Handmade Films
Handmade Films was a film production company set up by the Beatle George Harrison and his business partner Denis O'Brian in 1979.
It’s 1978. Out in Tunisia, a couple of sand dunes along from where George Lucas shot Star Wars, the Monty Python team are preparing their own little contribution to late twentieth-century culture — Life of Brian.
As filming begins, the film is stopped by EMI’s 69-year-old Chief Executive on religious grounds.
Enter George Harrison, who personally pays for the film’s production, a sum that would amount to $40 million today, just for the pleasure of seeing it made … So begins the story of HandMade Films, an independent film company with a difference.
Combining serious financial clout with creative freedom, elements that are rarely found together, the company produced classics as diverse as Withnail and I, Time Bandits, Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday, to name only a few. Here Robert Sellers has spoken to the people who made it all happen.
Major films produced by the company include:
