Month: July 2015

Prominent British producer David Puttnam, best known for “Midnight Express,” “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” is set to don his producer hat again after a long hiatus with environmental activism thriller “Arctic 30,” the true tale of the activists on Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship, who were thrown into a nasty Russian jail.

Puttnam has teamed up with Saudi philanthropist and film producer Hani Farsi.

They will co-produce the pic which is based on “Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg,” the recently published first-person account by Ben Stewart, the head of media for Greenpeace, of how they took on Russia’s largest oil company that was drilling in the Arctic and the ensuing months they spent in in a jail in Murmansk.

The project, which does not have a director attached yet, will be launched by Puttnam and Farsi in Cannes Monday morning at the Plage Royale.

There will be further announcements about the pic’s creative team.

For the past eight years Farsi’s production company, Corniche Pictures, has been producing and distributing films with an underlying social commentary such as Elia Suleiman’s “The Time That Remains,” and Mira Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” He is also co-owner of French distribution and sales company Le Pacte, which have eight films at Cannes this year, including Nanni Moretti’s “My Mother” and Palestinian pic “Degrade” by Arab and Tarzan Abu Nasser.

Puttnam, a member of the House of Lords who has long been involved in campaigning for environmental causes, said in a statement that in 2005 he “had the privilege” of chairing the Committee that scrutinized and then steered though Parliament the world’s first climate change bill.

“Reluctantly, and rather late in life, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the only professional tool I have at my disposal is that of a one-time producer,” he mused. “Not really believing in coincidences, I found myself absorbing Ben Stewart’s recounting of the adventures of ‘The Arctic Thirty’ at exactly the same time as being urged by my friend and colleague, Hani Farsi, to use my former skills to highlight my environmental concerns.”

Puttnam said that the upshot of all of this is “my decision to climb back into harness and hopefully help bring to the screen this amazing story.”

Farsi said that he had been friends with Puttnam for a number of years and has worked closely with him on a number of other projects through my foundation.

“It’s been a long-held ambition of mine to find a film project that we could work on together and on reading the manuscript of Ben’s book, I knew immediately that this was it.

“Their plan was simple and peaceful – to attach a Greenpeace pod to the side of a floating offshore rig in order to prevent oil being extracted from the brutally cold Arctic waters,” Farsi added.

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‘Puttnam plays Puttnam’ is one description for the fourth in the Hallé Proms concert series at the Bridgewater Hall, on July 18.

It’s a collaboration between father and son: David Puttnam the film producer, and his son Sacha, a concert pianist, composer (including film scores) and conductor.

Music will include classic film themes from Lord Puttnam’s movies, such as Chariots Of Fire, The Killing Fields, The Mission, Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone, Local Hero and Memphis Belle, which he’s to introduce, and Sacha features as solo pianist.

Conductor is the Hallé’s own Pops maestro, Stephen Bell.

“It’s a show dad and I have done together in Ireland and elsewhere already,” Sacha Puttnam told me. “But this will be a British premiere for us. It’s lovely that we’re doing that in Manchester.

“Audiences have told us afterwards that for them it’s like re-living the movies themselves: we use dissolving stills from the films and we have a mobile camera on stage, too.

“Dad’s got some great stories from his movie career. He lifts the veil on film production and what it’s really like. It’s all a kind of traveller’s tale in film music.”

Sacha himself trained in conducting and composition at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, followed by four years at the Moscow Conservatory.

He composes and arranges for movies, advertising, television, theatre and radio as well as several groups and ensembles.

As the son of one of the world’s great film directors, one of his earliest musical experiences was watching Paul Williams playing the original score for Bugsy Malone on the piano which he was receiving his own first lessons.

He was also present when Vangelis created the theme music for Chariots Of Fire and Mark Knopfler was working on Local Hero and Cal.

He learned his skills in the dubbing theatres of Soho and Pinewood, on Howard Blake’s The Duelists, Mike Oldfield’s The Killing Fields and Ennio Morricone’s The Mission.

For BBC Radio Four he wrote the music for award-winning adaptations of Bleak House, Q&A and A Suitable Boy, and in 2005 his first classical album, Remasterpiece, was released by EMI.

His father says: “Movies and music have always been inseparable for me – probably because so many that entranced me as a child were Hollywood musicals so when I became a film producer, finding the right music was, for me, every bit as important as having the right director or cinematographer.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David and Sacha Puttnam playing together in 1977

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