HAD you met Ken Russell at a bus stop, you would remember the encounter for the rest of your life. Or, if stuck in a lift with Jonathan Miller, the conversation would echo for years.

These two grandees of the arts had an apprentice at the BBC back in the 1960s, a young bespectacled Cambridge graduate, who has become at least as illustrious during the last half century   as Britain’s leading independent film-maker.

However, you could sit opposite him on a six-hour train journey and never notice he was there. This is the modest Mr Palmer.

Yet Tony Palmer has made more than 100 remarkable films, mainly thoughtful documentary portraits of musicians, from a movie following Ginger Baker drumming across Africa, to an encyclopaedic history of popular music, All You Need Is Love, and an eight-hour series on Wagner, to classic studies of Carl Orff, Maria Callas, Yehudi Menuhin, Berlioz, Dvorak, Walton, Malcolm Arnold, Holst, Vaughan Williams. On and on the list runs.

For 40 years, he has directed the world’s greatest actors and singers in plays and operas across the globe, accruing countless awards: BAFTAs, Emmys, no fewer than 12 gold medals at the New York Film Festival, two Prix Italia. Not to mention seven years as The Observer’s music critic and ten years as presenter of Radio 3’s Night Waves, plus authorship of half a dozen books.

But it all appears effortless. To handle the stream of intellectuals pouring through the Radio 3 studio and to direct personalities like Fonteyn, Callas, Olivier, Placido Domingo and Richard Burton, surely you need a Hollywood-catered ego, the volcanic energy of a Steven Berkoff and a small army of assistants. 

To the contrary, Tony Palmer sits placidly at his kitchen table in a perfectly tidy house that is silent, except for the summer breeze gently tinkling at a wind chime in the garden.

At 72, as fit as a 60-year-old, he is the calm centre of a hurricane of activity. There must be a powerful ego there to drive his projects to fruition but it is rarely glimpsed. His manner is gentle and courteous.

He explains this is an especially frantic year since it’s the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth, with screenings of his film worldwide, including two sold-out showings at the main theatre in La Scala, Milan.

Most significantly, he has recently finished a new film, Nocturne, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Benjamin Britten, with its premiere at the Barbican on July 2.

I first met him in his capacity as artistic director of the Ealing Film and Music Festival. Now, we are sitting in his enormous Edwardian mansion in the heart of Ealing. Up the road lives Pete Townsend, a friend.

Tomorrow, he is flying to California to receive another award, and to be guest of honour at yet another glittering festival. And also, so he tells me, to meet up with that curious figure of counter-cultural psychotherapy in the 1970s, Arthur Janov, the man behind the primal scream.

Of course, Palmer has made a film about him, too. Somehow, it fell by the wayside and was believed lost. Recently rediscovered, it will soon be screened for the first time.

Since he is constantly immersed in collective creative projects, or flitting from
Helsinki to Sundance to receive another award, we talk about whether he ever gets time to be on his own. 

“Yes,” he replies, “a lot. Whenever I’m in Cornwall. That’s my main home. It’s remote, beyond the reach of running water, the most westerly house in England.” He says he rarely goes to parties and mostly has just the company of his wife, Michaela, 30 years younger than himself, and three young children.

We discuss the view that creativity emerges from profound silence and recollect film clips of Britten strolling with his dachshund along the windswept shingle beach at Aldeburgh, but Palmer stresses the importance of discipline.

“ All great artists are highly disciplined,” he says. “The level of discipline is one of the differences between the great and the ordinary. And this is also the reason why very talented artists are not difficult to direct. They turn up fully prepared to do their job in front of the audience or the camera. My job is to facilitate their talent.”

He then tells a story about meeting Tom Cruise on the set of his friend Stanley Kubrick’s film, Eyes Wide Shut. He asked Cruise whether it was true that he had banned everyone there from making eye contact with him.

Cruise denied it and explained, according to Palmer, that it was simply distracting to have people off-camera staring into your eye-line when you are trying to act.

Tony Palmer rejects being labelled “creative.” Instead, he regards each of his films as a journey. He cuts the path and hopes the audience will experience the same process of discovery.

With animus, he admits this makes him a nightmare for commissioning editors to deal with. He acts out the minuet he has danced a hundred times:

What’s the budget? They ask. How much have you got? He answers
What’s the schedule? There is no schedule.
Where’s the script? – There is no script.
How are you going to make the film? If I know now what I will find out in the course of making it, why would I bother to make the film?
So you want to make a film about Britten but you have no script and you have no schedule and you have no budget? Correct.
Ah…

Nevertheless, even though Palmer had already made what seemed the definitive documentary on Britten’s life, A Time There Was, Sky Arts has supported him again, as they did with his award-winning film about the South African playwright, Athol Fugard, last year.

The previous film refracted Britten through the sympathetic intelligence of his lifelong companion, Peter Pears, examining the composer’s psychology and motivation. Whereas that film dealt with the artist’s personal life, the present film shows the public dimension of the artist, his moral and political concerns.

Born during the Great War, Britten became a pacifist while still a schoolboy. At the time of appeasement in the 1930s he signed the Peace Pledge: “I renounce war and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.”

When war was declared in 1939, he followed W. H. Auden to America, accompanied by Peter Pears.

The political tensions of the 20th century become in Palmer’s new film the foreground landscape to which Britten responds.

After the first few minutes, we are presented with harrowing scenes in colour of Belsen and the Warsaw Ghetto.

We see corpses bulldozed like Breughel mannequins into the pit.  We see a Bosnian woman in front of a house where her family has been incinerated; the weeping Syrian mother of a little girl who has had a bizarre chunk taken out of her leg, leaving the bone intact; a father clutching his head when shown his infant son toasted to a black crisp; the prancing cavalcades of imperial armies from a century past.

Images of war bombard the audience’s eyes. Two hours later, the scene has shifted to the House of Commons and there stands Tony Blair telling his 45-minute lie.

Cut to the daily cortege of coffins gliding along the High Street in Wootton Bassett. It seems nothing has changed since 1913. Or ever.

When the BBC commissioned Britten to write a television opera in 1970, he used the opportunity to express his pacifism to a mass audience.

In the Hyde Park aria, the eponymous Owen Wingate quotes Queen Mab, published by Shelley in 1813, and featured again in Palmer’s film: “War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, the lawyer’s jest...”

But, whereas Shelley optimistically hoped to reform society, Palmer is perhaps more realistic. He muses, “ The nature of politics will never change.”

He says people who have seen advanced screenings have often left the cinema weeping. Towards the end of the film, one of the most moving speakers is 94-year-old Ken Scott of the Royal British Legion in Wootton Bassett, a former sergeant in the Durham Light Infantry, who fought in North Africa and from Normandy to Germany.

The old soldier talks in tragic tones of the bereaved relatives he has met at the repatriation processions and states bluntly that those young men who returned dead should not have been sent to Afghanistan.

The trope of shocking the audience with pictures of real-life violence was common enough in the counter-culture of the Vietnam era, and indeed in the imagery of the World War I poets.

Palmer used it previously in a more callow manner, for instance in his 1968 film, All My Loving, with the same intention of providing a political context.

Today, the use of violent images is more understated, and he has the opera director Peter Sellars make the case that sometimes an audience must face the terrible truth.

In other ways, too, Nocturne demonstrates Palmer’s progression as a filmmaker. His subjects, mostly talking heads and serried ranks of musicians, are side lit, so that they emerge from the dark, appropriate to a film about moral shadows.

Rarely does he sharply cut from scene to scene but favours measured, slow dissolves.

As in all his films, there is no voice-over, instead the speakers’ comments are woven into a subtle narrative, cross-fading from one to the next parallel to the images.

The Yentob style of BBC arts documentary, in which the journey of discovery is made by a cultural pilgrim, the film literally following the presenter’s footsteps, while he expresses his thoughts, emotes his feelings, speaks his voiceover, sends Palmer through the roof. Annoyance peeps through the large spectacles.

That style of arts programme is the opposite of Palmer’s restrained approach. The main problem is that a presenter interposes.

He says: “The audience don’t have to be told what to think. My whole aim is to get out of the way of the material and let them make up their own mind.”

The audience will again get the opportunity when Nocturne is shown on television later this year. Very likely too, Tony Palmer will reap another clutch of awards for this latest effortlessly revealing film about the values of a great composer.