If the name is less familiar than that of Ken Russell or others from the period, it is partly because Boyd moved from the high-profile role of director to that of producer. He worked with Altman, Godard and Jarman and initiated a cinema remake of the notorious Borstal drama Scum when the original play was banned by the BBC.
He merited his own chapter in Alexander Walker’s National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, and was described as a "one-man film industry". But he has become a genuine maverick, flitting from drama to documentary, cinema to TV, producing Ruby Wax’s show one minute, dissecting his dysfunctional family background the next.
Harris: "a nightmare"
My Kingdom is a return to directing feature films, a loose reworking of Lear in contemporary Liverpool. It unites Boyd with one of the legendary names of British cinema, Richard Harris, who plays the crime-lord mourning the death of his wife and pursuing violent revenge, while his affections are torn between three daughters.
"Richard had told everybody how great the script was, how wonderful I was, he couldn’t wait to start," says the silver-haired director, whose heavy glasses and polished English accent contribute to an air of a middle-aged university professor who has retained the enthusiasm and energy of his first youthful tutorials.
"Butter would not have melted in Richard’s mouth until one week before we started shooting," he says. "And then all hell let loose... He became a complete nightmare."
Harris may have loved the script, co-written by Boyd and Guardian crime reporter Nick Davies, but that did not stop him commissioning his own version, with a new happy ending. "He brought somebody over from Hollywood who rewrote famous movie stars’ scripts and we fought like mad, until eventually I got him slung off the set." Presumably Boyd means the writer.
Low Road to Hollywood
Boyd was born in Nairn in 1948. His father worked abroad, while Boyd went to boarding school at Loretto in Musselburgh. Last year he wrote a long article in the Observer alleging he had been seduced by one of the masters at 12, a relationship that lasted several years. Clearly the experience left a deep emotional wound.
After a brief spell at a firm of chartered accountants, Boyd went to drama school in London, returned to the Fringe in 1967, with his own theatre group, Incognito, and enrolled at London Film School the following year. He directed a string of television documentaries and commercials before directing his first feature, Intimate Reflections, financed with £35,000 of borrowed money.
It was while working in the US, as second-unit director on International Velvet, that he conceived Honky Tonk Freeway as a modest, offbeat comedy about "the Real America". The budget rocketed and Boyd was deemed too inexperienced to direct it, but remained as producer, a position in which it was even more important to have an experienced hand.
The script required an elephant on water-skis and a private stretch of motorway. One can only speculate on what might have happened if the film had not crashed so disastrously. "I’d probably be dead now," Boyd jokes. Or at least I think it is a joke.
Change of hats
He returned to England, producing low-budget films through his own company and elsewhere. "People think, ‘Oh, he’s a producer,’ and nobody remembers you were a very successful and very high-earning director in the early Seventies," he says.
Occasional features as director, such as Twenty-one, with Patsy Kensit, did little to remind them. And then there was Lucia, an adaptation of the Donizetti opera, starring his daughter Amanda. His projects have become increasingly esoteric and personal in recent years and his BBC documentary Donald and Luba: A Family Movie dissected his parents’ unhappy marriage.
With three daughters, there is at least one obvious parallel between Lear and Boyd, though Boyd insists the starting points were his determination to film in Liverpool, whose cinematic qualities he feels have been largely ignored, and the theme of the demise of a corrupt man.
Boyd and Harris agreed to discuss the script every morning and iron out any reservations the star may have, but there were further clashes ahead.
Harris: "wonderful"
On one occasion, according to Boyd, Harris echoed Gloria Swanson’s famous line from Sunset Boulevard by announcing he was ready for his close-up. But the director did not want to zoom in on Harris in a highly charged scene that also involved one of the daughters.
Boyd told him: "This scene isn’t only about you. It’s about her... He really gave it to me then." The rest of the cast would run for cover during their rows, he says.
In Boyd’s Lear the focus is very much on family and family tensions. It plays like a violent cross between Shakespeare and Brookside, making good use of its urban wasteland locations and a towering central performance from Harris. With his flowing white mane, he looks and acts like a superannuated Lion King.
Boyd maintains the rows were worth it in the end. "He was wonderful," he says. Boyd is still full of energy and enthusiasm, after all the ups and downs of a career that spans more than 30 years and encompasses spectacular big-budget flops, iconic low-budget successes, and family movies for which Boyd found a national audience.
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