Peter Sykes (director)


Peter Sykes was an Australian television and film director who worked primarily in the United Kingdom. According to Filmink "auteurist critics always seem to pass him by."

Biography

He was born in Melbourne and worked as a dancer, then as an assistant director on documentaries and children's shows on Australian television. He moved to London in 1963.
He wrote to a fellow Australian, Donald Levy, admiring a documentary Levy had made called Time In. Sykes worked for Levy as an assistant on the film Herostratus. Sykes did an 18-month training cadetship with the BBC then made the documentary Walkabout to Cornwall.
He was commissioned to make a series of films for the British Pavilion exhibit at Expo 67 in Montreal. The series was called Britain Around the World. It led to him meeting Peter Brook who invited Sykes to produce Tell Me Lies.

Features

Max Steuer admired Walkabout to Cornwall and he invited Sykes to direct The Committee. According to Sight and Sound the film "had a fairly successful if controversial art house career" and while being "top heavy with rather pretentious theatrical dialogue... contained good sequences and was put together with some flair." Kenneth Tynan called it "admirable".
On the strength of this, Sykes was asked to direct some episodes of The Avengers. Sykes recalled they told him, "Look, we've seen this film. We don't understand it, but it looks fantastic, the atmosphere is amazing. Would you come and direct The Avengers? He says "It was a passport for me to do something completely different."
One of his Avengers episodes, "Noon Doomsday", was much praised. Sykes was set to direct a war film, The Rules of War, but that fell through and instead he directed Venom which he called "a romantic fantasy with horror overtones".

Hammer

Sykes was hired by Hammer to direct Blood Will be Blood which became Demons of the Mind.
He did two comedies for EMI, The House in Nightmare Park with Frankie Howerd, and Steptoe and Son Ride Again.
Sykes returned to television for Orson Welles Great Mysteries. He wrote Beware the Darkness.
He directed the last of the Hammer horror films, To the Devil a Daughter.

Later career

Sykes went to France in 1977 to direct the series Magicians of the Future. He was meant to return to Australia to direct Eddie and the Breakthrough but the film was never made.
He went to Israel to direct Jesus.
Sykes went to Greece to make The Search for Alexander the Great and then to Ireland for the second series of The Irish R.M..
He did The Lost Secret for the BBC and The Defectors for Video Arts
In the 1990s he taught scriptwriting at Winchester University while also directing for Danish television.
He died in 2006.

Selected filmography