John Boorman, it’s clear, had a momentous youth.

As shown in his autobiographical 1987 film, Hope and Glory, Boorman’s young alter-ego Bill Rohan gamely survived the horrors of the Blitz, eventually escaping London to live out his boyhood on an idyllic island down the Thames.

Now, with his newest effort, Queen and Country—which he wrote, produced, and directed—Boorman fast-forwards to 1952, the specter of the Korean War, and his late adolescence. It’s a sweet, funny, and nostalgic film, but it also explores some big themes as Bill (Callum Turner) is torn from his pastoral existence through conscription, thrust into the class struggle, and along the way bears witness to the collapse of the British Empire.

“I felt, that it was really a very important period,” says the 82-year-old Boorman, calling the Straight from his home in County Wicklow, Ireland. “Older soldiers who had been through the war were hanging on the notion of imperial Britain and the concept of empire, but we could see that it was all over. The greatest empire the world had ever known, two-fifths of the earth’s surface was British, and a few years later England, from being this great empire, had turned into this small island off the coast of Europe. It was a momentous change.”

It was also a period of rapidly evolving mores, and the early stirrings of social mobility, as the film illustrates through the experiences of Bill and his aristocratic paramour, Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton).

At its core, though, Queen and Country is simply a personal, frank, and revealing film about Boorman and his family. And as such, getting the right cast was of particular importance—but hardly an insurmountable obstacle, considering 28 years had passed since Hope and Glory.

“Well, I left it too late to be able to use the original actors,” says Boorman, with a bit of a sigh, “but I didn’t find it very difficult. When I asked Sinéad Cusack to play the mother, she asked me, “Do you want me to do an impersonation of Sarah Miles [who played Grace Rohan in Hope and Glory]?” And I said 'No, I cast Sarah because she had the same spirit as my mother, and so do you'. And I was very impressed with Callum, I thought he had what I had at that age.”

Although Boorman asserts that almost everything in the film really happened, he also admits that the power of cinema can sometimes be stronger than the power of memory.

“I can no longer remember the things that happened to me that are the basis for Hope and Glory,” he says, laughing. “I can only remember the film now, and in a sense I feel like I’m betraying my own memory by supplanting it with these movies.”

But clearly, there’s no supplanting the raw emotion that actual memories evoke. While filming Queen and Country, the veteran director found himself rattled a couple of times.

“David Thewlis is such a sweet, gentle man and he plays this monstrous character. He was so much like the character he was based on that every time he came on the set I had a frisson of fear,” Boorman says, laughing at first, but then turning serious. “The other scene that was quite painful was where Bill sees his mother waving to her lover across the river, and he says, 'I was ten years old, do I betray my father or my mother?' I found that a very difficult scene to shoot, because it was very close to the bone, as it were.”

Of course, when one has John Boorman on the phone, it’s pretty difficult to resist bringing up some of the director’s earlier works.

When asked about the infamous “Squeal like a pig!” line from Deliverance, his 1972 tale of a canoe trip gone horribly wrong, Boorman reveals that it came about in an attempt to get around network TV censors. Amazingly, the line that traumatized an entire generation was considered more socially acceptable than script’s original swearing.

“It’s often the case with film that the limitations bring about improvements,” says Boorman. “Warners was beating me up over the budget of Deliverance, and the only thing I had left to cut was composer and orchestra. I always intended to use Dueling Banjos as a theme, so I just got a couple of musicians into a studio for a couple of hours and did variations on it and that was the whole score—and it’s much better than if I’d had an orchestra.”

Boorman has also been lately involved with Fox’s new 4K Blu-ray remaster of his inscrutable yet enduring 1974 science fiction film, Zardoz, starring Sean Connery.

“They got in touch with me to say that they were going to restore it, and I said, 'Why?'’ Boorman says with a big laugh. “It’s one of those films that went from being a failure to being a classic without ever passing through success”.

In Queen and Country, the five-time Oscar nominee drops a number of hints about his future profession. Movie references abound, and the last scene even portrays Bill using a home movie camera. Asked if there will be a third installment of his biographical films, Boorman reveals that he has toyed with a couple of ideas. One is a prequel, about his mother and her family in London during World War One.

“My grandfather had a gin palace in the Isle of Dogs,” Boorman explains, “and they were bombed by zeppelins.”

The other takes place in the 1960s and covers his early film career. It would also revolve around his close friendship with actor Lee Marvin, whom Boorman directed in Hell in the Pacific, as well as the stylish gangster classic, Point Blank.

When it’s excitedly stated that this sounds like a perfect combination of time, place, and talent, Boorman just laughs.

“Yes, but who would you get to play Lee Marvin?”