leave when we wrapped for the night. I tried to tell them
that would mean no one was going to shepherd the other units out onto
location every morning but they wouldn't listen so I did what they told me
and the first day the second unit didn't turn the camera until about 11 or
two hours or more later than usual, so they saved on my hours and it cost
them a fortune paying for the extra time for everyone else on the unit.
But again it was terrific fun and a great experience and you learned
watching people like Brian Clemens turning out those scripts so
professionally and an excellent unit working like a machine, most of the
time. I also got to watch some terrific and varied directors either on the
way up or on the slippery slope because we were the very best of slick British
television of the era. I had a million experiences during that
year, which was mostly wonderful, and I owe a special nod to the late Patrick
McNee, known to millions as Steed, because he was so kind and
supportive, even if he could be a little strange.
When
talking about your early days, we probably also have to talk about your
father, producer Michael Klinger - so what can you tell us about him, and
in what way has he influenced/inspired you?
I
recommend anyone interested in my late father, Michael Klinger, should
take a good long look at the Michael Klinger Papers website created and
curated by Doctor Andrew Spicer from the University of the West of England
from the archive we donated of my father's filmwork. Andrew also recently
wrote an award winning book entitled The Man Who Got Carter about my
father and I've shot most of the film of the same name. Dad was
instrumental in establishing what a British independent film producer was
and it was largely thanks to his success that the British indie film
industry survived the huge slump of the 70's through which he kept raising
money and making films, and some of those films, like Get Carter, Repulsion,
Cul-de-sac he doesn't get the credit he deserved because people
might prefer to poke fun at the fact that he also made a wide range of
films. As you can see I'm enormously proud of dad, and all his
achievements who, as much or more than anyone else, created the British indie film producer.
Dad
came to the film industry from the totally opposite direction to myself
having been an engineer during the Second World War and then having to
find a way to make some money because he was, like millions of others at
the time very much a bright working class boy, having been born in Soho
from immigrant parents, his dad was a tailor's presser, so his first years
he didn't even have his own bed and had to share a mattress thrown over
the presser's table with his older brother. He really fitted the profile
of an American film producer more than his British contemporaries. People
always made the mistake of under-estimating his intellect and that was a
huge mistake. He had total recall, was enormously literate and was always
top of his class. He was also a great dad and probably the best script
editor I ever met. I don't think it was an accident that he made so many
memorable films.
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Back to you
though: When it comes to filmmaking, you seem to have done it all,
producer, writer director, and whatnot - so what do you enjoy the most,
what could you do without, and why? Without
doubt writing is the most fun for me. I realised I wanted to be a writer
involved with film from about the age of 8 whenI got to watch some Cadburys and
Nestle chocolate and had to write an essay for their competitions.
I won one for my age group and tied for first in the other
and the prize was a lot of chocolate and a visit to the chocolate factory.
Delicious. I've never really evolved from being a writer wanting
chocolate. But as a child who didn't know how to become a professional
film writer I went at it with some perversity and good fortune. My way
through was logical since I soon understood that no one was going to buy
my screenplays or even read them so I had to also be the filmmaker. That
evolved into my working on my own projects from the age of 17 at nights
and weekends while I was also working for other people as various forms of
gofer. That way myself and my then colleague and friend, Mike Lytton,
could "borrow" various kit and facilities and work overnight
when security was sleeping. I don't think we slept much for a few years
but we drank a lot of coffee, played football down the corridors to keep
awake and smoked an unhealthy number of cigarettes, none of which I would
recommend as good for your health. Directing for me was just a means of
getting my words or ideas on a screen, and producing followed because I didn't like not getting my fair share of what my ideas generated
financially. I've read somewhere
that you have turned down an offer from your father to produce the
Confessions ...-series
of raunchy comedies - you just have to talk about that
point in your life for a bit!
I
was making a film called Extremes and we were due to move our shoot from
London to Glasgow. I spoke with my father who said we should break our
train journey where he was shooting Get Carter in Newcastle and to buy a
book for the train journey and then we could talk about it when we
arrived. I did what he asked and it was a very funny book but not the kind
of book I would have bought for myself. When we got to Newcastle and
checked into the hotel dad asked me whatI thought of the book and would I like to work with him on it as either the executive producer or producer
with Greg Smith. I was shocked, and I reminded him that I was an award
winning documentary film maker and I couldn't possibly involve myself with
a sexy comedy. He said there wasn't anything so terrible about beautiful
naked women and laughter but I was pig-headed and wouldn't listen. So I turned down the offer and, as you probably know the
Confessions ...
series was
created and very ably produced by the late lamented Greg Smith with my old
man as executive producer. Dad would happily remind me that it was films
like the
Confessions ...-series
that paid for films like Get Carter or
Gold or Shout at the Devil - and he was right and I was being a stupid
immature toss pot!
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Your first big success as
a producer was probably the The Who-documentary The Kids are Alright
- so you of course have to talk about that movie for a bit! And what made
you eventually release a book, Twilight of the Gods, on the making
of this movie? The Kids are Alright was the film which was largely a nightmare to make but a
great deal of fun to watch, and I guess it was that experience that made
me write the book about making the film, it is a warning to any aspiring
film maker, that unless you really are passionate about making films don't
get involved because everyone in the creative industries is either a
fucking maniac, a clown, an ass licker, a genius or a loser... sometimes if
you're lucky you get to run into a decent human being who is competent but
usually they're the grips, or the sparks, people without an ego big enough
to house an elephant! I'm ranting, but if you read the book, which I think
was objective and a life lesson, you will see many of the people involved
could easily have come straight from a casting session of one of those
strange Federico Fellini films. We were all behaving a little freaky
through the filming. Strange isn't it? Someone told me they loved a film I
produced with my dad, Riding High, with Eddie Kidd, which was basically a
really fun film to make, except for normal production issues, but it was a
good time, but the film was nowhere near as good as it should have been
for a multitude of reasons, whereas The Kids are Alright came out pretty great despite it
being a nightmare to make. I thought it was worth putting down the history
for others to understand the process and the reactions have been fantastic
to the book so on that level it worked. To be honest it also served
another purpose. WhenI started writing the first draft, immediately after
production, it got some of the poison out of my system. I didn't want to
become cynical or hateful because I felt abused by anyone; I have never
felt a victim nor do I want that victim mentality. After writing the first
draft I put it away for reflection for a very long time and my subsequent
drafts were more considered and I hope objective. The film has stood the
test of time and is probably a very good picture of a period and a mind
set that we can all enjoy. Another film of yours you just have to
talk about is The Butterfly Ball ... Butterfly Ball
was based on great music by Roger Glover and visual representations
and poetry from the book of the same name by Alan Aldridge. I was hired to
make this film and I was probably 23 or 24 years old, so I knew enough how
to make a film, but wasn't really strong enough to fight my corner as I should have done. We had a budget, which
I remember was just over £60k
which was sizeable for that kind of film in that time. We were going to
film the concert at the Royal Albert Hall with all the musicians and then
film staged inserts. We were engaging the lady who had designed the costumes
for Tales of Beatrix Potter, we had a large group of dancers who
were going to rehearse for a week and a bunch of other great stuff. The
day before we were due to shoot I was called into a meeting at the Albert
Hall and was told my budget had been cut from 60 to 16k and we didn't have
permission to shoot Vincent Price [Vincent
Price bio - click here] perform the poetry and I shouldn't film
any of the rehearsals because we no longer had permission from the
musicians union. I should have walked, now I would but I wanted
desperately to get the film made, so instead of the great costumes we
hired crappy stuff from a fancy dress shop, instead of top actors to
perform we got friends to dress up and do their best and we somehow got a
film made on the cheap and crept over the finishing line. We wanted to
sharpen it up and reduce its length to 60 minutes but we'd signed a
distribution contract that demanded a 90 minute film so that's the version
that went into the cinemas. All told I still feel proud that we got it
made and have to look at it as a life lesson. I still get comments, some
great and some not so great about it after all these years and I think
this is the first time I've every really explained what happened. Even
people like Roger Glover didn't know what was happening and that might
also have been a product of the bitter in fighting there was between some
of the management of Deep Purple at the time which money wise probably had
a lot to do with why the money issues came up at the last minute. But like
my dad always reminded me thereafter, "you can't put a credit on the
screen saying the costumes are rubbish because..." Any other
movies of yours you'd like to talk about?
I'm credited as associate producer (line producer) on
Shout at the Devil
starring Lee Marvin and Roger Moore, but I actually pretty much produced
the film with my father. He suffered a heart attack when we were in the
early stages of production in the african jungle. It was a very tough
series of locations, with a nightmare director having a torrid love affair
problem, and financiers who were not sometimes providing finance. I was
worried for my father, who swore me to secrecy because he was worried what
would happen to the film, the insurance and the finishing of it if anyone
knew he was incapacitated. My mother was naturally very anxious so we hid
how ill he was from her also. It was dramatic and traumatic. Because we
were also making a huge film in four countries, Malta, South Africa,
Germany and the UK. I had to hold it together and pretend everything was
fine and we also had huge currency fluctuations, sometimes 10-20% and we
had an incredible inflation rate, something like 20% in that year, to cope
with, plus the money for the production was not appearing as anticipated.
My father was ill and heroic, and I think I did pretty well and we got a
pretty impressive film out of it, and I still can't believe we did it and
no one ever realised what we'd pulled off. It was only a pity that the
director wasn't more able because that film could have been really epic
and we missed that opportunity. But once the actor Charlton Heston said to
me in an interview a very wise few words, art by definition is
imperfectable. That film was a documentary called The Festival Game
and I think that was one of the best documentaries about the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the most played documentaries in
British cinema
history of the period with something like 1,400 playdates. I was proud of
having made that film at 19 and that was a great fun period for me working
with my then colleague and friend, Mike Lytton on films like Extremes
which were really ground breaking stuff.
with Michael Caine |
Any future
projects you'd like to share? Presently I am working on the next theatrical production of my recently premiered
play, A Tired Heart & the C, which opened last month
for a short initial run and got great critics and we even managed to
scrape a modest profit without any marketing spend or any promotional
activity. There's a great pay-off to that, we originally received, in
error, the returns for Othello, which was on at the same theatre before us,
and it turned out we did better than that, so I think it's legitimate for
us to feature the line "the play that beat Shakespeare" on our
posters! Anyhow I wanted to see how my new play performed in the raw, and
thanks to a terrific crew and very talented actors I had a great first
theatrical experience. Now I'm working on the next and bigger production
of that play, and on two others, one a big musical piece of theatre
together with my old friend and colleague David Courtney, but we're not
ready to announce any details on that. I am also directing and writing the
film about my father called The Man Who Got Carter and
although the focus is dad, it's about the passion and story of independent
film production and how crazy you have to be to tread that path, to which I
plead guilty. We have already shot the interviews with people like Michael
Caine and Mickey Rooney and many others and now we are into the VFX and feature recreation drama sections. It's grown into a bigger
project than I'd envisaged because we've gone about it more like a
documentary drama so what we discover has influenced what we film. I am
writing and producing the film Just a Boy which is an
ambitious and uplifting feature film about the life and times of Richard McCann who, when just 5 years old woke up one morning to discover his
mother had gone, murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper, his first victim wasn't
just Mrs McCann but the entire family. Their lives fell apart, drugs,
violence, prison was the background to Richard growing up until one day Richard decided his life didn't need to be that way. It's a film that
shows what you can do with love, determination and drive, it's Rocky
without the boxing. Last but not least I have my next novel due for
publication early next year, and its title is Under God's Table and it couldn't be more current or topical,
it's the story of
two boyhood friends originally from Iraq, an Arab and a Jew who grow up to
become deadly enemies living, loving and fighting across our world. This
follows my first novel, The Butterfly Boy, which was published
last year.
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Quite a few of your
movies/documentaries have rock music themes - pure coincidence or is there
a story behind this? Music
drives me and always has. I can't really separate the narrative from the
words and music because it's as universal a language as film and maybe more
so. It crosses borders, and it's emotion turned into sound. It was always
that way for me so it was natural that I would find music as a driver in
my career. Something about this passion must have made its way into the
group consciousness of the business because I have always been
offered a great deal of musical film type work. Strangely enough I also
receive a steady stream of compliments about my music sound tracks of the
films I made. Some of them go back to the earliest work I did, and that's
nearly half a century because I started as a boy! And some of those
soundtracks were for films that had no recognisable musical theme. That
plus I always battled to get great music on all my films even when there
was no budget. I well remember trying to convince Supertramp to license me
the rights about six tracks for my film Extremes. They were even more poor
than us and they would come and watch the various cuts of the film and
kept saying they weren't getting the buzz, until eventually they did get
the buzz. We did the deal for about £300, and then their manager called us
back and said they had a problem keeping up the payments on their van and
the drum kit so if we could pay a further £500 or £600 we could have a
half share in the publishing of those tracks. We didn't have any money,
because it worked out that our fee for making the film made into a weekly
salary was about £10 a week each. We went cap in hand to our
financier and distributor, Barry Jacobs at Eagle Films and begged him to
put in the extra money because we knew the tracks were great and we stood
to have a half share of the half share and he threw us out and told us to
f... off! Those tracks became pretty well known since that was a bit more
than half of the album Crime of the Century. I could go on with a
million stories like that, good and bad, but the major thing music gave me
was a canvas on which we could paint our stories onto film and that
remains a signature for everything I do, even the play we just premiered
had a great soundtrack. You've also made quite a few music
videos during your career - so do talk about those for a bit, and how does
shooting them compare to making a feature film?
Tony with 'Honest' John Plain and band |
The
first thing that should be different about making a music video is that it
should give you the freedom to innovate and experiment, if it doesn't do
that it can become very boring very fast. How many ways can you film a guy
playing bass guitar etc? It can get very repetitive. So you have to go
where the music takes you and be prepared to confront the musicians and
their management and the record companies if you really believe in your
vision. If the band is big it becomes more about you and them working
together to find a theme and an idea of how you want to express their
musical concepts through the visual medium. That collaboration should be
exciting and fun and can be very wonderful. It's the smaller musical acts
with crap management that are the biggest pain because they express their
insecurities with paranoia and a general lack of new ideas. They also want
million pound videos for ten quid. I'm not saying that you can't do
wonderful things for a variety of budgets but sometimes small and intimate
is better than thirty ladies bumping and grinding. Great lighting and
original settings are usually better than a second division version of
what some giant act has shot for a fortune. My videos have always been
dominated by what the musical artist is wanting to express and I, in turn,
can translate that for them visually. That is still exciting for me but
the stars have to be in alignment for me to want to do it purely because I
became very selective and only want to work with artists who excite me
musically and nowadays that is also hampered by the fact that the industry
isn't able to spend as generously as they did to promote their artists. In
the end it was about you doing a great job with great artists so they
could sell millions of records, take away the last part of that equation
and you have a problem all down the line. We had a part of one of the
companies we ran that made juke box videos, hundreds and hundreds of them,
but our entire fee for a three or four minute single was pennies, well not
literally pennies, but near enough. We treated it as a breeding ground for
new production and directing talents, something real that they could wet
their creative teeth on, but as a self-sustaining business, no way. So the
occasions for me to make music videos has shrunk but as you can tell
that's ok because I am pretty busy elsewhere.
The
biggest difference between music video production and feature film
production is the ability to express a narrative either with brevity or
over 90 + minutes. Everything is bigger and to a degree more cumbersome
with a feature, the schedule, the budget, the cast, the locations and the
crew. You appreciate that it also costs more, takes longer and is
infinitely more complex on a feature. I enjoy that challenge on a feature
much more because I see myself primarily as a storyteller and there are
bigger stories to tell in feature films. It's also like the difference
between eating fast food or a great three course meal. It's nice to enjoy
the odd Big Mac but you get better nutrition in a good restaurant. That
brings me to the last big differentiator and that's this, if you make
decent, honest films they can resonate over time whereas music videos are
generally disposable entertainment with no longevity. I genuinely enjoy it
when people talk to me about some of the features I've been lucky enough to
be involved with.
I've
read somewhere that despite all the movies you've made you see yourself as
a writer first - so do talk about Tony Klinger, the writer, and about your
books! I
touched on my past (Twilight of the Gods), present (The Butterfly Boy) and
future books (Under God's Table) and the scripts I'm working on at present
for my plays and films in development or in production and when I think
about it I guess I have writing diarrhoea! I can't stop, I have a writing
compulsion. More seriously I enjoy writing and consider myself a
professional writer. Being a professional writer means you write to a
schedule, and do so pretty much every day, and you do so as a paying
proposition. I started writing when I was about 8 years old as I indicated
in the tale of my entering some essay writing public competitions and that
made me realise that this was the life for me. I was offered my first book
publishing deal when I was 17 and I turned it down because it didn't seem
to me that £2,500 was a lot of money to write a book that would probably
take me 6 months to a year to write, what a shmuck I was! Mind you if I'd
accepted that deal it could have turned out that I'd never have become
seriously involved in film making and I've loved that life and had some
fun and a little success. You can always ask the if question and that can
drive you crazy. So I got back to writing books with about a 40 year gap
which was more than a slight detour but who knows, maybe that's the way it
was meant to be. I'm really enjoying the writing of the books and the
reactions to them, but not so much the experiences I've had with
publishers. Perhaps its just the publishers I've been encountering or
maybe I need a proper book agent, but then again sometimes you need a bit
of luck to find the perfect publishing partners.
You also have to talk about your project, the Be
Creative Directory, and the philosophy behind it! I
formed Be Creative Directory -
http://www.thebcreativedirectory.com
- to enable fellow creative people to
expand, share and communicate to other creative people their vision and
their passion. It has a few thousand free members and is available for
anyone in any creative sector. I would love to have more people help us
move this concept forward!
Early next year we launch a spin off concept that creates event or
training days for corporations through the creative medium to make them
accessible for everyone. Writers,
filmmakers, whoever else who inspire you?
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I
very much admire the Coen brothers and have done since they arrived on the
scene. They really can do the lot and do so in a meaningful and honest
way. They've got so much talent in every area of writing, direction and production
it's scary. Of course you have to admire the sheer brilliance of
Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fellini, and some of the time my dad's old sparring
partner, Roman Polanski. When you get to writers I don't know if you mean
screenplay writers or writers in general, going on the latter first, you
have to include people like Shakespeare, Zola, Salinger, Hemingway, Steinbeck,
Heller, and there are a million others I admire but these and a
few more I love. Less numerous are the screenplay writers and they are
less obvious because they are, many a time, not given free rein, so they
can be less constantly excellent in their output. I'd list Robert Bolt,
Woody Allen, Mike Leigh although he doesn't write screenplays like anyone
else, but he is totally original, Billy Wilder, Paddy Chayefsky, the Coen
brothers again, I.A.L. Diamond, Barry Levinson. That's a pretty stupendous
list of talented people with original things to say in a manner that will
always resonate.
Your favourite
movies? Remember
you didn't ask for the best films but the ones which are my favourites. It's
impossible to have a big enough list and also you get to be god like,
not that it matters either way, but here goes: Citizen Kane, Gone with the
Wind, the Laurence Olivier Henry V, 2001, Some Like it Hot,
Schindler's List, Lawrence of Arabia, Cul-de-sac, Fargo,
Paths of Glory,
Spartacus, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Gentleman's Agreement, The Grand
Budapest Hotel.
... and of course, films you really deplore?
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Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned) |
The links below will take you just there!!!
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I
don't think I want to add more discomfort on the people who made films
that I might really deplore. No one, not even the biggest schlockmeister
sets out to make crappy movies, but sometimes it can happen to anyone. No
one gets it right all the time. But what's the point in our enjoying their
pain? Your
website, Facebook, whatever else?
www.justaboythefilm.co.uk
www.thebcreativedirectory.com
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/tonybcreative
Facebook:
http://on.fb.me/tonyklinger
LinkedIn:
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonyklinger
Facebook fanpage:
http://on.fb.me/bcreativefb
Anything else you're
dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask? You
might like to check out the Creative Den which readers might find
interesting and useful... Thanks
for the interview! Special thanks to Richard S Barnett,
founder of IIWYK!!!
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