In the late 1980s, when he had two Oscars to his credit and he was widely regarded as one of the most gifted cinematographers in world cinema, Chris Menges took the decision that it was time to move on and to strike out as a film director in his own right. "If you [are] just aimlessly a professional cinematographer, you end up being as shallow as anything, and that's why I stopped doing it", he explained on his recent visit to the Dublin Film Festival where he introduced his new film, The Lost Son, a gritty thriller and moral drama set in present-day London.
His disillusionment set in 13 years ago during one of his many collaborations with director Ken Loach, when they worked together on Fatherland. "That film was such a disappointment for me," Menges says. "It somehow felt like we had lost our way. It's so exciting now that Ken has found his way again."
But for Menges by that stage there was no turning back, and his appetite for directing was whetted when producer Sarah Radclyffe showed him Shawn Slovo's script for A World Apart, an autobiographical account set in South Africa during the apartheid regime, as seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl whose parents were actively involved in the then-outlawed African National Congress.
"It was such a great, sensitive story that I couldn't say no," he declares. "I was even more interested in it because I'd worked in South Africa for World in Action in 1963, which was the period of the film. So it was a combination of Fatherland being a little down from the wonderful work Ken and I had done on earlier films - like Kes, which was the first feature I ever shot - and being totally driven by Shawn's screenplay.
"I really wanted to direct. I had directed some documentaries, but I felt it was time to direct a feature. I knew after Fatherland that I could fall into the trap of just photographing films. It could be so demoralising. It could make you wealthy, but it could make you empty."
A great many cinematographers would be very content to be "just photographing films" with the skill and subtlety which marked the finest work of Chris Menges, and his decision to put his career as a lighting cameraman behind him dismayed many in the industry who admired his talent and wanted to work with him. But such is his firmly independent spirit and his evident obsession to achieve the targets he sets himself that there was no questioning his determination to direct.
Now 58 and living in Wales, Chris Menges was born in Hertfordshire, England, and his father, Herbert, was a composer and musical director at the Old Vic theatre. Chris entered the film business at the age of 17 as a cutting-room trainee. In the early 1960s he joined Granada's now sadly defunct current affairs series, World in Action, working as a journalist and cameraman on a documentary about apartheid in South Africa.
He worked on a succession of documentaries around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, including a number of highly ambitious - and dangerous - projects with director Adrian Cowell. At one point Menges and Cowell worked undercover in Burma for six months to make The Tribe That Hides From Man, which went on to win multiple awards - though Menges believes that his dedication to his work and this extended absence from home brought about the end of his marriage.
He mentions his divorce when I note how each of the four feature films he has directed feature young children in pivotal roles. "Quite a long time ago I lost all my own kids, five of them, in a divorce," he says. "That was a really savage experience for me."
By 1967 Menges had become camera assistant to Brian Probyn on Ken Loach's Poor Cow and two years later Loach gave him his first assignment as a lighting cameraman in his own right when he asked him to work on Kes, still arguably Loach's finest film and what Menges recalls as "a truly exhilarating experience".
He went on to work on films as diverse as Stephen Frears's Gumshoe, Loach's Looks and Smiles, Neil Jordan's Angel and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero and Comfort and Joy, and to win Oscars on consecutive years for two Roland Joffe movies, The Killing Fields and The Mission. "I suppose I got those jobs because I'd spent so long in Vietnam and Burma," he says modestly, "and I think getting the Oscars really helped me get to direct A World Apart."
Even though set 24 years earlier, A World Apart, which was released in 1987, proved a highly topical picture of South Africa which operated persuasively on emotional and political levels. It earned Menges the runner-up prize at Cannes's Le Grand Prix du Jury, and its three principal actresses - Barbara Hershey, Jodhi May and Linda Mvusi - were jointly named best actress by the Cannes jury. And the New York Film Critics Circle named Menges best director for his work on the film.
However, the production had its problems, chiefly the tension which developed between Menges and the film's star, Barbara Hershey. A year earlier he had worked as lighting cameraman on Andrei Konchalovsky's Shy People, which featured Hershey, and he saw the warning signals.
"She and Konchalovsky had some very miserable fights, so I knew that could happen again," he says, "but maybe I arrogantly believed it wouldn't happen with me. My take on what happened to her character in A World Apart, when she finds herself in a political nightmare and her world goes out of control, was very different to hers. I didn't want it to be so black-and-white. I wanted it more complicated than that. Being naive and inexperienced as a director, I let her do her thing, which led to a lot of tension. Then again, maybe all that tension helped her performance."
That experience paled by comparison with what followed on CrissCross, which he virtually disowns and which he seems unable to refer to by its title. Made in the US in 1990, CrissCross is set in Florida's Key West in 1969, as a 12-year-old boy (James Gammon) and his mother (Goldie Hawn) are trying to survive three years after Hawn's husband, a disturbed Vietnam veteran, deserted them.
"It was a complete disaster," Menges says emphatically. Again there were warning signals and again he didn't heed them. "A director who had worked with Goldie Hawn warned me she was going to be difficult. He said: `Don't do it'. But it was a really nice story and I thought she was a quite good actress. She made all sorts of promises about the screenplay and I thought, `Fair enough'.
"I had cast this completely inexperienced boy in San Diego and I felt it was better for the film if he and Goldie stayed apart when they weren't shooting. If you take a kid who hasn't acted before, you've got to keep him level. But she doesn't understand about these disciplines. Then, a week into shooting the film, I found him in her caravan playing cards with her kids. So the whole thing was turning completely out of kilter."
Undaunted, Menges cast another reputedly difficult actor, William Hurt, in his third feature, Second Best, and he found Hurt "wonderful to work with". The film was a low-key and touching account of a lonely Welsh post office worker, played by Hurt, who sets out to adopt a boy and is allocated the disturbed son of a violent convict.
Neither CrissCross nor Second Best worked at the box-office, making it all the more difficult for Chris Menges to find another project to direct. He broke his vow and returned to working as a lighting cameraman - on Neil Jordan's Michael Collins and Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, both filmed in Dublin.
"If it weren't for my two films in Ireland, I'd be totally broke", he says. "But those films were emotional experiences, too. Michael Collins was a huge, exciting buzz for everyone who worked on it. Neil plans everything so carefully, whereas Jim lives in the moment, so he's much harder to anticipate. I'm proud to have worked on both films."
Chris Menges returns to directing with The Lost Son, which opens Chandler-style as a private eye with a shady past is hired to find the son of a wealthy couple. Intensely played by Daniel Auteuil, the detective finds that he still has the capacity for moral outrage and the will to act when he uncovers a sinister paedophile ring. Some scenes are skin-crawlingly disturbing in this energetic thriller, which also features Katrin Cartlidge, Nastassja Kinski and Irish actors Ciaran Hinds and Michael Leibmann.
The movie marks the first English-language role for Daniel Auteuil - "a wonderful actor with this extraordinary combination of anger and passion," says Menges. "Like me, he was bowled over by the horror of the story when he first read the screenplay. I went over to Paris to see him in January 1997. He didn't speak any English then, but we communicated anyhow and he said he would learn English for the film and he would come and live in London.
"So I went to work with Jim on The Boxer and Daniel came to London and lived there for six months. By January 1998 he was ready to go. It was a very hard film to make. We have to give the credit to Daniel for instilling in everyone his commitment to the film, which all the other actors picked up on. He gave it such dedication. He's in virtually every scene and he got so tired - the pain of the story is so intense."
For Menges much the most delicate aspect of the film involved casting the young boys who would play the paedophilia victims, and actually shooting those scenes. "We did auditions and these boys would come with their mums, and we would do little bits of acting with them, recording them all until we found someone who wasn't too self-conscious.
"Then there was the process of talking to the parents and explaining it to them until I felt comfortable that the parents knew what the film was about, that it was a serious film and that we weren't exploiting the children, and that the parents weren't exploiting them, either. "When it came to shooting the scene with the boy and the paedophile we shot it in such a way that the actor playing the paedophile was never in the room with the boy at the same time, and then cut around that. The boy's mother was in the room all the time. You have to be very responsible and sensitive in dealing with a story like this."
The Lost Son opens in Ireland next Friday