‘The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee’: Writer/Director Jon Spira

28 Oct

Season 1, Episode 005

In This Episode

Episode Description:

Christopher Lee may have become famous for his iconic performance as a young, suave, debonair Dracula, but his work went far beyond the Hammer Horror roles he is most often associated with. With a commanding voice, penetrating eyes and his imposing height (six feet, five inches), he often found himself cast as the villain, but like Vincent Price and his other horror contemporaries, the villains Lee played were often the most interesting and layered performance of the film.

Jon Spira, the writer/director behind the new documentary, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, has made some of the very best and most interesting films about British filmmaking and cinema. His feature work includes the excellent documentaries Elstree 1976, about the actors behind the masks in the original Star Wars, and Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Falls of the Great British Stuntman. His docu-series Reel Britannia explored the history of British cinema. Mixing traditional documentary filmmaking with animation and puppetry, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee is brought to life with archival material and new, exclusive interviews with filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, John Landis and Joe Dante, as well as Lee’s niece Dame Harriet Walter, Hammer actress Caroline Munro, and film historian (and former Film Review contributor) Jonathan Rigby, who worked closely with Lee in writing Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History. In the course of making the well-researched film, Spira met and interviewed Lee’s closest friends and family. The result is an amusing, eclectic documentary revealing a complex, comprehensive portrait of a cinematic icon.