N my decades covering Hollywood I have a very short list of those who are true originals. The usual suspects include actors Paul Newman, Rod Steiger and Elizabeth Taylor, directors Steven Spielberg,  John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock—all legends and in a league of their own.

But there is another filmmaker who deserves to join the pantheon of the remarkable. He’s Robert M. Young, filmmaker extraordinaire who was honored this spring at the first Ventura Film Festival.

Young’s filmic range is impressive. The versatile and articulate filmmaker—he is a producer, writer, cinematographer, director—who is fast approaching his 85^th birthday,  is a modest man, with a  phenomenal record of films that display a positively mind boggling range.

He has directed powerful feature films and award winning documentaries in a stunning career that has spanned 50 years and over 30 films. Young refuses to take the easy route—whether for features or documentaries. His films are never safe, but edgy, gritty  and totally unorthodox.

Robert M. Young

He drew a powerful performance from Farrah Fawcett, best known as the lightweight poster girl and star of the original Charlie’s Angels TV series, who played a woman  who turns the tables on a would be rapist in his l986 film Extremities, based on William Mastrosimone’s hit play.

It was also hard to watch Willem Dafoe as a former Greek Olympic boxer in the 1989 Holocaust drama Triumph of the Spirit, about a fighter who managed to survive Auschwitz  because of his fisticuff skills.

In his l977 film Short Eyes, the centerpiece of the story is a child molester who faces savage and harrowing justice when fellow inmates discover what crime he has committed. 

I first met Young in Morocco in the nineties where he shooting two very untypical Young movies. Both were biblical epics: Solomon and Sheba with Jimmy Smits and Halle Berry, and Slave of Dreams, a new version of the oft-told tale of Joseph, which starred Edward James Olmos.

He was one of the first filmmakers to go to Angola to capture the horror of the civil war.   Young has also directed episodes of TV’s Battlestar Galactica.

Does Hollywood still see you as a maverick?
I have never fit in to the Hollywood mold. For a long time I thought it was immoral to have an agent. When I make a film it takes my life over. I spent six or seven years making Life in the Sea with the Eskimos. My emphasis is more on the experiential thing.

Why has your path to moviemaking so unorthodox?
My trajectory has always been into other societies. Living with the Eskimos, native Americans and cannibals in New Guinea…people who seemed different from me.

My search has always been to find common humanity because I want to find the voice of the other person, and then  equate it with my own.

How did you get started?
I was discovered by Merian C. Cooper, the producer of movies like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. He had also produced many of the John Ford movies.  I had written a script Children of the Seas  in the late fifties and  he kind of adopted me.  He was my mentor.

How did  you happen to make a Holocaust movie?
Doing Triumph I was trying to explore my own background and what was different about me. I am Jewish but never a particularly religious person. I have a real problem with any kind of orthodoxy. I was trying to discover who I was. Growing up  I often asked myself,  ‘I’m Jewish—but what the heck does that mean? What’s different about me?’ The movie gave me the chance to investigate my own heritage.

Did Triumph get good reviews?
They were fantastic. Some critics said the film was going to win an Academy Award. But not many people wanted to go and see it because it was depressing. This was before Spielberg did Schindler’s List.  And so I thought the movie was a tremendous failure.  But I did get a call from Elie Wiesel who said he thought it was the best film ever made about the Holocaust. I never spoke to him personally; he left that message on my machine.

Did the film make any money?
A year after it came and went my lawyer called and said, ‘You are the most talked about director in Hollywood.’ Then he said, ‘I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is you’ve been awarded royalties of $155,000 in a successful suit filed against the company that made that picture. The bad news is the company has folded. And you’ll never see that money.’

What’s the history of your documentary Children of Fate? about families in the Sicilian slums?
We first shot the film for NBC television in l961. It was strong stuff and they got cold feet and decided it was too raw for home viewers. They buried the film in a vault and it was never aired. Then someone who heard they were going to destroy the film called me.  He sneaked into the vault, brought it to me and I made a copy and then gave it back.

Emma Thompson Clicks
With Dustin Hoffman on Screen

ITH Hollywood trying to emerge from its  gloomy movie era—films with sad and  tragic endings such as Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler and  The Reader—Last Chance Harvey starts as another downer. But thanks to the combination of  Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman, audiences walk out on a high.

In the realistic romantic saga, Hoffman is Harvey, a failed New York jazz pianist eking out a living as TV jingle writer. He learns he has lost his job as he heads to London to attend his estranged daughter’s wedding.  Things get worse when his daughter informs him that she’s decided her stepfather will give her away.

Just as gloom threatens to engulf all, he meets Thompson, another sad soul and unlucky in love, who has a dead end job working for an interview agency at London Airport.  They meet by chance in a pub and an unlikely romance blossoms.

For Thompson, who turned 50 in April, it was a chance to work with Hoffman again after they starred together in Stranger Than Fiction in 2006.

The Oscar winning stalwart of the British entertainment scene, who has successfully crossed over to Hollywood and back, has carved a special niche for herself on the movie front.

The daughter of showbusiness parents—who once said of her, "We hoped Emma would either marry Prince Charles or become prime minister but definitely not act"—always showed a penchant for showbusiness. 

She graduated from Cambridge University in l982 with a degree in English literature and got three years of performing experience with the famous Footlights Group. She was a natural born comic, performing in Cambridge’s first all-female revue Woman’s Hour which she co-wrote, co-produced and co-directed.

It wasn’t long before she was turning heads, getting rave reviews on stage and then making movies—often with her then-boyfriend Kenneth Branagh.

When they broke up she met and later married actor Greg Wise, her Sense and Sensibility co-star, They have a nine-year-old daughter Gaia.

Along the way the London-based Emma racked up lots of prizes including a best actress Oscar in l992 for Howard’s End. She also made her mark in assorted movies including Remains of the Day, the Harry Potter films, Nanny McPhee and Brideshead Revisited.

When did you and Dustin Hoffman first click on screen?
We met on Stranger than Fiction for the first time and made one of those rare discoveries that you make sometimes in our profession, that you can just work with someone and there seems to be no obstacle, no solving, no edges to rub off, nothing. It seems to happen with a very peculiar, intimate ease. It was frustrating to us because we didn't get more to do and we were kind of going mad with this feeling of "Oh, what a shame. Couldn't we just carry on these characters and do a film about them?" Then I got home and Joel [Hopkins] script was sitting on my desk and I just went, "Oh, my God! Send this to Dustin quickly before he's forgotten that he said he wanted to work with me again" because you don't believe anything that anyone says [laughs].

Is there a big challenge in doing romantic comedy?
The general challenge is that it's not full of plot, subplot, superplot, action, heroes, villains, good, bad, simple things. It is about the movements of the human heart. It's what I call bread and butter acting rather than the grand acting that we're sometimes required to do. It's inhabiting characters in a very subtle way and making very ordinary moments interesting and engaging and full of meaning and profundity. Dustin is unusually active from dawn until dusk. I've never known anyone like that.

Didn’t you saw Tony Hopkins, your co-star in Remains of the Day, was like that?
Anthony doesn't work in the same way. He's a Brit. His insecurities and peculiarities work themselves out in an entirely different way. Dustin will just never let a moment go free. We think maybe we've gotten it and it's like, "No! Wait, wait!  There's something in there that we're missing." I think that comes with practice as well. We would have never been able to do this movie when we were in our twenties.

What’s your reaction to the American political scene—and did you follow it at all?
It was very interesting for us. We have an adopted son who's from Rwanda and so we kind of went through this election with him and it gave us a very different perspective.

As we discussed as a family what was going to happen, our great fear was that behind closed doors and in the voting booth the polls would be proven wrong by an intrinsic racism. That did not occur. That was one of the great revelations, I suppose, of all our lives.

Did you watch it live in England?
We all watched the election as it happened at a half past three in the morning. He woke me and said, "It's happening, it's happening!" We watched Obama's speech. I texted my son and said, "Okay, that's ten years you've got to get into office. Okay?"

Dustin talks openly about how ashamed he felt for America during the past eight years?
In our newspapers there was a wonderful description, one of the editorials in The Independent, and it just said, America has just given us a master class in democracy. That made me very, very happy. It really did.

How do you feel about putting on another fake nose for the Nanny McPhee sequel?
We shoot that next year and I'm very excited. It's taken three years to do this script. The first script took nine years door to door because it took seven years to develop. It was just really hard to work it out, but this one, because I learned so much on the last one it only took three. We've got a green light  so hopefully it really will happen although who knows in this climate. There's a baby elephant in it which I'm particularly excited about.

Are they going to use a real baby elephant?
A real baby elephant.

Will you direct?
No. Susanna White is directing it. It'll be the first time that I've worked with a woman director which I'm really, really thrilled about. So the triumvirate at the top of it is all women. Me, Lindsay Doran and Susanna. I think that'll make for a very comfortable shoot.

But you’re not doing the next Harry Potter?
That’s right. The next Harry Potter has an awful lot of story in it and the last thing that they can afford to do is bring in peripheral comedy characters like mine and that's fine.

So it’s farewell to Harry?
Yeah, that's it. Cross it off your list of things that I do. I'd be so grateful