Talking to Peter Heath, you begin to think that if you never went to sleep again you might possibly achieve a small percentage of his output. No doubt about it, Peter has lived an extraordinarily productive life. He has made over 500 commercials (only the latest are on his reel). He is a director, lighting cameraman, documentary maker, writer, editor, music video producer, CD-ROM designer, computer programmer and sometime actor. And most of what he's done has won major awards.

All of which at a certain point became quite stressful. So he decided on a brief sabbatical, which turned into a seven-year, 100,000-mile sail aboard his glorious 43' Swan - enabling him to hone his other talents as skipper and navigator.

Of course, for Peter "sabbatical" did not mean 'rest'. Wherever a suitable job opportunity arose, local sailors were reverse press-ganged into becoming crew of a different ilk, resulting in a dozen or so commercials, and a meticulously planned and executed CD-ROM about diving for the St. Martin Tourist Association. (Taking a busman's holiday from his busman's holiday, Peter operated the Industrial Light and Magic Vista-Vision camera for the feature Speed 2, starring Sandra Bullock.)

A resourceful problem-solver himself, Peter sees nothing remarkable about his 'crew'. 'Sailors can maintain everything on the vessel, and these days that means a lot of electricals. "Live-aboards" are a self-reliant lot, he says. If you break down at sea, there's no one to come and fix it. You have to do it yourself.'

That’s what he did when he originally sailed from his base in South Africa to the States. The satellite navigator equipment broke down and no one left on board knew how to navigate without it, except in a rudimentary fashion by the sun. ‘We knew we had to go west,’ says Heath dryly, ‘and that’s all right in the open ocean but you really need to be able to use a sextant for the harbor entrance.’ What to do? Go to the bookshelf, find a copy of Mary Blewitt’s Navigation for Yachtsmen – ‘She writes really well’ – and study up.

He's adept at weather forecasting too. It's not a special talent, he insists; one simply must be aware of what's going on in the atmosphere. On a shoot in the mountains near LA recently, it had been raining all afternoon and everyone wanted to wrap. Peter stalled until he saw a small hole in the clouds, rushed up the mountain, shot the entire film and saved the clients tens of thousands of dollars.

Interesting skies are a feature of his films. Even his Schooner Beer spot, shot in the Caribbean (where, also for Labatt’s Breweries, he made a documentary with America’s Cup boats) is set against dramatic clouds rather than brilliant blue. Heath says he became observant of the weather because he was interested in lighting and he became interested in lighting because he was originally an actor. And actors are very conscious of the way the light shines on them. He found this out after school, where he did photography, when he joined a State Theatre troupe in South Africa (he was born in Wales but is part of a family that is flung around the world and he has always been peripatetic). He started making 16mm films for a Government-sponsored educational project and learned a lot of his craft on the hoof. Peter has continued to light films himself, or at least is closely involved when working with a sizeable crew. The first film he lit from beginning to end, featuring English comic actors Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes.

When Peter is not making commercials for major clients like Coca Cola and General Motors, he studies - these days mostly computer stuff. He wrote the code for the CD-ROM he made. ‘It’s not that difficult,’ he says. ‘I’m one of those strange people who enjoy reading computer manuals. I can apply the knowledge now to the Internet, database programming and digital video.'

In fact, a true autodidact, Peter is interested in many things. He once made a documentary about de-worming sheep and ‘needed to know a bit about it….’

Heath’s sabbatical has affected his perspective enormously and he feels blessed to have been able to take it. He says it dispelled the ennui he had fallen into after an excess of work, and an invigorated, revitalized Peter Heath takes boundless pleasure in making films again. He knows his lighting has improved – all those Caribbean horizons – and he somehow delivers footage much faster than before. Was he not tempted to sail away forever? ‘You can only see so many beautiful islands and spend what seems like eons sailing round them,’ he replies. ‘It’s not as if I dropped out. I used to sail north in the summer to sample New York or call in to Venezuela, and I continued to make films, in Israel as well as the US and the Caribbean. In fact, it’s great to be back. I love the film business. And I'm making even better pictures.’