00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi, folks, Welcome once again to conversations. My guest today is a he's a writer, he's a film producer, he's a photographer, and I guess he's a few other things. His name is Penn Densham. He joins us from is it La Penn?
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Speaker 2: Yeah?
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Speaker 3: Well, I live at a place called West Hollywood, which is sort of a subdivision of Well and it's a very ardy area that's much less techy, And I never think of myself as being Hollywood. I say I'm English by accident, Canadian by choice, but taken to Hollywood by Norman Jewison. So I still feel like I'm more connected to Canada in some ways than I am to Hollywood. When you've met the privilege of living in two or three cultures, you start to see that it was a very restrictive society. I was not really able to find people who are creative entrepreneurs to model off. My expectations were my school was that helped me be a bank clerk, or that I should go join the military because i'd have a future and they had good pensions, you know. And when I left school at fifteen thinking that, but I'm going to try and stop being an artist, and my folks had made short films when I was a little kid, and I was four years old watching them make movies, and I just fell in love with cameras and the magic of it all, and wrote an alligator in one of their films that was about people who kept strange pets, and it went into the movie theaters, and little thing that I am is watching these giant screens, and I just knew I wanted to do things. The cast spelled and leaving school at fifteen, I went out and tried to start my own businesses. And I did a few things, photographed the Rolling Stones and sold some photos and things. But I sort of thought I was a washed up failure, and I fled to Canada at nineteen and found a culture which was alive. People were swapping notes about how to get things done. Kids at fifteen were making sync sound films and selling them, and people helped you, and there was art grants. The culture was percolating with life and energy, and I found out that I was over the hill.
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Speaker 2: Actually was sort of like still had still had.
00:02:03
Speaker 1: A future, and you're going to stop that you've jumped about half the program because I want to go back to those childhood years, you're riding a crocodile. I read that what parent Litzi's four year old son ride a crocodile?
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Speaker 3: And I had thought that my mom couldn't have been there that day, you know, And I also figured that they couldn't afford babysitters. These were not rich people. They were making sort of films, but I think there was a sort of scrapple to do it. So the particular section that I was in was that my dad had gone to meet a lady who kept crocodiles and alligators in her apartment. And there was it was literally like fish tanks, big long fish tanks on the walls, with a crocodile in one and a crocodile in another. And I remember, being four years old. I still remember her admonishing me stay away from that because whatever was in that tank was gonna eat me, I think. But then she had this other bothtub on the floor in her kitchen, and the six actually it was a seven foot long and I believe it was a Chinese alligator and it was a female called Peter, and that I was allowed to ride. I was a film brushing its teeth and I was putting a cigarette in its mouth and lighting it all at four. And the strangest thing was that about six seven years ago a guy who was like an expot on animals was trying to trace down who this woman was and why she'd owned these things, and he was a professor of animals, and he actually and I got in contact, and he found a copy of the movie that my folks had made and sent it to me. So I suddenly am watching this film from nineteen.
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Fifties, and my mother was.
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Speaker 3: Actually in the film, and she was there that day, so I guess she was watching out my safety.
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Speaker 1: So many questions there, But it was your dad primarily a filmmaker.
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Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, My dad and my uncle were identical twins, and they had both grown up. They had their first projector when they were six years old. They formed a film club when they were in their teens, and my dad actually worked for a company called Scoffny Bed in nineteen thirty eight who were selling televisions and so that, and they ended up, you know, making short films and being cameramen for through the war years, and then they tried to start their own businesses independently of each other, so I grew up around cameras, and.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: Did he talk about the war years, did he serve? What was he?
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Speaker 3: My uncle did the more interesting things. He actually went to Europe about three days after D Day. He also went to the East while the Japanese were still fighting out there, and went and did some video and some filming out there. There was a film made called Western Approaches, which was about the convoy system, and he went out and filmed on the convoys, shooting in color, and that particular film was using real sailors to fill out a drama about what it was like to be on a convoy that got sunk and how the survivors had to get in a lifeboat.
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Speaker 1: So they were the convoys that came from the USA to Britain a war was subjected to the attacks by the German U boats.
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Speaker 2: I suppose the U boat packs.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, So he'd lived that life. And both my uncle and my dad wrote their own biographies. My uncle's biography had all these adventures in it, so I knew about him through reading his biography, and my dad's biography was sort of a little bit more self serving, a little more. When my mom died, my dad married a very damaged lady. I refer to a Cruella de villain acid and she's terrible. She put me and my siblings into I was literally put in an orphanage for a while while she was trying to get rid of us, and so my tenures were a little colorful. I was trying to create dream for the camera and being told I was a big ego and I was to stop that and get on with life and go get a real job. And so it gave me an outsized sense of wanting to protect other people that were creative, because creativity is so ephemeral.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Interesting when you're talking about that. I have this vision of working class England and there's a gritty aspect to it, but it seems as yours was far from that. Your upbring even though they had the difficulty with your stepmother, there was an artistic side to it which you were able to pursue.
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Speaker 3: I think seeing my folks make movies made it possible. I think we need to emulate sometimes in our lives. Gram that and I don't know what you're in the arts you're in, you know, discovering the world you're into, inventing your own future in a way by this kind of conversation, and I think, with the best will in the world, a lot of the school systems were trying to help us by processing us into consumable items as opposed to discovering what was innos and what we could be.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: So you're talking as the fifties and the sixties, you took sixties and sixties.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I left school in the in the mid sixties.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, And I left school with what ambition.
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Speaker 2: I mean, well, glad get away to my math teacher. My math teacher hated me.
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Speaker 3: I could not figure out math, especially when they started doing algebra and sticking letters in where the numbers were.
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Speaker 2: That was really cheating.
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Speaker 3: And one teacher, my English teacher, put me in the school play, gave me the lead. I won the school photography prize. I had two articles in the school magazine. He ignored my terrible handwriting, my terrible spelling, and he said, you know, I think he really got something. And that's when I quit school because I didn't think it could get any better.
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Speaker 1: You were the artistic kid, obviously, Yeah, I was thinking the rugby players, the soccer players. But you didn't fit in that group, not really.
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Speaker 3: No, And when I made Robin Hood. After the movie was a success, I actually was able to trace this gentleman down and thank him because he had sort of believed in me, and I think that sense of being valued had stayed with me and had given me hope and the ability to try and keep pursuing a creative career.
00:08:27
Speaker 1: Every time I speak to someone who's achieved, will always go back to this school, because there's always a teacher that either encouraged or discouraged, and either one either way, they were motivating. In one sense, it sounds like that that particular teacher was yours.
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Speaker 2: I feel very lucky.
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Speaker 3: There's been two or three times in my life when people have reached out and encouraged me and changed my life. You don't know what you're capable of. I never dreamed i'd be in Hover, never dreamed i'd have hit movies. I never dreamed that I would have had the career I had based on looking at myself. Even in Canada, I saw us as making short films documentaries, which was very much the Canadian standard. Thank goodness, Canada was amazing. The Canadian television system would pay us to make short films about anything we wanted, and they would give us little, not giant sums of money, but little sums of money, and so literally we could go out and pursue our own goals and nature films and sports films and films on underdogs. And the culture there was, I think, trying to separate itself from America, and everything in Canada flees as far south as it can to get warm, and all of the American TV stations are all along that border. And so I think the Canadians invested in the arts to try and give themselves a definition of culture, which is why that generosity.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Penn Densham is my guest, folks, a filmmaker, film producer, photographer, writer, back shortly, welcome back, everybody. My guest on conversations is Pendentium. He's a writer, he's a film producer, he's a photographer. Anything else you want to add into that pen that I may have missed.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: One of the things I would love to be is an encourage about other people that are creative, and I think that comes from people having helped me knowing how anxious one gets. There's a thing called imposter syndrome when you do things and you don't believe in yourself and I think artists are particularly vulnerable because we don't have tracks. You know, a dentist knows exactly what he's doing and he can judge himself against it. I dream of something that's never existed and try and bring it to reality. It's really not easy to figure out whether that's worth doing, whether it's like to just succeed, whether you're wasting your time. And without the people that other dreamers, our culture wouldn't have its shaman and it wouldn't have its storytellers. And so part of I think giving back is to try and help other people that are creative to see that their fears and the lack of clarity about your objectives sometimes and getting rejected is also part of it. Are the norms of the game, and you're not the only one that's getting rejected. Getting rejected is what you keep trying to figure your way around.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: I've seen your comment about anxiety versus excitement. You know, the anxiety and which are discussing which you really discussing now about the anxious approach to it, but also there's an excitement when it succeeds. We might come back to that. This is the pivotal question, the most important question of the conversation. Penn, surely isn't your real name? What does Penn stand for?
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Speaker 2: Well, my father named me Penray, and his name is Ray or Raymond, and he named my brother Gil Ray, and he named my sister Cheryl instead of Stingray. So I think she was very well.
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Speaker 3: And I never quite like Panrae, so I've always shortened it down to pen, which seemed much more easy.
00:11:53
Speaker 1: You leave school at fifteen, are you excited about the world where you're disenchanted or you're trying to escape? We could step mother if icking use that term.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
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Speaker 3: It was a very dark period at home, and my stepmother was a very troubled lady. She had description drugs that were like speed, and she would drink and you'd come home into the house and you never knew what you were going to run into. We never had any guests in the house. We never have people over to dinner. It was a very strange world. And I think my father settled for that because he had three kids and was looking for a way of having us taken care of. But it was it was a very difficult time.
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Speaker 1: Did he die a happy man? He did.
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Speaker 3: He actually went to Canada for a brief period of time and left my stepmother and I thought, my god, life's going to turn around and sanity's going to return. And then he lost his job in Canada and went back to England and ended up staying with her, and I think had some kind of happiness, had a couple of other kids who were really good people with her. He gave up on his filmmaking, and he gave up on his involvement with entertainment business.
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Speaker 1: How well was he when he died?
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Speaker 3: He was about eighty two to eighty one, Okay, so not a bad life, no, And my my grandfather was sort of the same age. So now I'm looking at eighty one eighty two and going, oh okay, bee fit in.
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Speaker 1: So a few things you put your lifestyle choices might be a bit different to our generations.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, there was no exercising going on in my jad's generation.
00:13:27
Speaker 1: So you leave school of fifteen. There's this line there that you photographed the rolling stones? Was that a tell us how that happened? Is that a claim to flame or I.
00:13:39
Speaker 3: Was always looking to try and figure out how to sell my photography, and one of the things I did was I photographed myself in multiple reflection reflecting surfaces and sold an article called Go Shoot Yourself about trying to find ways of being your own portrait career and the idea of photographing the Rolling Stones. It's just seemed very drumatic and fun. And I had a relationship with a guy at the BBC who was using my photographs on air and I photographed poets for him people, and I said, well, how about me photographing the Rolling Stones. It's a teenager's candid view of them. And he talked to the Rolling Stones and letting me come backstage and shoot them, both on stage and backstage when they were performing at the local theater. And so I got to go and meet them and photograph them. And I was a bit scared, you.
00:14:28
Speaker 1: Know, I was, so what you would do?
00:14:31
Speaker 3: They?
00:14:31
Speaker 1: Are they famous? At the stage?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's just sixty five okay, So there out there they already.
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Speaker 3: Had satisfaction and the song they were singing at that time was Hey, you get off my cloud.
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Speaker 2: And they were nice people.
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Speaker 3: That was really interesting going backstage and finding that they weren't pompous and they were just open and the youthfulness. You know, you look at Richard's now and his face is like a wrinkled rag. Back then he was old boyish, so young looking. He looked like he never needed to shave. So how he got to where he did, I don't know.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: But it's astounding that he's still doing it, to be quite frank, when you into into hisieties.
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Speaker 3: So it was Brian Jones was there in that time, that was before he died. And when you look at Mick Jagger and you realize that this guy's dancing for two hours eighty three to perform, he can do that. I should be at least exercising to get to my goals.
00:15:31
Speaker 1: He's got great hair still, I keep thinking, is that he's real here? But it must be. I don't know.
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Speaker 3: I have brown hair and i'm you know, in my seventies, I don't know quite wired.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: Obviously didn't worry enough.
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Speaker 1: We don't talk about hair around this house all that often to be so, where did the rolling Stones? Where did that lead you to?
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Speaker 3: I ended up bizarrely becoming very a discotheque disc jockey for a small period of time in Southampton, England eighteen. It was a job I could get and I love music that you know. It was a club when they saw alcohol and I put on the records and people danced.
00:16:10
Speaker 2: But you know, I'm trying to find a creative career. But it still didn't.
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Speaker 3: It didn't seem to offer a future, and Southampton didn't seem to have, you know, the abilities that London, and I think if I'd lived in London, I would have found other things. I was always impressed by people like David Bailey, who was one of the big fashion photographers of that time, and Canneby Street and the Beatles, and you know, we grew up in this revolution of the Who in my generation and that was our anthem and we all believe that's something better.
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Speaker 2: And the pirate radio stations that.
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Speaker 3: Were broadcasting music all day long and as opposed to the BBC, which would you know, they had like two pop record shows a week, you know, So we were trying to rebel.
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Speaker 2: Do not best to rebel?
00:16:58
Speaker 1: You're twenty two and your own film company? Who does that? Who does that? At that agent? What resources? Did you have?
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Speaker 3: No resources? I lived in Canada on my own for a while and just didn't like it. So I rented a giant house and sub rented out rooms. It was sort of a commune for working hippies, and so a lot of the people were filmmakers, or they were editors, or one of them was a local disc jockey for one of the underground radio stations. And I was working for a company making films with Marshall mccluan, who was very famous as a guru of communications at these in the sixties and seventies. I'm just learning about, you know that the company I was dealing with.
00:17:40
Speaker 2: Was self initiating movies.
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Speaker 3: They were going out and finding the money and making movies about subjects. And my friends were all fired from the company they'd been at and I and I came back and I sold one film to the to the CBC at that stage, my very only film, and I got one thousand dollars.
00:17:58
Speaker 1: What was it about.
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Speaker 3: It was about kids on the on the in the poor end of Toronto called Cabbage Town, playing on the streets in the Stummer It's called playground. And it was just like a just like a fly on the wall, watching them all having fun and just involved in their daily experience of being, you know, alive and communicating with each other and playing games with each other. I had made that film for one hundred dollars, and so to be able to sell it for a thousand dollars, I went back and said to my friends, if like Judy Golland, let's put on a show. What if we started our own company. And we went and met with the with the people who were at the CBC, who were a couple of ladies who were just wonderful to us, and we said, you know, would you buy anything else from us? And they said, well, you know, yeah, we need these things called fillers, which are little short films that we put into the American shows because they allow more commercials in America than we do, so we need to fill in these things. So you know, if you if you ever made us a film on a day in a park or sailing, you know, we'd probably buy those. We went back next week. We had a film on the parks and we had a film on sailing, and they gave us a contract for seven more and so now and they were paying us twelve hundred.
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Dollars and was there.
00:19:13
Speaker 3: And what was so exciting was if you put the fillers together, you could tell a long story. So then we figured out that we could sell those a lot, a lot of what we were doing is I would shoot, my partner would edit. We both try and figure out how to sell, and we were terrible.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: I have a terrible employee.
00:19:30
Speaker 3: I liked having a partner who encouraged me to take risks and to look to things that we probably wouldn't do on my own.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: So I liked.
00:19:38
Speaker 3: I liked the commanderie of a small company and John Watson and I who happened to be English but who had been working as a butler for a matthew of Don's wife in someone in New England, and he stayed in America so long he was becoming eligible for the draft, and at that point the Vietnam War was on, so he came north and was hired as an editor by one of the companies we knew, and he literally we had a very large closet and we let him slip.
00:20:08
Speaker 2: In the closets because he didn't have to pay any rent. So it was, you know, it was an inventive time for us.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: My guest today is Pendenthum, writer, filmmaker, film producer, photographer. So much to talk about. I want to know all about Kevin Costner when I come back. Okay, sure, back after the break, folks, welcome back to conversations, everybody. Look, if you just tuned in, we're speaking to a gentleman called Pindentium. Now he describes himself as British by accident, Canadian by choice. What was the one American.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: By exported to America by Norman Jewison?
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Okay? But so young fellow leaves school disinchanted with the education system, but finds his way in the in the media. Photographer moves to Canada and realize he can make a living by making short movies and so them to the Canadian film companies or TV companies, and it sounds like a pretty exciting job. Pen were there tough times a company or not.
00:21:11
Speaker 3: We never made a lot of money doing it, but you know we were. There was some wonderful people, Like there was this very jolly Scottish lady. It was very large and cheerful, and she ran a camera rental company and she would give us the cameras and trust us, knowing that we would pay if we were able to sell the movies we made, and we would. We would sometimes go out and shoot something and freeze the footage because we couldn't afford to process it.
00:21:35
Speaker 2: And then when we could afford to process it.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: We would then process it and show it to you know, potential sponsors. And you know, so we were inventing our futures as we went. And you know, Kodak would come around every every few months and try and sell us more film stock. And I said to them, you know, well, you know we're going to need more film stock as we could sell more movies. And Kodak actually taught us put on a course for filmmakers to teach us salesmanship. That was really helpful. It was because salesmanship could always seemed like something very seedy.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: You know, it's not something you should know. It's like there was secondhand car dealers.
00:22:13
Speaker 3: But in fact, it's just rationalized the process that none of us had really because artists, we never thought about it. You know, eliminate the objections to fine a need, make sure that you're opening doors for yourself. Don't wait for other people to discover you. You've got to go out there and push yourself. I thought people that got awards that the awards company sat there and watched all the movies and figured out to give awards to it. No, no, you enter it. And so we started entering awards and got two Oscar nominations, and that sort of put us on the map a bit.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: As you're speaking and you're talking about making films and you're talking about film stock there it's a technology that's disappeared. I would imagine I'm given all the digital stuff, does anybody make film? Like a few of.
00:22:56
Speaker 3: The big directors still hang on the film, But I'm suddenly a real convert to digital media. The quality of digital media is fantastic. It's extremely elastic. You get an instant result. You know, we used to go and shoot our footage, send it off to the lab. It would be put through various brews and parts of chemicals and then if everything wasn't scratched, and if it doesn't screwed up in the in the processing, then you got to see your work, you know, a day later.
00:23:25
Speaker 2: And in digital world, you get it immediately.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Can you tell the difference on the big screen.
00:23:30
Speaker 3: Because these days, you know, we've got eight K televisions and things that you know, just they pack the information in and all the There are a few companies that still will have real film projectors, but most of it is all distributed through digital because it's it took away that the prints and cans that they used to have dozens of cans of film they had to ship around America all the time, and it took away that cost. What a world are young people living in. They can make an iPhone and they can make a film on the iPhone that cost them nothing to shoot, and they could put that film in a movie theater because the quality the image is that good. You know, when we used to switch on a camera, it was like burning money. So the imaginations of the people that are being developed, who are able to use their cameras in their phones to explore I'm extremely excited by that.
00:24:22
Speaker 1: You come up with a vision to make a new movie about Robinhood, Robinhood, Prince of Thieves. Now, how many movies have been made about Robinhood. We go back to.
00:24:32
Speaker 2: Guess, which was a wonderful film.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: Why on us would you think there was another market for a Robin Hood?
00:24:38
Speaker 2: It was sort of backwards from that gram.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: I had the privilege of having a son with my wife and watched what effort went into raising a kid and how much love and energy was put into bringing people into the world. And I was watching Schwarzenegger and he's making movies called like Commander, where shooting people dead is considered heroic and the more the better, and you stick of you as you've gun up on the air and you put your foot on a corpse and you're a hero. And I'm looking at how much stress and effort it takes to raise a kid. And I wanted to make a movie that talked about what I called the makers of life as opposed to the takers of the life. And I learned in writing, which I actually never thought I would be a writer because I didn't think I was good enough. But if we got to Hollywood, I started to discover that the actually was okay. So it sort of brought down the fear of it. And so the idea of making a robin Hood for me was to say something about life. And putting a Christian and a Muslim side by side was one of my ways of saying all humanity should share the life together. So I went and pitched my take on robin Hood, which I went to three different studios, and they all told me it was the stupidest idea they did heard.
00:25:49
Speaker 2: No one wants to see guys with swords.
00:25:51
Speaker 3: They want to see people with guns, and it's a waste of time, and our system who typed our letters and things said, you know, I think it's an incredibly cool idea. I'll do anything I can to help you support you writing it. And if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have started. And I started writing what we call a spec script, which means no one's paying you to do it. And I'm just turning the pages over to my partner John and to this guy. And you can't judge what your writings. You're writing it because what you create seems obvious to you. So I'm going, okay, well, you know made Marion. He goes to her home, he sort of shocked, and he says, oh my, the years have been kind to you. And then he's jumped by this figure in a dark suit who's got a hood on, and that's really made Marian, And I says, isn't that courtey? No, No, this is right, keep going, keep going. I wrote the screenplay and then gave it to my partner to format and ad ideas because he's really good. And it's Christmas and he's finishing the script and it's Christmas time and he wants to and then we hear there's going to be a Fox is making a robin Hood and they and it's got John mctierna to direct, the guy that did die Hard and my partner John didn't want to finish the script and as would be dead in the water. We were just in some you know, small guys with a script. But I insisted that he finish it because I'd already given up on another project and I just didn't want to keep teaching myself to quit. And so we finished it because it seemed like a pyred victory, but at least we had a complete story and it was a complete script. And then we started sharing with Americans and they liked it and we're two Rish guys looking at they get this, Oh my goodness, you know, and they get the jokes, you know, because there was a little bit, you know, we'd goon show people Monty Python people and.
00:27:30
Speaker 2: Nothing's a bit Monty Python.
00:27:32
Speaker 3: And we ended up there was a suddenly four robin Hoods were out in the market and the four studios were trying to get a robin Hood mate, which was crazy. So we ended up selling ours to one of the cheaper people that we were offered a large summer money by Warner Brothers, but we heard that they were going to take the movie away from us and we wouldn't get to produce it.
00:27:51
Speaker 2: They were giving it to one of their star producers.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: We heard the Fox was trying to buy it, but they were probably trying to buy it to kill it so they could get their own maid. And there was this company called Morgan Creek who where the owner actually was willing to personally finance the movie. The race was who it seemed to be whoever got Kevin Costner to star was probably going to get that movie made.
00:28:15
Speaker 1: And how did you get Kevin Costner to start story?
00:28:18
Speaker 3: There was a lady called JJ Harris who was an agent at William Morris and she that was the place that represented us, and she had represented Kevin through his early career and he had just moved to Cia hed been seduced over to one of the larger, more kind of like aggressive companies, and she so believed in our script that she gave it to him saying, I don't care that it no longer represents you. You've got to read the script. And he ended up reading our script. He'd been taken apparently to Fox, where they'd shown imposterism, photoshoped with his head on Robin Hood clothes, and he didn't like their script, and there was a couple others we're trying to get him, and he liked our script a lot. It's not just a pure masculine adventure, and so he was willing to come on board as long as we got a direct that he liked. And what Morgan Creek did, which was really exciting, was the owner of Morgan Creek was willing to pay John to go to England rent studio space her crew start building sets, even though they didn't have a fun movie to go. That courage put us ahead of everybody else. Then we found a director guy called Kevin Reynolds, who had worked with Kevin Costa before, and we managed to put them all together and we ended up making the movie.
00:29:39
Speaker 1: When we come back after the break, I'll to continue that discussion, but not for long because we want to do about your your latest project. But I really want to find out what Kevin Costin's like. He's one of my favorites. Love to tell you back shortly. Pen Densham is my guest. My guest on Conversations is Pin Dentsham. It's a great story. You've got to go back to the start and listen to it. But as we went to the break, he just they'd written a movie, Robinhood, Prince of Thieves. They'd convinced Kevin Costner that he was he should star in it because they got the director for it, and you make the movie and it's a good mate. I think we all like sort of Robin Hood movies. But Kevin Costner's charisma is projects through the screen. There's no doubt about that. What's he really like, Well.
00:30:23
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: I met him socially through one of my agents before we'd met about Robin Hood, and we just went over to the agent's place for a barbecue and he was there with his wife and his kids, summing in the pool. And he was just a down to earth guy, and he wasn't pretentious, and he wasn't Hollywood, and he did seem to have a sincerity about him. And so when I think he'd read our screenplay and he had a little linkling of who we were, we were not strangers to him. I've watched, you know, the movies he makes, and there's you know, they call him the Gary Cooper of today, which is film's habit integrity. A lot of his films are very human. Most of his characters are decent people. He has played a serial killer, I think once or twice to sort of like shake things up. He also very much wanted to make sure that the script that he was working on with me worked from a point of view of what was right for his character.
00:31:17
Speaker 2: We would explore how to get more out of the scenes so that his character was better and richer. One of the things that we came up with was capture, don't lecture. When he's talking to the woodsman, he doesn't give him a lecture.
00:31:29
Speaker 3: He tries to raise their spirits so they'll support him to go fight the sheriff. And you know, we work through those kinds of things. I think some people think of him as being an egomaniac because I think in this business, people blow you up, you know, they blow you up and pop you and then they blow up again.
00:31:45
Speaker 2: And he did Dances with Wolves.
00:31:47
Speaker 3: The movie cost something like fourteen million dollars and he put a lot of his own money into it, and there was a lot of people chuckling in Hollywood and calling it Kevin's Gate, thinking that it's going to fail and then his egos gotten out of wine, you know. And then you see this movie and it's a tremendous statement about America, about the Native American culture, about decency, and in it one best picture, and then our.
00:32:13
Speaker 2: Movie followed that. We were very lucky.
00:32:16
Speaker 3: Also, one of the things that often find humorous was he got criticized for his accent, and you know, people would pick on him for not having a perfect English accent. Well, they were all speaking French, guys. You know, the Normans had raided England and all the tots, all the knobs at the top, the barons, everybody all spoke French. They all ate buff not beef. You know, it was like, you know, so that no one spoke with an English accent, BacT.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: So the bottom line is, despite all the other Robin hoods Ott then one of our own Australian New Zealand actors made one, How Did Yours Go?
00:32:52
Speaker 3: It got some It was reviewed I think peculi because of Cavin, because people didn't want to sort of like praise him to But the audience loved it and that was what was fascinating. You know, we'd written and I think Australians get this. You know, we'd written a body fun, uplifting, you know, adventure and based on kind of like who we were as people and how we grew up, and inspired by the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.
00:33:20
Speaker 2: Which I loved.
00:33:22
Speaker 3: Errol Flynn barely touches the ground when he goes through that movie. It's like so buoyant and the sword fights were so cool. And so you know, we watched this movie that originally that we couldn't sell, suddenly it's becomes I think it was the second biggest grossing movie that year, plus it was the largest grossing movie that Warner Brothers had.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: For some time.
00:33:44
Speaker 3: And it put us on the map as people that could make films in Hollywood. And we'd worked we've made a few other small films, and we'd also worked as consultants on some movies like for Stallone. But that opened the door and it gave us a chance to really really go in a way, make a giant version of our film company and from Canada, which is choose what you want to do, find things you're passionate about, and see if you can get a maid both in television and in film.
00:34:13
Speaker 1: Well, we have to jump, We have to take a big leapy at the latest project, which is more photography or photography. I'd like to say I understand it, but I'm trying to understand. You might have to explain it for me. Please.
00:34:28
Speaker 3: If you look back here, you see a shelf full of cameras, and some of them are from eighteen eighty six. As I said, watching my folks make movies, I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, watching the Wizard, you know, when he casts spells and things do things, and then Mickey Mouse grabs is wanted and gets himself totally screwed up. So for me, cameras and storytelling are like casting spells. I want to unrap people in stories and give them dreams or make them feel things that they couldn't feel. And for the longest I would carry a camera everywhere and photograph things. But I never felt that my photographs were very special. They were good, they were good by the standards of good. But what I found was that the photography world tends to teach you to replicate what's already existed, and that there's a right way to do a photo. And you have this composition and the critiques or put this figurehead here and focus there, and I got bored with my photographs. And then my fourteen year old daughter picked up my cameras and started making photos.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: That didn't have the rules, and they were.
00:35:36
Speaker 3: Mystical and they were poetic, and there were weird angles and lights and shadows in them were unique, and I suddenly going, I must have been doing this wrong. Instead of saying, well, how do I get it right? You got what if what if you move the camera when you take a picture and you get all these dreamy smears? Or what if you shake the camera out a tree and the tree suddenly it's like it's exploding with life.
00:36:02
Speaker 1: And it sidden that said, that's what got me. I mean, it looks some of those it looks like the camera is moving and and you're not supposed to do that.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: So you're saying, and follow the rules.
00:36:13
Speaker 1: Yes, well, I see you. Your comment about breaking rules leads to creativity, a certain sort of creativity.
00:36:20
Speaker 3: But what you're discovering, Graham, is that inside each of us is a is a voice, and that voice has taste, and once you let go of what you've been told you should do. And that's what I discovered in screenwriting. I tried to write the scripts the studio wanted. They never liked them. When I wrote the scripts that I was passionate about, they actually got made, even though they weren't commercial sensitively. And the same thing with discovering what photography to me went from being photography to heart. And when you look at Jackson Pollock, you don't say, well, that line or that squiggle.
00:36:53
Speaker 2: Should be here.
00:36:55
Speaker 3: You go, this makes you feel joyful. And I look at my and I'm humbled. I look at Turner and I look.
00:37:02
Speaker 1: At the money. You go, Jackson, Jackson Pollock. I don't understand. Years ago our National Gallery paid some ridiculous amount of money. Everyone ridiculed it. Now it's worth ten times what we paid for. But I still don't get it. Money I can get because you can see, even O's sort of impressionist by definition, you can still see the figures in the outline. You can still you can still feel it.
00:37:24
Speaker 3: And the thing is what does it? How does it affect you when you look at it? And that's that's the goal, is trying to create something that allows you as the viewer, to have a new sensory relationship with something familiar. So we drive home every day and we don't see the world we live in because our brains can't keep all the information, so we don't see the trees, we don't see the natural world. And when I'm when I'm photographing, I'm trying to remind us that we're part of this.
00:37:53
Speaker 2: You know.
00:37:53
Speaker 3: I love photographing waves. Well, we're four and a half billion years into this world and we came out of the oceans, and waves are like constant, living dancing sculptures, the reflections of sunset where they're dancing with like flames on the surface of the water. That stuff gets me so excited.
00:38:10
Speaker 1: So your book is Koalia. Now what's the reference to Kualia? I know it means something, I just don't know what it means.
00:38:18
Speaker 3: Well, you know, and once I let go of what I was supposed to do and I started discovering what felt good and what I was trying to find a term that would explain it, to give it some justification to people. That and I believe you have to build a bridge back to people. You know, you can't just go over there and say, hey, you don't get me, you're stupid. You actually have to help people see why something is turning you on and This word qualia came out of something I was reading and it said a philosophical term for things that can't.
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Be explained in words.
00:38:47
Speaker 3: Okay, and that's what I'm looking for for some of the looks at one of my images is that they feel something about their experience of life. They're looking at a KOI swimming and it's and.
00:39:01
Speaker 1: Am I going to offend you? Am I going to offend?
00:39:04
Speaker 2: Please? Do go ahead when I'm.
00:39:06
Speaker 1: Looking at I saying what I'm looking at and say what is it? People get? I know people can access Do you want them to buy the book? Do you want them to access online? To tell us what.
00:39:17
Speaker 2: I'm giving the book away?
00:39:18
Speaker 1: I wanted to share, but I didn't believe I've said that. I thought I read that. I said, that can't be right.
00:39:23
Speaker 3: Now you can download it off my website. And I'm just trying to turn people on the way that. You know, photography has gotten so easily created with iPhones. You know, people can take beautiful pictures iPhones. Now the next step is what is art? And can can I help you see the world through a different perspective that makes you feel good, that makes not about me feeling good? But can I make you feel engaged in this fact that we're all atoms together, that we forget that we're all built.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: On the same DNA base.
00:39:56
Speaker 3: You know, everything alive, nearly is all comes from these roots to and we're all we're all participants in this. And you know, all these trees around us that we don't see very often, they're all breathing for us. And we're busy down forests. And so, you know, can I make a statement that you put on your wall, something that looks vibrant and colorful and is organic, that makes you feel every day that you're engaging in life and being part of it, not just an electronic commodity, not like you know that we're we're just here to be used and then dispensed with.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: Well, people can find out for themselves and judge their reaction. Pen Your website is pendentsi photography dot com. Is that right?
00:40:40
Speaker 2: That's correct?
00:40:40
Speaker 1: Yes, pendentsim dee n s h A M photography pendents photography dot com. Forward slash qualitia q U A l I A and see what, see what I think? It's it's amazing You're letting people have the experience.
00:40:56
Speaker 3: You know, It's like I'm old enough that I don't need money, but I've really I'm just curious to see how people respond to it. I have this, honestly, Graham, I have this optimistic sense in me that things are going to happen that I don't know what they are, but they're going to be interesting.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: Can I just just one quick question as we wrap up? What camera do you carry around with you during the day.
00:41:17
Speaker 3: I use the thing a Sony camera, Sonny A seven R four, which has sixty four megapixels, and it leaves a lot of data that lets me use digital information.
00:41:28
Speaker 2: I don't use photoshop.
00:41:29
Speaker 3: Everything I do as a photo, but I like to have as rich amount of information as possible because I blow myself up to six feet. They're dynamic, they're hypnotizing.
00:41:39
Speaker 1: Great chat, Penn. Thank you so much for giving us your time, and I'll be really interested to see what people think, whether the reaction is the same as mine, or whether I'm just as I've always say, so culturally barren that I can't appreciate it. So all the best, mate, Thank you very much.
00:41:54
Speaker 2: Enjoy chatting Graham.
00:41:56
Speaker 1: Pendentim is my gift, folks. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Hi, folks, Welcome once again to conversations. My guest today is a he's a writer, he's a film producer, he's a photographer, and I guess he's a few other things. His name is Penn Densham. He joins us from is it La Penn?
00:00:14
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:00:14
Speaker 3: Well, I live at a place called West Hollywood, which is sort of a subdivision of Well and it's a very ardy area that's much less techy, And I never think of myself as being Hollywood. I say I'm English by accident, Canadian by choice, but taken to Hollywood by Norman Jewison. So I still feel like I'm more connected to Canada in some ways than I am to Hollywood. When you've met the privilege of living in two or three cultures, you start to see that it was a very restrictive society. I was not really able to find people who are creative entrepreneurs to model off. My expectations were my school was that helped me be a bank clerk, or that I should go join the military because i'd have a future and they had good pensions, you know. And when I left school at fifteen thinking that, but I'm going to try and stop being an artist, and my folks had made short films when I was a little kid, and I was four years old watching them make movies, and I just fell in love with cameras and the magic of it all, and wrote an alligator in one of their films that was about people who kept strange pets, and it went into the movie theaters, and little thing that I am is watching these giant screens, and I just knew I wanted to do things. The cast spelled and leaving school at fifteen, I went out and tried to start my own businesses. And I did a few things, photographed the Rolling Stones and sold some photos and things. But I sort of thought I was a washed up failure, and I fled to Canada at nineteen and found a culture which was alive. People were swapping notes about how to get things done. Kids at fifteen were making sync sound films and selling them, and people helped you, and there was art grants. The culture was percolating with life and energy, and I found out that I was over the hill.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: Actually was sort of like still had still had.
00:02:03
Speaker 1: A future, and you're going to stop that you've jumped about half the program because I want to go back to those childhood years, you're riding a crocodile. I read that what parent Litzi's four year old son ride a crocodile?
00:02:19
Speaker 3: And I had thought that my mom couldn't have been there that day, you know, And I also figured that they couldn't afford babysitters. These were not rich people. They were making sort of films, but I think there was a sort of scrapple to do it. So the particular section that I was in was that my dad had gone to meet a lady who kept crocodiles and alligators in her apartment. And there was it was literally like fish tanks, big long fish tanks on the walls, with a crocodile in one and a crocodile in another. And I remember, being four years old. I still remember her admonishing me stay away from that because whatever was in that tank was gonna eat me, I think. But then she had this other bothtub on the floor in her kitchen, and the six actually it was a seven foot long and I believe it was a Chinese alligator and it was a female called Peter, and that I was allowed to ride. I was a film brushing its teeth and I was putting a cigarette in its mouth and lighting it all at four. And the strangest thing was that about six seven years ago a guy who was like an expot on animals was trying to trace down who this woman was and why she'd owned these things, and he was a professor of animals, and he actually and I got in contact, and he found a copy of the movie that my folks had made and sent it to me. So I suddenly am watching this film from nineteen.
00:03:56
Speaker 2: Fifties, and my mother was.
00:03:58
Speaker 3: Actually in the film, and she was there that day, so I guess she was watching out my safety.
00:04:05
Speaker 1: So many questions there, But it was your dad primarily a filmmaker.
00:04:09
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, My dad and my uncle were identical twins, and they had both grown up. They had their first projector when they were six years old. They formed a film club when they were in their teens, and my dad actually worked for a company called Scoffny Bed in nineteen thirty eight who were selling televisions and so that, and they ended up, you know, making short films and being cameramen for through the war years, and then they tried to start their own businesses independently of each other, so I grew up around cameras, and.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: Did he talk about the war years, did he serve? What was he?
00:04:47
Speaker 3: My uncle did the more interesting things. He actually went to Europe about three days after D Day. He also went to the East while the Japanese were still fighting out there, and went and did some video and some filming out there. There was a film made called Western Approaches, which was about the convoy system, and he went out and filmed on the convoys, shooting in color, and that particular film was using real sailors to fill out a drama about what it was like to be on a convoy that got sunk and how the survivors had to get in a lifeboat.
00:05:26
Speaker 1: So they were the convoys that came from the USA to Britain a war was subjected to the attacks by the German U boats.
00:05:33
Speaker 2: I suppose the U boat packs.
00:05:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he'd lived that life. And both my uncle and my dad wrote their own biographies. My uncle's biography had all these adventures in it, so I knew about him through reading his biography, and my dad's biography was sort of a little bit more self serving, a little more. When my mom died, my dad married a very damaged lady. I refer to a Cruella de villain acid and she's terrible. She put me and my siblings into I was literally put in an orphanage for a while while she was trying to get rid of us, and so my tenures were a little colorful. I was trying to create dream for the camera and being told I was a big ego and I was to stop that and get on with life and go get a real job. And so it gave me an outsized sense of wanting to protect other people that were creative, because creativity is so ephemeral.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Interesting when you're talking about that. I have this vision of working class England and there's a gritty aspect to it, but it seems as yours was far from that. Your upbring even though they had the difficulty with your stepmother, there was an artistic side to it which you were able to pursue.
00:06:44
Speaker 3: I think seeing my folks make movies made it possible. I think we need to emulate sometimes in our lives. Gram that and I don't know what you're in the arts you're in, you know, discovering the world you're into, inventing your own future in a way by this kind of conversation, and I think, with the best will in the world, a lot of the school systems were trying to help us by processing us into consumable items as opposed to discovering what was innos and what we could be.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: So you're talking as the fifties and the sixties, you took sixties and sixties.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I left school in the in the mid sixties.
00:07:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, And I left school with what ambition.
00:07:22
Speaker 2: I mean, well, glad get away to my math teacher. My math teacher hated me.
00:07:30
Speaker 3: I could not figure out math, especially when they started doing algebra and sticking letters in where the numbers were.
00:07:35
Speaker 2: That was really cheating.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: And one teacher, my English teacher, put me in the school play, gave me the lead. I won the school photography prize. I had two articles in the school magazine. He ignored my terrible handwriting, my terrible spelling, and he said, you know, I think he really got something. And that's when I quit school because I didn't think it could get any better.
00:07:56
Speaker 1: You were the artistic kid, obviously, Yeah, I was thinking the rugby players, the soccer players. But you didn't fit in that group, not really.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: No, And when I made Robin Hood. After the movie was a success, I actually was able to trace this gentleman down and thank him because he had sort of believed in me, and I think that sense of being valued had stayed with me and had given me hope and the ability to try and keep pursuing a creative career.
00:08:27
Speaker 1: Every time I speak to someone who's achieved, will always go back to this school, because there's always a teacher that either encouraged or discouraged, and either one either way, they were motivating. In one sense, it sounds like that that particular teacher was yours.
00:08:44
Speaker 2: I feel very lucky.
00:08:45
Speaker 3: There's been two or three times in my life when people have reached out and encouraged me and changed my life. You don't know what you're capable of. I never dreamed i'd be in Hover, never dreamed i'd have hit movies. I never dreamed that I would have had the career I had based on looking at myself. Even in Canada, I saw us as making short films documentaries, which was very much the Canadian standard. Thank goodness, Canada was amazing. The Canadian television system would pay us to make short films about anything we wanted, and they would give us little, not giant sums of money, but little sums of money, and so literally we could go out and pursue our own goals and nature films and sports films and films on underdogs. And the culture there was, I think, trying to separate itself from America, and everything in Canada flees as far south as it can to get warm, and all of the American TV stations are all along that border. And so I think the Canadians invested in the arts to try and give themselves a definition of culture, which is why that generosity.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Penn Densham is my guest, folks, a filmmaker, film producer, photographer, writer, back shortly, welcome back, everybody. My guest on conversations is Pendentium. He's a writer, he's a film producer, he's a photographer. Anything else you want to add into that pen that I may have missed.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: One of the things I would love to be is an encourage about other people that are creative, and I think that comes from people having helped me knowing how anxious one gets. There's a thing called imposter syndrome when you do things and you don't believe in yourself and I think artists are particularly vulnerable because we don't have tracks. You know, a dentist knows exactly what he's doing and he can judge himself against it. I dream of something that's never existed and try and bring it to reality. It's really not easy to figure out whether that's worth doing, whether it's like to just succeed, whether you're wasting your time. And without the people that other dreamers, our culture wouldn't have its shaman and it wouldn't have its storytellers. And so part of I think giving back is to try and help other people that are creative to see that their fears and the lack of clarity about your objectives sometimes and getting rejected is also part of it. Are the norms of the game, and you're not the only one that's getting rejected. Getting rejected is what you keep trying to figure your way around.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: I've seen your comment about anxiety versus excitement. You know, the anxiety and which are discussing which you really discussing now about the anxious approach to it, but also there's an excitement when it succeeds. We might come back to that. This is the pivotal question, the most important question of the conversation. Penn, surely isn't your real name? What does Penn stand for?
00:11:34
Speaker 2: Well, my father named me Penray, and his name is Ray or Raymond, and he named my brother Gil Ray, and he named my sister Cheryl instead of Stingray. So I think she was very well.
00:11:48
Speaker 3: And I never quite like Panrae, so I've always shortened it down to pen, which seemed much more easy.
00:11:53
Speaker 1: You leave school at fifteen, are you excited about the world where you're disenchanted or you're trying to escape? We could step mother if icking use that term.
00:12:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:04
Speaker 3: It was a very dark period at home, and my stepmother was a very troubled lady. She had description drugs that were like speed, and she would drink and you'd come home into the house and you never knew what you were going to run into. We never had any guests in the house. We never have people over to dinner. It was a very strange world. And I think my father settled for that because he had three kids and was looking for a way of having us taken care of. But it was it was a very difficult time.
00:12:32
Speaker 1: Did he die a happy man? He did.
00:12:34
Speaker 3: He actually went to Canada for a brief period of time and left my stepmother and I thought, my god, life's going to turn around and sanity's going to return. And then he lost his job in Canada and went back to England and ended up staying with her, and I think had some kind of happiness, had a couple of other kids who were really good people with her. He gave up on his filmmaking, and he gave up on his involvement with entertainment business.
00:13:01
Speaker 1: How well was he when he died?
00:13:03
Speaker 3: He was about eighty two to eighty one, Okay, so not a bad life, no, And my my grandfather was sort of the same age. So now I'm looking at eighty one eighty two and going, oh okay, bee fit in.
00:13:16
Speaker 1: So a few things you put your lifestyle choices might be a bit different to our generations.
00:13:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was no exercising going on in my jad's generation.
00:13:27
Speaker 1: So you leave school of fifteen. There's this line there that you photographed the rolling stones? Was that a tell us how that happened? Is that a claim to flame or I.
00:13:39
Speaker 3: Was always looking to try and figure out how to sell my photography, and one of the things I did was I photographed myself in multiple reflection reflecting surfaces and sold an article called Go Shoot Yourself about trying to find ways of being your own portrait career and the idea of photographing the Rolling Stones. It's just seemed very drumatic and fun. And I had a relationship with a guy at the BBC who was using my photographs on air and I photographed poets for him people, and I said, well, how about me photographing the Rolling Stones. It's a teenager's candid view of them. And he talked to the Rolling Stones and letting me come backstage and shoot them, both on stage and backstage when they were performing at the local theater. And so I got to go and meet them and photograph them. And I was a bit scared, you.
00:14:28
Speaker 1: Know, I was, so what you would do?
00:14:31
Speaker 3: They?
00:14:31
Speaker 1: Are they famous? At the stage?
00:14:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's just sixty five okay, So there out there they already.
00:14:38
Speaker 3: Had satisfaction and the song they were singing at that time was Hey, you get off my cloud.
00:14:44
Speaker 2: And they were nice people.
00:14:46
Speaker 3: That was really interesting going backstage and finding that they weren't pompous and they were just open and the youthfulness. You know, you look at Richard's now and his face is like a wrinkled rag. Back then he was old boyish, so young looking. He looked like he never needed to shave. So how he got to where he did, I don't know.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: But it's astounding that he's still doing it, to be quite frank, when you into into hisieties.
00:15:12
Speaker 3: So it was Brian Jones was there in that time, that was before he died. And when you look at Mick Jagger and you realize that this guy's dancing for two hours eighty three to perform, he can do that. I should be at least exercising to get to my goals.
00:15:31
Speaker 1: He's got great hair still, I keep thinking, is that he's real here? But it must be. I don't know.
00:15:37
Speaker 3: I have brown hair and i'm you know, in my seventies, I don't know quite wired.
00:15:41
Speaker 2: Obviously didn't worry enough.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: We don't talk about hair around this house all that often to be so, where did the rolling Stones? Where did that lead you to?
00:15:52
Speaker 3: I ended up bizarrely becoming very a discotheque disc jockey for a small period of time in Southampton, England eighteen. It was a job I could get and I love music that you know. It was a club when they saw alcohol and I put on the records and people danced.
00:16:10
Speaker 2: But you know, I'm trying to find a creative career. But it still didn't.
00:16:14
Speaker 3: It didn't seem to offer a future, and Southampton didn't seem to have, you know, the abilities that London, and I think if I'd lived in London, I would have found other things. I was always impressed by people like David Bailey, who was one of the big fashion photographers of that time, and Canneby Street and the Beatles, and you know, we grew up in this revolution of the Who in my generation and that was our anthem and we all believe that's something better.
00:16:43
Speaker 2: And the pirate radio stations that.
00:16:45
Speaker 3: Were broadcasting music all day long and as opposed to the BBC, which would you know, they had like two pop record shows a week, you know, So we were trying to rebel.
00:16:57
Speaker 2: Do not best to rebel?
00:16:58
Speaker 1: You're twenty two and your own film company? Who does that? Who does that? At that agent? What resources? Did you have?
00:17:06
Speaker 3: No resources? I lived in Canada on my own for a while and just didn't like it. So I rented a giant house and sub rented out rooms. It was sort of a commune for working hippies, and so a lot of the people were filmmakers, or they were editors, or one of them was a local disc jockey for one of the underground radio stations. And I was working for a company making films with Marshall mccluan, who was very famous as a guru of communications at these in the sixties and seventies. I'm just learning about, you know that the company I was dealing with.
00:17:40
Speaker 2: Was self initiating movies.
00:17:42
Speaker 3: They were going out and finding the money and making movies about subjects. And my friends were all fired from the company they'd been at and I and I came back and I sold one film to the to the CBC at that stage, my very only film, and I got one thousand dollars.
00:17:58
Speaker 1: What was it about.
00:17:59
Speaker 3: It was about kids on the on the in the poor end of Toronto called Cabbage Town, playing on the streets in the Stummer It's called playground. And it was just like a just like a fly on the wall, watching them all having fun and just involved in their daily experience of being, you know, alive and communicating with each other and playing games with each other. I had made that film for one hundred dollars, and so to be able to sell it for a thousand dollars, I went back and said to my friends, if like Judy Golland, let's put on a show. What if we started our own company. And we went and met with the with the people who were at the CBC, who were a couple of ladies who were just wonderful to us, and we said, you know, would you buy anything else from us? And they said, well, you know, yeah, we need these things called fillers, which are little short films that we put into the American shows because they allow more commercials in America than we do, so we need to fill in these things. So you know, if you if you ever made us a film on a day in a park or sailing, you know, we'd probably buy those. We went back next week. We had a film on the parks and we had a film on sailing, and they gave us a contract for seven more and so now and they were paying us twelve hundred.
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Dollars and was there.
00:19:13
Speaker 3: And what was so exciting was if you put the fillers together, you could tell a long story. So then we figured out that we could sell those a lot, a lot of what we were doing is I would shoot, my partner would edit. We both try and figure out how to sell, and we were terrible.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: I have a terrible employee.
00:19:30
Speaker 3: I liked having a partner who encouraged me to take risks and to look to things that we probably wouldn't do on my own.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: So I liked.
00:19:38
Speaker 3: I liked the commanderie of a small company and John Watson and I who happened to be English but who had been working as a butler for a matthew of Don's wife in someone in New England, and he stayed in America so long he was becoming eligible for the draft, and at that point the Vietnam War was on, so he came north and was hired as an editor by one of the companies we knew, and he literally we had a very large closet and we let him slip.
00:20:08
Speaker 2: In the closets because he didn't have to pay any rent. So it was, you know, it was an inventive time for us.
00:20:16
Speaker 1: My guest today is Pendenthum, writer, filmmaker, film producer, photographer. So much to talk about. I want to know all about Kevin Costner when I come back. Okay, sure, back after the break, folks, welcome back to conversations, everybody. Look, if you just tuned in, we're speaking to a gentleman called Pindentium. Now he describes himself as British by accident, Canadian by choice. What was the one American.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: By exported to America by Norman Jewison?
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Okay? But so young fellow leaves school disinchanted with the education system, but finds his way in the in the media. Photographer moves to Canada and realize he can make a living by making short movies and so them to the Canadian film companies or TV companies, and it sounds like a pretty exciting job. Pen were there tough times a company or not.
00:21:11
Speaker 3: We never made a lot of money doing it, but you know we were. There was some wonderful people, Like there was this very jolly Scottish lady. It was very large and cheerful, and she ran a camera rental company and she would give us the cameras and trust us, knowing that we would pay if we were able to sell the movies we made, and we would. We would sometimes go out and shoot something and freeze the footage because we couldn't afford to process it.
00:21:35
Speaker 2: And then when we could afford to process it.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: We would then process it and show it to you know, potential sponsors. And you know, so we were inventing our futures as we went. And you know, Kodak would come around every every few months and try and sell us more film stock. And I said to them, you know, well, you know we're going to need more film stock as we could sell more movies. And Kodak actually taught us put on a course for filmmakers to teach us salesmanship. That was really helpful. It was because salesmanship could always seemed like something very seedy.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: You know, it's not something you should know. It's like there was secondhand car dealers.
00:22:13
Speaker 3: But in fact, it's just rationalized the process that none of us had really because artists, we never thought about it. You know, eliminate the objections to fine a need, make sure that you're opening doors for yourself. Don't wait for other people to discover you. You've got to go out there and push yourself. I thought people that got awards that the awards company sat there and watched all the movies and figured out to give awards to it. No, no, you enter it. And so we started entering awards and got two Oscar nominations, and that sort of put us on the map a bit.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: As you're speaking and you're talking about making films and you're talking about film stock there it's a technology that's disappeared. I would imagine I'm given all the digital stuff, does anybody make film? Like a few of.
00:22:56
Speaker 3: The big directors still hang on the film, But I'm suddenly a real convert to digital media. The quality of digital media is fantastic. It's extremely elastic. You get an instant result. You know, we used to go and shoot our footage, send it off to the lab. It would be put through various brews and parts of chemicals and then if everything wasn't scratched, and if it doesn't screwed up in the in the processing, then you got to see your work, you know, a day later.
00:23:25
Speaker 2: And in digital world, you get it immediately.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Can you tell the difference on the big screen.
00:23:30
Speaker 3: Because these days, you know, we've got eight K televisions and things that you know, just they pack the information in and all the There are a few companies that still will have real film projectors, but most of it is all distributed through digital because it's it took away that the prints and cans that they used to have dozens of cans of film they had to ship around America all the time, and it took away that cost. What a world are young people living in. They can make an iPhone and they can make a film on the iPhone that cost them nothing to shoot, and they could put that film in a movie theater because the quality the image is that good. You know, when we used to switch on a camera, it was like burning money. So the imaginations of the people that are being developed, who are able to use their cameras in their phones to explore I'm extremely excited by that.
00:24:22
Speaker 1: You come up with a vision to make a new movie about Robinhood, Robinhood, Prince of Thieves. Now, how many movies have been made about Robinhood. We go back to.
00:24:32
Speaker 2: Guess, which was a wonderful film.
00:24:34
Speaker 1: Why on us would you think there was another market for a Robin Hood?
00:24:38
Speaker 2: It was sort of backwards from that gram.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: I had the privilege of having a son with my wife and watched what effort went into raising a kid and how much love and energy was put into bringing people into the world. And I was watching Schwarzenegger and he's making movies called like Commander, where shooting people dead is considered heroic and the more the better, and you stick of you as you've gun up on the air and you put your foot on a corpse and you're a hero. And I'm looking at how much stress and effort it takes to raise a kid. And I wanted to make a movie that talked about what I called the makers of life as opposed to the takers of the life. And I learned in writing, which I actually never thought I would be a writer because I didn't think I was good enough. But if we got to Hollywood, I started to discover that the actually was okay. So it sort of brought down the fear of it. And so the idea of making a robin Hood for me was to say something about life. And putting a Christian and a Muslim side by side was one of my ways of saying all humanity should share the life together. So I went and pitched my take on robin Hood, which I went to three different studios, and they all told me it was the stupidest idea they did heard.
00:25:49
Speaker 2: No one wants to see guys with swords.
00:25:51
Speaker 3: They want to see people with guns, and it's a waste of time, and our system who typed our letters and things said, you know, I think it's an incredibly cool idea. I'll do anything I can to help you support you writing it. And if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have started. And I started writing what we call a spec script, which means no one's paying you to do it. And I'm just turning the pages over to my partner John and to this guy. And you can't judge what your writings. You're writing it because what you create seems obvious to you. So I'm going, okay, well, you know made Marion. He goes to her home, he sort of shocked, and he says, oh my, the years have been kind to you. And then he's jumped by this figure in a dark suit who's got a hood on, and that's really made Marian, And I says, isn't that courtey? No, No, this is right, keep going, keep going. I wrote the screenplay and then gave it to my partner to format and ad ideas because he's really good. And it's Christmas and he's finishing the script and it's Christmas time and he wants to and then we hear there's going to be a Fox is making a robin Hood and they and it's got John mctierna to direct, the guy that did die Hard and my partner John didn't want to finish the script and as would be dead in the water. We were just in some you know, small guys with a script. But I insisted that he finish it because I'd already given up on another project and I just didn't want to keep teaching myself to quit. And so we finished it because it seemed like a pyred victory, but at least we had a complete story and it was a complete script. And then we started sharing with Americans and they liked it and we're two Rish guys looking at they get this, Oh my goodness, you know, and they get the jokes, you know, because there was a little bit, you know, we'd goon show people Monty Python people and.
00:27:30
Speaker 2: Nothing's a bit Monty Python.
00:27:32
Speaker 3: And we ended up there was a suddenly four robin Hoods were out in the market and the four studios were trying to get a robin Hood mate, which was crazy. So we ended up selling ours to one of the cheaper people that we were offered a large summer money by Warner Brothers, but we heard that they were going to take the movie away from us and we wouldn't get to produce it.
00:27:51
Speaker 2: They were giving it to one of their star producers.
00:27:54
Speaker 3: We heard the Fox was trying to buy it, but they were probably trying to buy it to kill it so they could get their own maid. And there was this company called Morgan Creek who where the owner actually was willing to personally finance the movie. The race was who it seemed to be whoever got Kevin Costner to star was probably going to get that movie made.
00:28:15
Speaker 1: And how did you get Kevin Costner to start story?
00:28:18
Speaker 3: There was a lady called JJ Harris who was an agent at William Morris and she that was the place that represented us, and she had represented Kevin through his early career and he had just moved to Cia hed been seduced over to one of the larger, more kind of like aggressive companies, and she so believed in our script that she gave it to him saying, I don't care that it no longer represents you. You've got to read the script. And he ended up reading our script. He'd been taken apparently to Fox, where they'd shown imposterism, photoshoped with his head on Robin Hood clothes, and he didn't like their script, and there was a couple others we're trying to get him, and he liked our script a lot. It's not just a pure masculine adventure, and so he was willing to come on board as long as we got a direct that he liked. And what Morgan Creek did, which was really exciting, was the owner of Morgan Creek was willing to pay John to go to England rent studio space her crew start building sets, even though they didn't have a fun movie to go. That courage put us ahead of everybody else. Then we found a director guy called Kevin Reynolds, who had worked with Kevin Costa before, and we managed to put them all together and we ended up making the movie.
00:29:39
Speaker 1: When we come back after the break, I'll to continue that discussion, but not for long because we want to do about your your latest project. But I really want to find out what Kevin Costin's like. He's one of my favorites. Love to tell you back shortly. Pen Densham is my guest. My guest on Conversations is Pin Dentsham. It's a great story. You've got to go back to the start and listen to it. But as we went to the break, he just they'd written a movie, Robinhood, Prince of Thieves. They'd convinced Kevin Costner that he was he should star in it because they got the director for it, and you make the movie and it's a good mate. I think we all like sort of Robin Hood movies. But Kevin Costner's charisma is projects through the screen. There's no doubt about that. What's he really like, Well.
00:30:23
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: I met him socially through one of my agents before we'd met about Robin Hood, and we just went over to the agent's place for a barbecue and he was there with his wife and his kids, summing in the pool. And he was just a down to earth guy, and he wasn't pretentious, and he wasn't Hollywood, and he did seem to have a sincerity about him. And so when I think he'd read our screenplay and he had a little linkling of who we were, we were not strangers to him. I've watched, you know, the movies he makes, and there's you know, they call him the Gary Cooper of today, which is film's habit integrity. A lot of his films are very human. Most of his characters are decent people. He has played a serial killer, I think once or twice to sort of like shake things up. He also very much wanted to make sure that the script that he was working on with me worked from a point of view of what was right for his character.
00:31:17
Speaker 2: We would explore how to get more out of the scenes so that his character was better and richer. One of the things that we came up with was capture, don't lecture. When he's talking to the woodsman, he doesn't give him a lecture.
00:31:29
Speaker 3: He tries to raise their spirits so they'll support him to go fight the sheriff. And you know, we work through those kinds of things. I think some people think of him as being an egomaniac because I think in this business, people blow you up, you know, they blow you up and pop you and then they blow up again.
00:31:45
Speaker 2: And he did Dances with Wolves.
00:31:47
Speaker 3: The movie cost something like fourteen million dollars and he put a lot of his own money into it, and there was a lot of people chuckling in Hollywood and calling it Kevin's Gate, thinking that it's going to fail and then his egos gotten out of wine, you know. And then you see this movie and it's a tremendous statement about America, about the Native American culture, about decency, and in it one best picture, and then our.
00:32:13
Speaker 2: Movie followed that. We were very lucky.
00:32:16
Speaker 3: Also, one of the things that often find humorous was he got criticized for his accent, and you know, people would pick on him for not having a perfect English accent. Well, they were all speaking French, guys. You know, the Normans had raided England and all the tots, all the knobs at the top, the barons, everybody all spoke French. They all ate buff not beef. You know, it was like, you know, so that no one spoke with an English accent, BacT.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: So the bottom line is, despite all the other Robin hoods Ott then one of our own Australian New Zealand actors made one, How Did Yours Go?
00:32:52
Speaker 3: It got some It was reviewed I think peculi because of Cavin, because people didn't want to sort of like praise him to But the audience loved it and that was what was fascinating. You know, we'd written and I think Australians get this. You know, we'd written a body fun, uplifting, you know, adventure and based on kind of like who we were as people and how we grew up, and inspired by the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.
00:33:20
Speaker 2: Which I loved.
00:33:22
Speaker 3: Errol Flynn barely touches the ground when he goes through that movie. It's like so buoyant and the sword fights were so cool. And so you know, we watched this movie that originally that we couldn't sell, suddenly it's becomes I think it was the second biggest grossing movie that year, plus it was the largest grossing movie that Warner Brothers had.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: For some time.
00:33:44
Speaker 3: And it put us on the map as people that could make films in Hollywood. And we'd worked we've made a few other small films, and we'd also worked as consultants on some movies like for Stallone. But that opened the door and it gave us a chance to really really go in a way, make a giant version of our film company and from Canada, which is choose what you want to do, find things you're passionate about, and see if you can get a maid both in television and in film.
00:34:13
Speaker 1: Well, we have to jump, We have to take a big leapy at the latest project, which is more photography or photography. I'd like to say I understand it, but I'm trying to understand. You might have to explain it for me. Please.
00:34:28
Speaker 3: If you look back here, you see a shelf full of cameras, and some of them are from eighteen eighty six. As I said, watching my folks make movies, I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, watching the Wizard, you know, when he casts spells and things do things, and then Mickey Mouse grabs is wanted and gets himself totally screwed up. So for me, cameras and storytelling are like casting spells. I want to unrap people in stories and give them dreams or make them feel things that they couldn't feel. And for the longest I would carry a camera everywhere and photograph things. But I never felt that my photographs were very special. They were good, they were good by the standards of good. But what I found was that the photography world tends to teach you to replicate what's already existed, and that there's a right way to do a photo. And you have this composition and the critiques or put this figurehead here and focus there, and I got bored with my photographs. And then my fourteen year old daughter picked up my cameras and started making photos.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: That didn't have the rules, and they were.
00:35:36
Speaker 3: Mystical and they were poetic, and there were weird angles and lights and shadows in them were unique, and I suddenly going, I must have been doing this wrong. Instead of saying, well, how do I get it right? You got what if what if you move the camera when you take a picture and you get all these dreamy smears? Or what if you shake the camera out a tree and the tree suddenly it's like it's exploding with life.
00:36:02
Speaker 1: And it sidden that said, that's what got me. I mean, it looks some of those it looks like the camera is moving and and you're not supposed to do that.
00:36:11
Speaker 2: So you're saying, and follow the rules.
00:36:13
Speaker 1: Yes, well, I see you. Your comment about breaking rules leads to creativity, a certain sort of creativity.
00:36:20
Speaker 3: But what you're discovering, Graham, is that inside each of us is a is a voice, and that voice has taste, and once you let go of what you've been told you should do. And that's what I discovered in screenwriting. I tried to write the scripts the studio wanted. They never liked them. When I wrote the scripts that I was passionate about, they actually got made, even though they weren't commercial sensitively. And the same thing with discovering what photography to me went from being photography to heart. And when you look at Jackson Pollock, you don't say, well, that line or that squiggle.
00:36:53
Speaker 2: Should be here.
00:36:55
Speaker 3: You go, this makes you feel joyful. And I look at my and I'm humbled. I look at Turner and I look.
00:37:02
Speaker 1: At the money. You go, Jackson, Jackson Pollock. I don't understand. Years ago our National Gallery paid some ridiculous amount of money. Everyone ridiculed it. Now it's worth ten times what we paid for. But I still don't get it. Money I can get because you can see, even O's sort of impressionist by definition, you can still see the figures in the outline. You can still you can still feel it.
00:37:24
Speaker 3: And the thing is what does it? How does it affect you when you look at it? And that's that's the goal, is trying to create something that allows you as the viewer, to have a new sensory relationship with something familiar. So we drive home every day and we don't see the world we live in because our brains can't keep all the information, so we don't see the trees, we don't see the natural world. And when I'm when I'm photographing, I'm trying to remind us that we're part of this.
00:37:53
Speaker 2: You know.
00:37:53
Speaker 3: I love photographing waves. Well, we're four and a half billion years into this world and we came out of the oceans, and waves are like constant, living dancing sculptures, the reflections of sunset where they're dancing with like flames on the surface of the water. That stuff gets me so excited.
00:38:10
Speaker 1: So your book is Koalia. Now what's the reference to Kualia? I know it means something, I just don't know what it means.
00:38:18
Speaker 3: Well, you know, and once I let go of what I was supposed to do and I started discovering what felt good and what I was trying to find a term that would explain it, to give it some justification to people. That and I believe you have to build a bridge back to people. You know, you can't just go over there and say, hey, you don't get me, you're stupid. You actually have to help people see why something is turning you on and This word qualia came out of something I was reading and it said a philosophical term for things that can't.
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Be explained in words.
00:38:47
Speaker 3: Okay, and that's what I'm looking for for some of the looks at one of my images is that they feel something about their experience of life. They're looking at a KOI swimming and it's and.
00:39:01
Speaker 1: Am I going to offend you? Am I going to offend?
00:39:04
Speaker 2: Please? Do go ahead when I'm.
00:39:06
Speaker 1: Looking at I saying what I'm looking at and say what is it? People get? I know people can access Do you want them to buy the book? Do you want them to access online? To tell us what.
00:39:17
Speaker 2: I'm giving the book away?
00:39:18
Speaker 1: I wanted to share, but I didn't believe I've said that. I thought I read that. I said, that can't be right.
00:39:23
Speaker 3: Now you can download it off my website. And I'm just trying to turn people on the way that. You know, photography has gotten so easily created with iPhones. You know, people can take beautiful pictures iPhones. Now the next step is what is art? And can can I help you see the world through a different perspective that makes you feel good, that makes not about me feeling good? But can I make you feel engaged in this fact that we're all atoms together, that we forget that we're all built.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: On the same DNA base.
00:39:56
Speaker 3: You know, everything alive, nearly is all comes from these roots to and we're all we're all participants in this. And you know, all these trees around us that we don't see very often, they're all breathing for us. And we're busy down forests. And so, you know, can I make a statement that you put on your wall, something that looks vibrant and colorful and is organic, that makes you feel every day that you're engaging in life and being part of it, not just an electronic commodity, not like you know that we're we're just here to be used and then dispensed with.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: Well, people can find out for themselves and judge their reaction. Pen Your website is pendentsi photography dot com. Is that right?
00:40:40
Speaker 2: That's correct?
00:40:40
Speaker 1: Yes, pendentsim dee n s h A M photography pendents photography dot com. Forward slash qualitia q U A l I A and see what, see what I think? It's it's amazing You're letting people have the experience.
00:40:56
Speaker 3: You know, It's like I'm old enough that I don't need money, but I've really I'm just curious to see how people respond to it. I have this, honestly, Graham, I have this optimistic sense in me that things are going to happen that I don't know what they are, but they're going to be interesting.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: Can I just just one quick question as we wrap up? What camera do you carry around with you during the day.
00:41:17
Speaker 3: I use the thing a Sony camera, Sonny A seven R four, which has sixty four megapixels, and it leaves a lot of data that lets me use digital information.
00:41:28
Speaker 2: I don't use photoshop.
00:41:29
Speaker 3: Everything I do as a photo, but I like to have as rich amount of information as possible because I blow myself up to six feet. They're dynamic, they're hypnotizing.
00:41:39
Speaker 1: Great chat, Penn. Thank you so much for giving us your time, and I'll be really interested to see what people think, whether the reaction is the same as mine, or whether I'm just as I've always say, so culturally barren that I can't appreciate it. So all the best, mate, Thank you very much.
00:41:54
Speaker 2: Enjoy chatting Graham.
00:41:56
Speaker 1: Pendentim is my gift, folks. Thank you so much for joining us.
