The Cement Garden

Andrew Birkin (b. 9 December 1945 in Harrow, London) is an English screenwriter, director, and occasional actor. He was born the only son of Lieutenant-Commander David Birkin and his wife, the actress Judy Campbell. One of his sisters is the actress Jane Birkin.

Birkin left Harrow School at the age of 17 to work as a mail boy at 20th Century Fox’s London office, graduating to Elstree Studios as a production runner in 1963. He began work as a runner on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1965, but soon became Kubrick’s location scout. By the summer of 1966, Kubrick had promoted Birkin to Assistant Director on Special Effects; Birkin later proposed the shooting and color transposition of aerial footage for the ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’ sequence, some of which he filmed from a helicopter over Scotland . In 1967 Birkin supervised the shooting of ‘The Dawn of Man’ front projection plates in the Namib Desert. In 1968, Kubrick again engaged Birkin as his assistant director and location scout on his unmade epic of Napoleon.

Having worked on an adaptation of Peter Pan for NBC in 1975, Birkin conceived and wrote The Lost Boys (1978), a 3-part mini-series for the BBC about Peter Pan’s creator J. M. Barrie, which won him writing awards from the Writers Guild of Great Britain and The Royal Television Society. The critic Sean Day-Lewis wrote in The Daily Telegraph, ‘I doubt if biography has ever been better televised than in this sensitive and beautifully crafted masterpiece, and I am quite sure such excellence is beyond any other television service in the world.’ The BBC’s Director-General Sir Ian Trethowan called it ‘a landmark in television drama’. Birkin has also written a biographical account of Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979; 2nd edition 2003), described by The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as ‘the most candid and perceptive biography to have been written of Barrie’. Birkin also hosts Barrie’s official website on behalf of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom he donated his Barrie/Llewelyn Davies/Peter Pan archive in 2004.

In 1980, Birkin won a BAFTA award and an Academy Award nomination for his short film Sredni Vashtar, based on the short story by Saki, which he wrote, produced and directed for 20th Century Fox. In 1984 he wrote the shooting script for The Name of the Rose (in which he also had a small acting role), and in 1988 he wrote and directed Burning Secret, based on the novel by Stefan Zweig, which won two awards at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, as well as the Young Jury prize for Best Film at the Brussels Film Festival. In 1993, Birkin wrote and directed The Cement Garden, based on the novel by Ian McEwan, for which he won the Silver Bear as best director at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as Best Film at several film festivals, including Dinard, Fort Lauderdale, and Birmingham. In 1998 he collaborated with Luc Besson on the script of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, and in 2004 co-wrote the screenplay for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. —Wikipedia