David Puttnam's energy and drive as a film producer gave the world some brilliant films, peaking in a phenomenal run of eight hits made in less than eight years, from Bugsy Malone to The Mission, including Midnight Express, Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields and Local Hero. The moral anger and passion of The Killing Fields still burns in him today, as he tours the benighted places of the globe for Unicef or stands up in the north of England for the dispossessed of Wearside. It is almost impossible to associate such a vital man with the lassitude and hopelessness inflicted by ME, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
But for the past 16 years, since he was the controversial head of Columbia Pictures in California, the disease has periodically laid him low. He has never spoken of it until now because he does not feel in the least bit sorry for himself and indeed, he says, something positive has come out of it. Lord Puttnam agreed to talk to the Guardian only at the request of the charity Action for ME, of which he is a patron, to help foster greater awareness and understanding of a much misunderstood condition.
It began in 1988, but he knows now that the roots of it were in the years of huge creative energy and hard work that came before. "I was so exhausted when I finished The Killing Fields, to which I gave everything I had in me - everything I had learned, everything I knew, everything. There are moments in people's lives when you have accrued all the professionalism that you need to do the job, where you are a true professional, where you have genuine energy and focus. All those things came together for me over a period of about five years, culminating with The Killing Fields. Everything told me when I'd finished making it that I should retire. I couldn't have afforded to anyway - it was a daft idea - the kids were at school. But viscerally, it was absolutely right. I had nothing left to give, absolutely nothing."
He was going to take an easier year as executive producer of The Mission, but personality clashes as filming began meant he had to "go in and do the job".
The Killing Fields, which followed Chariots of Fire, was shot in 1983 and finished in 1984. The Mission took up 1984 and 1985. The following year Puttnam was head-hunted by the Coca-Cola Corporation to head Columbia Pictures. It was to have been a glorious revolution in Hollywood movie-making. Puttnam's ambition was to make low-budget artistic films embracing moral, social and political issues, using talented European directors yet aimed at a mass audience. But he spoke his mind, attacked the commercial film culture and fell out badly with the big-name stars and producers of violent and uncerebral blockbusters such as Rambo.
In the middle of all this, in 1988, he was hit by ME. "I had a six-month period when I couldn't do anything," he says. Nothing, really nothing. Going to the loo was like climbing Everest. It is impossible to explain to people how utterly debilitating it is.
"I was living in California and my wife and I went for a long holiday in Hawaii. It was a good thing to do, but everything was exhausting. Just driving a car was exhausting. It occurred at exactly the time that things were coming to a head at Columbia Pictures, which was another reason why it was very easy for me to say look - thanks, but no thanks. It was very much a contributing factor."
Initially, doctors thought Puttnam, who had just returned from south-east Asia, had dengue fever. He had the highest temperature he had ever experienced, he says, and was sweating to the point where rivers of water were running down his chest. "Then I had a very, very good doctor who quite quickly decided it wasn't, and came down in favour of what Americans were then calling Epstein-Barr [a virus that causes glandular fever]. He was clever enough to say the after-effects might be a long, debilitating period. In a way, he was identifying what we now call ME."
Puttnam, like many sufferers, believes that his ME was triggered by a viral infection hitting him when he was under the sort of strain and pressure that meant his immune system did not have sufficient strength to resist. He knows, he says, that "a lot of doctors would laugh", but the explanation fits his symptoms and those of others. "I think this mutated virus gets into the immune system and I'm not sure if you ever lose it. In my case, I certainly didn't."
He was lucky in his doctor and in the support he has always enjoyed from his wife, Patsy, and his family. "I had a doctor who did not minimise it. This was in California and he had seen it before. He was very clear with me and my family that this was not malingering and the recovery period would be very long."
Puttnam became involved with Action for ME very quickly, originally through Martin Lev who played Handy Dan in Bugsy Malone and was one of the founders of the charity. Tragically, Lev later killed himself. Puttnam became a patron alongside Claire Francis, the round-the-world yachtswoman who at that time was in a wheelchair because of the disease, and Melvyn Bragg.
In a good year, Puttnam says he will have maybe three or four attacks of ME. In a bad year, there will be as many as eight. His wife sees it coming. "She says I get what she calls marmoset eyes. She will look at me and say, 'You have an ME attack coming.' It's quite incredible."
They last around three days and there are specific symptoms. The first is an urge to pee every hour. The second is that his temperature begins to rise "as if my internal thermostat has blown" and the sweating begins.
The third symptom is lack of concentration, making it impossible to read a book. But the worst, he says, is the depression. "You become irrationally gloomy and everything becomes negative. Sometimes it's not such a terrible thing, but I suddenly see all the dangers of a situation or all the problems.
"After all these years, I know it won't last more than a couple of days. I know that - I'm a perfectly intelligent person - and yet every time there is a lingering fear that this might be the big one. This maybe is the one that will never go away. That fear really grips you. People say snap out of it, fight it. But you don't. You pull yourself down into it. Security resides in the feeling of sadness. It is a very weird thing. It is a pit and you pull yourself into the pit. There is no sense that you want to fight this."
He is lucky, he says frequently. He has his family and a wonderful house on the west coast of Ireland, in a village that reminds him of the one where he shot his favourite film, Local Hero; he has had extraordinary success as a film producer and now has an absorbing life as president of Unicef and a hard-working peer. The day we met he had just made speeches about the future of the BBC and higher education.
But it hasn't come easy. Five years of cognitive therapy have given him self-knowledge. "It helped me understand the illness, but also the way in which I may have been partially responsible for creating it.
"I have been extremely lucky and very successful in many respects, but I have always found everything difficult. Everything. I've never found anything easy. I find giving a speech difficult. I just have to apply myself. If you become successful, the demands on you are rightly significant, but if you have, as I think I had, an essential feeling that you are not as good as people think you are and you've got to work twice as hard to be as good as people think you are, you are creating a form of very real stress."
He was upset by a jocular reference to a meeting with him in a diary which Giles Brandreth published. "He said, as usual I was desperately busy and earnest. That hurt me. I know what he means, but what people like him who are either genuinely or pretend to be kind of relaxed and jokey about life don't understand is that if you are not like that, you can't pretend to be. Yes, I am earnest and busy because I can only get through what I challenge myself with by being earnest and busy. I wish I wasn't. I find it offensive that someone who would appear to find life easy is prepared to mock someone who doesn't find life easy at all."
In the education debate, he heard his own voice becoming angry as he championed the kids of Wearside, where he is vice-chancellor of Sunderland University. "I'm very proud to be vice-chancellor because in Wearside we are the only game in town," he says.
About 85% of the kids there are the first in their family to go to university. "It does make me really angry when I have to confront Surrey and Cheshire attitudes that have no comprehension that Wearside is a different country with different pressures and problems, trying to crawl back not on to its feet but on to its knees."
He takes life seriously because he cares. He is angry because the same passions burn that informed some of his films. Things matter, he agrees. "Yes, desperately." If his ME is partly related to the stress he puts himself under, it has not stopped him championing the causes he believes in - including, of course, opening a window on his own experience to help other sufferers. He can relax by going home to his house and garden in Ireland, where he is "blissfully happy", he says. He adds that ME has in a curious way done him a favour, by forcing him to reduce the pressure he puts himself under which may mean he will not die of a heart attack as his father did. He managed to spend more than 100 nights in Ireland last year, he says, and would like to get it up to 130 or 140. He grins in wry amusement that I find it strange that he counts so exactly. "It tells you everything about me," he says with a laugh that is more frequent than his confessed seriousness suggests. "I have to measure things."
· Action for ME can be found at afme.org.uk and on 01749 670799
