David Korda

Above is a rather blurred phone photo I took of David back in 2018 when he agreed to appear in a teaser film for a documentary about Film Finances Ltd, the company of which he was then the chairman. And below, the tribute I wrote after he died on 18 September 2024. A short version of it was read at the celebration of his life, which was held at the Orangery in Holland Park, London on Sunday 6 October 2024.

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David Korda, who has died aged 87, had a long career of more than sixty years working at the heart of the international film industry.  As an executive producer, who was head of production for RKO Pictures and then Cappella International during the 1980s and 1990s, the major films he saw into production included the Vietnam War drama Hamburger Hill, Wolfgang Pietersen’s first Hollywood film Shattered, and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. But he also made a hugely influential, behind-the-scenes contribution to the development of independent film-making in his work as a completion guarantor. It was his successful supervision of  Outsiders and Rumblefish in the early 1980s that enabled New Hollywood’s great maverick talent Francis Ford Coppola to make a successful comeback after colossal overspending on Apocalypse Now and the box-office disaster One from the Heart.

If David Korda  was quickly able to establish a rapport with Coppola, one reason why was the fact that, as a member of the Korda film dynasty, he already possessed life-long experience of having to deal with temperamental talents. His mother Joan Gardner had been a movie star in the 1930s. His father, Zoltàn, had shot one of the cinema’s greatest action epics, The Four Feathers. One uncle was the great painter and production designer Vincent Korda. Another, Sir Alexander, achieved international fame through making films on an epic scale in England, and was the producer of Coppola’s favourite movie, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which he would finish in General Service Studios, the very Los Angeles studio that Coppola bought forty years later as a home for his own company, American Zoetrope.

Born David Alexander Korda on 26 May 1937 in Hampstead, London, David had already seen pretty much everything there was to see in the movie business before he had even left school. When the war began, at the age of three he moved with his parents from London to Beverly Hills, where they lived in a house on Rexford Drive. His first memory of Los Angeles was his Uncle Alex turning up in a large limousine to take him on a tour of the town, then sending him home with a bag of silver dollars. Other early memories included playing with props from the Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Book.

Sabu, the boy star of both these films, would turn up at the family home with wild animals as gifts. They included three large ravens that lived in the garage, a monkey that was kept on the end of a long rope in the garden, and a baby jaguar that had to be given to Los Angeles zoo after clawing to pieces the curtains and furniture.  The madness and extravagance of Tinseltown were ordinary life for David.  As a student at Oxford some years later his holiday job was not to work, say, in a bank, but to act as an assistant on the great Ben Hur chariot race at Cinecittà.

Having experienced the flamboyance of the film industry at close quarters, he grew up to be wary of its excess. Modest and reticent, he preferred, in his own film career, to avoid the limelight. He saw himself as a pragmatic rather than entrepreneurial producer, whose skill was to make things work and to provide a stable platform on which others might achieve success.

As a child, he was required to cope with the rages of his lovable but chronically bad-tempered father. Plagued with ill health after having been gassed in the trenches during the first world war, Zoltàn suffered from constant pain and a wide variety of ailments that contributed to a sulphurous moodiness that predisposed him to outbursts of often incandescent rage. As minor an offence as slurping one’s soup could trigger him.  His brother, Alex, used to call  him “an angry little red man”. A familiar childhood experience of David’s childhood was being chased around the house with a stick, although he stressed that his father never once actually beat him. ‘It was more the fear that he instilled.’ 

If such an upbringing encouraged a wary, cautious disposition, at the same time it inculcated the sort of temperament that was needed to deal with the large egos of the movie business, whether those egos belonged to Francis Ford Coppola, Terry Gilliam or the Weinstein brothers. When the future Miramax moguls co-directed Playing for Keeps in 1986, it was David who imposed the unassailable authority that was required to control the production. When Gilliam’s epic fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen threatened to cost more than twice its original budget, it was David who spent nearly a year of his life in 1988 imposing some sanity and order.  In an industry notorious for itsenfants terribles, David would gain a reputation for being one of its more dependable grown-ups.

I got to know him through writing a biography of his uncle Sir Alexander Korda. The joke between us was that it had been his lot in life to recover some of the millions that his uncle had lost during a tumultuous career as one of the world’s most colourful and spendthrift movie tycoons.

In contrast to many of the moguls he had known growing up, David was not a gambler. A sense of responsibility, pragmatism and common sense were the qualities that were most evident in his film career. Starting out as a young man, he had entertained the idea of becoming a director like his father, but he soon decided that he lacked the patience to deal with the temperamental people that the thirst for the spotlight tended to encourage. And to a degree, perhaps, the example of his often tormented – and tormenting – father made him fear his own temper. He once ruefully recalled an anecdote that Gregory Peck told about working with Zoltàn on a Hollywood picture called The Macomber Affair. When the producer turned up one day during the shoot, Zoltàn took out a knife and, sticking the point against the producer’s chest, threatened: “You get off my set and if you ever come back here again, I’ll cut your liver out!”

After the war David returned to England to study at the Lycée in South Kensington. Then in 1952, aged fifteen, he attended the International School in Geneva. He was not notably scholarly. Recalling their time together in what was a co-ed school, his friend James Bendon recalled that, as two young men in their prime, their chief pursuit had been having “a bloody good time” and that it was a miracle that they managed to pass their A-levels.

After an unhappy term at Pomona College in California, in 1956 David abandoned his studies and returned to England. He attended a crammer school to learn Latin, which was then an Oxford University matriculation requirement. When he got a place in 1957 at Pembroke College, reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics, he assumed with his usual modesty that it must have been thanks to an influential family friend, the former government minister and close Churchill ally Brendan Bracken, but he possessed such a sharp, quick mind that it’s difficult to believe that even an Oxford entrance exam would have posed that much of a challenge.

At Oxford he discovered the theatre. Two life-long friendships, with the actors Vernon Dobtcheff and John Quentin, were formed at auditions for the Oxford University Drama Society. Dobtcheff, who was then running OUDS, first met David when he turned up for a reading of Troilus and Cressida. Quentin recalled that David was persuaded to appear in plays because he was so good-looking, but that he soon shied away from acting because of his natural reticence. He was someone with “great beauty of character as well as beauty of person”, remembered Quentin. But in spite of his movie star looks, he was, Quentin noted, “completely unvain”.

In 1960, after leaving Oxford, David set up a theatre company with the Polish actor and director Wladek Sheybal, who is perhaps best known today for playing the villain Kronsteen in the Bond film From Russia With Love. It was David’s father Zoltàn who, in a characteristically generous gesture, funded the venture with money that came from the sale of his stamp collection.

Based at the Little Theatre in Bromley, the 101 Company put on an ambitious, well-received repertoire of new work or plays in translation. Among the performers who appeared for the company were a young Eileen Atkins, Prunella Scales and Jeremy Brett.

The company was disbanded shortly before David’s father died in 1961. The following year David married the actress Penelope Horner and they had their first child, Nik, in 1963. A daughter Lerryn then followed in 1971. Parenthood encouraged David’s natural caution as he reverted to the traditional family means of earning a living: the movie business.

Through his friend Toby Robertson, who had directed a play for the 101 Company and would later become the artistic director of the Prospect Theatre Company, he got a job in 1963 as an assistant on Peter Brook’s production Lord of the Flies. He then worked for Ray Harryhausen’s producer Charles H. Schneer. There was a determination to make his own way in life. ‘I think in retrospect,’ commented Vernon Dobtcheff, ‘he didn’t want to live off the name of his father and two uncles.’

Several of Schneer’s productions involved cobbling together thin stories around action footage from old films. David’s job was to comb through the film libraries for suitable material. The films he worked on included an Arthurian epic Siege of the Saxons, a British Empire story, East of Sudan, and a Western, The Land Raiders. East of Sudan, David recalled, plundered sequences from Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers.  ‘I always thought my father must have turned in his grave.’        

After working as unit manager on Schneer’s big-budget musical production of Half a Sixpence for Paramount, David soon moved on to become a production manager and then a line producer. For Peter O’Toole’s company Keep Films, he  produced The Ruling Class in 1972, and Man Friday in 1975.

After having built his career working on mostly Hollywood-financed films shot in England, during the late 1970s he worked as a production supervisor of several independently financed films that made use of international pre-sales and tax shelter money.  For the British company Hemdale, he was associate producer of the Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981), starring Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger, and the romantic comedy Sunburn (1979) with Farrah Fawcett-Majors, which were both shot in Mexico.

Having already suffered a broken marriage, David regretted the fact that these films, which involved such lengthy periods away from home, imposed a heavy cost on his family life. Keen to spend more time with his two children, he accepted an offer in 1980 to work as the London-based production executive for the completion guarantor Film Finances.

Working closely with the company’s chief executive Richard Soames, David played a critical role, with his successful supervision in 1983 of the Coppola films Outsiders and Rumblefish, in establishing the  previously little known concept of the completion guarantee in Hollywood. As a means of managing even the most maverick talents, it was the calling card that put Film Finances at the heart of the rapid expansion through the 1980s of independent film-making in America. In the following year, 1984, the company would go on to provide bonds for such successful films as The Terminator, Romancing the Stone and Nightmare on Elm Street.

David cared little for the increasingly parochial, low-budget  film-making of Britain’s cottage industry, where during the 1980s the TV station Channel 4 had replaced the old combines of Rank and EMI as the most significant force in British production. So the opportunity in 1985 to become head of production of RKO Pictures, with the brief to take it back into making films again, was too good an offer to refuse, especially as the job was based in London.

David was in effect running a mini-studio that, over the next three years, was responsible for the development and production of approximately ten films. But despite some solid box-office successes there was no runaway hit that might have persuaded the parent company, General Tire Inc., to continue with the venture. After RKO Pictures was sold off in late 1987, David returned to Film Finances the following year to try to contain the colossal over-expenditure of Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which risked ruining the company. With his children now grown up, he then moved to Los Angeles in 1990, where he became head of production and development for Capella Films.

Perhaps in keeping with the cosmopolitan but family-conscious nature of the Kordas, there was always a tug in David’s life between the competing forces of Hollywood and Europe, and between business and the personal. So when his daughter Lerryn had a son, Kosmo, in 2002, it was the occasion to return to London: ‘I thought I’m not going to sit here and become one of those old guys in LA going to the Academy and seeing movies. I want to be with my children, and enjoying Europe. So I packed my bags and came home.’

But coming home did not mean retirement from the film business. Most of the next twenty years were spent working for Film Finances. He was still chairman of the British company when he died in September 2024. In his private life, he was a voracious reader and a keen connoisseur of painting. And were it not for the continuing demands of the film industry, he would surely have devoted more time to his ambition of writing a book about his father, whose complex character came increasingly to fascinate him. No one who knew David during his last years will forget the astonishing stoicism and courage with which he continued to work, despite considerable discomfort and pain, showing unflagging commitment to the business that he had helped to grow and prosper.

Uncomplaining and stoical, David was outwardly modest to the very last. The only visible signs of any pride were the four movie posters that decorated his office: behind his desk were the two Francis Ford Coppola pictures, The Outsiders and Rumblefish, whose successful completion had helped to establish Film Finances as a major force in Hollywood, while on the opposite wall was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the production that would have risked the very existence of the company had David not managed to contain it. 

The fourth poster was Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching, which Film Finances guaranteed in 2007 soon after David’s return from Hollywood. A small, independent film which told the story of the famous Rembrandt picture The Night Watch, it would not have been obvious to visitors why it was on his wall. It offered a characteristically quiet nod to the first picture that his uncle Alex had directed at Denham, the great studio he had built for his company London Film Productions in the mid-1930s – Rembrandt, starring Charles Laughton, a film about the compromises between art and commerce that David had negotiated with such grace in his own life.