Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2010 | Page 46

life

INTERVIEW

Photo: Bill pictured on the with Rutger Hauer

much (wedge about the size of a small
paperback) eaten.”
At the time Bill knew that the actor
Dennis Weaver had just started a
charitable food collection service for the
homeless, so he phoned the organisation
to collect the remains of the spread. The
director was livid, but Bill pointed to
a group of homeless people nearby to
remind him that life chances are tenuous:
“You muck up on the next commercial
and that could be you.” When it turned
out to be Dennis Weaver himself who
arrived to collect the food, the director
appeared the model of generosity.
So in 1990 he left Los Angeles and
moved to Spain where his parents were
living. It was 1990. His father, who, as
Bill had discovered when he was a child
had been a spy, had been working on
his memoirs but the ghost writer he
had employed had pulled out. So Bill
persuaded the publisher that he was
capable of writing the book. “It took
about a year-and-a-half of fights and
struggles,” he says, adding that the chief
difficulty was that his father never took
anything too seriously, making the facts
slow to come; and that now and again he
would get collywobbles about the Official
Secrets Act. In the end an over-judicious
former colleague got wind of its imminent
publication and Bill and his father had to
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February/March 2010

Photo: Natasha Kinski

get the book published in Spain. Three
days later, having been in the public
domain, it was published in the UK with
impunity.
The book had forged a bond between
father and son which hadn’t previously
existed and Bill describes the joy of
endless evenings of drinking wine and
talking about anything and everything.
“I hadn’t known him before and felt
so privileged. We drank – we got

‘The food spread was like
nothing I’d ever seen.
Homeless people watched as
we ate. Then the director said
he’d take the beef joint home
for his dog’
slaughtered! – and talked even about
things I’d got up to at school, about
everything I’d ever done. He was never
judgemental.”
The book was finished and Bill
decided not to go back to LA. “I’d
de-Americanised myself, and thought if I
go back, I’d be saying LA is my home. I’d
marry an American woman, and have kids
that chewed gum,” he grins, wincing as
he imitates the accents and attitudes of
US children. Then he met Judy, who had a

property business in Spain. They now have
a son, Bertie, who is 10, with an English
accent and who, as far as Bill knows,
doesn’t chew gum.
So they stayed, and Bill started a
locations company, sourcing places for
advertisers to shoot promotional films for
the likes of Nissan, BMW, Land Rover and
Toyota, and producing their brochures.
"The company would give me the brief,
and I might say ‘this needs to be done in
Switzerland’. Then I'd be driving around
for six days on my own, taking photos of
wonderful scenery and architecture, and
seeing how things worked in different bits
of Europe or Morocco."
It sounds an idyllic existence: but the
sheer organisation involved in getting
that shot of a car driving along an
empty road, or into an apparently sleepy
Moroccan town, is huge. A shoot in
Valencia involved blocking one side of
the bridge, which was a major traffic
outflow from the centre. “It was Friday
afternoon. We were going to be there
about two hours, but we were there till
10 at night, holding up two lanes of
traffic, while radio announcements told
the angry drivers that the four-and-a-half
km traffic jam was due to photographers
shooting a Nissan commercial!” Honking
and gesticulating drivers didn’t faze the
policeman who had sanctioned the time
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