Boorman won the Best Director Award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for "The General", his biopic of Martin Cahill. The film is about a glamorous, yet mysterious, criminal in Dublin who was killed, apparently by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Boorman himself had been one of Cahill's burglary victims, having the gold record awarded for the score to "Deliverance" stolen from his home.