Val Guest - Directing Career

Directing Career

He wrote screenplays for the rest of the decade, including working on scripts for Will Hay, as well as some film scores, before in the early 1940s becoming a director, with his debut feature in this role being Miss London Ltd. in 1943. He went on to direct, produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years, with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). He also directed the cult science-fiction films The Abominable Snowman (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) (which won him a BAFTA Award with Wolf Mankowitz for Best Screenplay). He also directed and wrote the screenplay for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970).