The history man: 

interview with director Justin Hardy

By Roger Howe

You know what to expect from the BBC: a ‘multicultural re-imagining’ of The Dam Busters in which Guy Gibson is a black guy with a white dog called Honky.

According to Justin Hardy it isn’t like that.  Still best known as son of Wicker Man director Robin Hardy, he has carved out a career of his own in television history, apparently free from agonisingly PC ground rules.

Interviewed in his barn conversion home in an idyllic riverside village in rural Oxfordshire he exudes edgy confidence; noticing cigarette smoke drifting in my direction like a true gent he refrains from smoking further.  The barn, now glittering and modern inside, tennis court and vegetable patch outside, was previously owned by General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, retired British GOC Northern Ireland.  In 1990 the IRA planted a bomb in the general’s garden.  Fortunately it did not go off.

The day I met him Justin Hardy was turning over the question of how to build a television history of Ireland around the British Pathé newsreel archive.  Wondering “whether there remains an appetite for a black and white archive film for 90 minutes”.  How do you make the past live?  Even if it has Queen Victoria in it.  The names of Ken Burns and Louis Marcus were mentioned.

Born in October 1964, Justin Hardy was eight when his father Robin made The Wicker Man, the iconic British male death-drama.  Old enough to remember the actor if not his immolation or his frantic cries.

“I remember my father calling me and various of my cousins to a sound studio in order to record the voices of the children in the village [in Summerisle] when I think Edward Woodward is running around trying to follow the hobby horse - in the latter half of the film - and we were all required to say, ‘We bring death into the village’ - and I remember wondering what we were talking about.  But we got a cup of tea and a bun and it was a day out from school.  And then as the years have gone on I’ve seen the film a number of times and realised that that’s my little voice placed over a scene.”

“And I do remember Britt Ekland in a taxi wearing a fur coat and not much else as she was going to an additional dialogue replacement session ‘cos I’m sure that she had to work quite hard on her Scottish accent.  I don’t think that accents were her thing [but] I was aware I was in the presence of a very very beautiful woman.”

Are we to imagine 29 year-old Britt Ekland wearing a pair of boots and a pair of panties otherwise trusting to soft fur?  Very educational.  The infant Justin seems to have seen the potential of the situation.  Though his father is famous for one film the son has worked more consistently.

“I’ve been lucky, equally that was a choice I made - the highs and lows of film-making [mean it] is a pretty terrible life and television was very much the medium I felt could enable me to be busy and prolific.”

Back a bit.  Who were the Hardys?  How do father and son fit into the family pattern?  Robin Hardy was born in 1929, son of an imperial tax collector in Calcutta who died when he was four, “so my father never really grew up with any connection to who the Hardys were and are.”

He, the father, attended “various schools in Switzerland” then an English public school, Bradfield College.  “And he wasn’t really a typical English public schoolboy because he already had a deep and committed interest in women and he started to make love to the Welsh maids who made the beds and then he was caught and expelled, joined the Army and did a couple of years in Palestine in 1947/48 which must have been an interesting time to be there.”

After time as a Punch cartoonist Robin Hardy got in at the beginning of television advertising in Britain in the 1950s.  He “ran a commercial television company for ten years with a partner called Anthony Shaffer who dabbled in writing on the side as did his brother Peter Shaffer; and Hardy, Shaffer & Associates employed lots of young people who were interested in going into films and going into commercials.  They were the first employer of Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Alan Parker - that whole generation.”

The Jungian harvest of his loins was also fecund.  “My father had eight children and I am Number Six.  I’m the only one that’s gone into film-making.  My mother had two. Two children with him and then he had six children by various other ladies.  He had had five children before he met my mother.”

And what do the others do out of interest?  “The others are all people who have chosen not to follow such a buccaneering borderline feckless life and so they all have one child each or at most two; they work in museums, they work in art galleries, they work in meals on wheels.  They do good things.  They do good solid unephemeral things.”

Justin Hardy and his wife Larissa have four children: Sam (15), Ludo (13), Nico (11) and Summer (8).

School?  “I, oddly, went to Bradfield College.”  He laughs.  “My father was horrified, but by then my father had left my mother and it was decided that because we couldn’t afford for me to go to a boarding private school, that I stood a chance of getting a bursary and a scholarship if we went to the place that my father had gone to.”

He was better behaved than his father?  “Just about.  I was suspended for making love to an English nanny, so, funny how these things repeat themselves.  But because I was an Oxbridge candidate I think they chose at the last minute not to expel me.  And I’m forever grateful for that.”

His contemporaries at Bradfield were “very much children of Army, Navy, occasional clergy, middle management.  But it wasn’t exclusive like Oxford was exclusive.”

Ah, Oxford!

“By the time I landed at Oxford Brideshead Revisited had just come out and we were absolutely committed to repeating that piece of history.  We completely saw ourselves in those terms and it was when I was at Oxford that the now famous Bullingdon Club photo was taken.  I wasn’t a member but a number of my friends were.

“The Bullingdon’s been going a long time.  The reason it’s famous now is that photograph in which both Dave [Cameron] and Boris [Johnson] co-existed - and that was my year.  That was my year and I went on one of the Bullingdon Club evenings and it was pretty benign to be honest.  And I think The Riot Club is way off-beam.

“I’m not defending their behaviour and their arrogance but - they’re not villainous like that.”

So, cocaine and Thatcherism?  “No, we were pre-cocaine.  We occasionally would dabble with amyl nitrate.  Ooh!  Horrid drug!  Horrid drug!  But otherwise no, it was drinking plenty of champagne and thinking that we were really Evelyn Waugh.”

“My generation were the first ones where almost everybody - no matter if they studied literature, languages, history, law - almost all went into banking.  They all went for the sign that said ‘Big Money To Be Had Here’.

“Rather sadly because a lot of people would say, as we turn fifty, ‘I slightly wish I hadn’t taken that fork in the road’.  What one really wants more of is the kids that say, ‘I feel bright enough and well connected enough and full of beans enough to be an entrepreneur -come up with something.  I don’t know if Oxford really develops that as well as it should.”

Justin Hardy was a student at Magdalen College, set in its paradisal grounds down by the bridge.  “It’s one of the big three in terms of glamorous imposing structures.  They get people going [gasps] ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to be there!’  And Magdalen’s got deer, it’s got deer within the college grounds.  It has a set of buildings called the New Buildings that were constructed in 1700.  There’s so much about it that is utterly beguiling.”

Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, went to Magdalen.  Betjeman.  Oscar Wilde.  “Andrew Lloyd Webber [chuckles] starting with the sublime - moving on from there.  It was known as a sort of poetic college, a literary college and also I have to admit as a social college whereas Balliol was very much a political college - lots of Prime Ministers have been at Balliol.  St. John’s very much a clever college.  Yeah.  All different in their different ways.”

Several of Justin Hardy’s contemporaries have gone into careers in the well known Conservative Party.  “Dave [Cameron] was at Brasenose in the year below me.  They were evidently to be taken quite seriously.  You met them out and about at various functions and you knew that Dave Cameron was a player: he was a social player, he was already talking about a political career, potentially.  We had no idea what that meant, but we went, ‘You’re working the room pretty damn well’ - in fact no one worked the room better than he did.

“We knew that Boris was already a completely magnetic charismatic buffoon genius who would be giving papers at the Canning Club on classical subjects.  Michael Gove was then also in the year below me at Lady Margaret Hall, already President of the Union, already giving firebrand speeches.

“We thought, ‘My God, these guys are great!’  But what was interesting was that for about ten years after Oxford we then realised we were nothing special, we were not a great generation and twenty years after we’d left they all became really special.  A lot of us didn’t get going until we were actually in our thirties.  We actually messed around for a good ten years.”

Justin Hardy studied History at Oxford.  His tutor was Professor Laurence Brockliss.  The syllabus covered an historical sweep from 1066 to the twentieth century, ground travelled again by Hardy television dramatisations.  He specialised in the Reconstruction era after the American Civil War, the brief interlude for black Americans between slavery and segregation.

“That’s a phenomenal period and one that I am desperate to make a film about.”

An MA at Magdalen was followed by Film Studies at UCLA in Southern California.  This, children, is the world that will open to you if you study hard and eat up your greens. His first feature film was a school story: “A Feast at Midnight emerged from UCLA, Christopher [Lee] came and joined in, Robert Hardy joined in, Edward Fox did, Sam West. In retrospect a really stellar cast.”

And Michael Gove was the chaplain?  “That’s right.  He was.”  Did he have any aptitude as an actor?  “He did!  My God!  The man is - I would say comedy gold!”

Thus the breakthrough to television history began.  “There’s always been an appetite amongst British people to find out more about their history.  When I first started [David] Starkie and [Simon] Schama had broken a hole in the wall and shown how many people were interested in seeing their own history and I was probably the first person to say, ‘I think we can bring drama into this’.

“I was less interested in having a historian walk us through history, but to make factual dramas.  And I suppose I’ve been doing that for fifteen or twenty years culminating in 37 Days [his centenary dramatisation of the outbreak of the First World War].” 

There have been problems working with actors.  Sinéad Cusack was unhappy with her role as Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister in 1914.  “When you are digging into history,” says Justin Hardy, “it’s very hard to find the women.  It’s very hard to find their influence - and the likelihood is that they were not influential outside of dinner party cajoling or outside of pillow talk.

“So poor old Sinéad turned up as virtually the only woman in an entire cast of men and it may have felt tokenistic and I think that we didn’t give her quite the role that she would have liked.

“I have made plenty of historical films which have focused on the female experience but I’d have to be honest and say, almost invariably they’re prostitutes [laughs].  Not proud of that but - Harlot’s Progress, City of Vice, Heist - my medieval Heist - they’re almost all gin-addled prostitutes, which are of course immensely compelling subjects.

“What films have I got coming up?  I’ve got a film about a house of young prostitutes in eighteenth century London at exactly the time that Jane Austen was starting to write.  And there’s a whole demi-monde there that is not Jane Austen’s world of the time.  There was a society that we can’t fully understand that would have been completely accepted and therefore not entirely written down.  We have some clues from a pocketbook written by a man called Mr Harris who was the head waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head pub in Covent Garden which articulates the courtesan down to the tuppenny upright.”

Formality and informality change with time.  Hats were worn, surnames preferred among business acquaintances.  The nuances are like a lost language, vital to make the atmosphere convincing without being too forbidding for the viewer.  Etiquette may have been defined though not always observed: 

“We did have some photographs of the Foreign Office [for 37 Days] and there were some of the men not wearing jackets, not many it has to be said.  Equally we found there were some photographs of women clerks, but they said to us of a population of 700 [Foreign Office] clerks there were four - women.  Therefore it gave us just about enough licence to have our female character, but not so much that we could claim that it was a fully twenty-first century call-centre.

“It takes a long time to learn to be a director.  I started to refine how I felt my time machine moved into the past, how I felt I could handle budgets, squeeze every last dollar out of them.  And I just got better at it.  Some films work better than others.  Larissa [his wife] would say that The Great Plague is the best film that I ever made and it was my first real history film and it was the first ever Royal Television Society Award for history.

“But the history Golden Age is now over.  There was a time when the commissioners would commission ten, twelve, fifteen films about history a year - and now there’s much much less.  BBC2 have been doing a lot recently, partly because the last of those patrons was still running BBC2.  But she - Janice Hadlow - has now moved on and I can’t really see where many of those commissions are going to come from.”

So, a lull in television history?  “I’m afraid so.  It’s an expensive thing to make television and whilst there are two million, two and a half million viewers who will come to see history that doesn’t seem to be qui-ite enough to pay for the numbers.  I mean it’s partly because drama sucks up the big numbers - shiny-floor entertainment, by which I mean X-Factor and Strictly, sucks up the other big numbers - and these big numbers are so well defended by those who live off that that every other department struggles to try and get some air and we got some air for a long time - and in fairness we did Trafalgar twice!  Nobody can claim they haven’t had enough Tudors and Stuarts!”

His most recent project was Captain Webb, the story of the first man to swim the English Channel.  The film was part funded by James Salter, a banker who had swum the Channel himself: “Originally at Teddy’s in Oxford [St Edmund Hall] and has done very well in Japanese equities”.

The filming was completed for less than half a million pounds.  “Miramax have picked it up [for a distribution deal], we’re signing on Monday and it’s going to MIPCOM next week or the week after.”

Further ahead, Justin Hardy is working on historical films for Channel 4 and BBC2 to mark Remembrance Day in November 2018.

So, does he have a breakdown of the audiences for history on television - or cinema?  “The audience profile of my films has been 50 year-old men plus who have biographies on their bedside tables and they’re a very important audience in the sense that they have a lot of disposable income, they’re a lot of opinion-formers, they’re a lot of CEOs of companies.

“But television is undergoing enormous change and I think it won’t exist in a few years time in the way it currently does.  There will still be live events, your football team will still play live and you’ll want to see it live, but I think drama will be available through the next generation of Netflix.  I don’t think that drama has to be, ‘Ooh, you have to watch this on a Sunday night.’  I think we’ve got tired of that, of being told when to watch things.”

BBC?  “It needs to be a publishing company, it needs to cut the production.”  Channel 4?  “Basket case.  I haven’t been seduced to watch Channel 4 in five years apart from Utopia and New Worlds.”

The beacon burns down on the headland.  Heroes consumed, guaranteeing the harvest.  The collective memory, merely skin-deep.

So there you have it: a cast of characters nimbly impersonated by a cast of character actors.  Lloyd George, Churchill, the Kaiser.  Lurgan Orange Hall doubling for the Reichstag in Berlin.  A world of bombing and heraldry.  Trumpets from the steep, groans from the stews - and at the heart of it, amiably presiding, genial host of his own pop-up London Dungeon, Justin Hardy - trying not to worry he is just too posh.

Link: www.hardypictures.com

Justin Hardy interviewed, Oxfordshire, 2 October 2014