Alan Parker
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2000
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Alan Parker. When Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone came out in 1975, it marked the beginning of a very successful and sometimes controversial career. Films like Midnight Express, Fame and The Commitments underline his versatility and have won him countless awards all over the world.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Nimrod by Edward Elgar Book: A giant photo album of his four children and grandchildren that goes back over twenty years. Luxury: Watercolour paint box (plus brush and pad)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:05.2 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.3 | The program was originally broadcast in 1986. |
| 0:12.0 | The cast away who was to have been the late Roy Plumley's first guest when his series |
| 0:32.2 | returned to the air last June is introduced now by Michael Parkinson. |
| 0:36.4 | Our cast away today is the British film director Alan Parker, who's made such fine films |
| 0:41.4 | as Midnight Express, Bugs in Malone, Fame, and most recently, Birdie. |
| 0:46.6 | Alan, you grew up in the forties in London and a diverse of teenage in the fifties. |
| 0:50.6 | That's sort of the tail end of the cinema generation. |
| 0:53.3 | Was the cinema much of an influence on you as a child? |
| 0:56.1 | I think so, yeah. It was very little else that we could do there. |
| 0:59.3 | I grew up in Islington and there wasn't a lot of things that we could go to anyway. |
| 1:03.9 | The thing I loved most of all was Saturday morning pictures, |
| 1:07.5 | which became sort of an institution with us. |
| 1:10.2 | And I think that was probably when I first got the bug. |
| 1:13.2 | The worst thing about it was that if you got chosen for the school football team, |
| 1:16.9 | you couldn't do Saturday morning pictures anymore. |
| 1:19.2 | But apart from that, it's my first memory of movies. |
| 1:22.1 | Do you imagine yourself in those days as being a film star? |
| 1:26.1 | Or were you also interested in directing movies? |
| 1:28.3 | No, I know, coming from Italy. |
| 1:30.0 | If you saw someone, you wanted to be a film director, they'd fall about laughing. |
... |
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