Publications

After Tim Burton’s movie ‘Ed Wood’ was released in 1994, people were suddenly talking about this cult director who had a fetish for angora, sometimes wore miniskirts in public and had been called the “worst director of all time” for such epics as ‘Glen and Glenda’, ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ and ‘Bride of the Monster’. It was only after the movie came out that I began to wonder if this was the same man I’d worked with in Los Angeles more than two decades earlier.

It’s finally over. For the past four months, the epic that is ‘Timeline’ has been on the road, filming in the Isle of Man in Britain, at several locations throughout Spain and now Turkey. Logistically it’s been a nightmare; six half hour television programs that recreate key moments in history as though television news was there at the time; the Crusades, the Black Death, the Mongol invasions of Europe, the Vikings, the fall of Moorish Spain and Christian Byzantium.

We called him a primitive. We likened him to Gauguin or Rousseau. In most ways we were proud to think he was our friend and yet, in a much deeper way, we thought him a figure of fun, someone to laugh at in a tolerant fashion for his idiosyncrasies.

The day started early in our little village in northeastern Crete. From soon after 6.00AM, when an orange sun made its first rather timid appearance over the dusty mountains that ring Sitia Bay, the street had been full of activity, villagers bustling backwards and forwards, talking, laughing, loading pickup trucks, three-wheelers and donkeys with the galvanized steel buckets, wicker baskets and coarse black netting that they’d need for the harvesting of the grapes. It’s very much a family affair, with grandmothers, children, friends from Sitia, even relatives as far away as Heraklion and Athens, all coming together in the village to help pick the family grapes.

The cobbled streets dream in the midday sun. It is siesta hour and the entire town is as lazy as the two Indians who are asleep under their sombreros outside a cantina. The sun-baked houses are drowsy, filled with the listless sounds of noon; a transistor radio playing somewhere in the distance, the clink of bottles, the slow shuffle of an old man and his burro as they go from door to door, offering their load of wood to any who answer their call.

Soon after joining The Saint as a fresh-faced 19-year-old kid straight out of school, Pat Kelly, the tough old Irish First Assistant Director, took one look at me and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I never want to f****ng see you”, he said, “but when I take one step backwards I want to tread on you.” It’s probably the best job description for a third assistant director one could ever get.