Cinequest Honors Director John Boorman

Director John Boorman will be honored and screen his final film at this year's Cinequest

The thrilling, dangerous visions of British director John Boorman include some of the most distinctive films of the last half of the 20th century.

In Point Blank (1967), the rock-faced Lee Marvin prowls a pop-art California. Boorman's hit Deliverance (1972) is one of the definitive statements of American fantasies of violence. Zardoz (1974) is au courant enough to be the subject of a full-sized Burning Man effigythere, inside the Playa-clay cranium of Zardoz, a one-couch capacity theater played the 1974 film in an endless loop. Boorman's later work is just as vital: the multi-Oscar nominated Hope and Glory (1987), the ripping adventure Beyond Rangoon (1995) beat The Hunger Games to the punch and is one of Patricia Arquette's best films. Le Carre meets farce in The Tailor of Panama (2001), and the nimble, ridiculously entertaining The General (1998) is one of the finest films ever made about Ireland.

Boorman opens this year's 25th annual Cinequest film festival with Queen and Country. The festival will also honor the director, along with actress Rosario Dawson, with the Maverick Spirit Award.

Via telephone, Boorman claims this sequel to Hope and Glory will be his last film, though critics are trying to convince him otherwise. "I've been encouraged to do another oneI'm 82," he says. "I think Clint Eastwood is 84, and Manuel de Oliveira is 100-something years old. That makes me a spring chicken."

I'd swap American Sniper for Queen and Country in a fast minutediscarding Eastwood's movie-derived idea of military life in favor of the fresher, wiser anecdotes of Boorman's own stint in the National Service.

Boorman's surrogate, Bill Rohan (Callum Turner), is praying like hell not to be shipped to fight in the Korean War. On base, he deals with sardonic officers: Richard E. Grant and David Thewlis among them. Boorman being Boorman, the women in the film are loaded with personality: Dawn Rohan as Bill's wild sister and Tamsin Egerton as the self-destructive upper-class student Rohan romances.

Like Rohan, Boorman was indeed charged with "Seducing a Soldier from His Duty." "This boy was the son of Ian Mikardo, a prominent Labor MPafter having listened to my lectures, the son decided he wasn't going to go to Korea," Boorman says. "Mikardo threatened to raise the matter in Parliament. It was a big scandal."

Boorman filmed in Romania, since he couldn't find a period British Army base to shoot in; however, the riverside house at Shepperton is an existing location, not far from the spot where Boorman lived when he was a young escapee of the London Blitz. There he watched movies being filmed at the nearby studio. Seventy years later, it's by the Thames that Boorman indicates his career is closing. "At the end of Queen and Country, you see a camera winding downit's my signal to the world that this is my last movie."

After a noteworthy career in British TV, Boorman worked on a documentary on D.W. Griffith. Both Hell in the Pacific (1968) and Leo the Last (1970) were informed with a silent film aesthetic. Boorman's studies of the impact of the silent cinematic image may have helped make the penultimate shot in Deliverance powerful enough to be stolen by dozens of films. It's a surprise cut to a shocking image, after everything seems peaceful and resolved: a dead arm thrusting out of the water. The graveside finale of Carrie (1976) copied it; a last popup is now mandatory in every horror film. "Jon Voight's nightmare," Boorman explained, "is that the body of the man he killed will come to the surface and betray him. That image comes out of Arthurian legend, and I used it in Excaliburthe arm of the Lady in the Lake. This, to me, is an image of an idea coming out of the unconscious. "

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Cinequest Honors Director John Boorman