THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2015
PAGE 7A
John Boorman catches up with alter ego in
QUEEN AND COUNTRY/BBC WORLDWIDE
SUSAN KING
Love during wartime: Caleb Landry Jones and Tamsin Egerton
Tribune News Service
John Boorman has made a lot of tough-nosed, violent and demanding films, including the 1967 film noir "Point Blank" with Lee Marvin, the Oscar-nominated 1972 thriller "Deliverance," starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, and "Excalibur," the visceral 1981 dramatic fantasy based on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
But the 82-year-old British filmmaker showed his softer side in "Hope and Glory", the charming Oscar-nominated 1987 comedy-drama based on his own experiences growing up during the World War II Blitz. "Hope and Glory" ended with his 9-year-old alter ego, Bill, rejoicing that his school had been destroyed by a wayward German bomb.
Boorman always had in mind to do a sequel. But it took him nearly 27 years to make "Queen & Country." The comedy-drama follows the adventures of the now-18-year-old Bill (Callum Turner) as he begins his two-year conscription in the army during the Korean War.
One reason Boorman waited so long was because there was an issue with his attorneys, who thought that because the characters in the film were based on real people, "they might be offended and might want to sue us," Boorman said over the phone from New York.
"I'm talking about the older characters. But by this time, they are probably all dead now or too old to go to the trouble of suing."
The England Boorman depicts in "Queen & Country" is far different from the Great Britain at the outset of "Hope and Glory."
"The older soldiers who had been through the war were still hanging on to the idea of empire and imperial Britain," said Boorman. "For the younger ones, it was clear to us everything was going to change. The British Empire was the biggest empire the world had ever known, and within a few years that was all gone."
it was a massive change for the country _ and a good one, as far as Boorman was concerned. "England became a much better country. The class system, which you see in the film, was much weakened, and in a few years time, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were around."
Like Bill in the film, Boorman was very much an observer at 18. He was a movie buff _ his family lived near Shepperton Studios _ and he noted, "I felt very much at the time if you made movies, you could make things come out much better than they do in life."
Boorman has said that "Queen & Country" is his swan song, but he's beginning to change his mind. "I am tempted to do another one."
"Queen & Country" producer Kieran Corrigan, who runs the Irish production company Merlin Films with Boorman, described the filmmaker as tremendously focused.
"When he really decides to do something, he puts a phenomenal amount of effort into it and thought and consideration," he said. "When he's making a movie, it's like a full, absolute commitment. He garners tremendous loyalty. When you work with John,you are always a friend."
Boorman, who lives in County Wicklow, Ireland, has had a lot of friends during his long career.
After making documentaries and drama films for the BBC, Boorman started to get offers to do feature movies.
Enter producer David Deutsch, said Boorman, who "was always encouraging me to do a film."
"Eventually, he came to me and said, 'If you do a film with the Dave Clark Five, you can have carte blanche and do whatever you like."
The result, the 1965 musical romance "Having a Wild Weekend" known as "Catch Us If You Can" in England starring the red hot British pop group, impressed critics, including the New Yorker's powerful Pauline Kael.
"She praised it much more than it deserved, and as result of that I started getting offers from Hollywood," noted Boorman.
Boorman was sent the script to "Point Blank" at the same time as Oscar-winning actor Marvin, who was in London to make "The Dirty Dozen."
"We met and Lee said to me, 'What do you think of the script?' I said, 'I think it's really feeble.' He said, 'Well. I agree with you, so what are we talking about?' I said the character is interesting. We met a number of times, and I sort of wove this story together. Eventually, Lee said, 'I will do this flick with you on one condition.' He picked the script up and he threw it out the window."
Fossil sheds light on turning point in human
MALCOM RITTER Associated Press
NEW YORK - A fragment of jawbone found in Ethiopia is the oldest known fossil from an evolutionary tree branch that eventually led to modern humans, scientist reported Wednesday.
The fossil comes from very close to the time that our branch split away from more ape-like ancestors best known for the fossil skeleton Lucy. So it gives a rare glimpse of what very early members of our branch looked like.
At about 2.8 million years old, the partial jawbone pushes back the fossil record by at least 400,000 years for our branch, which scientists call Homo.
It was found two years ago at a site not far from where Lucy was unearthed. Africa is a hotbed for human ancestor fossils, and scientists from Arizona State University have worked for years at the site in northeast Ethiopia, trying to find fossils from the dimly understood period when the Homo genus, or group, arose.
Our species, called Homo sapiens, is the only surviving member of this group.
The jaw fragment, which includes five teeth, was discovered in pieces one morning by Chalachew Seyoum, an Ethiopian graduate student at Arizona State. He said he spotted a tooth poking out of the ground while looking for fossils.
The discovery is described in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Science.
Arizona State's William Kimbel, an author of the pape, said it's not clear whether the fossil came from a known early species of Homo or whether it reveals a new one. Field work is continuing to look for more fossils at the site, said another author, Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The fossil is from the left lower jaw of an adult. It combines ancestral features, like a primitive chin shape, with some traits found in later Homo fossils, like teeth that are slimmer than the bulbous molars of Lucy's ilk.
Despite that mix, experts not involved in the paper said the researchers make a convincing case that the fossil belongs in the Homo category.
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The find also bolsters the argument that Homo arose from Lucy's species rather than a related one, said Susan Anton of New York University.
It's the first time that anything other than isolated teeth have turned up as a possible trace of Homo from before 2.3 million years ago, he said.
Also on Wednesday, another research team reported in a paper released by the journal Nature that the lower part of the face of Homo habilis, the earliest known member of the Homo branch, was surprisingly primitive. That came from reconstruction of a broken jaw that was found 50 years ago.
And they present good evidence that it came from a creature that was either at the origin of Homo or "within shouting distance," said Bernard Wood of George Washington University.
"This fills a gap, but it hasn't yet given us a complete skeleton. It's not Lucy." Delson said. "This is always the problem. We always want more."
The new paper's analysis is first-rate, but the fossil could reveal only a limited amount of information about the creature, said Eric Delson of Lehman College in New York.
SOMEBODY SOMEONE this is a job
species.
Analysis indicates the jaw fossil came from one of the earliest populations of Homo, and its age helps narrow the range of possibilities for when the first Homo species appeared, Kimbel said. The fossil dates to as little as 200,000 years after the last known fossil from Lucy's
The finding means the evolutionaryary step from the Ethiopian jaw to the jaw of Homo habilis is "not so large," said an author of the Nature study, Fred Spoor of University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
"There's no head, there's no tools, and no limb bones. So we don't know if it was walking any differently from Australopithecus afarensis", which was Lucy's species, he said.