EIFF Interview with Malcolm McDowell 8/24/04 on Lindsay Anderson

O Missed Man!
Alastair McKay 8/24/04

    Tonight, at the Traverse theatre, Malcolm McDowell will present a "remembrance" of his friend, the film director Lindsay Anderson. It will, no doubt, be a moving event. McDowell will read from Anderson's writings, among them his piece about the last time he saw the great director John Ford alive. There will be time, too, for his humorous comparison of Bette Davis and Lillian Gish. And there will be personal reminiscences, as McDowell does his best to rescue his late mentor from obscurity.
    Anderson died ten years ago on 30 August, 1994, after a swimming accident in France, with his reputation in a state of flux. McDowell, who acted in Anderson's three best known films - the trilogy of if...., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital - is in no doubt that he was special. "It was magnificent, some of his stuff. He was a very extraordinary, very determined human being.
    "A lot of critics have said his films are the most important works, post-war, of any British director. I think that is probably true."
    Anderson started out as a documentarist. His first film, Meet The Pioneers, was a study of the Sutcliffe's engineering works in Wakefield, and he made several similar works before branching into fiction. He adhered to a manifesto of filmmaking which he first explored in the film journal Sequence. The credo was based on artistic freedom, and "the significance of the everyday". It stated: "As filmmakers we believe no film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude."
    In McDowell he found a foil. The actor was 24 - "but a young 24" - when he auditioned for If … , and considered the director a significant influence on his life. "He was a magnificent person. He had a great intellect. It was like being in the presence of an Oxford don. There was nothing that he didn't know about."
    McDowell recalls an early incident where Anderson became annoyed with him because he refused to consider the psychological condition of his character. "I said, 'I don't work that way. I work emotionally and spontaneously. If you start giving me this bullshit about what the character had for lunch, I don't care."
    In vain, Anderson argued that his approach would help. "And I'd say: 'It won't'. I'm quite amazed that I was that adamant. But I knew what was right for me. I don't work that way. And he would never have chosen me if I did, because he wanted something much more spontaneous and emotional and in the moment."
    Anderson's most famous film, the 1968 Palm D'Or winner if...., was only released when the Jane Fonda science fiction spoof Barbarella flopped. The studio was far from impressed by this wayward attack on the public school system, in which McDowell aimed his impudent charisma, and a machine gun, at Anderson's old school, Cheltenham. McDowell thinks if.... caused the reform of the public school system, forcing "a move away from rules and fags, all that bullshit, to a much more democratic liberal sort of thing".
    The film played on the national conscience. "It attacked everything that Britain held, or holds, dear." The anti-authoritarian theme fitted with the politics of 1968, but McDowell thinks the film has a continuing relevance. "if.… is about a school, but of course that's a microcosm for any organization. It could be a government department, and it could be a country itself."
    O Lucky Man!, which was based on McDowell's experiences as a coffee salesman, shows the schoolboy from if...., Mick Travis, learning the rules of the market. He finds that he must shed his principles to succeed, a stance which finds an echo in the way Britain maintains its influence in the world by dealing with dictators. "The establishment loves assimilation," McDowell says. "That's the way they confront things. It's brilliant because it doesn't give you anything to fight against."
    The process of assimilation also applies in the film industry. "It's a real business now, which is sad. You could never make a film like O Lucky Man! today. It wouldn't be possible. They just wouldn't let you do it. It doesn't have a beginning, middle and end. It doesn't have a formula. It's a unique piece of art and that's a very rare thing now.
    "It's interesting what they consider brilliant films are today. They consider Notting Hill a brilliant film. God help us! But that's where we're at. It's harder now because it's a business run by accountants. Personal films are an art-form. They're an expensive hobby. They really are. And even masters don't make money. Look at Bunuel. Look at the great artists of the cinema - Bergman and Fellini - geniuses really. But what's coming out of Hollywood, it's such crap. I haven't seen a Hollywood movie in years, actually. Wild horses wouldn't drag me into that sort of film."
    McDowell allows himself a sip of tea. "Catwoman?! What possessed Halle Berry? Is nobody saying to her, 'Look, you just won an Oscar - you can actually do better stuff than this'? The whole thing is a joke. It's pathetic. It's ridiculous."
    In recent years Lindsay Anderson has been claimed as a Scot, by virtue of his father, a Scottish major-general. Though Anderson was born in Bangalore, and educated at Cheltenham and Oxford university, McDowell thinks there was something Scottish, or at least Celtic, about his outlook.
    "He was so irritated with England. 'England' to him was a word of real derision. He would go, 'Oh my God, England'. Or 'He's so English.' Which was a real insult. It meant that sort of cold, unemotional Southern English sort of uninvolved kind of person. The sort that scorned anything artistic, especially in cinema. He fought against that, and it annoyed him greatly."
    As the star of A Clockwork Orange, McDowell is able to compare Anderson with director Stanley Kubrick. Both were great, he says, but Kubrick was a technician, while Anderson was a humanist. "Stanley was more into lights and speeds than talking to the actors. Lindsay loved the actors. The actors were the strength for him of his work. They were props for Kubrick. He didn't really consider them. There was no emotional involvement."
    Kubrick made only two emotional films, McDowell says: A Clockwork Orange and Lolita. "I had a great time with Stanley. I loved him. How could you not? It was one of the great journeys an actor could have in his career, and you don't get that very often. Of course, my work with Lindsay was far deeper and far more personal."
    Anderson never explained the politics of his work, McDowell says. "He didn't have to. We knew what the films were about. It was all-encompassing. It wasn't just a job. It was life too. I asked him once about his politics. He said 'I'm an anarchist. I want to pull the whole bloody lot down.' I said: 'And replace it with what?' 'Nothing!' he replied. "I think he was just having me on. He said: 'There are people in society, Malcolm, who've got to ask the question, why? I'm one of them.' And he said: 'If you don't believe my films just look around you."
    McDowell has been less idealistic with his subsequent work. His CV contains little which can be ranked alongside his seminal early performances. He cites Robert Altman's The Company, and Gangster No 1, as recent examples of quality work, rather than mortgage-paying projects. Most recently he was in Moscow working on a "Top Gun type thing".
    "I'm playing the wayward CIA man who's gone off the rails and taken Rutger Hauer with me. And the good one, the big doofus, is Armand Assante. It's hilarious, you know, but it's fun. It's nothing too serious."
    He recalls how he used to ask Anderson for advice. "I could give him a script and say 'What do you think, should I do this?' He'd say: 'Well, you can do it if you like, but it's rubbish, of course. But go ahead. It won't do you any harm.' "