Michael Winner’s seaside special – recalling the time the director, who died this week, joined forces to make a film with Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough

IT was after ten in the evening and raining on a clifftop in Scarborough. Hardly a glamorous film set and reason to suspect that British film director Michael Winner – a man who once defined teamwork as “a lot of people doing what I say” – would not be in the happiest of moods.

Even before I met him, several people had regaled me with stories of his cruelty towards actors. He had a reputation for being outspoken, picked up while becoming Britain’s oneman film industry at a time when home-grown movies were having a hard time getting made.

Then he arrived on the set. A grey-haired man, cigar clamped between his lips, climbing from a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. The director of the violent Death Wish thrillers wasn’t in North Yorkshire to direct a movie – he’d done that the previous year – but to make a TV programme for Tyne Tees Television.

There was no big film crew of hundreds of people, just a small crew from a North-East regional company who were directing a man more used to giving directions than receiving them.

But surprise, surprise Winner was very jolly and friendly as he filmed an edition of arts magazine 55 North in which he lamented the decline of the seaside summer show and renewed his acquaintance with playwright Alan Ayckbourn. He’d spent the previous summer in the town filming his play A Chorus Of Disapproval.

Winner’s death this week doesn’t so much rob the film world of a director – because he’d become a newspaper food critic rather than movie-maker in recent years – as rob it of a man who did much for British films, but was often dismissed because his forceful nature could rub people up the wrong way.

INDEED, some of his later films – Dirty Weekend (and yes, the T-shirt to promote the film did read “I had a Dirty Weekend with Michael Winner”) and Parting Shots – were not very good. A Chorus Of Disapproval didn’t cause much of a ripple in the cinematic pool either, although he clearly enjoyed the experience of making it with a 100-strong unit, including stars Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins, in Scarborough.

“I am genuinely fond of Scarborough and Alan Ayckbourn, so if you put the two together, I am delighted to do it,” he told me about making the TV show.

Of course, he said filming was “very inconvenient”

as he should have been scouting locations in Switzerland, Paris and Austria for his next movie starring Roger Moore and Michael Caine. Instead he was at the seaside sheltering under an umbrella, which he willingly shared with me, on a wet night in Scarborough.

LOCATIONS he used for the Ayckbourn film ranged from the Royal Hotel to a small guest house, from local pubs to ice cream parlours. Before filming, the writer took Winner around the town to show him the places where he thought the characters would live.

The film was testimony to the persuasive powers of Winner, who worked with Marlon Brando and Orson Welles, and took on the Americans at their own game by directing several westerns.

A Chorus Of Disapproval was the first time Ayckbourn had allowed one of his plays to be filmed for the cinema.

The modest budget of £1.2m was financed privately by an American living in this country.

“No one took any serious money. They all did it for love,” said Winner. “I think occasionally you have to make films you are unlikely to be great box office”.

Winner, whose mother was said to have lost £3m in a Cannes casino, was careful with money.

While filming in Scarborough he went to the Odeon cinema one Saturday night and caused something of a stir by trying to use his Rank free cinema pass to get in.