|
Saxon Logan
photographer Bob Giles
Saxon Logan
Director, Writer
Much like his mentor Lindsay Anderson, Saxon Logan has enjoyed a successful career as a `vocational' filmmaker, working mainly on projects in which he takes a strong personal interest. While still in his teens, Saxon worked as personal assistant to Lindsay Anderson on the director's scathing satire O LUCKY MAN! He then worked in a minor sound editing capacity on Gary Sherman's classic DEATH LINE, before moving on to work for BBC TV. Throughout the remainder of the 1970s he was largely employed as an editor before becoming a Producer on the BBC Art's strand Omnibus. He made documentaries on DIRK BOGARDE and the figurative Sculptor RAYMOND MASON eventually leaving to make a name for himself as an independent documentary producer/director of considerable repute. Among his award-winning work for Channel 4 and Granada, BLACK RHINO - THE LAST STAND and PLACE OF SKULLS showed the environmental side of Saxon's character, bringing the plight of endangered African species into the living rooms of British television viewers. Although further work on this conservationist slant was to follow, taking him deeper into Africa and to the Amazon rain forest, it was his strong political views, commitment to humanist values, and love of English cinema which led Saxon to direct and co-write SLEEPWALKER, a remarkable combination of anti-Thatcher tract and splattery slasher antics which anticipated the nightmare world of Freddy Kruger and the "greed is good" ethos of Gordon Gekko to equal effect. Despite positive audience reaction and the award of a Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, SLEEPWALKER was the wrong film at the wrong time as far as U.K. distributors were concerned, and lay unreleased until 2002 when, with the assistance of British horror films website `Pass The Marmalade', a surviving 35mm print was exhumed and unspooled at selected special engagements.
Saxon is currently working on various film projects including a thriller entitled FIDDLER'S GREEN and AT THE GATE OF THUNDER a screenplay based on Victorian explorer Dr. Livingstone's Zambezi expedition. He has recently completed work on a new screenplay called FREEDOM, an epic, continent-straddling tale of conflict, tyranny, hopes and dreams, which has the potential to become a British APOCALYPSE NOW.
|