Six books so far! That’s a shock. I didn’t think of myself as a writer – I was a bad reader at school and there were no books in our house when I grew up. But my compulsion to makes things took over and so, when I’m not doing what I do, I write.
Kevin Macdonald and I edited this when we were early in our careers as filmmakers. We wanted to avoid theoretical stuff – there are hundreds of doc theory books – and instead look at non-fiction filmmaking from the director’s point of view.
Images of my desk as I wrote The Story of Film. A basic laptop, a teapot, a big sheet of paper and a marker pen. I was till in my thirties, so probably not ready to write a global history of the movies, but I was a good planner – the big sheets of paper show my structure for the start of the book – and was fuelled by what I didn’t know.
I worried that The Story of Film book would be slaughtered by the critics – and the first internal reader reports were bad – but then the reviews came in, and the international editions – Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, etc. I see the book all around the world. Japanese, Farsi and Arabic on their way I hear. No French edition!
After four years on the BBC in the UK presenting and directing Scene by Scene – where I talked to actors and directors about the techniques and ideas behind scenes in their films – we compiled some of the transcripts into a book.
After a decade writing about films for the UK’s Prospect magazine, we collected some of the essays into Watching Real People Elsewhere. As the title suggests, the themes in the book are cinema-going, realism and documentary, filmmakers and actors and international movie making.
I seem to have written scores of chapters for, or introductions to, books, and pamphlets and booklets. This one – First Life, Second Life – was a record of watching a great short film by Abbas Kiarostami. By this stage I’d worked with him.
I wrote this book, The Story of Looking, recently – in my 50s. It combines my science background, my love of buildings and new places with my sense that looking is the thing I’m best at, they thing that keeps me alert, agog.
Dear Orson Welles is a recent collection of my essays about movie people I’ve worked with, filmmaking, ideas and introversion. I never thought I’d have a book with gold letters on the front, plus I’m lolling in a cinema. As you know it’s best to buy a book from its publisher, so if you’re inclined