Alan Parker

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Sir Alan William Parker (born 14 February 1944) is an English filmmaker.

Parker's early career, beginning in his late teens, was spent as a copywriter and director of television advertisements.

After about ten years of filming adverts, many of which won awards for creativity, he began screenwriting and directing films. Parker is noted for having a wide range of filmmaking styles and working in differing genres.

He has directed musicals, including Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991) and Evita (1996); true-story dramas, including Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), Come See the Paradise (1990) and Angela's Ashes (1999); family dramas, including Shoot the Moon (1982), and horrors and thrillers including Angel Heart (1987) and The Life of David Gale (2003).His films have won nineteen BAFTA awards, ten Golden Globes and six Academy Awards.

Parker was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the British film industry and knighted in 2002.

He has been active in both British cinema and American cinema, along with being a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain and lecturing at various film schools.

In 2013 he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest honour the British Film Academy can give a filmmaker.

Parker donated his personal archive to the British Film Institute's National Archive in 2015.

Early years

Parker was born into a working-class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He grew up on a council estate of Islington, which always made it easy for him to remain "almost defiantly working-class in attitudes" said the British novelist and screenwriter Ray Connolly. Parker said that although he had his share of fun growing up, he always felt he was studying for his secondary school exams, while his friends were out having a good time. He had an "ordinary background" with no aspirations to become a film director, nor did anyone in his family have any desire to be involved in the film industry. The closest he ever came, he said, to anything related to films was learning photography, a hobby inspired by his uncles: "That early introduction to photography is something I remember."

Parker attended Dame Alice Owen's School, concentrating on science in his last year. He left school when he was eighteen to work in the advertising field, hoping that the advertising industry might be a good way to meet girls.

Personal life

Parker was married twice; first to Annie Inglis from 1966 until their divorce in 1992, and then to producer Lisa Moran, to whom he was married until his death. He had five children, including screenwriter Nathan Parker.

Parker died in London on 31 July 2020 at age 76, following a lengthy illness (not believed to be related to COVID-19).

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Career

He started his career as an office boy in an advertising company's post-room. However, more than anything, he said, he loved to write and would write essays and ads when he returned home after work. His coworkers encouraged him to write, which eventually led him to a job as a copywriter in the company. Parker worked with various companies over the next few years, but by then, he was already a copywriter, and was able to function as a copywriter. Collett Dickenson Pearce in London, where he first met future designers David Puttnam and Alan Marshall, both of whom would later produce several of his films, was one of many of his creative companies. Puttnam was credited with inspiring him and talking him into writing his first film script, Melody (1971).

Parker had gone from copywriting to successfully directing numerous television commercials by 1968. He helped Marshall establish a company that would make advertisements in 1970. The company eventually became one of Britain's finest commercial production houses, winning nearly every major national and international award open to it. The UK Cinzano vermouth commercial (starring Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter) and a Heineken commercial that used 100 actors were among their award-winning ads. Parker attributed his early involvement as a film producer to his ability as a producer.

Parker shot his first fictional film, No Hard Feelings, in 1971, after writing the screenplay for the Waris Hussein film Melody. The film is a bleak love story set against the Blitz in London during the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe bombed the city for 57 nights in a row. Parker was born during one of those bombing raids and said, "the baby in that [film] might have been me." He was unable to find financial assistance and decided to risk using his own money and assets from mortgaging his house to pay the bill. The film captivated the BBC, which acquired the film and showed it on television a few years later in 1976. Mark Shivas had, in the interim, subpoena Parker to direct The Evacuees (1975), a Second World War story by Jack Rosenthal that was shown as a Play for Today. The work was based on true events that resulted in the evacuation of school students from central Manchester. The Evacuees received a BAFTA award for best television drama as well as an Emmy for Best International Drama.

Parker wrote and directed Bugsy Malone (1976), a parody of early American gangster films and American musicals, but with only child actors. Parker's intention in making the film was to please both children and adults with a unique vision and style of film:

Jodie Foster's film received eight British Academy Award nominations and five accolades, two of which were BAFTAs.

Parker next directed Midnight Express (1978), based on Billy Hayes' account of his detention and escape from a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country. Parker made the film in order to do something completely different from Bugsy Malone's, which would broaden his style of filmmaking. Oliver Stone wrote the script for his first screenplay and won Stone his first Academy Award. Giorgio Moroder, who received his first Oscar for the film, was also responsible for the music. Parker was named as a "front rank filmmaker" by the Midnight Express, who also nominated him as a film producer. Along with his freedom from there on to direct films of his own choosing, the success of that film gave him the opportunity to do so.

Parker later wrote Fame (1980), which follows eight students through their years at the New York City High School of Performing Arts. It was a big box-office hit and resulted in the creation of a television spin-off series of the same name. Parker said after doing a serious drama like Midnight Express, he wanted to do a film with music, but it would be very different from previous musicals:

"The best part of Alan's work with us is that he made us feel like classmates," says actress Irene Cara. Parker, on the other hand, was refused admission to the fictional school depicted in the film due to the notoriety he gained from his previous film, Midnight Express. "Mr. Parker, we can't risk you doing for New York high schools the same way you did for Turkish prisons," the school board's chief told him.

Shoot the Moon (1982), Parker's next film, the story of a marital break-up in Northern California, was told in the story. "It's the first grown-up film that I'd done," Parker says. "I really want to do different work," he said about a subject that was not related to his previous film. "I believe that doing different tasks each day makes you more creative." He referred to the film as "two people who can't live together but who can't live without one another." A tale of faded passion, senseless rage, and the inevitable bewildering betrayal in the eyes of the children." Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, two of Its cast members, were nominated for their performances.

Parker, who said he was forced to examine his own marriage, was also affected by the film's personal meaning: "It was a difficult film to make for me because there were echoes of my own life in it." It was about a divorce breakup, and the children in the story were very close to my own children in age. Shooting the Moon was very close to my own life." He spent days with writer Bo Goldman on crafting a realistic story and claims that his marriage became "infinitely better" as a result of the film.

In 1982, Parker produced The Wall, a Pink Floyd experimental rock opera that starred Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof as the fictive rocker "Pink." Parker later described the film as "one of my most painful experiences of my creative life." Although not a box office success, it received rave critical praise and became a cult classic.

Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage appear in Birdy (1984), directed by Parker (1984). It chronicles the lives of two school friends who have recovered from the Vietnam War but were both physically and mentally wounded. After having read William Wharton's book, Parker called it a "wonderful tale." However, he had no idea how to make it into a film because of the tale's details: "I didn't know if you should take the book's poetry and make it cinematic poetry, or if an audience would actually care about it."

The film became a critical hit. Parker had "transcended realism [and] achieved his personal record," according to Richard Schickel, while Derek Malcolm finds Birdy to be Parker's "most mature and certainly his best film." Critic Quentin Falk writes that the film's message is "joyously life-affirming," a feature that he claims is common to much of Parker's work. Parker's films achieve a blend of "strong story and elegant frame," according to him, a style that eludes many writers who rely too much on the purely physical.

Parker was nominated for Best Director in Mississippi for his second time in 1988. Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe star in this film, based on a true tale about three civil rights campaigners in 1964. Hackman was nominated for Best Actor, and the film was nominated for five other Oscars, including Best Picture. It was named for Best Cinematography.

Parker created The Commitments, a comedy about working class Dubliners who form a soul band in 1991. The film was a worldwide success and resulted in the release of a hit sound track album. Parker was the most curious of the estimated 1,200 different bands performing around Dublin. He performed with over 3,000 different band members. Parker preferred young artists, most of whom had no acting experience, in order to remain "true to the tale." "I brought everybody right to the character that they play in the film." They aren't really playing outside of who they are as individuals." Parker says he wanted to make the film because he could relate to the struggles of young Dubliners, having come from a similar working-class background in north London.

Parker's "incredible fondness for people, place, and music," film critic David Thomson observes. It was as close as Parker has come to hope. Parker said it was the "most enjoyable" film he had ever made.

Evita (1996) was another musical, starring Madonna, Antonio Banderas, and Jonathan Pryce. The score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice from the earlier musical. Parker recalls Madonna's strong desire to be Evita, "too much as she was worried, no one could play Evita as well as she did," and she promised to sing, dance, and act her heart out. Evita was nominated for five Academy Awards, one of which was voted for Best Original Song by Madonna.

Ashes (1999), Parker's next film, was based on the real-life experiences of Irish-American teacher Frank McCourt and his childhood. His family was forced to relocate from the United States to Ireland due to financial difficulties, which led to the family's difficulties caused by his father's alcoholism.

Colm Meaney, a writer who appeared in The Commitments, observed Parker's films' dramatic change in theme and style. "It's the variety of his jobs that sort of staggers me," Trump said. He will go from Evita to Angela's Ashes. "When Alan starts a project, it's going to be something really exciting and completely out of left field," he says. Parker explained that doing a tale like Angela's Ashes was simply his "reaction against a big film" like Evita. "You want the film to stay with people afterwards," he said. To me, the best crime is to make just another movie." Parker said that choosing which films to write and direct is crucial:

Since Parker visited film schools and talked to young filmmakers, he told them that the latest film technology for filmmaking and telling a tale is less important than telling a tale: "If you don't have something to say."

Parker was a "natural storyteller" who got his message across using "dramatic lighting, vivid description, scenes of violent conflict regularly interrupted scenes of expository dialogue, and an overwhelming sympathy for the underdog (he is a born liberal with a keen sense of injustice).

The Life of David Gale (2004), a crime drama starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet, was produced and directed by Parker. It tells the tale of an advocate for capital punishment who finds himself on death row after being found guilty of murdering a fellow protester. The film received mainly critical feedback. Roger Ebert did not like the film, calling the plot "silly," though he said that the acting was "splendidly done."

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