Andrew Birkin (b.
9 December 1945 in
Harrow,
London) is an
English screenwriter,
director, and occasional
actor. He was born the only son of Lieutenant-Commander David Birkin and his wife, the actress
Judy Campbell. One of his sisters is the actress
Jane Birkin.
Work
Birkin left
Harrow School at the age of 17 to work as a mail boy at
20th Century Fox’s London office, graduating to Elstree Studios as a production runner in 1963. He began work as a runner on
Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey in 1965, but soon became Kubrick's location scout.
[Dan Richter, Moonwatcher's Memoir: A Diary of 2001: A Space of Odyssey (2002)] By the summer of 1966, Kubrick had promoted Birkin to Assistant Director on Special Effects;
[Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (2000)] Birkin later proposed the shooting and color transposition of aerial footage for the 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite' sequence, some of which he filmed from a helicopter over Scotland
[Michel Ciment, Kubrick (1999) ][Rolf Thissen, Stanley Kubrick: Der Regisseur als Architekt (1999)]. In 1967 Birkin supervised the shooting of 'The Dawn of Man' front projection plates in the Namib Desert.
[John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1997)] In 1968, Kubrick again engaged Birkin as his assistant director and location scout on his unmade epic of
Napoleon.
[John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1997)][Rolf Thissen, Stanley Kubrick: Der Regisseur als Architekt (1999)][Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick (2004)]
