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KEN RUSSELL My latest film is about a real live person, a defrocked priest who ended up being eaten by a lion whilst reading the Testament of Daniel in a lion's cage at Skegness as a stunt to raise money to launch an appeal against his unjust conviction for hanky-panky with prostitutes. Well, that's real Ken Russell material if ever I heard any...
MARK KERMODE Tonight on The Directors we meet a very British legend, a film-maker whose brilliantly flamboyant excesses have become the benchmark against which genuine artistic eccentricity - and indeed integrity - may be judged.
Ken Russell is one of the very few film-makers who can inspire heated responses from subjects which may otherwise seem staid and dated, a director whose unflinching portrait of the composer Richard Strauss led to alarmed exchanges in Parliament and whose adaptations of literary classics by DH Lawrence have proven more erotically daring than latter-day blockbusters like Basic Instinct.
Now in his seventies, Russell's attitude is still as punky as ever, as he experiments with digital video cameras and collaborates with youthful performance artists for his forthcoming underground movie Lion's Mouth. What was the first film you remember enjoying?
KR Hellzapoppin'. I saw that several times and I thought it was the greatest innovation in world cinema. But I think maybe even more than that, I enjoyed Roman Scandals with Eddie Cantor. It's the most unpolitically correct film ever made, with lovely naked women with long hair being lashed to death by hairy slave-drivers on a wedding cake.
MK What did you like about it?
KR What I've just described! The spectacle.
MK At the same time that you were enjoying these particular delights, were you also listening obsessively to music?
KR My parents never played classical music. We had the radio and I listened to Children's Hour and In Town Tonight and that was about all. It wasn't until I had been in the Merchant Navy, and was recuperating from a breakdown I'd had at sea, when I ascertained an amazing sound coming from the radio. Everything else just fell into silence and I concentrated on what was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. I didn't realise there were such sounds in the...