CR spoke with BAFTA and Emmy Award winning Director Norman Stone

Norman Stone

2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Amongst all of the celebrations and various TV programmes, a highly entertaining, 90 minute drama-documentary was released. Jonathan Bellamy spoke at length with the BAFTA and Emmy Award winning Director, Norman Stone.

Jonathan: You've worked with many well-known exceptional actors, including, Joss Ackland, Jonathan Price, James Fox, Lee Remmy, Dirk Bogard, Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Irons, Helen Baxendale and others. Who do you think is the best you have worked with?

Norman: What a horrible question to ask. Well it really is a difficult question because I'm on so many different shows doing so many different things. I think Eileen Atkins, who is the most wonderful actress you will ever come across; she was in Cranford. I think she is probably my favourite female actor or actress as we should say. Apart from that, do you know, I suppose I treasure the time I worked with Dirk Bogard most. I mean he's left this life now, bless him, but there was something quite exceptional about his ability to come through the camera. His eyes were the key. It's a similar thing with Jonathan Price and indeed Peter O'Toole. They are the three I'd go for; and my good friend Joss Ackland, how could I not mention him, he's great at everything. It's a rotten question to ask.

Jonathan: I know, but I thought I'd start with a hard one. It gets easier from here. You started in 1975 as the BBC's youngest producer/director at the time. Was that an advantage or a hindrance?

Norman: What for a three year old like me? I suppose in a way it was an advantage, because I'd been through about seven years of art college and film school before then. I was given the freedom suddenly; in those days you got freedom. The freedom to play around with the toolbox of television and film was tremendous, whilst still having that useful naivety and energy, so I was able to try things out. I put on the first ever morning television show for children on the BBC.

Jonathan: What was that?

Norman: That was a thing called the Sunday Gang and went out to a massive 3.5 million audience. Everyone thought no one would watch. It was just a time when you could experiment and try things out and go with it and I had a whale of a time.

Jonathan: You did a lot of Everyman documentaries back then. That must have been a good place to cut your teeth.

Norman: Yes it was and interestingly enough a lot of people cut their teeth on that, including the head of the BBC at the moment.

We used to fetch coffee for people in those days, but I suppose that time of the Everyman documentaries was the most lively documentary strand in the whole of the BBC at that time. Various worthies who went on to run BBC films and BBC Scotland and people like that would come into that department just to have the buzz of working on something that was - what was it I think one critic called it - 'it goes anywhere in the world and claims first rights for God'. That may be a strange review, but on the other hand it meant that you could go into a story and not just bounce off the superficial reasons for the activity or story you were covering, but go underneath the surface and look at the moral direction and ask deeper questions. That was always the brief, which was good.

Jonathan: That's something that is permeating through many of your productions over the years, isn't it? How important is that to you?

Norman: I am an active Christian and I believe that the spiritual side of things in life is important; how can it not be? We're only here for 70, 80 maybe 90 years and after that, what? Anyone and everyone would ask questions about that, it's just that it doesn't always come across in television these days when it's squashed between coca-cola adverts and Simon Cowell.

Jonathan: Shadowlands was a drama that you did in 1984 for the BBC on the love and grief of C.S. Lewis; it was probably the defining moment in your career winning two Baftas and International Emmy in the Prague Dior award for best Director. How did that come about?

Norman: I left the BBC to go freelance in 1980. I thought that when you get good ideas and write them down on paper, then people would pay you to make them. How naïve was that? Except in this case they did. It took them four years to get around to it. They couldn't quite see the attraction in the story about an old Oxford don that got married to a divorced Christian Jewess who got cancer, got better, got cancer and died. It isn't a very good picture when you put it like that is it? Having said that, they stuck with it and four years after I first started pestering them they said, 'Ok let's do it'. That launched my career and led on to Anthony Hopkins speech film and stage plays.