Lord Mr Ford- a 1976 interview with Derek Ford

A rare interview with British sex film director Derek Ford, published in the french magazine 'Sex Stars System' in 1976, and here translated (occasionally awkwardly) into English for the first time.

This is the first time that Derek Ford, an English filmmaker, has been interviewed by a French newspaper. I went to London for a multi-hour interview with Ford, whose latest film, "Sex Express," is currently playing in Paris.
Ford's films are comedies in the purest British tradition of "The Lavender Hill Mob" or "The Knack," but seasoned with modern eroticism. Imagine "Kind Hearts and Coronets" or "Whiskey Galore" with a hardcore twist, and you have "Sexplorer" and "Sex Express."

S.S. Can you tell us how you got your start in film? Have you made films for television?

D.F. Yes, but I started with radio. I wrote plays for the wireless. when I was seventeen. After my military service, I decided to pursue a career in film. Since I was an accountant, I was put in the accounting department. But I wanted to be in production. I got a job as a clackman (at twenty-five, I must have been the oldest clackman in the studios). Then I did a bit of everything—boom operator, assistant cameraman, assistant grip, assistant director before becoming production manager and finally director. My first film was partly shot in Paris, but the most extraordinary was my second. I had a crew of Swedish technicians and the actors were Spanish. Completely opposite temperaments, with constant arguments, me as referee. I almost had a nervous breakdown, and for a while, I got fed up with directing films. I started writing screenplays again...

S.S. Not for long. You started again in 1968...

D.F. In 1968, I created my own company, in which I was both director and producer.

S.S. Censorship, whether during filming or editing, do you think about it?

D.F. Censorship exists in England, and so you have to accept it. When I make a film, I have certain responsibilities towards my shareholders who have invested funds in the company. But my films aren't only intended for the English market. There's France, the United States, etc., and if certain scenes have to be highly erotic, I shoot them anyway.
As for France, I can say that we in England sensed, even before the French producers, that censorship controls would be abolished.
That's why we had prepared a hardcore film for the French market, which was ready when the right time came.

S.S. What was the title of this?

D.F. "Keep It Up Jack" The film was shot in England for the French and American markets. It was a success. The film was also screened in London, but the French version was 25 minutes longer.

S.S. Do French films have to be cut when they're screened in England too?

D.F. Yes, foreign films are censored in England, but that's not the case for mine.
I shoot a scene by adding an erotic piece for a foreign country. A hardcore scene in one of my films is an integral part of the sequence. For example, in "Sex Express," I shot two completely different scenes, one for France and the other for England. The French version of "Sex Express" cannot be seen in England, at least for the moment.

S.S. - Tell us about your actresses. When you're preparing a film, do you immediately think of a certain actress?

D.F. - Sometimes during the shooting of my films, I think that I'm the one creating the star, and once the film is finished, she disappears. This is because every time I sit down and write a script, the actress I needed (and we've always had very good actresses in our films) has, as if by magic, turned up ready-made. This is exactly what happened, for example, with Heather Deeley (the star of "Sex Express"). Often the girls I choose don't have much film experience and have only played a few supporting roles. What do I look for in an actress? It's simple.
Naturalness and intelligence. I can't stand silly women. And another thing: I would never give a role to a woman I wouldn't invite to dinner with out on the town. So I impose my tastes. And I would never star in one of my films a girl I wouldn't want to be seen with in public.

S.S. Are your scripts very precise? How much room do you give to improvisation?

D.F. I almost always write my scripts myself and don't improvise afterward.

S.S. What do you prefer to film: a classic love scene, a scene between two girls, or an orgy?

D.F. No preference. I'm only concerned with the success of the scene, which must be sensual and erotic, but also intelligent and have its place in the dramatic structure of the script. I don't have a preference because the end of each scene is dictated, so to speak, by my personal dynamism. Everything follows, and when I'm shooting, I don't want to have relationships with the actresses. I want to remain calm and offstage. So I can't have a preference. I always put myself in the audience's shoes and do my best to excite them. To do that, I have to remain cool and detached.

S.S. And politics? Do you take that into consideration when you're filming? I think, for example, that Pasolini's films contained quite intense erotic scenes, but also left-wing politics.

D.F. No politics! I don't think politics can have a place in my films. My only policy, if you can call it political, is to never distort the truth. I mean, I try to tell a story the way I think it should be told. If it turns out to be politically right, left, or center, I don't care, as long as it's true. Obviously, you can't always avoid politics because politics is life, and cinema is precisely about life. I said that you should never distort the truth, and this naturally applies to scenes of love and eroticism. You should never distort sexuality.

S.S. What is your favorite of your films?

D.F. It's a difficult question because I have preferences for certain scenes in almost every script I've shot, while I don't find any of my films perfect. Currently, I prefer the film I'm currently shooting.

S.S. And directors? Do you have a favorite director?

D.F. I'll tell you a story about Just Jaeckin, the director of "Emmanuelle" and "The Story of O." I tried to buy the rights to film "The Story of O" in 1968.
I didn't succeed because I looked for the money here in London. It wasn't the right time or place. I saw "Emmanuelle" and I must say that, except for a few scenes, I found it average. Then I went specially to Paris to see "The Story of O," which hasn't yet been shown here in London. Since I really wanted to make this film myself, I was prejudiced against the one who had succeeded where I had failed, and, moreover, I knew that it was fashionable in Paris to disparage this film and that the critics hadn't been very kind to Jaeckin. Well, I found "The Story of O" a very great film. It's magnificent, and I have a lot of admiration for Just Jaeckin. I think he did a very, very good job because the book is very difficult to film. I know this because I spent about six months racking my brains over this problem. Maybe I found that, which is also what Pauline Réage, or whoever wrote "Story of O," did. The book doesn't contain objective descriptions of sadism. All of that is left to the reader's imagination. You're presented with a situation and left to your imagination to fill in the details. In my opinion, Just Jaeckin paid the same compliment to his viewers.
The film was so good because I was aware of all the problems Jaeckin had to solve.

S.S. He told me, when I interviewed him, that it was a love story.

D.F. That's right. I think Just Jaeckin and I are the only two people in the world who understand "Story of O." Of course, it's a love story that has nothing to do with sadism. I wrote this in 1968 in a report I wrote for some producers I was trying to interest in the book. It's a love letter addressed to an imaginary lover. If the lover isn't imaginary, he's a very lucky man. Just Jaeckin understood my heroine; he understood that it's not a tragic story. I said the book was a love letter. But it's very difficult to make a film out of a love letter, first of all because the director is obliged to concretize a fantasy. Indeed, there is no objective description of the characters in The Story of O. I know this because I spent a lot of time looking for a description of O. But, no, you have to imagine her. And as soon as you add flesh and bones to a creature of the imagination, you disappoint most people who had imagined her differently. Because the ideal woman, for one person, can be black and tall, 5'7", and for another person she can be tall, 5'11", and blonde. The critics didn't understand any of this at first, I imagine, because they didn't even bother to read the book....

S.S. They said the film was insignificant... Not enough violence, torture...

D.F. Listen to me. If Just Jaeckin had made a film like that, he would have addressed five percent of the world's population, and the other 95 percent would have taken his work as the ramblings of a madman. Instead, he addressed the same audience Pauline Réage had chosen and resolved the various problems admirably. If I'm the only one who thinks Just Jaeckin made a great film, then I hope someone will tell him.

S.S. What's the relationship between your private and professional life?

D.F. None. I have only one life, and I spend most of it making films, preparing for filming, or resting after finishing a film. All my time is taken up by cinema. My wife works with me, and even my children are interested in my films.

S.S. Do you think that today, in the midst of the pornographic trend, a striptease can still play an interesting erotic role?

D.F. But how! Even something that's much less erotic than a striptease. A good director can create a very erotic scene with two people looking at each other from one side of the table to the other. To think otherwise is to forget that there were very erotic films long before the arrival of pornography. In theater, since the Greeks, there have often been very erotic situations without resorting to pornographic realism. To say that you can't create something very sensual without resorting to hard core is to say that ballet can't be erotic when we know that often the opposite is true. But there has never been a hard core ballet. At least, I've never seen it. I would like to make a film of a ballet because I think that ballet is one of the most erotic shows you can see.

S.S. And you'll put hardcore in it?

D.F. Of course, if necessary. The difficulty is that in England, no one wants anything to do with short films.
Otherwise, I would have loved to make a twenty-minute film of a ballet. My wife, Valerie, is a ballet dancer, and we even wrote a screenplay about it together. But there's no market...

S.S. Maybe in France.

D.F. Our screenplay is called "The Orgy." Can you imagine a film about ballet like the classic "Red Shoes" shot without false modesty?

S.S. What are your tastes, your hobbies in life, outside of cinema?

D.F. Like shrimp fishing? No, no. I am completely absorbed in cinema and have no other interests except, of course, my family.

S.S. But then, if you had to stop making films, what would you do?

D.F. I don't know. I could write screenplays like I used to. But assuming the film and television industries ceased to exist tomorrow, I don't know what I would do. I suppose I could write a novel. In fact, I'd like to write a novel, but I've always been too taken up with cinema to do so.

S.S. Would you like to tell us about your plans?

D.F. I start shooting my new film here in England in January. It will be something new, something different. Indeed, the film will examine the relationship between a seventeen-year-old boy and a call girl ten years his senior.

S.S. Like Chéri, by Colette. If only in the novel the woman was a fifty-year-old hen and not a twenty-eight-year-old girl...

D.F. No, no. My story is completely different. It's modern and belongs to 1976.

S.S. Its title?

D.F. "Games."

S.S. When will the film be finished?

D.F. - I hope in May to be presented at the Cannes Film Festival. Then it will be dubbed into French and will be available to Parisian audiences in the fall.

S.S. Are all your films dubbed in French or only some?

D.F. No, no. They're all dubbed in French. I don't want subtitles.

S.S. And after "Games"?

D.F. In May 1976, I'll be leaving for Turkey to shoot a film there. This film will be called "A Turquoise Garden." It is also a psychological film—a study of the relationship between two women and a man. The two women fighting over the man are his own daughter and his second wife. You may have noticed that women always play an important role in all my films. I believe this is one of the reasons for their success. In so many films today, the woman has a secondary role, with the two heroes fighting over her in close-up...

S.S. That's true. And yet in the great classical plays, in Shakespeare, for example, women had very important roles.

D.F. As for erotic films, especially here in England, the woman is merely an "object," as the members of the Women's Liberation Movement say. You currently have on the screens "Confessions of a Window Cleaner", "Adventures of a Taxi Driver" and so on. It's always a story about a man who sleeps with ten women. I think this happens because producers think that a film with only one woman would be boring... If they really believe this, it means that their own wife, the one they live with, bores them. I, on the contrary, believe that the relationship between a man and a woman must always be alive. So an erotic film with a woman in the foreground isn't just good politics, it's also very profitable economically. After all, if a man asks a woman to accompany him to the movies, she'll be the one choosing the show. And women like my films because I give them intelligent roles.

S.S. You were saying that, generally, erotic films are aimed at men and that they feature robust actors making love in every way and in every imaginable position... Can we consider making a pornographic film for women?

D.F. A simple "sex object" can be thoroughly examined, and she becomes very interesting. I'm never afraid to have a single woman in my films and tell the story of her sexual adventures instead of the sexual adventures of a man with a dozen cardboard women.

S.S. It seems that producers of erotic films are aimed at a male audience and think that women aren't interested in eroticism... But is that true? After all, women make up fifty percent of the world's population.

D.F. Women are interested in eroticism, even if they don't make up fifty percent of the audience for erotic cinema.

S.S. I conducted a survey on this subject here and in France.
Women often visit erotic films with their husbands or boyfriends.
They're happy to go if the film is serious with a woman playing an interesting and leading role, not that of a doll who is there to allow men to demonstrate their sexual prowess.

D.F. Of course, but it won't be simply the same thing as for men; I mean, a woman making love in all positions with a dozen men. Eroticism in women depends much more on the realm of imagination, and therefore they want to see an intelligent woman on screen with whom they can identify. If they see a call girl on screen, they will identify with her. That's why "Story of O" is a film about women in search of sensations. All women identify with "O." And I say that if my films are successful with women, it's because they can identify with the star.

S.S. Do women like to dream?

D.F. Dreaming with their eyes open. It's basic psychology. Everyone knows it, but filmmakers often forget it. There are even some basic fantasies among women, such as the knight in armor, or the sheik, who kidnaps the woman, puts her on his horse, and rides off with her. In these intimate dreams, the woman must never be held responsible for what happens to her. She must be taken by force, raped, by a man stronger than her. This allows her to believe that whatever happens to her can never be blamed on her. You know the story told about the German advance in France during the war of 1870. In a certain village, the women shuddered as they heard the terrible stories of rape by enemy soldiers and wondered what they would have done in a similar situation. Finally, the village was taken by the Germans, but they, more interested in pursuing the enemy than sleeping with their wives, continued their advance. The women, alone and disappointed, complained because they had been told stories of rape that weren't true...

S.S. This is, in essence, the story of "The Heroic Fair" by Jacques Feyder. When the Spanish advanced on a small town in the Netherlands in the 16th century, the good bourgeois were terrified of losing their property and their lives, while their wives shuddered with pleasure at the thought of being raped.

D.F. - Yes, but women don't want rape—rape is a horrible thing in life. They want it in their imagination. That's how a woman will go to the movies and identify with the heroine and her suffering and pleasures. She'll go to see an erotic film, if it's well done, and she'll identify with a whore, a fickle woman making love to her lover in front of her husband, or with an innocent, defenseless young girl raped by a brute. If this kind of film is made with taste and intelligence, the director can even spice it up with hardcore material, the woman won't be offended. On the contrary, it will help her imagination, her fantasy.
But I say that the simply dirty film, the sex film, is over. The same thing happened in America and France. All censorship was abolished, and for a few months, audiences flocked to theaters to see anything as long as it involved buttocks. But not anymore. Today, American audiences only go to see erotic films if they are well-conceived and well-directed. That's what I try to do, while giving the woman an interesting role, and if I've had some success, I don't think I'm flattering myself by saying it's due to observing these few rules.