This will be Adrian’s fourth year presenting a lecture series at MIFF. In this year’s series, Mavericks, Spies and Tough Guys, he’ll be exploring the lives and work of Humphrey Bogart, Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carre and Katharine Hepburn – four people he finds truly fascinating.
Although Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart did make one famous film together, there’s little in the way of a common link between the four people being discussed – aside from ‘these all being fascinating people who have extraordinary careers and very much influenced the movies in different ways,’ Wootton said. ‘They’re also very unconventional. They’re a quartet of mavericks, people who didn’t take the path that life had perhaps originally intended for them to take, to follow a particular traditional career or traditional life, and who rejected a certain kind of conformity and made their own way, very individually. As a result of that, they had a profound influence on cinema.’