Dickie bow

"I CAN tell you a story. How long have we got?," asks Lord Attenborough who, after 65 years on both sides of the camera, has a wealth of movie-related tales to tell.

Spend just half an hour in the company of this enthusiastic, chatty 84-year-old and you relive a lifetime of films.

His story concerns Poppy, his beloved wife and actress Sheila Sim, who's sitting in the front row as he talks to regional journalists at a Cinema Days event in Leicester, the city where he grew up.

He was home on leave during the Second World War and accompanying fiancee Sheila to Denham film studios where director Michael Powell was making A Matter Of Life And Death.

After they were introduced, Powell asked him how much he earned in the RAF. Seven shillings and threepence, replied Richard Attenborough.

Powell looked over at the film set depicting a stairway to the stars and told him: "If you would care to come up that escalator and when you get to the top say it's heaven', I'll pay you more than that."

Money is still something that occupies the mind of the indefatigable Attenborough - not earning it, but raising it to direct the pictures he wants to make. His impressive credits behind the camera include the Oscar-winning Gandhi, Cry Freedom, Oh What a Lovely War, Shadowlands and A Chorus Line. It's as varied a bunch of credits to match his equally eclectic acting roles, from juvenile thug Pinkie in Brighton Rock to the man who built a prehistoric theme park in Spielberg's Jurassic Park.

Acting doesn't appeal as much as directing these days. "It doesn't any more give me the real thrill, the real excitement," he says.

ISHAKE with excitement when I go on the studio floor for the beginning of the day's work.

I'm over the moon with this opportunity I've got and, because I'm a bossy bugger, I like being the boss. I like being the director, having the right to hone and shape the performances of wonderful players. My satisfaction is considerably more as a director than as an actor."

But back to raising finance for movies. Gandhi took him 20 years to put on screen. His latest, Closing The Ring, took a mere five. Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer star in this romantic drama spanning several generations, skipping back and forth between 1941 and 1991, and between America and Belfast.

"It's very hard raising money now. You're not any more dealing with people who are, to say dedicated is ridiculous, but aren't even interested in the movies. They're part of conglomerates. People making decisions rarely read scripts, they have a chart with names of players and they have numbers which you add together - and if you get a certain number, you can have your money.

"You battle on which, when you get to my age, is too old really. I should be saying goodbye and packing it in but for some ridiculous reason I can't. I just can't contemplate the idea of retirement."

He praises Peter Woodward's first time script which suited Attenborough's style of film-making.

The Oscar-winner does perhaps himself a disservice when he talks about his directorial style. "I don't make innovative movies, I make craft movies.

They have beginnings, middles and ends. I'm not interested in the pornography of violence, in fact I'm distressed by it. I'm not interested in special effects, I'm interested in people and relationships," he says.

His last film as a director was Grey Owl seven years ago, with Pierce Brosnan in the true story of an Englishman who poses as a native American and advocates the conservation of nature. Some consider the movie was badly distributed and not given the promotional backing it needed. Attenborough certainly did his bit, undertaking a regional publicity tour as he has done with Closing The Ring.

Whatever the truth about the distribution, he takes some of the blame, although the experience hasn't dented his enthusiasm and dedication to film-making. "I'm a hopeless optimist; I'm a committed worker," he explains.

"I adore the smell of the studio and the camera.

I'm in seventh heaven. I was disappointed because I thought it was a better film than it was recognised as. I made a balls-up. I had difficulty raising money because Los Angeles wanted me to use a Hollywood actress and darken her up. I wanted to have the real thing. If you're making a film about a man who fakes his life, you can't put a phoney girl in that position.

"I cast the girl and thought she did very well.

What I didn't recognise was that being native American and French, her intonations were very difficult to deal with. I did an awful lot of dubbing of her dialogue and it didn't serve her performance very well. I accept I made a misjudgement."

The conversation gets a bit morbid as it turns to his legacy. He's willing to go along with it while unable to name a piece of work for which he'd like to be remembered. "I'm not a great film-maker. I'm a craftsman," he says.

"I don't believe I'm leaving behind a great piece of work. Gandhi achieved a lot in terms of impact on certain countries. It's true to say that Nelson Mandela very sweetly said that my film Cry Freedom made a greater impact on white South Africans than any speech he made.

"I believe in being involved in a creative industry that can and does make the cry for passion and plea for tolerance. I hope the movies I've been involved with, either as a player or as a director and producer, have made an impact, made people reconsider certain feelings and attitudes, and opened up certain fears and concerns that we all feel."

But he has more or less resigned himself to never achieving his long-held ambition of making a film about Thomas Paine, the 18th Century political writer who supported the American revolutionary cause and later became involved in French politics.

The project is "still bubbling", says Attenborough.

"Of course, no one wants to make it. It's period, it's politics, it's religion, there's no violence in terms of really graphic violence. I doubt very much whether I will ever make it.

"I'd like to end my life on the last day of shooting, someone else can edit the film. I would like to say, cut' and drop dead. That would be my perfect end."

* Closing The Ring (12A) is now showing in cinemas.