HIS recent trip to Bermuda for the Bermuda Underwater Education Institute's fund-raising dinner, which was built around a reunion of the creative talents who produced the book and the film of The Deep, gave the Mid-Ocean News the chance to arrange an interview with veteran director Peter Yates.

Known primarily as an accomplished and consummately commercial film director, Peter Yates' biography describes a man of many creative parts: actor, film editor, assistant film director, stage manager and director, television series director, film director, screenwriter, and producer.

As assistant director, he worked on such films as The Entertainer, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and The Guns of Navarone. He also assisted the late British theatre and film director Tony Richardson in the making of A Taste of Honey, and it was Richardson who encouraged him to direct stage and television productions.

He directed episodes of classic British television series The Saint and Danger Man, but it was the direction of his own screenplay of the excellent 1967 film Robbery starring Stanley Baker, which marked the turning point in his career.

Peter Yates had been a professional racing driver in the Fifties, and a car chase in Robbery, his third feature film, caught the attention of Steve McQueen, whose production company was about to produce its first film, the detective thriller Bullitt. Yates was asked to direct, and the film, which encompassed some of the most expertly choreographed car chase scenes ever filmed, was a major critical and commercial success.

Subsequent films included Murphy's War with Peter O'Toole, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle with Robert Mitchum, before the capricious world of film brought him to Bermuda to direct the commercially successful film adaptation of Peter Benchley's The Deep, with Robert Shaw and Jacqueline Bisset. He earned Oscar nominations in 1979 for the sleeper hit Breaking Away and in 1983 for his direction of Ronald Harwood's superb adaptation of his stage play The Dresser, eliciting excellent performances from Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay.

More recent film work included Eleni, Suspect, The House on Carroll Street and the charmingly offbeat The Year of the Comet. Last year, he directed a television film production of A Separate Peace. Peter Yates is 75 this year, but, speaking from London to reporter COLIN O'CONNOR, he reveals that he is still working on plans to direct and produce films.

Q: Before we discuss some aspects of your film career, how did you enjoy The Deep reunion weekend in Bermuda?

A: It was lovely, I must say. It's amazing but, unfortunately, when you make a movie, you usually get very close to the people you are working with, and then you don't see them again, or not for a long time.

Luckily, I have met Peter Benchley quite regularly. I hadn't seen Jackie (Bisset) for a bit, but Teddy Tucker was over here in England once with the Benchleys, and it is always a pleasure to see him. It's funny to go back somewhere after 28 years, and obviously, there are some fairly major changes.

I was somewhat surprised at the amount of building, but there do seem to be some controls in place, in terms of size and the heights that are allowed. It should never be Hong Kong, thank God!

Q: In a recent interview with us, Miss Bisset talked of the challenges of making The Deep and her anxiety about the danger of working underwater. What are your memories of the special challenges of underwater filming?

A: Well, firstly, before we even left Los Angeles, the rumour went around that Jackie couldn't swim, so I was dispatched to watch Jackie swim in her own pool, and I was able to report that she did beautifully!

It just shows how these bizarre rumours get around. In fact, it is quite unimportant, because I am not a very good swimmer, but I had no problem underwater. Swimming and diving are absolutely different, and I had such a feeling of freedom when I was diving. I loved the weightlessness of it.

The people who were going to film underwater, (second unit underwater directors and cinematographers) Al Giddings and Stan Waterman, were somewhat surprised, I think, at the ease with which the actors and myself, and the cinematographer, were able to dive and cope with being underwater.

Also, I especially chose Christopher Challis, the director of photography, because he was a very experienced sailor, and unlike the usual situation, where you have people saying 'I've got to have the light over here' and that sort of thing, he realised that you don't fight the sea, because the sea is always going to win. And it was my second 'sea' picture, because there was a lot of water filming in Murphy's War.

Q: Let me go much further back. How did a boy from Aldershot end up in Elstree Studios in the Fifties?

A: Well, I started as an actor, and I went to RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). I trained as an actor, and worked as an actor for about four or five years. I wasn't a very good actor, and I wasn't working very regularly , so I went into the car business.

I was very keen on car racing, and went to work for a company called HWM. We had three racing cars, and we were the first British company to enter European racing as a team, with drivers like Peter Collins and Stirling Moss.

I did that for about three years, and fortunately, or unfortunately, the garage was right next door to the film studio. Whenever they wanted to rent a car for a film, I used to insist that I went with the car, and I slowly got pulled into film. The real problem was to get a union card, which, in those days, was extremely difficult.

Q: Just to get on a film set as an assistant director?

A: Yes, but firstly, I started working as an editor, and my first union card was as an editor, before I worked as an assistant director.

Q: You did that for a number of years, on such impressive films as The Entertainer and A Taste of Honey. Presumably, excellent experience before you began to direct your first features?

A: Yes, it was, and I was greatly encouraged by Tony Richardson, who directed both of those films, to go back into the theatre, and he was running the Royal Court at that time, so I went back to the theatre and directed two of Edward Albee's plays, very early plays called American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith.

Q: According to Leonard Maltin's brief biography on the Internet, your work on Robbery was noticed by Steve McQueen, which led to Bullitt and your first work with Miss Bisset. McQueen had a reputation as a tense, tightly-wound man, sometimes difficult on a set. How was that experience?

A: Well, I was very lucky, I think, because Bullitt was the first film produced by his production company, and he was determined to protect everybody. His reputation was for always attacking everyone, but I must say he was marvellous to me.

I think that perhaps my accent helped a bit, because he was a great Anglophile! Honestly, I think that he always used to feel that, because of the accent I had, I was much more intelligent!

Q: Tracy Keenan Wynn, the screenwriter of The Deep, described Bullitt as a "watershed" movie, and it was a considerable success. Were the now legendary car chase scenes quite a technical challenge in the late Sixties on the streets of San Francisco?

A: Yes, they were, and I needed a lot of co-operation from the San Francisco police, which I got. It meant drawing up all sorts of 'storyboards', which I don't honestly like doing. But, on sequences like that, you just have to do it, because there are so many other departments involved, and everyone must have a very clear understanding of exactly what you are trying to do.

The same thing, really, with the dives in The Deep, which also required 'storyboards', otherwise, you would get lost if you tried to make it up as you went along. It is something like choreography, and each department must know what one needs.

Q: You mentioned Murphy's War, which starred Peter O'Toole, who also has a reputation as an actor of some spirit. How was he to work with?

A: He was fine. We had his (then) wife, Sian Phillips, playing the female lead, and he was trying so hard to make it something that would help her. He behaved beautifully.

Q: And the famously laconic Robert Mitchum in one of my favourites, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. How did you find working with that legendary fellow?

A: Aaaahhh! He was very, very good. He was someone who was a very much better actor then people gave him credit for. He just didn't like talking about acting. He would rather do it. You would just have to point him a direction and he would take it.

People would ask me, while we were making that movie, why Mitchum was spending so much time hanging out with the Boston police, but you only have to listen to his Boston accent in that film, and you know exactly what he was doing.

He also put on weight, because he was a Teamster, and they seem to do nothing but eat! You understand why, in the old days, stars refused to appear unless they were looking their perfect best, because when that film came out, people were saying that poor old Mitchum had let himself go and was falling to pieces, and he did it for the part!

Q: You have also taken on the challenge of producing a number of films, including the two for which you were nominated as director, Breaking Away and The Dresser. Ms Bisset hated her one experience of acting in and producing a film, Rich and Famous. How do you like combining the roles of director and producer?

A: Well, I love it! As long as you have the writer there. I've got into trouble for this remark before, but it is quite true. On the whole, I would rather have the writer there than the producer. It depends how involved the producer has been in the creation of the film, and the idea of the story.

On The Dresser, for example, it was easier to have (writer) Ronald Harwood around, than have a producer, as long as I had a "line" producer to do the dirty work. For me, that was a better way to go. Sometimes a producer, through "politics", is inclined to hinder a film, whereas the right kind of writer can be the best person to work with, can be so constructive and can give you a lot. Anyway, the DVD of The Dresser has finally come out!

Q: When I talked to Tracy Keenan Wynn, who is a mere boy of about 58, he was complaining about rampant "ageism" in the film industry. Are you still trying to make films? Mr. Wynn has joined a writers' legal action against film and TV companies and he says you hardly get a sporting chance if you are over 40.

A: I thought it was 30! But yes, indeed. I am actually working on two films. One of them is a Hemingway story, Across the River and into the Trees, for Working Title Television, and we are looking for a lead actor, and the other is a feature called The Poppy Factory, written by William Fairchild and based on his book.

Across the River is basically set in Venice, and I am hoping to get Ed Harris. The character is a 55-year-old army officer, and I think that Harris can portray the hardness and the softness that the character demands.

We are still at the point of trying to raise the money for The Poppy Factory, which involves a lot of battlefield scenes, which can really be filmed anywhere. We haven't really got down to casting, but the sort of actor I would like would be Paul Bettany, who played Maturin in Master and Commander.

Q: Despite your long and successful career, do you find, when you are trying to raise money for a new film, that it is a case of starting from scratch every time? A question of "That was yesterday, what have you got for me today"?

A: Absolutely. That is a very good way of describing it. Nowadays, that does seem to be the way it is. Unless, of course, you are under 30! But while people will still pay me, I will carry on.