I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.
I turned down the opportunity to be in some films that went on to be blockbusters.
I did my first film when I was in the final year of my graduation. At that time, I was still a kid, and I couldn't read the industry very well.
There was a phase in my career in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing strange, arty-farty Euro films that were, you could tell, never had much chance of any release anywhere in the world.
I had been working early in my life in films - since I was 11.
How my film career happened, I don't know. It was unplanned. I'd been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really 'The Naked Civil Servant' in 1975 that put me on the radar.
I pulled out of making movies in about '96 or '97.
We were like a stock company at Warners. We didn't know any of the stars from the other studios.
In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.
I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
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