John Boorman

Boorman is a British director whose filmography has no through-line except nerve. He made his name with Point Blank in 1967, a revenge thriller cut like a European art film and shot in a Los Angeles of empty corridors and hard sunlight, and followed it with Hell in the Pacific, a war film with two actors, no subtitles and almost no plot.

Then Deliverance, in 1972, which is still the one everyone has seen. What holds up about it is not the notorious scene but the sound and the geography: a river that is genuinely dangerous, four men genuinely unfit for it, and a moral problem the film refuses to resolve on their behalf.

After that he became difficult to predict, and not always in a good way. Zardoz is a science fiction film of enormous ambition and ludicrous costume that has never stopped being argued about. Exorcist II: The Heretic is one of the famous disasters of studio cinema and he has never entirely been forgiven for it. Excalibur, in 1981, is the correction: a mud-and-armour Arthurian film played completely straight, and the best-looking thing he ever made.

The late work turned personal. Hope and Glory looks back at a childhood in wartime London and plays it as comedy, and Queen and Country returns to the same character years on. The General, a black-and-white portrait of a Dublin criminal, is the sharpest of the later films. His awards include a BAFTA Fellowship and a Cannes directing prize. Not many directors have both those and Exorcist II on the same page.