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bard to the bone
Writer- director Don Boyd tells Quentin Falk about family dysfunction and the lure of a Shakespeare classic
Photos above: Don Boyd; right: Richard Harris and Emma Catherwood in My Kingdom
Like King Lear, the inspiration for his latest feature film, My Kingdom, writer-director Don Boyd has three daughters and white hair. But that, he asserts cheerfully, is where the resem- blance ends.
But is it? Lear’s world was a paradigm of family dysfunction and Boyd has recently made a virtue of exploring various dark and messy aspects of his own background which would have made even the Bard salivate.
In Donald And Luba: A Family Movie, his Storyville documentary for the BBC, Boyd traced in an intense and very personal way the peripatetic lives and disas- trous marriage of his late parents who met and married in China where they both grew up.
The film centred especially on his colourful mother, a frank con- tributor to the programme, who ended up destitute and alcoholic in a small room near Gloucester Road tube station. Boyd’s father died seven years ago while his mother, who saw and apparently approved of the final film, even- tually passed away last year.
Then, last summer, Boyd went public – naming names, as they say – in a long Observer feature article about the sexual abuse he’d suffered as a small boy at a distinguished public school in Scotland. Later he went on R4’s The Choice to explain just why more than 35 years on he’d decided to wash such dirty linen so publicly.
When it comes, though, to his three daughters Boyd, unlike Lear, has absolutely no reservations in the role of proud parent.
Amanda, an opera singer- actress, starred his 1998 film, Lucia; Kate, a documentary film- maker in her own right, was co- cameraman on Donald And Luba; Clare works for the BBC on the research and development side of documentary and “is fab- ulously useful to me in the area of script editing.
“I wouldn’t,” Boyd added, “call it a family business because we do keep our careers relatively independent. But we’re a family resource, if you like. It’s all quite unexpected because I never thought they’d want to follow in my footsteps.”
Those footsteps made their first impression more than 25 years ago when Boyd, then only in his late twenties, began to work tire- lessly as what he’d like to call “an entrepreneurial director” (his models are Coppola and Spielberg) in a mostly rudderless British film industry.
When he wasn’t directing the odd feature he was more often than not playing producer to other directors like Alan Clarke (Scum), Derek Jarman (The Tempest), Claude Whatham (Sweet William), Matthew Chapman (Hussy) and Chris Petit (An Unsuitable Job For A Woman) on a series of often ambitious, low-budget British films.
It was only after directing Twenty-One in 1991, his third fea- ture fully fourteen years after his previous outing that he says he properly began to forge in his own right “a traditional directorial career. Between then and now I have been in a sense the equiva- lent of a young director having a
career of just 10 years after, say, leaving film school and making a couple of documentaries.’
Except, in Boyd’s case, his par- allel career to date as a docu- mentary filmmaker has, com- pared with the features, been spectacularly, and commercially, successful. None more so than an award-winning (and BAFTA nomi- nated) alliance with Ruby Wax.
It began with what he thought would be just one programme on addiction in her Health Quest series and ended up lasting nine- teen, including the first series of Ruby Wax Meets... featuring now hilariously infamous encounters with the likes of Imelda Marcos and Burt Reynolds.
Meanwhile, back on his fea- ture trail, Boyd believes that “commercially, my best is yet to come; I’m confident of that.” Set for release later this year, My Kingdom, relocating the Lear tragedy to an underworld setting in contemporary Liverpool is, he avers, part of that process.
“It started off being a film I wanted to make in that particular city about a corrupt man. I went through all the various classics that could provide some frame- work for it, from Ovid and Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens.
“Then it became so obvious. Lear is the perfect vehicle for this story of the demise of a corrupt man. Like films about New York and Hong Kong where there’s a sort of iconography, the same could be said of Liverpool which also shares a strange and rather separated society.”
Boyd has publicly been very frank about his sometimes turbu- lent working relationship on the film with star Richard Harris – “my second choice after John Hurt turned me down because he thought the script was too vio- lent” – playing Sandeman, the Lear-like Liverpool crime boss with serious filial problems.
“When all is said and done, I am immensely respectful of Richard’s performance,” says Boyd, trying to damp down any resulting fires, “and also of our working process together which was incredibly stimulating. The important thing for me is, he seems to love the film.”
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