David Puttnam revived the British film industry in the 1980s. Now, he tells David Gritten, he's handing on the torch.
IT'S a fair bet that eyebrows were raised in education circles last week when the Government named members of its Standards Task Force, which aims to spread good teaching practice in the three Rs. Among the teachers, academics and education officers on the list was Sir David Puttnam, Britain's best-known film producer. Some mistake, surely?
Not at all. Puttnam, 56, calls himself a "zealot" for education. In his recent book about the film industry, The Undeclared War, he urges Britain to seize the initiative in harnessing the audio-visual industry for educational needs. He thinks that we could be world leaders in the field in the next century.
There's another reason that his appointment to an educational task force isn't illogical. Puttnam is phasing himself out of the film business. "I have three more scripts that I really like, that I want to see made," he tells me. "And that will be it.
"It's a young man's game. Unless you're prepared to believe all the bull****, there's a certain way in which you just can't do it. I've gone to Cannes for 25 years, and this year I sat on a hotel balcony watching all these kids in their twenties and thirties rushing up and down the Croisette with mobile phones, all with a sense that their next meeting could change their lives.
"If you reach a point when you know it won't change your life, you're already stepping back. The movie world ought to belong to young people. The fact that I was three or four floors up watching them says it all."
So now he is keen to move on. "The new big industry to be affected by cinema will be education. Education, intellectual copyright and the creative economy are crucial to Britain. In areas like this we're good at creating but bad at exploiting. I find these challenges more interesting and more relevant to the notion of being 60 years old than the movies."
He sees the world hurtling towards an information and education age, and worries that Hollywood will carve up this embryonic industry, much as it did with films. "If we move fast, we could become the Hollywood of education," he says. "With our national curriculum, the skills of bodies like the BBC, the Open University and the British Council, Britain could be the place where educational software is developed, finessed and marketed in a way that has never been possible in any other sector."
We talk in a hotel near Scotland's Loch Fyne, where Puttnam is producing World of Moss, a film based on a memoir by the television-industry grandee Sir Denis Forman about his idyllic upbringing and his eccentric landed family. Colin Firth plays the paterfamilias, a crackpot inventor, and the film reunites Puttnam with director Hugh Hudson, with whom he made Chariots of Fire, which triumphantly won Britain the Oscar for best film 16 years ago.
Puttnam talks about the coming information age long and earnestly, with a reverence for small details common to many a self-educated man. He left school at 16 with four O-levels, and later studied at evening classes. Since then six British universities have awarded him honorary doctorates. He wrote back to one, Bristol, asking if the award meant he would have to resit his O-levels.
Given that Puttnam still has three films to produce, an elegy for his career is premature. But it's worth recalling that in Chariots, Local Hero, The Killing Fields and The Mission he made several splendid films at a time - the mid-1980s - when Britain had no film industry to speak of.
Success catapulted him to lofty heights. He was the first European to become a studio boss, but he survived only a year at Columbia, having railed against agents, highly paid stars and producers who enjoyed cosy deals with the studio. "I forgot I wasn't American," Puttnam says now. "I was telling them how to run their business, and I was a foreigner."
In the seven years since Columbia, as an independent producer, he has made Memphis Belle and Meeting Venus, minor successes compared with his earlier movies. He was also stricken with the debilitating disease ME, which, he says grimly, "still reminds me of its presence a few times each year".
Yet in this same period Puttnam has been working behind the scenes for the Labour Party and has close friendships in the highest circles. Tony Blair and his family were guests over New Year in west Cork at one of Puttnam's houses. Rachel Kinnock, daughter of Neil and Glenys, is running the World of Moss production office.
Puttnam is fascinated by power and relishes the political process. In the 1980s he was an active SDP member. Recent Westminster gossip claimed that Blair would make him Lord Puttnam (he has a famous weakness for titles) and appoint him Minister for Films, but Puttnam sees his role as broader, if less visible. He clearly has talent as a backroom briefer: he says that the Government swallowed his vision of Britain at the hub of a creative economy "hook, line and sinker".
The projected films keeping Puttnam from retirement are: Serenade, a musical set in Las Vegas, directed by Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) and with a book by playwright William Nicholson; Fadeout, about a Czech actress at a Nazi-controlled film studio in the dying days of World War II, which is to be directed by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient); and an adaptation of a French novel acquired by Puttnam, A Very Long Engagement. "I feel real enthusiasm about them all," he says.
These three, in addition to the promising World of Moss, should ensure that Puttnam ends his film-producing career on a high note. "Hope so," he says briskly. "The thing I dread is getting on a bit and walking up and down Wardour Street, trying to collar people and saying, ΓÇÿI'm sure I've got one more film left in me.' And the younger people talking behind my back: ΓÇÿThat's David Puttnam, you know. Apparently he used to be all right once. But now - oh dear.' "
