The maestro's mission: David Puttnam on his legacy, the left, and the future of film

Spielberg, seated behind him and whose cheery face is visible in a framed photograph of the scene in Puttnam’s cosy and stylish office, was entirely correct.

Underneath this photo is another, this one holding the actual Oscar envelope. And underneath that again, another frame one displaying the proverbial winning ticket.

“I hadn’t had my hair cut and if you see me walking up, I’m constantly brushing my hair back, trying to look respectable,” Puttnam, now a sprightly 82, continues, with a shake of his head. 

It was a moment of triumph, and looking back, he needn’t have worried — his hair looked great.

The movie in question was Chariots of Fire, and while that win was surely a great highlight of a long and storied career, it wasn’t a moment in splendid isolation.

The aforementioned office, set by the banks of the River Ilen in West Cork and behind a door which bears a sign saying ‘Professeur’, has a shelf almost sagging under the weight of various statuettes, including a team of BAFTA awards.

The walls are covered with various accolades, alongside photos from Puttnam’s career and some pictorial tributes to his late Dad. 

But the room, small as it is, also has four screens, including a huge TV facing his desk — the place from where the filmmaker still connects with the world, on those occasions when he isn’t flying directly somewhere else on the globe.

The day after we speak he is due in Singapore to meet with the government there about his other great passion, education. 

And by the time you read this, he will be back, safely ensconced in his home in Skibbereen, and planning his own visits to the Cork International Film Festival, of which he is a patron and supporter.

Puttnam’s career, as he describes it, is as much about the business of making movies as it is about the magic of what appears on the screen. As for that Oscar win, he describes the whole situation as “a miracle”.

“People forget,” he muses, momentarily lost in thought. “A film that almost should never have been made. What was it doing being made? Really, men in white shorts, running around? Madness.” 

But he still delights in the quirks of the cinematic cycle — some genres moving from raging popularity before fading into the background, those unexpected hits and inexplicable flops. “Movies are pretty amazing,” he says fondly.

And so Puttnam will be there at various points in this year’s festival in Cork. 

'THE ARTS IN IRELAND ARE A DIFFERENTIATOR'

He begins by praising festival director, Fiona Clark, who faced some knotty difficulties in expanding this year’s schedule, sparked in part by concerns prior to last summer that a regular key venue, the Gate Cinema, would not be ready in time as it gets refurbished.

“I met in July with Fiona and it all looked pretty worrying,” he says. “The worry bit was ‘where?’ We literally didn’t have a venue. I think she has done [an] incredible [job]. It struck me that there are more movies than ever, and more events than ever. I’ll be in and out three times, there are a couple of panel discussions. She is amazing, she is a force of nature.”

Puttnam is also a supporter of the recently opened West Cork Film Studios, located nearby outside Skibbereen, and is optimistic that it can snare a TV series and also act as a training base. 

He is a passionate advocate for cinema, citing An Cailín Ciúin as just the latest example of an Irish success story from a sector of the arts which can — at times — look a little neglected.

“The arts in Ireland are a differentiator,” he says. “Ireland is now the only English language country in Europe. I’m not sure people have realised yet what an extraordinarily useful thing that is, if it’s handled right.” 

He also sees the cultural renaissance of the Irish language as hugely positive, but warns that at a time of continuing concern over the spiralling costs of major infrastructural projects and the nuts and bolts of the cost of living, the arts should not be sacrificed. 

He refers to a weekly cinema club in a church in Baltimore, which will soon play host to Paul Laverty, who wrote many of Ken Loach’s films, as just one example of the Irish grá for movie storytelling.

“I think, personally, that is an incredibly precious thing, so to jeopardise that uniqueness by not investing fully in the arts....”

He queries why the BBC no longer has a programme dedicated to cinema, and why media generally don’t pay as much attention to the movies as they should.

His own perfectly-appointed office complex has a room stuffed with DVDs, which he uses to cull clips for various educational projects. 

Chariots, Local Hero, which he also produced, The Commitments — they’re all there, while another wall of shelves has CDs of music organised by genre and alphabetically.

But don’t get the impression this means Puttnam is analogue in a digital world. Quite the opposite.

“AI fascinates me,” he says. While the world of cinema grapples with Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT, Puttnam is exploring how it can be used to enhance education. 

“If you use it well, what it requires is that you are much more precise in the questions you ask. Get your question wrong and it will give you a distorted answer. The next thing is: what do you do with the answers? I don’t think we should be fearful of it if we use it as a tool. We should be fearful of it if we see it as an answer.”

He plays a recording of a short speech he recently delivered at an education conference in Switzerland, in which he used a clip from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons to make a point to the audience. 

Gene Morgan, played by Joseph Cotton, is investing in automobiles, and at a party, he is upbraided by another character over the crassness, noise and nuisance factor of that trade. 

Gene comes back with an answer which says, yes, all you say may be true — but the automobile is here to stay. 

Puttnam had told the audience in Switzerland to listen to the dialogue but instead of thinking about cars, to instead think about Artificial Intelligence — a masterclass in making a movie clip speak to a larger debate.

You see, he says, it’s all tied together — how the teachers of the future will find ways to marry the online and virtual world with the traditions of the classroom, in the same way that he and his peers, in the mid-90s, suddenly saw celluloid, the lifeblood of cinema to that point, replaced almost overnight by the digital revolution.

He sees these links everywhere and his life has been one of “connectivity”, he says, from his night school year of studying copyright law, priming him for all that legal wrangling when it came to making movies, to his time as a Labour Peer in the House of Lords, linking to his work on climate and education. 

As usual, there is a cinematic analogy — this time the ingenious collage of documentary maker Adam Curtis, he knits together apparently disparate source material to show us something new about the world.

'IF I DON'T, WHO WILL?'

There is certainly something professorial about him, as the sign on his office door indicates, but also something of both an optimist and a hard-nosed realist; a man who argues that he was “appalling” at running a studio because he wasn’t a manager.

So he hopes the UK Labour Party can turn around what he sees as the mess of Conservative rule while fearing that the election after next across the water will be pitched as an unedifying battle over the type of migration that will escalate due to climate change. 

Back here, he has words of praise for Micheál Martin, but also his local TD, Holly Cairns. He recalls a conversation with her, before she even ran for council when he asked her whether she wanted to send herself down that road. 

“Her answer was brilliant,” he says: ‘If I don’t, who will? And who can I then blame if nothing changes?’

A long-time resident of West Cork, Puttnam says he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else — and he’s been around. 

As we chat, photos of his Dad, Len, peer out from the wall — pictures of Puttnam’s father with Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. It was no ordinary life, to the extent where Puttnam, born in London, says he didn’t really meet his father until World War II was over.

“I loved him from day one,” he says. Some of his own first memories, as “a genuine blitz baby”, are those of air raid sirens. Maybe it put everything that followed into perspective, or as he describes it, “it is definitely a filter”.

And maybe that’s why he also seems to be propelled forward, still restless, still flying off around the world to contribute to the issues about which he is most passionate — education, politics, and still, enduringly, cinema.

He has a private cinema in another part of his house, and the movies under consideration by the Academy are now coming into his purview. 

Directors, actors, writers, producers, like he once was — their movies are being scrutinised ahead of next year’s awards, all the way down here just outside Skibbereen, a link in the chain which will end with some other soul, maybe even someone having a bad hair day, clasping that Oscar statue.