Boorman demonstrated an early entrepreneurial spirit by leaving school at the age of 16 and setting up a successful dry cleaning business with a friend. He also worked as a film critic on the side, and though his involvement with dry-cleaning ended when he entered military service, Boorman continued to pursue journalism. He joined the newly-formed Independent Television News (ITN) in 1955 as an assistant film editor and later produced documentaries for Southern Television. Boorman's early dissatisfaction with realistic documentaries led him while head of the BBC's Bristol Film Unit to begin making poetic or impressionistic documentaries, films about atmosphere and the search for cinematic moments that rejected the strictly journalistic approach. He was responsible for two highly-acclaimed documentary series while there, "Citizen 63" (1963) and the even more ambitious "The Newcomers", a six-part study of a newly married Bristol couple and their friends with "an Antonioni-esque flourish in which twelve cameras filmed what went on in Bristol in the last half-hour as the birth of twins took place."
Boorman's first feature, "Having a Wild Weekend" (1965), was a competent, exuberant 1960s musical featuring the Dave Clark Five which unsuccessfully attempted to duplicate the success of the Beatles/Richard Lester ground-breaker "A Hard Day's Night" (1964). After "The Great Director" (1966), a documentary on D.W. Griffith for the BBC, Boorman moved to the USA and directed the genre-bending "Point Blank" (1967), a taut, violent thriller marked by a complex flashback narrative structure. Starring a palpably sexy Angie Dickinson and a somnambulant but intense Lee Marvin, the film exhibited a sustained brilliance of camerawork and editing no one expected from the sophomore director. Ignored at the box office, it has since acquired the status of masterpiece, one many critics feel the director has not surpassed. Marvin played to perfection the archetypal Boorman protagonist, a disruptive loner with a lip-curling distaste for all forms of authority, and the picture managed to bridge the two halves of his future oeuvre, functioning as a stylized, artificial universe of the mind as well as depicting the struggle with nature.
"Hell in the Pacific" (1968), also starred Marvin and mined the director's WWII experiences which included guilt about surviving an ambush on Saipan that wiped out his entire platoon except for one other person. Playing a stranded flyer on a tiny Pacific island, Marvin encounters a Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune), and the two first stalk each other, then come to a temporary truce before the clash of cultures drives them apart again. The film approached the completely silent movie Boorman had hoped to make after his Griffith documentary. Most critics believed he had beat his anti-war message to death, but some praised his ability to sustain a two-character story-line over feature length. For "Leo the Last" (1970), the director upped the allegorical content to a level considered excessive by most with his story of an expatriate prince (Marcello Mastroianni) who eventually becomes emotionally involved with his poor black neighbors and joins them in their struggle against heartless property speculators. The picture brought Boorman the director's award at Cannes and was a hit in France but flopped in Britain and America.
Boorman made a strong recovery with "Deliverance" (1972), in which four Atlanta businessmen take off on a weekend canoe trip down a wild (but soon to be tamed) Appalachian river, deliberately pitting themselves against the imperiled wilderness. The adventure becomes a nightmare when a couple of hate-filled, near-mutant hillbillies sodomize one of the travelers (Ned Beatty), turning the game into a real struggle for survival and revenge. Creative (and personal) differences with screenwriter James Dickey (who had adapted his novel and also played the sheriff in the film) led Boorman to ban the writer from the set, protecting his vision for a far more ambiguous ending than exists in the book. On the level of allegory, the director may have erred by again hammering his message relentlessly home, and as for complex character studies, he was content (as always) to examine archetypes, not individuals. However, the visual account of the journey and the irrational hostility of the hill people was stunning, thanks to outstanding cinematography (featuring extremely long takes) by Vilmos Zsigmond, guaranteeing its box-office success.
Boorman's next two films missed the mark. The sci-fi pic "Zardoz" (1974) earned kudos for its special effects but plunged into myth without creating a satisfactory context for it, leaving audiences confused. On the other hand, "Exorcist II: The Heretic" (1977) was a fiasco of monumental proportions, containing some decent f/x but offering nothing in the way of its predecessor's strong suits (like a somewhat believable story). Of course "The Exorcist" (1972) was a tough act to follow, but Boorman's ambitious, exclusively visual film put people off, though some critics began seeing it in a more forgiving context once the stench of its scornful reception died down. The director turned to the Arthurian legend for his next picture, writing (with Rospo Pallenberg) "Excalibur" (1981), based mostly on Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur". Although the cast included Nicol Williamson (Merlin) and Helen Mirren (Morgana), Boorman for the most part went with lesser known actors, beginning a practice he would follow thereafter to insure that no star would ever be bigger than the picture.
Although "Excalibur" struck some critics as humorless, thematically heavy-handed and overlong, it was still a spellbinding, sexually aware rendition of the King Arthur legend by a stylish filmmaker working at the peak of his powers. Effectively evoking the dreams, the magic, the imagery and the romance, Boorman fashioned arguably the best movie about Camelot, and his next film, "The Emerald Forest" (1985), followed in logical progression exploring the same thematic territory. The story (written by Pallenberg) of a white child raised for ten years by a primitive Amazon tribe provided his biggest challenge since "Deliverance" and a superb showcase for his virtuosity with the camera. Shot at great hardship on location along the Xingu River in Brazil, it starred the director's son Charley and Powers Boothe as his engineer father who finds him after a ten-year search. Initiated in the tribe's shamanistic rituals, Boothe recognizes the barrenness and cruelty of his own culture, and after father and son destroy a dam together that threatens the rain forest, they part, the boy remaining with his adoptive people. Giving the impression it was every bit as suspenseful to make as watch, it was his biggest box-office success in more than a decade.
In a real change of pace, Boorman followed with the most conventional film of his career, the delightful, autobiographical "Hope and Glory" (1987), which captured a child's innocent delight at the disruption of the Blitz mirroring the director's own experience of living through the London air raids of World War II. Although there were a few examples of the visual flourishes expected from Boorman, he remained content to tell a simple, loving story, and audiences responded to the material. That success, however, would be his last for more than a decade. "Where the Heart Is" (1990), a disappointing farce about 80s values with faint echoes of Shakespeare's "King Lear" co-written with his daughter Telsche, was just a little too outlandish to take seriously, and he missed again with "Beyond Rangoon" (1995), an examination of the political intrigues in 1980s Burma (Myanmar). The picture fell short in its analysis of the little-known political situation, but Boorman and production designer Anthony Pratt (in the pair's fifth collaboration) were right at home capturing the tropical milieu and delivering exciting large-scale action sequences. The film's biggest negative was leading lady Patricia Arquette's inability to carry the ball, though all characters were uniformly one-dimensional.
While Lady Luck refused to smile on his large screen projects, Boorman delivered two very fine efforts for TV. First, he made the remarkable one-hour film "I Dreamt I Woke Up" (1991), a personal essay-meditation on cinema, landscape and myth for a BBC Scotland series, "The Director's Place", and on the other side of the pond, he directed the "Two Nudes Bathing" segment of Showtime's "Picture Windows" (1995). Pouring out all his love for his adopted homeland Ireland, the director startlingly rejuvenated his career with "The General" (1998), a biopic of Irish crime lord Martin Cahill (a perfect Boorman protagonist). Working in black-and-white for the first time since his feature debut, he reestablished himself as a major creative force in critics' eyes, winning the Best Director Award at Cannes, though commercially the picture was primarily a specialty item for urban audiences and movie buffs. Director of photography Seamus Deasy contributed mightily with his widescreen lensing, as did Ron Davis, his editor since "The Emerald Forest", but the real star was Boorman, rediscovering the vitality and freshness of his earlier work and reasserting himself as a unique, visionary filmmaker.
Boorman continued with his streak of fine work with “The Tailor of Panama” (2001), an adaptation of the John Le Carré spy novel. Set in a post-Noriega Panama, the film centered on a naïve tailor (Geoffrey Rush) who is enlisted by a banished British spy (Pierce Brosnan) to concoct a left-wing movement against the government that would force an American invasion and nullify the Panama Canal treaty. Though it barely made a blip at the box office, the movie received rave reviews, particularly for the performances of Brosnan and Rush. Boorman’s next feature, “In My Country” (2005), faired more poorly with critics than his previous effort. About the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—a public hearing conducted to reconcile the atrocities of apartheid—the film centered on an angry Washington Post journalist (Samuel L. Jackson) who butts heads and eventually falls in love with a white, naïve South African poet (Juliette Binoche).