When Oscar-winning producer David Puttnam told his wife, Patsy, that he had bought them a holiday home in a country beginning with the letter “i”, her heart leapt with joy. “Oh Italy – you mean Italy,” she recalls early in the heart-warming and illuminating David Puttnam: The Long Way Home (RTÉ One, Thursday, 10.15pm).
He did not mean Italy. Instead, Puttnam had secured for the family a house in Skibbereen , west Cork, with epic views over the river Ilen. This was in the early 1980s, and – the occasional adventure in Tinsel Town notwithstanding – the Puttnams have lived happily in rural Cork ever since.
“If Ireland came up against England in the World Cup,” reveals David with a grin, “I would support Ireland”. Edel O’Mahony’s film is two documentaries in one. The first chronicles Puttnam’s career as a producer, including the Academy Award success of Chariots of Fire in 1981 and his stressful stint running Columbia Pictures from 1986 to 1987 – a move he describes as an “absurd decision” and where his achievements include greenlighting early Spike Lee feature School Daze.
[ David Puttnam: ‘The Irish invented immigration and went through every single form of the immigrant experience’ ] But the heart of the doc concerns Puttnam’s relationship with Ireland. That it might be good for his soul to escape the bustle of London occurred to him while making Local Hero in Aberdeenshire in 1983. Having scoured both Scotland and Ireland, he found hi.
