Andrew Birkin

Andrew Timothy Birkin (born 9 December 1945) is an English screenwriter and director. He was born the only son of Lieutenant-Commander David Birkin and his wife, actress Judy Campbell. One of his sisters is the actress and singer Jane Birkin. Birkin was educated at Elstree School and Harrow School. At the former he was remembered by a teacher as being "one of the naughtiest boys ever to have passed through Elstree" and his record at Harrow was no better. He left school at the age of 17 to work as a mail boy at 20th Century Fox's London office, graduating to Elstree Studios as a production runner in 1963 on Man in the Middle and The Third Secret. After hitch-hiking and freight-jumping across America in 1964, he returned to England in 1965 and began work as a runner on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but soon became Kubrick's location scout. By the summer of 1966, Kubrick had promoted Birkin to Assistant Director on Special Effects; Birkin later proposed the shooting and colour transposition of aerial footage for the 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' sequence. Kubrick dispatched him to Scotland with cameraman Jack Atcheler and a 65mm Panaflex camera bolted to the floor of an Alouette helicopter; but Atcheler soon quit the enterprise, deeming Birkin to be reckless. Birkin continued alone and shot most of the resulting footage himself. In 1967 Birkin supervised the shooting of 'The Dawn of Man' front projection plates in the Namib Desert. After working as First Assistant Director to the Beatles on Magical Mystery Tour in 1967, Birkin served as Location Manager on Play Dirty in Spain before again working for Stanley Kubrick, this time as his assistant director and location scout on his unmade epic of Napoleon. Following second unit directing work on Melody, Birkin began writing scripts for producer David Puttnam, including The Pied Piper (1971) for director Jacques Demy, Slade In Flame (1974) for the rock band Slade (which won the Vision Award at the 2007 MOJO Awards, and was described as the "Citizen Kane of rock musicals" by BBC film critic Mark Kermode ), and an unmade adaptation of Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich for Puttnam and Paramount, which involved a year's consultation with Speer in 1971/72.