Paul Morrison (director)

Paul Morrison (born 1944, London) is a British film director, screenwriter and psychotherapist.

Early life and education[edit]

Morrison was born in London to a family of ethnic Eastern European Jews from Ukraine and the USSR. They had changed their surname to assimilate to England.

He made his first film while attending University College School^[1] as a boy. He used Super 8 film to shoot a Keystone Cops-inspired silent comedy, The Doubry Film, with his friends acting. He recalls it as his most joyous experience as a filmmaker.

Upon leaving school Morrison studied economics at Churchill College, Cambridge, where he was in the same cohort as Tony Atkinson and graduated with a first-class degree in 1966.^[1] While at Cambridge, Morrison tried acting but found he was more suited to directing. He directed a number of plays and short plays, including Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, with Robert Cushman as Goldberg.

Afterwards he attended the Royal College of Art Film School on their one-year course (1966-67). The following year he accepted a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University's Kennedy Graduate School to study the Sociology of Underdevelopment. While there he became a part-time projectionist with the Ivy Film Club; he could view and analyse films overnight before they had to be returned.

He also worked with Josh Waletzky on a drama film about a rent strike. He worked with Morgan Fisher on several highly regarded conceptual films, including The Director and His Actor Look at Footage....

Career[edit]

After Morrison returned to London, he started work with the BBC, making short films for the nightly current affairs programme 24 Hours. He moved up to longer pieces, working with a young John Humphrys on an expose of conditions at Ashford Remand Centre. He made a series of films with Kenneth Allsop on ecological issues. He hired the first black presenter to make a film exposing the systematic undervaluing of black children’s scholastic ability.

In 1969 Morrison made a fly-on-the-wall documentary with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was broadcast to coincide with the launch of their War is Over/Give Peace a Chance poster campaign. That film was later honoured by Broadcast magazine as one of the great moments in the first fifty years of television. It has recently been reissued in the United States on Amazon Prime.

In 1970 Morrison left the BBC and went to work with a Community Arts Project, Inter-Action, where he led the films division. He encouraged young people and community groups to make their own films, using the newly available portable Sony and Akai cameras. He also made experimental participatory films with Geoff Hoyle, an actor, comic and mime.

While still at Inter-Action, Morrison was sought out by producer Irving Teitelbaum from Kestrel Films. He directed several sponsored films for Kestrel, notably Like Other People, about sexuality and disability. It won the Grierson Award for best UK documentary in 1972. It was shown twice on the BBC in the Man Alive slot and became a touchstone for the emerging disability movement.

At Inter-Action the tragic death of a colleague resulted in Morrison seeking help to face difficult feelings. For the first time he sought psychotherapy and to learn its deep and lasting value.

Paul left Inter-Action to become a founder member of the Newsreel Collective, helping make campaign and educational films. These included Divide and Rule – Never! against racism, and True Romance etc. about relationships and sexual preference. The script for the latter was workshopped with the young people who performed in it. Divide and Rule – Never! won first prize at Oberhausen. True Romance etc! was runner-up for the Grierson award.

During the same period, Morrison was deeply engaged in the nascent men's movement. It explored redefining men’s roles and masculinity in response to women’s liberation. He published a volume of poems celebrating and exploring the birth of his daughter, Pregnant Fatherhood. He also wrote for and helped to produce Achilles Heel, a radical men’s magazine.

With the advent of Channel Four, Morrison was able to direct three documentary series close to his heart.

About Men… explored issues of masculinity via a group of Coventry men. They came together once a week with the filmmakers to examine their conceptions of what it was to be a man.

A Change of Mind opened up the world of psychotherapy. It included moving sequences of therapeutic sessions filmed live. It mixed old and newer schools of psychotherapy.

A Sense of Belonging was about issues of British-Jewish identity. It featured dozens of ordinary and extraordinary Jews who had previously been unknown. This series was produced through APT Film and Television, which Morrison founded with Andy Porter and Tony Dowmunt.

In this period, he also directed a feature documentary From Bitter Earth: Artists of the Holocaust, for BBC. It recounted artists who bore witness, at the risk of death, to the ghettoes and death camps of World War II.

Morrison wrote and directed his first fiction feature film, Solomon & Gaenor. It also explored issues of Jewish identity, as it was a love story between a young Orthodox Jewish man and Welsh woman, set in 1911, during anti-Jewish riots in the Welsh valleys. Morrison worked to raise funds for the film.

During this extended period, he also completed his modular training at Spectrum Centre for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy. He began to practise as a therapist.

Solomon & Gaenor starred Ioan Gruffud and Nia Roberts. It was shot in 1998, released in 1999, and won numerous festival prizes. It was nominated for an Academy award in the Foreign Language category in 2000.

Morrison wrote and directed his nilm, Wondrous Oblivion, a coming-of-age dramedy. It featured a Jewish boy in a working class neighborhood who loves cricket but requires support and coaching from his Afro-/Caribbean neighbours to be half-way good at it. It featured Delroy Lindo as Dennis, the next door neighbour. The film explored the endemic racism of the early sixties, suggesting the Jewish family was awkwardly perched between the Jamaican family and hostile white English residents of the street. In 2003 it opened the Berlin Kinderfilmfest. Morrison also wrote a novel based on the film, and published it that same year.

In 2007 Morrison shot Little Ashes, written by Philippa Goslett. It told the story of the thwarted love affair between Salvador Dali and Federico Lorca, in which Luis Buñuel became the jealous saboteur. Robert Pattinson played Dali, Javier Beltran played Lorca, and Matthew Macnulty played Bunuel. The film was shot in Barcelona and Cadaques and won Best Feature at the GLAAD awards.

For the next ten years, Morrison maintained his therapy practice and was otherwise caught up in family care. He did not work in film. In 2018 he retired as a psychotherapist.

In 2019 Morrison returned to filmmaking. He wrote and directed 23 Walks, an older person’s dog-walking love story, starring Alison Steadman and Dave Johns. It was released in 2020.^[2]

Morrison has two films in active development. Windermere explores a group of 1970s political activists who re-unite post-pandemic at a house on the eponymous, famous lake. The Leningrad Gig is a rock-and-roll 'journey of return'. Morrison recounts his road trip in 1964 to Ukraine and the USSR to discover his family's Eastern European Jewish roots.

Filmography[edit]

• Solomon and Gaenor (1999)
• Wondrous Oblivion (2003)
• Little Ashes (2008)
• 23 Walks (2020)

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Paul Morrison at IMDb
• Met Film Production
• The Official Little Ashes website