Harrogate Film Fest's star guest on Adele, John Lennon and more

The final major arts event to take place in Harrogate before the coronavirus clampdown enjoyed its biggest success yet.
Harrogate guest star - BAFTA award-winning film director Tony Palmer, left, with Henry Thompson of Harrogate Film Society, centre, and Adam Chandler, founder of Harrogate Film Festival.Harrogate guest star - BAFTA award-winning film director Tony Palmer, left, with Henry Thompson of Harrogate Film Society, centre, and Adam Chandler, founder of Harrogate Film Festival.
Harrogate guest star - BAFTA award-winning film director Tony Palmer, left, with Henry Thompson of Harrogate Film Society, centre, and Adam Chandler, founder of Harrogate Film Festival.

The fourth annual instalment of Harrogate Film Festival saw more days, more events, bigger crowds – and iconic film guest stars including Brian Blessed, Ken Loach and Tony Palmer.

The closing show with larger than life British acting legend Brian Blessed still managed to attract around 400 people to the Royal Hall despite the growing list of cancellations in the arts world over the outbreak.

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The Monday before saw a packed Wesley Centre welcome Cannes Film Festival award-winning socially-conscious director Ken Loach help raise £1,000 for Harrogate Homeless Project.

The esteemed British filmmaker also told the audience he may well have made his last movie.

He said: “There does come a point where you realise that you can’t go on forever.

"I don’t know if there will be another one, if we can it will be nice."

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The Thursday night saw a twice sold-out event at The Clubhouse at Cold Bath Brewing Co see a fascinating and feisty discussion with BAFTA and Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker Tony Palmer – another exclusive for Harrogate Film Festival.

Arranged by interviewer Graham Chalmers in conjunction with Harrogate Film Society, the confidante of John Lennon, Pete Townsend, Leonard Cohen, Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Stravinsky and a lot more, revealed the inside story of classic rock and the classical music world.

Palmer, who had made 100 film and won 40 awards in the last half-century, told the rapt audience that he had been inspired to make All My Loving and All You Need Is Love, the films which invented the rock music documentary in the 1960s and 70s, by his friend John Lennon.

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He said: “All You Need Is Love was the first film about The Beatles which they allowed to be made by anyone other than themselves.

“As a result, Paul and John gave me all kinds of material, which they didn’t include even when they produced their ginormous anthology series.”

As for why he stopped making films about pop and rock music in the late 1970s to focus on classical music, opera, theatre and cinema, he said: "I stopped in 1977 because I thought, I would never get round to those subjects which also interested me - from John Osborne to Maria Callas.

"I also think that with the advent of David Bowie and the dreadful Bono, rock music lost its way and became bland and more about style than substance."

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But the provocative, incisive and thought-provoking Palmer, who is also a writer and opera and stage director, revealed he nearly re-entered the world of pop music with a film about Adele in the late noughties.

He said he fell in love with Adele's attitude and humour, as well as her voice, after hearing an early single on BBC Radio 2 and got in touch with her to see what she thought of the idea of making a film about her life.

A meeting with the London-born singer went well and she gave her full agreement.

But, delayed by another project he was working on, when he got back in touch six months later, Adele had gone from a rising star to an international phenomenon because of the incredible success of her second album 21.

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Tony Palmer said: "From talking to her on her own and agreeing that it would be a film done my way, she was now surrounded by her manager and producer and people from the record company.

"Although she still liked the idea, there's no way I could have made the film my way if I had to go through so many people.

"I politely told her I could not make the film."

As for current documentary filmmakers on pop and rock music, Palmer said he rated Nick Broomfield whose film Marianne & Leonard last year saw Palmer act as executive producer and Julian Temple who he described as “always interesting, if a little undisciplined.”

He also hailed Amy, Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary on Amy Winehouse as a “clever film” but was withering about Marley, Kevin MacDonald’s 2012 film on Bob Marley which he damned as “a mess.”