Don Boyd, a TV and film director and producer who has been a creative powerhouse at the heart of the British film industry since the 1970s, stars in the latest podcast from the Rye Arts Festival.
The ninth weekly podcast features the Scot, who trained as an accountant before quickly switching career by enrolling in the London Film School. Cutting his teeth on the BBC’s iconic science magazine Tomorrow’s World, he moved into commercials, working on ads for Shell and Coca-Cola among others.
And then film, setting up his own production company which championed and revitalised British film in the 1970s, with a range of productions from Derek Jarman’s “The Tempest” to Julien Temple’s “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle”.
Honky Tonk in Hollywood
Don moved to Hollywood in the early 1980s and successfully produced John Schlesinger’s “Honky Tonk Freeway”, but after a couple of years was back in the UK, where he has remained ever since, producing, writing, directing and teaching film.
We hear about “Aria”, his multi-director (Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Goddard, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell and Nicholas Roeg among others) film, which brought opera to the screen in a way never seen before.
Don’s bullet-pointed biography runs to six pages of A4, but the essentials of a packed career and life are boiled down to a fascinating half-hour conversation which goes live on RyePod at 9am this Friday, July 3.
RyePod is available on all the major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify, and to see the full list, just go to anchor.fm/ryepod
Image Credits: Hilary Boyd .