INT: My name is Robert Markowitz. Today is April 1st, 2008 and I am conducting an interview with Mick Jackson for Directors Guild of America's Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

MJ: Okay, my name is Michael Norman Reginald Jackson, named after fathers and uncles. That's the name I was given at birth and my professional name and nickname is Mick Jackson, which I think I took up at the same time as Mick Jagger. My birthdate is April, sorry is October 4th, 1943. I was born in Aveley Essex, England, just outside London.

INT: Were you really named after The Mick [Mick Jagger]?
MJ: No, no. I think--I decided that if I was going to go into movies which I decided during my university career I would have a movie Director's name, and Michael wasn't that. This is before Michael Jackson with the glove came along. And I don't think I modeled it on Mick Jagger. I think he and I 'round about the same time decided we didn't want to be Michael and we didn't want to be Mike, but we wanted to be Mick, so I've been Mick ever since. [INT: So, let's begin by talking bit, a little bit about your growing up. Where you grew up, your family, whether you had any brothers or sisters, and where you fit in, and that, you know. What kind of class life did you have in England and your discovery of-- When did art come into your life?] I think in English terms I'd say I was a working class boy made good. My parents were very poor. My mother worked occasionally as a waitress, and then an asbestos factory during World War II, in which she got asbestos which curtailed her life. My dad was a medic in the World War II in the army. He went away and I didn't see him until I was three years old, so rather late in bonding with my father. We were quite poor. I mean the first robe I had, the dressing gown as we called it was made out of an army blanket that my mother had hemmed up. And we lived in a row house amid the manure heaps and the oil refineries of the Thames Estuary just outside London. [INT: How many of you were there?] There was my younger sister, who was four years younger than me, and from whom I'm now kind of estranged, not through any desire, but I just don't see her very much. She lives in England. My father and mother are now dead.

MJ: I remember the period of my childhood as being one where I spent a lot of time on my own. I had a kind of facility for drawing, painting, sketching. And I had homework from school so during the early 50s [1950s] when the family would be watching television I found it a distraction from homework and I would go into a back room and do my homework without any distractions. I had what was then called a portable radio, it wasn't like a transistor radio, it was this kind of portable radio--[makes big square with hands] huge, with a handle on the top, it's what made it portable. I listened to music and turned the lights out except for the gas fire. At the end of my doing homework I just used to let pictures come into my head with the music. I got foreign stations which played classical music. And around the mid 50s, late 50s, the first recordings of Wagner [Richard Wagner] operas came out, Decca [Decca Records] recordings, which I was captivated by. Those spoke to me, whatever you think about Wagner [Richard Wagner], but the music spoke to me about enormous passions and emotions, and vast visual panoramas of fire and gods and dragons. So I had started to do in the light of the firelight, storyboards of these operas. I thought if one day I grow up and be a movie director I will make a movie of this and this will be, I've actually got from the same period [holds up the book THE NIBELUNG'S RING by Richard Wagner] I did kind of sketches like this, this is a book about Wagner [Richard Wagner] operas. [INT:: That's your sketch?] Yeah. I used to do storyboards like this. And it struck me, you were waiting to do this interview the other day and I was looking through old movies and I looked at VOLCANO, which is a big disaster movie I did in 1997, and this would've been like 40 years later. And it struck me like a thunder flash. I remembered dubbing that movie, and being in a big scene in the middle where the lava from the volcano is rolling down Wilshire Boulevard and it's incinerating the Peterson Automotive Museum and the May Company and Alain Silvestri the Composer had written a wonderful score for it--very big, huge 97 piece orchestra with anvils, and this was the March of the Lava. And he was sitting in the back of the dubbing theater and he was saying, "Man, this is like freaking grand opera. Look at this, it's like Wagnerian, what you're doing here." Didn't strike me at the time, but it struck me yesterday that you know this thing had come from my sitting in the darkened room doing Wagner [Richard Wagner] storyboards to actually doing a huge disaster movie [INT: When--] 40 years later. [INT: How many years later?] 40, almost to the year.

INT: So how old were you when you were doing that sketch, 'cause you mentioned in passing that you said to yourself, "One day if I became a movie Director..." I mean when did that idea even enter your mind, how old were you?
MJ: As kind of fantasy thing, not as a career choice. My career choices were, I want to be an airline pilot, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a engineer. [INT: But even the concept of--how old--] The concept, I think when I was sort of in my early teens, like 12, 13, you know listening to music in the dark. [INT: And when did you first pick up a pen and, I mean do you remember when you first started drawing.] Anything? [INT: Yeah.] I--my father discovered some old notebooks I had done from my school days, early school days and sent them to me before he died. And they're supposed to be diaries, you know, "Today we did so and so, we went on a field trip and we went to so and so," but they're just covered with drawings. Some of them are quite funny, you know cartoons and things. So yeah, I was always sketching, always sketching. And I think I had a visual sensibility that I try and bring to movie making, I didn't know that's what I'd end up doing, but I think of it as a period great imaginative ferment for me, my mid to late teens. When I was, what I guess would be high school. [INT: And when you said that you were, I mean your sister was four years younger, so in someway you were like an only child.] Yeah, yeah. [INT: So and you spent, you say you spent a lot time alone. Your mother was ill, right?] My mother was ill. I was--I went to a back room essentially to do my homework and I did it there but I found just listening to the music and letting pictures come to my head kind of irresistibly enticing. I started imagining things, visual things, scenarios, characters, huge emotions in close-up and stuff, so I guess I was sort of edging my way into being a movie Director.

MJ: But I know when I decided I was gonna be a movie Director. I know to the day and to the time. It was the 18th of May, 1965. It happened in Southampton England at about 9:30 in the evening. I was at university. I was at my first university reading electronic engineering--Southampton University. I was at the student union with a friend and we were watching a Ken Russell movie on the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]. And to kind of lead into this, I was at university in the '60s [1960s], early '60s at the time when moviemaking was just intoxicating. All this stuff was coming from the French New Wave and Italian Neorealists, and it was the time of you know BREATHLESS, and LA NOTTE, and LA DOLCE VITA, and Fellini [Federico Fellini] 8 1/2, and L'AVVENTURA, and JULES AND JIM. And I lived not far from London so I would grab a bus whenever I could and go up to the art house cinemas in London and just see this black and white exciting stuff. The Academy Theater on Oxford Street and the Curzon on Curzon Street and the Cameo-Poly. And so I was kind of, I was set up to be in a visual world, very much excited and intoxicated by what movies could do. Particularly the playfulness of these French movies, these European movies. And I saw this movie that Ken Russell did for the MONITOR series [BBC arts programme], art movies that he did for the BBC and it was about the composer Debussy [Claude Debussy]. It was called THE DEBUSSY FILM. Oliver Reed starred as Debussy [Claude Debussy] and as the actor playing Debussy [Claude Debussy] in a film being made about Debussy [Claude Debussy]. And Vladek Sheybal, a great Czech Actor played Pierre Louis, who was Debussy's [Claude Debussy] kind of mentor and Svengali figure, and played the Director of the movie in the movie. It was a wonderful screenplay by Melvyn Bragg and it was in black and white, and beautiful, wonderful art nouveau imagery--Ken Westbury was the DP [Director of Photography]. I saw this movie and it struck me like a thunderclap that not only do I want to be a Director but if you can do things like this where you play the decadence of the '60s [1960s] against the decadence of the 1890s, and you write something that goes smoothly backwards and forwards between these two like--and it's so clever, and it's so involving, and the music is so powerful linking these to things. Not only do I want to do that, but I can do that. I can do that. They turned us out of the student union building before the movie was over, so my friend and I jumped into a car and drove as fast as we could and banged on the door of somebody who had a television set [makes banging motion with fists] and said, "Let us in, let us in, let us in," and saw the rest of the movie. We missed about half an hour of it, though the very next day I wrote to Bristol University and said, "I know you have a film school program. It's the only one in the country. I want to come and do a post-graduate course in film with you. I want to be a movie Director, not an electrical engineer." And they took six people that year and I was one of them. And I think the other people were theater directors and Actors and people. I was an electrical engineer and I think they thought that would look good on their prospectus. [INT: You were 22 then?] Yeah.

INT: And so you were going to school, you had already finished your undergraduate work to be an electrical engineer--
MJ: Yep yep, I had earned the degree. [And that's what you thought your life was gonna be?] No, I mean, it was foolish. I was--my sister or my girlfriend could mend a radio with a pair of tweezers, I couldn't do that. I mean I had all of this theoretical stuff which is no interest to me at all. You make choices about your career at a very early stage in England. It's based on no knowledge of the world at all. You like a particular teacher, you dislike another teacher, so you go this way. So I chose science, but I was an artist, you know, by temperament. [INT: What did you father do?] He was sometime bus conductor, sometime musician; he played in bands in the evenings. [INT: Oh so he did have a creative part to him.] Yeah, yeah. [INT: So you think that--was your mother creative at all?] No, she was the younger daughter of a whole family of brothers and treated as kind of more like a servant than as a full family member, so she didn't really realize her potential. [INT: Were you aware of that?] [Nods head in agreement] [INT: So would you say that your social conscience was something that you also carried out of your childhood?] It made me an observer, I think. My parents, even when my father came back from the war had a rather unhappy marriage and I found myself watching a lot. Intervening when I could, but watching. And I think that gave me a kind of talent for watching silently and taking stuff in.

INT: Well there are two things connected to that, that come to mind after seeing your films. One, particularly all of your early films, and most of your early films were all films like THREADS, had very strong social conscience [MJ nods in agreement] in a documentary sort of way. That's the first thing, so I mean do you think any of that--that you were--your interest in that--I mean I know as a Director we take opportunities as they come to us, but there is a very clear pattern with you in terms of grabbing your hands around very, sometimes controversial social issues. I was wondering whether or not that was, whether you were conscious of that?
MJ: I wasn’t conscious, no. I don’t think you are conscious at that age of currents in your life, you just feel them and you go along with them. I was always a very passionate person and I think passion is one of the qualities I now realize I bring to movie making. When I went to what would here would be called high school, I guess, secondary school, I got a scholarship to a local grammar school. It was a 250 year old school and had been a boarding school for very rich boys and I was one of the very few working class boys in the school so I got a sense of the disparity between the backgrounds of the other boys and my own background I suppose gave me the inklings of a social awareness--a social conscience about the inequities in life. I wasn't aware of that shaping my destiny in anyway but I guess that could work--[INT: What about the fact that, your mother you said was ill because of asbestos?] Yeah. [INT: And how did that happen to her, was she working somewhere?] She worked in an asbestos factory in World War II as part of the war effort while my father was away as a medic, an army medic. And nobody knew the dangers of asbestos at that time, but it got into her lungs, and you know, as she aged it got worse and worse and worse, and she was short of breath, and died at a relatively young age. [INT: So you think that also fed your--] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. When you're a watcher you notice these things and you start making connections between things.

INT: Well the other, the other pattern that I saw in your films; obviously we'll start to get into the specifically, was that leaped up at me, not in all your films, but most of them, in one way or another they're about an outsider--[MJ nods in agreement] and so you, as you you described your childhood where you spent a lot of time in isolation or by yourself, and as I mentioned to you before, this is--I found this pattern with a lot of Directors who had a childhood where either by illness or by social place they've spent a lot of time alone and then found some visual way to create another world. So were you aware that you, that so many of your films had to do with outsiders?
MJ: Not per se, I was aware of it maybe in a different way, which is that one of the things that I love to do in a movie scene is to hold the camera on one person's face, quite separate from what's going on around them, and indeed arrange for there to be a whole melee of activity and people being pre-occupied with other conversations around them and just concentrate on that one person alone in the scene and what they're thinking, and it actually helps focus in on that person if they are a loner in the scene. They're the only person that the camera is noticing, the other stuff is coming between camera and them and swirling around them and people are having conversations and things. So I guess that's a kind of recurring shot in my movies that maybe exemplifies that. [INT: Well let me just call off some titles for you and you'll see what I mean. YURI NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB], THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX [British title LIFE STORY], A VERY BRITISH COUP, maybe INDICTMENT [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] I'm not sure about that, TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, THE BODYGUARD. [MJ nods in agreement after each title] In each case there is somebody who is standing outside the mainstream [MJ nods in agreement]--CHATTAHOOCHEE--either railing against it or trying to change it.] Yeah, that's a hero, hero of a movie. It's not the only kind of hero, but yes I guess I'm drawn to that. I'm drawn to a person in their setting at odds often with that setting, and I think that makes for a compelling drama. I hadn't thought of it as being myself.

INT: Right, okay so let's start picking up where you left off. You got into, what was the university you got--?
MJ: Southampton--[INT: Southampton, okay. And then what happened?] I found I was spending less time with engineers and electronics people and more time with arts students, arts undergraduates and I became involved with the arts festival at the university. I thought this is silly, I'm going down a path that seems to be set for me and it's not a path I want to go down. I spent a long time watching all these wonderful movies coming out of, initially form Italy and France, and then more and more out of the British film industry, THE SERVANT and A KIND OF LOVING and THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER and all that stuff. I thought this is so exciting, why do I feel so excited at these movies as a electronic engineer? Is this the ideal incarnation of circumstances? As I say, I saw this movie [THE DEBUSSY FILM], by I thought a very talented director called Ken Russell, then comparatively unknown, then comparatively unspoiled, who was reigned in as so many good Directors are at the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] by a very very tight script, and very tight Producers, and within that box I think people often do their best work. And this was just a brilliant, sparkling, totally overwhelming piece of filmmaking for television. I saw that and as I say, the next day I decided I am going to be a movie Director. And I spent a year at Bristol [Bristol University] as a post-graduate doing all kinds of things: designing stage shows, producing stage shows, acting, doing sets, costumes, and whatever, but essentially getting tutored in film by a very very charismatic--he wasn't professor then but became professor--a guy called George Brandt who worked with McLaren [Norman McLaren] in the National Film Board of Canada around the time that McLaren [Norman McLaren] was doing PAS DE DEUX, the celebrated movie. And he just brought this European passion for art into a life that had been kind of bounded by science and equations and electronic circuit diagrams, and showed me that you could bring humor and passion and commitment and style and art to making movies in a way that I never thought of before and almost it was a one to one tutor relationship, and if ever a person mentored me, that guy did. And at the end of the one year course he used connections at the BBC, the BBC in Bristol, to get me a temporary job in my vocation with the BBC in London as a holiday relief assistant film Editor. [INT: Assistant film Editor?] [MJ nods in agreement]

INT: So then how, what was the trail from there? [from first job as an Assistant Film Editor at the BBC]
MJ: Shall I tell you what I did on my first day? [INT: Sure] There were a series of BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] travelogue films called TRAVELLERS' TALES. David Attenborough who you may know from the PBS series--[INT: Of course]--narrated them, and they were shot in various places in Africa and Asia, and they were essentially black and white travelogue films shot on 16mm. They were quite successful and they were bought by an American network, and they were to be re-packaged as "The World of Lowell Thomas." He never went to any of these places but they had to kind of tail--top and tail with Lowell Thomas at a study desk with, kind of, African masks and things and a globe of the world and he would say, "When I was in was in Mbutoland or whatever," and it was my job on my first day to join these beginnings and ends on and then do an additional task which was occasionally these documentaries showed what would then be called native dances. And sometimes the native dancers were female, and sometimes their breasts were uncovered--this was the BBC and it was kind of allowed but this could not be shown on network television in the U.S., so my job was to take what was called blooping ink and every time there was a jiggling uncovered nipple I was to put a spot of ink on the print. And far from kind of distracting attention from the bare nipples it was like a swarm of bees around each breast [laughs]. That was my first job, and then I swept out the film vault. That was my first day in the movie industry. And then I worked with an established film Editor, in Ealing Studios as it had been, the home of much of the British film industry, taken over by the BBC, as an assistant film Editor. Very clearly and well defined and disciplined role in those days. My first Editor was a lady called Gitta Zadek who was Hungarian and who had drawn a line across the cutting room. It was a narrow cutting room, plain brick walls and on one half of the line the assistant was and on the other half of the line the Editor was doing the editing and by god you got it if you crossed that line. [INT: Was that unique to her or was that pretty common?] Pretty common. I found that period just starting at the BBC one of great creative ferment. People like John Boorman, John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, Tony Palmer--[INT: Were they all working there at the same time--] Working or had recently worked there and the spirit was in the place and it was a place of kind of transformation for the BBC. It was coming out of Auntie BBC--kind of conventional 1950s stateness, into the excitement of the 1960s.

INT: And was there a formal structure in terms of where you served a certain amount of time as a journeyman, I mean--
MJ: There was the most wonderful thing, I don't know of any other equivalent anywhere in the world. It was called the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] Attachment System and basically it meant that whatever job you did at the BBC, whatever official job you did, and it could've been you know a caterer or an assistant film Editor or anything, you could apply for an attachment to do anybody else's job in the organization for a short space of time, to see if you could. And if you were interesting enough at the interview to say I think I could bring something to this, you didn't get paid that salary, you got paid your normal salary but for six months you did someone else's job. So I applied for that. I said, "I want to be a Director." I had an interview and obviously talked my way through it and you know the next day I was in a control gallery directing a live program. [INT: The next day?] Yeah. And one of my friends from the Assistant Editor pool was showing some friends around. There was a glass partition where you could bring visitors into the television center. He said, "My god I know that guy [points] what's he doing in there?" And yeah, the answer was I was dying from terror, but--[INT: How did you prepare yourself for that? I mean for that particular, in other words, just give a--] Brash self confidence, arrogance I guess. [INT: But you had observed obviously other Directors doing--] Yeah, yeah. I think the period of time that I spent in the cutting room was great because for me it's a way of getting very close to a Director when he's making the final decisions about a movie. And you're there when he's talking to the Editor, or sometimes talking to you saying, "Well what do you think about this?" And he's--after some trepidation, I would offer my opinions and then I got to actually edit a movie myself because of these conversations I had with the Director who said, "Well yeah, it's a two part series. Why doesn't so and so do this part, and why don't you edit this part?" [INT: Do you remember who any of those Directors were that you--or if any--] No, I don't remember their names now. They were kind of arts documentaries, they weren't the dramatized. [INT: Right, so this is all documentary and, but when you were in the control room doing live television what kind of show was that, was that an interview show or?] No it was a medical show. It was called TELEVISION DOCTOR and it was--[INT: A dramatic show?] No, no. A series about latest advances in medicine and various stuff like that.

INT: So at this specific moment in time did you envision that you were going to be doing dramatic films or did you think that you were still open to a life in documentary?
MJ: Documentary means different things to different people. There is the kind of camera on the shoulder fly on the wall documentary. I'd done a little bit of that but I was never much into that, what I was much more interested in and got into in a big way is not the observed documentary but the created documentary. Where you take a thesis and you make, you construct a thing around it. You construct a whole visual construct around it. And with THE ASCENT OF MAN which is the first, kind of, blockbuster they used to be called in those days--blockbuster documentaries series, 13-parter funded by Time-Life and the BBC. I got to do that, I got to take someone's thesis, in this case Jacob Bronowosky's, about the ascent of man, the origins and development of man. And shoot in 30 countries over three years and do the most amazing things on the BBC's [British Broadcasting Corporation] dime. [INT: Were you the only Director on that?] No, I was one of three directors. [INT: One of three Directors? So each of you did about four of them?] No it wasn't kinda structured like that. [INT: I see.] Everybody did a bit of everybody else's, but the thing was very closely planned. There were two film crews going around the world in different places and Directors going between them and Assistant Directors going backwards and forwards between them. Very complex operation. [INT: How old were you then?] 27, and it was an education in the world, I found--[INT: 30 countries you went to? Over three years?] Yeah. That is again, on THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY with John Kenneth Galbraith, somewhat big series on economics, and then again with James Burke on CONNECTIONS, and each one of those was two or three years of shooting in multiple locations in every continent around the world. [INT: And so how many years did you do documentary then? I was at the BBC for 21 years. [INT: 21 years?] 21 years during which time it never occurred to me to leave. I was just so happy, essentially, doing what I was doing. It wasn't dramatized and I didn't realize I was going to end up doing that. But I was traveling to places and going to absurd parts of those places. I mean I traveled to Lake Como in Italy, wonderful scenic location, in order to go to the sewage works because the point of going for James Burke's CONNECTIONS, that particular one, was Volta and his electric pistol. Volta [Alessandro Volta], after whom volts are named, made a glass pistol and filled it with sewage gas and put a popcorn, a pop gun cork in the end of it and passed an electric current through it and it ignited gas and blew a cork out. [INT: It's like going to Milan for the garbage.] It gives you a strange insight into the world when you go to these odd places. And I'm trained to come at different levels of society. I would one day be trying to arrange setting up where I was going to shoot with Mrs. Gahndi's [Indira Gandhi] office in the capital of India and the next day I would be out in a small village, you know, far from high society in Delhi. So seeing those, those social contrasts was again something very--it was a good education that the BBC paid for, for me.

INT: Well there's something else, I mean I also began in documentary so I make these connections, but-- Then what about the process of actually editing and constructing the film? Would--did you, was someone else doing that or do you coming back and doing it?
MJ: I'm coming back and doing that. [INT: Right so you, how did that--] It is so different from what we think of the, particularly in the industry now, as the way that you edit a film. The way we would do it then was I would go out and shoot something, be it a drama or a documentary--[INT: To a treatment of some sort?] Yeah, yeah, but I would come back and sit down and view all the dailies from the beginning to the end over the course of a day, or two days with the Editor. And we'd take a break for lunch and we'd go out and we'd talk about it and what we thought about it and what we thought the movie was about. And then we'd sit down and start from the first frame to the last shot and we'd put it together. It's unheard of here. [INT: Right.] What happens here is that the Editor is cutting while you're shooting and that I find very unsatisfactory 'cause I think most the time you're undoing things that have been done and trying to start again, rather than building on what's being done. It has nothing to do with the quality of the Editor, it's just that if, like me, you have an editing sensibility you are putting together the movie in your head as you're shooting it and you know just how it's gonna go. And then to be presented with someone else's idea of that, with whom you have very limited contact, it's like being offered a rusty razor blade to slit your wrist with. I don't know of any stage in the whole directing process that is so demoralizing to the soul as seeing the Editor's first assembly, however good it is. [INT: Right.]

INT: How long was the editing process generally speaking?
MJ: It was as long as it needed to be. [INT: What ratio do you think it was to the shooting? Just ballpark. I mean when you think that we've had films that we've had to deliver in two weeks, right? And if you're lucky you get all of four weeks of your editing--] Right. [INT: So that's a ratio probably--] Oh much, much longer than that. And I think the conversations were not, "Will you be ready for neg cutting on this day?" but, "How much longer do you think you'll need? How's it going?" [INT: So you could go six months or--] Not quite that long, but yeah. "We're thinking this might have a slot in week 42, would you be ready for that?" That kind of conversation. Very much more informal. [INT: So they were relying, they were relying on creative--let me rephrase it--the choices were made on the basis of the creative decision that a Director was making?] Yeah, getting it right, getting it right. Having something worth showing, and when you got that, that was the end of the editing period. [INT: Delivering the most quality rather than delivering to a schedule?] Sounds silly doesn't it. [laughter] Yes. [INT: And were you paid well? Is there--] I was paid the same whatever I did. My finishing salary after 21 years at the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] was 29,000 pounds a year. And really that was kind of small increments, that was really top of the line as a Senior Producer/Director. But you got a regular paycheck, that was the thing, you didn't have to worry about your next job. You got that paycheck whatever you did. You'd be doing these monster series in five continents or you could be doing a tiny gardening program, but you got paid the same amount of money.

INT: And during those, 22 years, right you said?
MJ: 21. [INT: 21 years. So did you make a transition to dramatic films there?] Yes, yes. [INT: So how did that happen?] There was a stain, this blot on British television that existed since the 1960s which was that Peter Watkins, a brilliantly gifted moviemaker had made a documentary that he dramatized called CULLODEN about the Battle of the Culloden, as if you were there interviewing the people with a camera on your shoulder. And he said he wanted to make another movie, and the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] because he was such a valued, you know, Director said, "Okay, make it. What do you want make it about?" He said, "Nuclear war. I want to shoot as if it was a documentary of a nuclear attack on England." And he was actually with much trepidation given permission to do it. And BBC saw what they'd got and they thought, "Oh shit, we can't show this. We can't show this." They showed it to the government, the government said, "You can't show this." Their argument was that it is so realistic that an old lady sitting at home in her house watching this on television may go out and throw herself under a bus. Somewhat simplistic argument, but they were so concerned that it would...Well the BBC was concerned that they would have people committing suicide, the government were concerned that it would undermine support for the British nuclear deterrent. So for years and years and years, during the course of my whole BBC career virtually, that movie remained unshown. I thought I would test the waters. In the, kind of, slightly camouflaged setting of a half hour documentary series about science I would say, "Let me just show what would happen in a kind of demonstration way if one nuclear weapon went off over one city." And I used things like a pumpkin and an air mortar that threw broken glass fragments at a pumpkin. And I got a side of beef and rigged up a propane kind of Gatling gun thing and burned it. And intercut those with shots of people in the street, random people in the street. And you know the effect of that montage was kind of graphic and very disturbing and the program was very controversial. But they aired it. Then I said, "Look, I want to do something more than just this kind of scientific thing. I want to show with all the faculties of drama what ordinary life would be like for a group of people in one city in England if this awfulness were to happen, for real. In a political context, but to show it not as overview so you get wide shots, but just as experienced by these people." I had the idea of initially taking the cast of a long running soap opera, CORONATION STREET and saying, "These are people who are known to the audience, what about putting them through a nuclear war and seeing what Elsie Tanner or whatever goes through." Couldn't do that, the rights were with Granada Television, this was the BBC. So I worked, worked, and worked with Barry Hines, the screenwriter who wrote KES, the Ken Loach movie, and he and I--I initially, traveled for about two years around the States [United States of America], around Europe, and around England talking to scientists, doctors, atomic technicians, everything. [INT: Were you doing this full time?] Yeah, BBC paid me to do it. [INT: For two years?] Yeah. [INT: And they not knowing what you were going to end up with?] No, but they wanted me to know everything I could know about it, so that it would be impeccably researched. At that point I went on a training course with the screenwriter, and we went to a secret place in England where they trained government officials who were normally just, you know, in charge of the Transportation Department or whatever, but who are designated secretly in the run up to a nuclear war to take control of the country and who go down into secret bunkers and who... And it was a farce. It was a farce. Barry [Barry Hines] and I take--realize that this was the great argument for doing this drama, which was that the people who write these plans for coping with a nuclear war have no imagination. They cannot see the way the world really is. People don't follow a plan, and you know, I then realized everything I had done in the 21 years at the BBC, 20 years at the BBC was preparing me for that. Knowing how the world is through having been out into the world. Knowing what people really do by having seen people really do it, and knowing that some people will never be able to imagine the unimaginable...