Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2010 | Page 45

INTERVIEW

February/March 2010

life

Photo: Bill pictured on the Toyota shoot, Spain

Creative whirlwind
hits the Isle of Wight
Bill Bristow had persuaded his father to reveal his secrets in a book, and had
enjoyed success in film in LA. But it was time for a change. Roz Whistance tells
Part Two of his story
ON the one hand he was at the thick
of it. Bill Bristow was working with actor
Rutger Hauer on various projects and was
involved with the great and the good
in the film world. But he was becoming
disillusioned. Nothing had come of a
couple of screenplays he had written, his
marriage had failed and the sheer excess
of the States was starting to grate with
him.
“There is a side to me that doesn’t like
Visit our new website - www.visitislandlife.com

seeing money spent just because you
can spend it,” he says. “I was working

Fun in the fast lane took its
toll. ‘I used to cry myself to
sleep’
on a commercial near where, just two
years before, I’d made Who Are They?
my movie about the homeless. We, the

people working on the commercial, were
given lunch, and it was a food spread the
like of which in all my years of working
on movies I’d never seen: – there was
roast beef, there was smoked salmon,
fresh salmon, salmon from Alaska and
salmon from Canada, lobster, king prawns
. . . And when we’d eaten all we wanted,
the director said ‘I want the beef for my
dog’. There was this joint about this size”
(stretching his arms akimbo) “and this
45