Christopher Miles
Wiltshire

Christopher Miles - film director
Christopher began his film making career when he was 12, and being the eldest could bully his family to act in front of the camera - his two sisters, Vanessa and Sarah, got a taste for this madness, but his brother Martin sensibly opted out!

He was the first person in the world to show 8mm film on public television at 16; and at 18 was already inside a Communist Chinese jail for filming near the Great Wall. He has been nominated for an Oscar, and one of his first films "The Virgin and the Gypsy" was voted Best Film of the Year by the UK Critics Circle.

As films cost millions, things have never been easy....recently he made "The Clandestine Marriage" and during filming the producers' cheques started to bounce. The day was saved by Joan Collins and Nigel Hawthorne digging deep into their pockets, so that he was finally able to complete the film.......just!

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Topic:-
Talks:-

The films I never made - Christopher was once asked by a producer to direct a film of "My Family and Other Animals" and found himself lunching opposite Ingrid Bergman. That afternoon he received a telegram from the Durrell brothers (whose mother was 5ft 4ins) which read -

"If you have that 8ft smorgasbord to play our mother
we're going to chase you out of Soho with a frying-pan
love Gerry and Larry"

This then became, for other excruciating and sometimes hilarious reasons, one of the many films he never made.
Those DH Lawrence paintings - Another strange and fascinating subject suggested itself as he was preparing a film on the life of DH Lawrence, with Ian McKellen, when he wanted to film the 'infamous' moment in1929 when a London gallery was raided by six policemen who carried off 13 of Lawrence's paintings. These were then "imprisoned" for obscenity.
Once in prison, the paintings were visited by a Mr Agnew, who gave his artistic judgment and the judge ordered them to be burned.....why this did not happen, and what the paintings really meant to Lawrence and why the Scotland Yard ban has never been lifted, is the subject of another of his talks.

Last updated: 14/12/2009 | © 2004 Easy-Speak