My latest directing mentor has been John Boorman. (Deliverance. Zardoz. Exorcist 2. Excalibur. Hope and Glory. The General. To name but a few of his films.)
Interestingly John had an early film Point Blank, which was one of the first non linear stories at the box office. We tend to think of Tarrantino as the master of flashback and flashforward but there has been the odd director who got there first. Point Blank in 1967 had Lee Marvin swimming away from Alcatraz prison with the film shot different to classic beginning, middle and end. The story was flashforward and flashback with strange encounters and characters, so John eventually got an invite from the producers. There was someone sat in the corner of the room taking notes and John later found out it was a psychiatrist employed by them to "work out if he really was crazy" for wanting to make the film in the first place. Times have changed but its still amazing today how people with little or no imagination, can call a piece of art mad, simply because they don't understand it in the first place.
