Richard Franklin

Richard Franklin (15 July 1948 – 11 July 2007) was an Australian film director.

Early life and career Franklin was born and grew up in Brighton, Melbourne, the son of Margaret Anne (Jacobson) and Rea Richard Franklin, an engineering company director. He was educated at Haileybury College. In the 1960s, Franklin was the drummer in the Melbourne band The Pink Finks, which also featured Ross Wilson and Ross Hannaford, later of Daddy Cool. The band released several singles, none of which had any significant chart success. Franklin chose a career in film rather than music. He studied film at The University of Southern California alongside other notable directors George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis and John Carpenter. Franklin was a devotee of Alfred Hitchcock (ever since he saw Psycho at the age of 12), and his attempt to arrange a screening of Hitchcock's Rope (1948) at USC produced a call from Hitchcock. Franklin invited Hitchcock to give a lecture at the university, and he became good friends with the director. Franklin would shortly direct a film loosely based on Bloch's novel Psycho II, though the film screenplay had little to do with Bloch's novel.

American films After moving to Hollywood, Richard Franklin directed Psycho II (1983), the first sequel to Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho, with Anthony Perkins reprising the role of Norman Bates. The film was a financial success and received generally good reviews (it also led to a further two sequels, neither of which Franklin was involved with). Franklin then directed the 1984 spy/adventure movie Cloak & Dagger, starring Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman. The film was a remake of The Window (1949), which was in turn based on the short story "The Boy Who Cried Murder" by Cornell Woolrich (Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" was adapted into Hitchcock's Rear Window, which was the inspiration for Franklin's Road Games).

Franklin was going to make The Lost Boys at one stage but his next film was Link (1986) a British horror movie (starring Elisabeth Shue and Terence Stamp) about a super-intelligent, murderous orangutan. The film reunited Franklin with screenwriter Everett De Roche.

Franklin was disillusioned with Hollywood after the experience of directing the 1991 action/thriller FX2: The Deadly Art of Illusion (starring Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy).(why?)

Return to Australia He returned to Australia where he filmed Hotel Sorrento (1995) and Brilliant Lies (1996). Franklin called these films

Final years Franklin's final film, Visitors, was shot in 2003. He lectured at Swinburne School of Film and Television in Australia until his death.

Richard Franklin died of prostate cancer on 11 July 2007, four days before his 59th birthday. and he screened Psycho II at the sixth Quentin Tarantino Film Festival (2005). Tarantino revealed in an interview that when he was a teenager, he wanted to write a book on genre filmmakers, and Richard Franklin was one of the directors he wanted to engage in conversation for it.

Filmography