Richard Franklin (director)
| Richard Franklin | |
|---|---|
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|
| Born |
15 July 1948 Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Died | 11 July 2007 (aged 58) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Years active | 1975–2003 |
| Awards |
AFI Best Screenplay (Adapted) 1995 Hotel Sorrento |
Not to be confused with Richard Franklin (actor), the British actor, writer and director.
Richard Franklin (15 July 1948 – 11 July 2007) was an Australian film director.
Franklin was born and grew up in Brighton, Melbourne, the son of Margaret Anne (Jacobson) and Rea Richard Franklin, an engineering company director. He was educated at Haileybury College. In the 1960s, Franklin was the drummer in the Melbourne band The Pink Finks, which also featured Ross Wilson and Ross Hannaford, later of Daddy Cool. The band released several singles, none of which had any significant chart success. Franklin decided upon a career in film rather than music. He went on to study film at The University of Southern California alongside other notable directors George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis and John Carpenter. Franklin was a devotee of Alfred Hitchcock (ever since he saw Psycho at the age of 12), and his attempt to arrange for a screening of Hitchcock's Rope (1948) at USC resulted in a phone-call from Hitchcock himself. Franklin invited Hitchcock to give a lecture at the university, and subsequently he became good friends with the director.
Franklin returned to Australia in the 1970s, when the country's film industry was experiencing a resurgence. He directed four episodes of the Australian police drama Homicide before directing the bawdy 1975 sex comedy feature The True Story of Eskimo Nell and the 1976 soft-core pornography feature Fantasm. Franklin's next film was the cult horror movie Patrick (1978), written by Everett De Roche, about a man in a coma who uses telekinesis to create murder and mayhem in a hospital. Franklin gave De Roche a copy of the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1958), and De Roche suggested a movie with the plot of Rear Window taking place in a moving vehicle. The result was Roadgames (1981), directed by Franklin from a screenplay by De Roche. Filmed and set in Australia, and starring American actors Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis (the latter whom Franklin met whilst visiting his one-time USC classmate John Carpenter on the set of The Fog), Roadgames was the most expensive Australian movie ever made at the time of its release in 1981.
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