The Yorkshire Post video interview: Barry Norman
It is a decade since Barry Norman last presented his BBC Film programme, but his opinion is still worth hearing. Nick Ahad met the film critic.
WHEN it came to interviewing, it seemed there were two Barry Normans.
If you were Michelle Pfeiffer speaking to the nation's favourite film critic, then he would be charm– and flirting – personified. If you were Robert De Niro, you might have found him argumentative and even a little spiky. I get to meet both incarnations in the space of one interview.
While being interviewed, Norman is also filmed for the Yorkshire Post internet pages.
The camera angle isn't quite right and he is asked to move a little to the left, a request he meets with "Can't you move the camera?" and a steeliness in the voice makes it impossible to tell just how serious he is.
Ask him about his top 10 films and he can be equally dismissive: "There's no such thing, it changes every day." Ask him, however, about some of his happy times during his long and illustrious career, and he again exudes charm.
"Michelle Pfeiffer? Ah yes," says Norman, a smile lighting up his 74-year-old face.
"I was interviewing her about Frankie and Johnny, but she had made the movie six months previously, another one since and was filming a third. She couldn't remember the movie and the interview was a little dull and I remember that she had said in a previous interview that she sometimes felt like a duck. I said that if only all ducks looked like her, then most of the men in the country would be in court for bestiality," he laughs at the memory.
It is a pleasant story, the type that Norman enjoys telling, but not the sort that would satisfy in today's celebrity-obsessed, gossip hungry world.
"The film industry has changed so much from when I was involved," says Norman, reflecting on what he sees as a happier time.
"It had changed during the course of my career in a way which I didn't like very much.
"The days when if you wanted to interview someone, you could ring their people and say 'I have seen their latest film, I very much enjoyed it and would like to talk to them at a time convenient to us both' were long gone.
"Then this daft celebrity culture took over and now, if you are very lucky, you might get 15 minutes at a press junket which, certainly with a television camera, is nowhere near enough. I got really fed up with the fact that the publicity people ran the industry."
Doesn't Norman, however, need to take some of his share of the responsibility for creating this media obsession with gossip? He was, after all, the showbiz correspondent for the Daily Mail in the Sixties, until being made redundant 1971.
"In those days it was very different. If I wanted to talk to Connery, or Terence Stamp or Roger Moore, young British stars back then, I would ring them up – I had their home phone numbers, and we would go for lunch, do the interview for an hour, then I would put my notebook down and we would sink a couple of bottles of wine.
"It was understood that once the notebook went down then we were off the record," says Norman. "That wouldn't happen now." After being made redundant from the Mail in 1971, something which Norman says was the best thing that happened to him career-wise, the journalist moved to television and was one of a rota of presenters of Film '72.
The following year he took the seat for himself and kept it until 1998 when he moved to Sky in a defection considered so important it was the second item on that evening's news bulletins.
"I really don't miss the 'day job'," says Norman. "After 20 years of coming off air in June and going back on in September, I remember at the end of the last series for the BBC, I went off for the summer and I thought that, come September, I would be pawing at the ground like some old warhorse. It got to mid-September and I realised I hadn't even thought about it."
All the same, it's clear that Norman, who still regularly attends the cinema but finds little inspiring these days, would like to have a platform to air his opinions which, when it comes to film, are as forthright as they ever were. "People do still ask me what I think and it's nice that they are interested in my opinion," says Norman. "As far as films that are around at the minute I think There Will Be Blood is over-rated, pretentious, difficult.
"I think No Country for Old Men is a terrific movie, Atonement I enjoyed, but it has been rewarded a little more than perhaps it ought to and, while it was nice to see Tilda Swinton receive an Oscar, it should really have gone to Julie Christie for her wonderful performance in Away from Her."
Barry Norman was appearing at the Bradford International Film Festival, which runs to March 15.
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