"This Is What It Should Be": Spielberg on Peter Medak's Ghost Story

Peter Medak, the director of The Changeling, The Krays and The Ruling Class, died in Los Angeles on Tuesday, October 27, aged 88, his family announced. ^[1][3][4]

The Guardian reported that he died peacefully. ^[1] No cause has been given.

Medak made 27 features, according to Variety, and directed episodes of The Twilight Zone, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, House, Hannibal and Breaking Bad. ^[4][1][2] The Directors Guild of America describes a career that balanced film and television steadily. ^[2]

That is not quite how it went, as we shall see. But the steadiness of his appetite is the point.

The film other directors screened

Start with the smallest detail, because it says the most. When Steven Spielberg was preparing Poltergeist, he screened The Changeling for the crew to set the tone he wanted. Medak recalled Spielberg telling them: "This is what it should be." ^[3]

Medak also said Spielberg and Martin Scorsese each had a 35mm copy. ^[3] Directors do not buy prints of films they merely admire. They buy prints of films they want to take apart and learn from.

The Changeling, released in 1980, stars George C. Scott as a grieving composer who moves into a new house and is drawn into a supernatural mystery. ^[1][3][4] The BFI's catalogue lists it as a British-Canadian production. ^[5] Variety reported that it won eight Genie Awards, Canada's national film prizes, including best motion picture. ^[4]

Its fear comes from a bereaved man in a house that will not leave him alone, not from a monster. That is a hard thing to do well, and it is why other filmmakers kept coming back to it.

From Budapest to Pathé

Medak was born in Budapest in 1937 and fled Hungary for England during the 1956 uprising. ^[1][2][3][4] He found his way into the British film business through Associated British-Pathé, with help from an aunt who was an opera singer. ^[3] The Directors Guild's record shows him working as an assistant director before he directed. ^[2]

An exile who learns a trade in a foreign industry learns to be adaptable, because nobody owes him a signature style. Medak's later career reads like that lesson applied for sixty years.

His first feature, Negatives, came out in 1968. ^[1][3] Then came a double act in 1972 that few directors could match for ambition. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg adapted Peter Nichols's play, and The Ruling Class adapted Peter Barnes's. ^[1][2][3][4]

The second is the stranger and better remembered. Peter O'Toole plays a British nobleman who believes he is Jesus Christ and later Jack the Ripper. ^[2][3][4] The film competed at Cannes, earned Medak a Palme d'Or nomination for his direction and brought O'Toole an Oscar nomination for best actor. ^[1][2][3][4]

The usual story of a director's early success is that it builds a brand.

Medak's did not. He had just made a savage stage satire about the English upper classes, and two years later he was making a comedy with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.

The nightmare

That comedy, Ghost in the Noonday Sun, released in 1974, became the great setback of his career. ^[1][3][4] In a 2007 interview Medak called the shoot "the biggest nightmare of my life." ^[3]

By his own account it derailed his film career for years. ^[3] He did not bury it. He later made a documentary about the experience, The Ghost of Peter Sellers. ^[1][3][4]

That choice tells you something about the man. Plenty of directors would have left the wreck off the filmography and the conversation. Medak turned a camera on it.

The Changeling arrived six years after the film he called a nightmare. I would not call it redemption, since Medak is not recorded describing it that way. But the film other directors screened for their crews came after the one that nearly finished him.

Menace of a different kind

If The Changeling is dread, The Krays, released in 1990, is something closer to gravity. Gary and Martin Kemp play the London gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. ^[1][3] The film won Medak an Evening Standard award for directing. ^[4]

The subject is menace rooted in family, two brothers whose public notoriety is part of what frightens. It is the same director, but he is working with a different muscle.

He followed it with Let Him Have It, about the hanging of Derek Bentley in 1953. Bentley was 19 and had not fired the shot that killed a police officer. ^[1][3] It is a harder kind of material than a ghost story, because the dead here are real and the verdict was official.

Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who worked with Medak on the film, remembered him as a "kinder, more respectful collaborator" who treated them as equals. ^[1] They also said he was still eager to make future projects. ^[1] A man in his eighties with that appetite was not coasting.

The long second act

The feature list keeps zigzagging. It includes Zorro: The Gay Blade, The Men's Club, Romeo Is Bleeding and Species II. ^[1][2][3][4] You would struggle to find a thread through those titles, and I do not think there is one, beyond a director who said yes to a wide range of things.

Television is where the range becomes plain. Homicide and The Wire are two of the most admired crime series ever made, and Medak directed episodes of both. ^[1][2][3] He also worked on House, Hannibal, The Twilight Zone and Breaking Bad. ^[1][2][3][4]

Critics sometimes treat a film director's turn to television as a comedown. In Medak's case it looks more like the same job in a different room. He kept working where the work was good.

What the career means

The auteur theory, the idea that a great director leaves one recognisable signature across everything, has never known what to do with a man like Medak. His films do not rhyme. A deranged aristocrat, a haunted house, a pair of London gangsters and a wrongful hanging do not share a palette.

I think that is the right way to read him. His consistency lay in nerve. He took the material in front of him, whatever it was, and treated it as seriously as he had treated the last thing.

The failure belongs in the same account. Ghost in the Noonday Sun cost him years, and he said so. A career that includes that and still ends with Breaking Bad and a shelf of enviable films has a kind of integrity that is rarer than a signature.

Medak was married three times and had four children. His survivors include his children and grandchildren. ^[1][3][4]

The obituaries will lead with The Changeling, and they are right to. Spielberg and Scorsese each had a 35mm print of it, and Spielberg used it to tell his crew what a ghost story should feel like. "This is what it should be," he said. ^[3] Medak spent the rest of his life declining to make it twice.