Lord of the Flies

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is “a girl and a gun.” When Peter Brook took 35 children (none of them professionals) from the US and Britain to an island of the coast of Puerto Rico to appear in his adaptation of LORD OF THE FLIES, he has his own formulation. For his film, he suggested, the necessary in- gredients were “kids, a camera and a beach.” As Brook wrote in his autobiography, he deliberately made the film on a relatively modest budget. He knew that his backers “would have no excessive anxiety” if they lost their investment. The film, like Golding’s book, shows a bleak vision of humanity. The children are stranded in an Edenic wilderness and given the chance to create their own paradise. Instead, they turn into murde- rous little savages. Brook had looked for boys who were like the characters they had to play. “Directing was not trying to impose a characterisation. It was making the boys feel at ease,” Brook later said. He used multiple cameras, encouraged improvisation, and edited the 90 minute film from over 60 hours of footage. The result was a film of startling orig- inality which also stayed faithful to its source material. (Geofrey MacNab)