Michael Deeley

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2008

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Oscar-winning film producer Michael Deeley. Over the past 40 years he's been involved in some of the most highly acclaimed movies we've seen, including Don't Look Now, The Deer Hunter and The Italian Job. Yet his job is one that's barely understood. Neither the artistic visionary nor the star player the producer, he says, is the person who is the ramrod-figure who causes a film to be made - buying the rights to stories, hiring actors, finding locations and overseeing the production. He fell into it - he'd always thought he'd be a diplomat or a lawyer - but a casual job ended up being a career of many decades standing. He says rather modestly, "I just found I had the knack".

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) by Meat Loaf Book: Decent translation of the Koran Luxury: Two hundred cases of vintage wine.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is the film producer Michael Dilly. The Italian job,
0:31.3	Blade Runner and the Deer Hunter, are just a handful of pictures with his name in the credits,
0:36.0	and all are the sort of cultish classics that have left their mark on movie-making history,
0:42.0	yet the linchpin role of a film's producer
0:45.0	is one that is barely understood by most of us.
0:48.0	Neither the artistic visionary nor the star player.
0:51.0	The producer, he says, is the ramrod figure who causes... the for his art. When you were making the Italian job back in the 60s, it's true, isn't it, that you had a
1:05.0	fueled plane standing by on the runway in case you personally had to make a speedy exit out of the
1:10.8	country. What was that all about? We were doing a really seemingly dangerous stunt,
1:16.0	having three mini-cars jump between the roofs of two buildings.
1:20.0	And there was the risk that someone's foot was slip off the throttle and
1:24.0	ended up splattered against the wall and at that point, apparently I would have
1:28.1	been arrested as the person in charge and sort of tried to argue my way out of jail, which is not too easy in Italy apparently.
1:35.0	And of course these were the days before CGI computer generated imagery,
1:39.0	so these were cars that were really traveling in midair.
1:41.0	It's perfectly true.
1:42.0	And therefore I had you know had a quick
1:44.2	getaway plan and is it is it true also that most of the the cast who weren't
1:50.0	involved in the scene and most of the crew just simply couldn't bear to look.
1:54.0	That is right. Could you, could you bear to look? Yeah I had to look. Yeah I had to look.
	...

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