Allan Parker

Born on Valentine’s Day, 1944, in Islington (North London), Alan William Parker comes from a very humble working-class family, which would be reflected in his later work. His father, William Leslie Parker, was an upstanding house painter, and his mother, Elsie Ellen, was a seamstress.

He discovered that his thing was the cinema almost by chance. At the age of 18, he dropped out of school and managed to get hired by an advertising agency. With tenacity, he gradually learned the trade until he was promoted to editor (copy). One day, the company was hired to shoot TV commercials, so the creative director asked him to learn the technique. He shot spots with such passion that his colleagues suggested that he dedicate himself exclusively to audiovisuals. Between 1969 and 1978 he produced more than 500 commercials, with which he won some advertising award (his Cinzano spot with Joan Collins became very popular).

Since the early 1970s, Parker has combined his work in advertising with scriptwriting, with which he intended to make his way onto the big screen. With one of them, Melody , she caught the attention of an acquaintance in the advertising world, the then photographer agent David Puttnam, who wanted to make his way in the field of production. The later producer of The Mission was impressed by Parker’s ability to capture the child’s point of view, in the story of a boy who experiences a story of initiation into love with a girl his age, to the point that both explain to him to their parents that they will get married, in the future, as soon as possible. Puttnam entrusted the realization to Waris Hussein, a television professional who was hardly lavished in the cinema, which featured the young Mark Lester , fashionable because he had been the protagonist of Oliver! shortly before.

In the same children’s vein, and again with Puttnam as producer, Alan Parker shoots his debut feature, Bugsy Malone, Al Capone’s grandson , the typical story of gangsters but played by children who, instead of shooting each other, throw pies at each other. He had a very young Jodie Foster, who was 13 years old at the time. Parker’s good hand for the musical numbers was already noticeable.

After Puttnam brought forth The Duelists , Ridley Scott ‘s debut , the producer and Alan Parker established themselves internationally with The Midnight Express , a harrowing reconstruction of the real case of Billy Hayes, an American arrested for drug possession in Istanbul, sentenced to 30 years in an inhuman prison. Puttnam and Parker entrusted the script – adapted from Hayes’s autobiographical book – to the then very young Oliver Stone , who worked on it thoroughly. Brad Davis, in his best work for the screen, embodied the protagonist. The film provoked an outcry from the Turkish government, which claimed that it offered a harrowing view of the country’s prisons, and even the real Billy Hayes went so far as to declare that his life experience had been exaggerated. But it achieved an impressive success with the public, and six Oscar nominations, of which it won those related to adapted screenplay (Oliver Stone) and soundtrack (an excellent work by Giorgio Moroder that became very popular).

Installed in the United States, the Briton directs Fame (1980) , with which he returned to the musical, but with a more realistic and somber tone than that of his first film. It sums up the quintessence of Alan Parker ‘s cinema , as it follows the journey of young people from humble origins with dreams of triumph that collide with harsh reality. It won Oscars for Best Original Score and Song (“Fame”). In addition, it inspired a famous television series, more optimistic and kind, which achieved striking success (in Spain it marked an entire generation in the 80s, served as inspiration for the native series Un paso adelante , and was reconverted in 2008 into the contest of talents “Fame, let’s dance!”).

Alan Parker turned to melodrama with the harsh After Love , which exposes the bitter consequences of divorce through the breakdown of the marriage of George ( Albert Finney ) and Faith ( Diane Keaton ), parents of four children who are devastated. The film, very heartfelt, seems plagued by an almost autobiographical sincerity, and in fact predicts the subsequent divorce (a decade later) of Parker himself, who also had four offspring with Annie Inglis (since the 1990s the filmmaker has been paired with Lisa Moran, who has worked as a producer for his films).

His next musical, Pink Floyd: The Wall , was filmed in 1982, the same year as Michael Jackson ‘s “Thriller”, with whom he shares the honor of having promoted modern video clips. With a somber tone, and more abstract than narrative, it initially follows in the footsteps of Pink, a singer in a group who cannot bear the harsh reality that surrounds his profession, which is why he ends up taking refuge in drugs. Basically, it seems that Parker has concentrated on composing suggestive images that fit very well with the music of the famous British symphonic rock band.

Also escaping from the outside world is Matthew Modine ‘s character , in Birdy , a young man who dreams of flying like the birds. But with his friend Al ( Nicolas Cage ) he will be forced to face a harsh destiny, as both are sent to the Vietnam War, which will change them forever. Angel Heart is a worthy foray into the horror genre by the filmmaker, full of disturbing images, with an impeccable performance by a fatter Robert De Niro than ever, and a surprising ending.

Gene Hackman , Frances McDormand and Willem Dafoe starred in one of Parker’s most well-rounded films, Burning Mississippi , which again recreates a real event, and in which he recovers his authorial obsessions, as it deals with idealism and its consequences. Hackman and Dafoe play two FBI agents investigating the murder of three black civil rights activists who have disappeared in the southern United States in the 1960s, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan has intensified. your activity.

In Welcome to Paradise , with its obviously ironic title, Jack’s ( Dennis Quaid ) idyllic love for Lily ( Tamlyn Tomita ), a young Japanese woman, will be put to the test by an unexpected twist of fate: the attack on Pearl Harbor, which causes the government to decide to intern citizens of Japanese origin, including Lily, in concentration camps. It did not get the expected results, which left Parker in a bad position in Hollywood…

But such a disaster did not come at all bad. She decided to return to Britain where she shot The Commitments , also among the best of his filmography. When it seemed that Parker had given his all to the musical genre, the filmmaker transmuted, adopting a style close to that of the films close to Ken Loach ‘s documentary . It centers on the disillusionment of a group of lower-class teenagers from north Dublin, who, inspired by musicians like Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin , intend to form a soul band. When asked why he plays black music, Jimmy Rabbitte ( Robert Arkins ) replies: “The Irish are the blacks of Europe. The Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. The North Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin.”

Subsequently, Alan Parker ‘s career has been losing interest. He made the unsuccessful The Spa of Battle Creek (the first disappointing film of his career), a comedy with Anthony Hopkins as the bizarre Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, creator of the cereals that bear his last name. He made a partial comeback with Evita , a more classical musical than his previous forays into the genre, which presents an Eva Perón (Madonna) as beneficent as she is ambitious, which caused a huge stir in Argentina, where a national production was launched. , Eva Perón , as a response to Parker’s work. Later he took Angela’s Ashes to the cinema, based on Frank McCourt ‘s famous memoir , which recalled the immense hardships of his family, of Irish origin, at the time of the Great Depression. Parker failed to capture McCourt’s subtle irony and self-defensive humor, which is why his film seems overly scary.

Parker seems to have closed his filmography with The Life of David Gale , where Kevin Spacey plays a university professor, an activist against the death penalty, who by a twist of fate ends up sentenced to death. An ambitious reporter ( Kate Winslet ) interviews him in jail three days after his execution. Although the story of an idealist in distress fits in with the rest of his filmography, the script ends up being too gimmicky and far-fetched, which takes the film away from the director’s best work.

Curiously, Alan Parker has never had fetish actors, and he is reluctant to repeat with the same performers. “One day I ran into John Hurt , with whom I had a very good relationship during the filming of The Midnight Express and he said: ‘You never hired me again.’ I can’t help but identify the actor with the character. After working with I can only imagine them playing that role”, he declared. “The big exception to her would be Madonna. Not because I want to work with her again, but because it would be impossible to always think of her as Eva Perón.” On the contrary, he continually repeats with the same technicians, such as the director of photography Michael Seresin, or editor Gerry Hambling. “They are the true family of the director, the ones who are with you in difficult times in the middle of nowhere. That’s when having a friend around matters.” In 2002 Alan Parker was made a Knight of the British Empire. At the beginning of 2013 it is announced that he has been awarded the BAFTA Award, for the whole of his career. And after a long illness, in 2020 death came.