Michael Powell (director)

Michael Powell (1943)

Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990) was an English film director. Via his partnership with Emeric Pressburger and their production company "The Archers", the two men wrote, produced and directed a series of British films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (US: Stairway to Heaven 1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). His film Peeping Tom (1960), now considered a classic, was heavily vilified on first release seriously damaging his career.

Many film-makers such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have cited Powell as an influence. In 1981, he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award along with Pressburger, the highest honour the British Academy of Film and Television Arts can give a filmmaker.

Quotes

• I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema ... I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.
  • Midi-Minuit Fantastique (October 1968)

• I got my first assignment as a director in 1927. I was slim, arrogant, intelligent, foolish, shy, cocksure, dreamy and irritating. Today, I'm no longer slim.
  • Michael Powell (1987)

• [of his wife Frankie] In fact, if only I had been the perfect husband, she would have been the perfect wife.
  • Million Dollar Movie

Attributed

• [Cinematographer] Jack Cardiff once asked Powell "Michael, do you make films for all types of audiences, or just for yourself?" Michael shook his head vigorously. "I make films for myself. What I express I hope most people will understand. For the rest, well, that's their problem."

• "My master in film, Buñuel, was a far greater storyteller than I. It was just that in my films miracles occur on the screen."

• "We decided to go ahead with David O. (Selznick) the way hedgehogs make love: verrry carefully !"

• "For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art."

• "Actors and technicians were being demobbed every day. Very soon the only ham actor left in the combined forces would be General George Patton."

• "The great innovators have always been fearless.... I have fallen off haystacks, out of trees, over cliffs. I have been nearly drowned, shot and hanged. I have been in countless car crashes without getting a scratch. I have been alone in an office with Louis B. Mayer."

• "Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty."

• "Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder archbishops there."

• "[After Peeping Tom] When they got me on my own [the critics] gleefully sawed off the limb and jumped up and down on the corpse."

• "The truth lies in black and white."

• "Seventy years ago there were men like D.W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive."

• "I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story."

• "Of course, all films are surrealist. They are because they are making something that looks like a real world but isn't."

Quotes about Michael Powell

• he was determined to make Earthsea into a movie.
  • 1982 interview in Conversations with Ursula Le Guin