Behind the Scenes: Zardoz (Boorman, 1974) with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling

Speaks to you, his chosen ones, the done is good. In the stone head. I don't know. It is the only path and passage into the vortex. You will show me how you come to be here. Everything. My name is Zed. For Zardos, I am an exterminator. Caution, caution. Well, this is a film that you could only make after making a big hit, which was Deliverance. So because it was such a huge success, it gave me the ability to make a rather strange film. The origin of it was that, you know, I'd noticed then, and this was 1973, and I'd noticed it much more since, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And the rich have access to better medicine and they tend to live longer. So I projected that into the future, where I could imagine that the elite could extend their lives to the point where they could achieve immortality, whilst the rest of the world rather declined into a kind of new primitivism. And so I just projected that forward to see what a community of people who were going to achieve immortality, how they would behave, and how the rest of the world would fall into decline. And so that was the origins of the story. And I sat down and started to write it. And of course, inevitably, it became rather philosophical, because if these people achieved immortality, clearly there was no purpose, no point in having children, because that would just swell their numbers with their limited resources. And since they were going to live forever, they had to come to terms with a world without children. Then, extrapolating from that, would the sexual urge survive those kind of conditions? And then, taking it a step further, I questioned this whole notion of sleep. No one quite knows why we sleep. But when these patterns of life and death were broken, I suggested that they would also cease the need to sleep. And in the vortex, therefore, of these people cocooned in this society of the immortals, how they would react, how people would react to immortality and to that kind of life. And so you see that this society is gradually divided up into really three types. There's the immortals who are dealing with that process, and then there are the apathetics. They are people who found immortality impossible to endure. And the third category were those who rebelled against the whole notion of immortality and had to be disciplined. And within the society, which was highly democratic, everything was voted on all the time, continuously. And so that when transgressions occurred, people were punished by aging. So that was the basis of the story. I worked for a time for the BBC in Bristol, and my children went to a nursery school run by Bill Stair's wife, and that's how I met him. He was an artist and an art teacher, and we got on tremendously well. Bill was very neurotic and paranoid and all those wonderful things, but he's had an extraordinary mind, and I loved him. When I went to Hollywood to make Point Blank, I took him with me because Point Blank was my first colour film. I sort of had a kind of theory of colour, and I brought Bill over, and Bill supervised the colour of that film. I shot each scene in one colour so that it was actually monochromatic, and Bill kind of policed that right the way through. From then on, we would toss ideas around, and out of it came, well, first of all, the first film we really did together was Leo the Last, that he wrote with me, and then Zardoz. He's dead now, I'm afraid, but he was very funny and also had great penetration in his mind, and I asked him to help me with this project, and we worked on it together. He particularly worked on the visual aspects of it in suggesting how this vortex would look, and he worked closely with Tony Pratt, who was the designer, and so the script went through several drafts. I can hardly remember what we left out, what transpired. I think in the editing, I did quite a lot of changes. I intended it to be mysterious, really, not for it to be too explained, but in the editing process, I felt it was perhaps too obscure and put some explanations in, but the concept, really, from the beginning followed that line that I've described. I'll tell you what inspired me more than anything was Aldous Huxley's book, After Many a Summer, which is about a rich man who is determined to prolong his life and takes all sorts of devices to accomplish that. Eventually, he physically starts to turn into an ape. It's like he goes back into history. I love that book, and I suppose that was one of the things that inspired me. It was very, very difficult to get it financed, even though I had just made a hit, because people didn't understand it. The studios didn't understand it at all, and eventually 20th Century Fox decided to do it because they had new management, more adventurous, perhaps, than the other studios at that point. But still, the philosophical issues were people didn't follow, I don't think, really. A lot of people didn't anyway, and they found the film obscure. To my mind, it was simple enough, but perhaps I didn't make it clear enough, but certainly a lot of people found it perplexing. I always conceived it as an area of land which was defended by a kind of invisible wall that the outside world, the brutals from the outside could not penetrate. Then, of course, the name Zardoz derives from the Wizard of Oz. Sean Connery, who plays the brutal, who finally breaks into the vortex, he discovers how they've been manipulated by this stone head which is god-like. My idea was that I got... It was rather based on the idea of the Wizard of Oz where the wizard is just this little old man, but he's got a huge voice, a scary voice, and that's what Arthur Frayn devises, this system of controlling the outlands by having them a god to worship, which is how much of the world, much of history, people have been constrained and ruled and obeyed various gods who've been presented to them. So this was a sort of... The satirical element in the story was a kind of satire on religion. When the film opened in France, the communist newspaper asked me to go to their office and they were very nervous and agitated. There was their critic and one or two others and the editor of the paper. They said they wanted to give it a good review. They were concerned that I had based the flying head on Karl Marx and that I was making fun of Karl Marx with this head. That had absolutely never occurred to me. The sculptor who made the head based it on me. I sat there for him and he cast it. It was based on my face, not Karl Marx at all. So they obliged me to sign a letter pledging that it was not based on Karl Marx because they felt that if they gave it a good review and then afterwards I said I was making fun of Karl Marx they would look stupid. So that was how that came about. I cast Narabaghi because I admired him as an actor and that's why I chose him. The idea that he was rather young was important because, again, he was an immortal so he could be any age really. He hadn't been aged by misdemeanors and so he looked very young. He was perhaps 200 years old perhaps. To play the lead, to play Zed, I needed a physically powerful person and also an actor who could exude a certain intelligence. Sean Connery had been doing Bond and he finished doing Bond and he was finding it difficult to get cast because he was so associated with Bond that people didn't really resist him as casting him in other roles. On the other hand, I found it almost a perfect casting for me because, first of all, he had the magnificent physique and also he's a very highly intelligent man which you could see in his eyes and his face. When he came over in this house here where I live and he stayed in the house while we were preparing the film and he's a marvellous raconteur. He's a wonderful guest. It was a pleasure to have him in the house and we ate dinner every night and we drank a bottle of wine or two and Sean understood this piece. It's interesting that none of the actors that I cast in the film ever really questioned it. The only thing that Sean was concerned about was his name. The Americans say Z and we say Zed. He said, what is my name? Is it Z or is it Zed? I said, no, it's Zed. Actors are so instinctive and imaginative that they never ask those or very rarely do they ask these fundamental questions like, what is this film for? What is it saying? They enter it and they just depended on me to look after them and support them. It was a very joyful shoot. I staged it here in the Wicklow Hills where I live which is itself a kind of magical place. Here I'm surrounded by marvellous trees many of which I've planted. Not only an hour away is a major city of Dublin but whilst you're here you couldn't imagine that you were that close to a city. This in a way is a kind of vortex in itself. Perhaps living here is what probably inspired the idea I don't think I'm immortal though. I'm 82 but I have a great sense of mortality. I've always been very concerned about colour because the way that different colours have decayed from the retina at different rates and you have to be very careful about it in a film that you're not overloading the audience with colour that distracts from the story and the compositions. In Zardoz, in Point Blank it was a monotone. Each scene was all in a single colour. In terms of Zardoz, Geoffrey Unsworth had devised this method of colour photography Up until Geoffrey, cameramen had lit colour in the same way as they lit black and white which is where you use light to differentiate the different planes. Geoffrey revolutionised it by shooting this with soft reflected light allowing the colours to separate the planes. He used a certain amount of diffusion and it was very complicated the way he did it and very difficult to achieve but what it gave you was a pastely set of colours which were soft and easy on the eye, very beautiful. Recently when I was in America I was promoting my film Queen and Country and I was addressing different groups and every time Zardoz was mentioned there would be applause. This perplexed me and my perplexity was increased when 20th Century Fox called me and said they were going to restore it and I said, well why are you doing that? They said, well there's a great deal of interest in this film now. It seemed to me anyway that if you projected the current situation of the world and projected it forward with all the innovations of technology with better medicine that you would reach the same conclusion that I came to and that's what I put on the screen.