Page 28 - Fujifilm Exposure_28 Michael Winner_ok

CALM DOWN, DEAR!
“It’s amazing just how much time is taken up being Michael Winner.”
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with some of the later commercials, including one in which Winner not only appeared as himself but also glee- fully cross-dressed as both a good fairy and a nasty witch (“it’s bloody hard work!”)
Not that Winner was a complete novice at ads. As an actor, and often director too, he’s done them for Kenco, Doritos, Books for Schools, the News Of The World and The Sun, and those with an elephantine memory may recall his black-and-white effort in 1956 for Elizabethan Tape Recorders. Or perhaps not. For, as Winner laughs, “the company went out of business about a year later.” Now, he’s also doing them for Peter Wood’s latest insurance initiative, First Alternative.
“I only seem to get commercials if I’m in them too. They obviously seem to think Michael Winner is so difficult, we’d better let him direct. That he’d be impossible otherwise, which I’m not.”
For Winner, who hasn’t directed a feature film since Parting Shots in 1999, the television commercials are clearly a very big deal – almost, it seems, like a sort of lifeline to get him back behind a camera.
“We write, produce, direct and take on the crew (including DPs like Tony Imi BSC and Ossi Rawi BSC) – everything we’d normally do on a fea- ture. We’ve done six or seven, includ- ing two in one day. I remember show- ing one of the top people in the busi- ness the ad and he said, ‘That’ll take three days to shoot.’ I said, ‘Three days? If this was a movie, we’d start at eight in the morning and we’d have finished by 12.30 – then go somewhere else in the afternoon.’
“Why should anyone need more than a day to shoot 40 seconds? With a movie, you shoot two-and-a-half to three minutes a day. My ads are very simple. We don’t care about the weather too much but basically rely on some very funny gags.”
When I last met Winner on Parting Shots, he described himself as “a film- maker who writes articles.” He’ll be 70 next year yet shows absolutely no sign of letting up, which also means proba- bly trying to crank up yet another fea-
ture in a prolific career that has spanned five decades.
“Okay, I’m not as hungry to make a film as I was. Unless it’s something you care deeply about, to make your 35th film is not as necessary as, say, your third film. However, I do have a very good horror film about an evil clairvoyant called Madame Celeste, so I may do that.”
It’s amazing, he says, “just how much time is taken up being Michael Winner.” This alter ego is, he adds, “a mad character who is not really me, of course,” although he’s apparently, “posher than me.”
The other Michael Winner is asked to do endless radio and TV shows and presumably dress up as a fairy and nasty witch in the Esure ads.
We may learn more about this split personality in his autobiography, Winner Takes All: A Life Of Sorts, which will be published in September. He started writing it while still a stu- dent at Cambridge and put it on hold as his directing career first in England then Hollywood began to catch fire.
It was the prospect of someone else unauthorisedly conjuring up his life from press cuttings which spurred him back into writing action.
“A couple of years ago, I had been giving a lecture at Oxford and the girl- friend said, ‘You know, they were more interested in you than the stars you’ve worked with.’ Yet, when you write a book, it’s difficult to talk about your- self because you don’t know yourself, really. I don’t know who I am: I live through the eyes of others.”
But that, to be sure, is unlikely actually to stop him writing – with the odd “startling revelation”, he purrs – about himself, the stars, the dining and whining, and, naturally, those Esure and First Alternative ads. ■ QUENTIN FALK
A number of Michael Winner’s insurance commercials have been originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos above: Michael Winner as a nasty witch and a good fairy in the Esure Commercials and centre: with Julia Foster
26 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video