Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a film director. He began to learn his craft like many other distinguished members of his profession at the BBC making short films for tonight and monitor.

But soon he'd graduated to bigger stuff. In England he made a kind of loving, darling and far from the Mading crowd.

In America, his film Midnight Cowboy won two Oscars.

But he hasn't confined himself to the cinema. He's directed plays for the

RSC and the National and Operas at Covent Garden. Today he's once again working in

television with the sequel to his highly successful production of Alan

Bennett's an Englishman abroad. He is John Schlesinger. It's quite a range

John from the English small screen to international grand opera and much more in between.

I'm sure you relish it all, but do you have a favourite?

Not really.

I mean, I think it's wonderful to be able to dip one's toe in different kind of deep ends.

I hate being labeled in one particular groove.

I mean, critics like to sort of see you doing one sort of film and repeating yourself

because then they can kind of trace a line and I'm more interested in doing different

things and having different experiences because each time you go out there

whatever you're doing you're learning something and testing oneself.

But you can with you, if you like, trace align with certain performers.

For example, Alan Bates and Julie Christie of course occurred very early on in Far

from the Mading crowd and a kind of loving and then again Alan Bates reappears as Guy Burgess in the 1980s.

And with both of them I did separate tables the same year actually. I think once you've got a relationship that really works with an

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