Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Making Films (Interview with Alistair Owen)

Do you consider yourself as much a screenwriter as a novelist?

No, I consider myself a novelist, but after spending a year alone writing a novel I find it tremendously refreshing to hang out on a filmset for a while. I’ve always loved movies, and after I’d published my first novel and a collection of short stories — and my second novel was in the works — I hoped that this would open the doors to film or television, but of course they say, “Have you written a script?” and you say, “No, that’s what I want to do.” I did write a couple of trial scripts which my agent could show people, but then came a lucky break: Channel 4 started up and approached non-screenwriters to write scripts, and their remit was that it had to be British and it had to be contemporary and that was it.

Why did you choose the subject of public school?

The original plan was to write a series of short stories — I wrote one called “Hardly Ever,” about putting on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, which was in my first collection — but I decided that I would use some of my ideas for a film, Good and Bad at Games, a very dark piece about revenge and torture and madness. After that I was approached by an independent producer, Sue Birtwistle, to do a comedy about public school, so I wrote a lighthearted look at sexual conditioning, Dutch Girls, and that used up the rest of my material. I published the two scripts, wrote a long memoir about my own schooldays and discovered that I’d done what I’d set out to achieve: a completely honest account of what it’s like to be in a single-sex boarding school. Having spent nine and a half years in one of these institutions, an experience common to a huge number of writers, it was astonishing to me that if you looked for anything remotely true or realistic about them in literature, let alone in film or television, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. With the exception of If and a TV film which Frederic Raphael wrote, called School Play, everything was a bit Victorian or romanticized. It’s very odd, this absence, a sort of collective act of unremembering by British artists who will not look closely at these incredibly powerful institutions. My schooldays are a long time ago now, but they still have a resonance — nothing has changed that much. The public life of these schools has changed, in that the kids are more sophisticated and they go home at weekends, but the private life of every closed society is by definition not available for scrutiny and can be a particularly nasty and unpleasant place. It doesn’t have to be 1965, it could be 2001.

Your early fiction was compared to the work of Evelyn Waugh, some of which you later adapted into the television dramas Scoop and Sword of Honour, and he also wrote about public school in Decline and Fall. Did you want to bring something of his satirical style to these scripts?

Decline and Fall is about prep school, which is a sub-category of the genre. Waugh’s own diaries, which he kept as a schoolboy, are a harrowing and realistic portrait, and the same savage indignation is at work in Good and Bad at Games. It was based on a boy I remember who was hideously persecuted for five years. I always wondered what had become of him, so I invented a fate for this character: he goes mad and exacts revenge. I know quite a few very successful, apparently well-balanced, adults who are still tormented by their schooldays. It does have a profound effect on you, and it was quite a controversial film when it came out. I was actually attacked for it — like a class traitor. Dutch Girls, though, is a comedy, and is meant to make you laugh and say how ridiculous it is to bring up boys with this attitude. There are satirical elements in it, but I want all my work to be grounded in the real. However dark or absurd it is, I don’t want it to take off into fantasy or magic realism. I’m very pleased with the films. They’re still requested by schools, and I go and talk about them.

What did you learn from working with directors Jack Gold and Giles Foster?

I learned how the industrial process of film-making can influence the way it turns out on-screen. Because they were television films — and because I’ve always worked with people I’ve got on well with — my role was far more respected than if I’d started out writing for the movies. I was a welcome presence, as involved as I wanted to be, and in fact on both films I was on set almost every day. They were original scripts, so I was the source of all wisdom, and they’re very close to what was written. But once you know how a film is physically made that shapes a lot of your thinking, especially if you’re working on a low-budget independent movie.

Scoop was your first experience of adapting a classic. How did you find it?

When I saw the finished film, I said to Sue Birtwistle and the director, Gavin Millar, “You can relax. Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool Waugh pedant is going to object to this.” And boy was I wrong. It got a real hammering. It’s never been repeated, unfortunately, but I still think it’s a good adaptation: lavish, brilliantly acted, faithful to the narrative shape of the book and true to the spirit of Waugh. One of the only things I left out was a literary joke. William Boot writes his country column about the badger, and his sister changes the word “badger” to “great-crested grebe.” It’s hilariously funny, but the only way it can work onscreen is if you show the words — which is manifestly not filmic. But there seems to be something about Evelyn Waugh which gets the most jaded hack asking to write a piece for their editor. Having been a TV critic for two years with the New Statesman, I know the thought processes that go on, and when we were really pleased with Sword of Honour, I said, “Beware!”

In fact, you were one of the few critics who disliked the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

I was teaching at Oxford at the time and knew the novel inside out, so I was probably a bit self-righteous. It was a memorable event in television history and was compelling in its own way. It was nine hours long, which seems extraordinary today. Again, the problem is one of adaptation. It’s a first-person novel, so everything is in the voice of Charles Ryder, which is why there was masses of voiceover.

What do you think of voiceover, by and large?

Voiceover is one of the tools in your toolkit and should be employed whenever it works well. I remember having an argument with someone who put money into The Mission. He said, “I didn’t have the faintest idea where this country was.” I said, “Why didn’t they use a map?” Shock! Horror! I’m a great believer in maps or captions if they do the job, otherwise you have to explain it all with dialogue. “Of course, you used to be the ambassador to Indo-China and then you were fired. What was it for, now? Yes, it was because of …” That’s classic bad screen-writing, and you can cut through that nonsense by putting, say, “The Libyan Desert—1942.” Captions are very succinct and very effective. With voiceover, however, I think there are certain ground-rules. It should be present from the start: often it’s a rescue attempt, bolted on here and there, and usually that doesn’t work. I’ve been guilty of this myself, so I know what’s involved. And it should have nothing to do with what’s happening in the scene: there’s nothing worse than seeing a man going into a house and hearing him say, “When I went into my house … All this is to do with the problems of adapting for film. No one goes to see Verdi’s Falstaff, then comes home to compare it to The Merry Wives of Windsor. No one goes to see the ballet of Eugene Onegin then comes home and compares it to Pushkin’s epic poem. The two art forms are allowed to coexist. But the first thing people say about a film adaptation of a novel is, “Why did you leave out the bit about …?” It’s a mistake, a complete category error. “Did it work as a film?” is the question you should be asking, and if you say, “Yes, I enjoyed myself and I was engaged,” end of story. Having been a victim on numerous occasions of that sort of critical misunderstanding, I feel this can’t be said often enough. You have to make it work as a film, not as a simulacrum of the novel. The two forms are quite distinct, and there are different aesthetic pleasures to be derived from each.

Scoop was adapted from a single novel into a single drama. Sword of Honour was adapted from three novels into two parts totalling four hours, with adverts, yet a trilogy would seem to lend itself to three parts. Whose decision was that?

It was Channel 4’s decision. Initially they asked for six times one hour — it was going to be weekly — but then there was a change of thinking: “Channel 4 audiences do not tune in every Sunday night to watch the classic serial, so could we do it as two film-length episodes back to back on consecutive nights?” For me, having written my six-hour version, moving the goalposts in this way was something of a kick in the teeth, but in fact I think it was the right decision. I said to the director, Bill Anderson, “This is the David Lean version. Think of it as Lawrence of Arabia.” And, of course, when you think of it like that you can strip away all the stuff which you’d normally do in a leisurely TV way and concentrate on the essence of the story. The novels are wonderful but incredibly uneven, full of longueurs. Guy Crouchback’s war is essentially Evelyn Waugh’s, and when Waugh was bored rigid from 1942 to 1944 there’s an enormous sag in the books. He left a seven-year gap after writing Volume Two, and was jaded and embittered and close to the end of his life when he wrote Volume Three, but because we had our new format we were able to make the narrative lines more graceful and more telling. But there’s a lot left out.

Whether it’s six hours or four hours it’s still a difficult story to tell because it’s about lives intersecting randomly, one of your favourite themes.

To a certain extent that’s my interpretation of it. Evelyn Waugh might disagree with me. What makes the books endure, I think, is that they’re like an English Catch-22. War is horrifying. Armies can’t function. You think something is going to happen and the opposite will happen. You try to be brave but you’re forced to be a coward. These are very cynical, disenchanted, Joseph Helleresque points of view. Waugh would argue, as he did in the preface to the novels, that he was actually writing about the collapse of Roman Catholic values in contemporary Britain, but what you take away from the trilogy now is its modernity, its sense of the cruel and absurd, its dark and ruthless observation of human beings in a war zone. I stressed that angle because as a devout atheist I wasn’t remotely interested in Evelyn Waugh’s tormented workings-out of a Catholic gentleman attempting to cling on to his faith when the hideous modern world was trying to trample it underfoot.

Did you tailor the script to suit the budget?

I don’t think you really do tailor your first draft because these decisions often come later on, but you know you’re not making Gladiator, and you don’t have $185 million to spend, so you save your bravura shots for things you can actually deliver. The Battle for Crete was going to be our big set-piece and would need a cast of thousands, so there was no point in writing earlier, “A convoy steams over the horizon and we see it from the coast of Africa.” That’s just common sense. But because of special effects you can now do stuff which looks fantastic. We had two Dako-tas, one with American markings and one with RAF markings, but we couldn’t get a Stuka in Majorca because Spanish air-traffic control wouldn’t allow us to fly one into their airspace. So we did the Stuka attack with CGI and it actually looks better, because we had three Stukas coming out of the sky. These decisions are often taken on the hoof. You don’t really think about them when you’re writing. But there is a scene on board a destroyer off the coast of Africa, and I knew that could be done on a blue screen, so the whole scene was written shooting out, as it were, from two men leaning on a railing. It works well, it looks great, it didn’t cost a lot and it’s underpinned in the writing by a sense of, “What’s the best way of shooting this that will give us the biggest bang for our buck?”

Do you prefer writing for the big screen or the small screen?

I would never say, “I’ll only write movies,” like certain actors say, “I don’t do television.” It’s really a question of what works best — and what’s available — although for me that choice is a luxury because I’m primarily a novelist: that satisfies so many urges and needs.

Mister Johnson and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter were based on novels by Joyce Cary and Mario Vargas Llosa which both feature highly exotic settings, something they share with your own fiction. Is that why you were approached?

Commissioned work is often very attractive because the book appeals to your tastes or chimes with your interests. Mister Johnson is set in Nigeria, and I’d lived in Nigeria and written an introduction to the Penguin World Classics edition of the book, so it was an easy decision. Aunt Julia came about as a result of my relationship with David Puttnam, because the adaptation of my novel Stars and Bars was with his company, Enigma, before he went off to run Columbia Pictures. It was suggested that I might be the person to adapt it, so I read it and loved it but knew it was going to be a bold adaptation. By then it was no longer at Columbia but with an independent company, and they said it could be set anywhere in America but not in Peru, so it seemed to me that New Orleans delivered the same polyglot mix as Lima. That was one of those nice jobs which comes your way, and the relationships I built up at that time endure to this day. Mark Tarlov, who produced Aunt Julia, also produced A Good Man in Africa, and we have any number of irons in the fire.

I believe you actually discussed the changes to Aunt Julia with Vargas Llosa.

Yes, I did. There’s a character in the novel who writes soap operas for the radio, about fifteen different stories which get progressively more surreal and outlandish, and there was no way the film could cope with that. Vargas Llosa, who had approved the Americanization of the novel, just said, “Go for it. Do the best you can.” He knew the book would be respected and he was very pleased with the film. What got him furious was that the American distributor changed the title to Tune In Tomorrow. It was a real no-brainer, but they thought that they had a comic hit on their hands and they felt that the original title was a bit too arthouse. I protested vehemently; Vargas Llosa refused to have anything to do with it; the film did no business at all; and every review started with, “What idiot changed the title?” But it’s good work and I’m proud of it. I’ve got a full-page ad for the film from The New York Times which is chock-a-block with raves. We got across-the-board raves for Mister Johnson, as well — Bruce Beresford said he’s never had such good reviews — but it didn’t even do a million dollars’ business in the US. It did nothing here. It played for just four weeks in one cinema. If you looked up Mister Johnson on some database of US critics you’d say, “Why didn’t this film do better?” Well, because of the financial precariousness of the distributor, and the fact that the guy at Fox who commissioned the movie had been fired. The main achievement was to get the films made, so I’m quite philosophical about these things.

Three of your novels have been filmed: Stars and Bars, A Good Man in Africa and Armadillo. Are you able to take more or less licence with your own work?

More licence. Because the book is always there, the adaptation is a wonderful bonus and I can authorize myself to strike a pencil through this or that character and this or that episode. I also find that as soon as a character becomes flesh and blood, once you see the contribution of a talented actor in the role, all sorts of beneficial and productive things can suggest themselves. A minor character can bloom with the right casting, and you might exploit that by bringing them into a scene and giving them lines to say. In A Good Man in Africa, Sean Connery brought something to the role of Dr Murray which simply wasn’t there on the page. So we worked on his part together, and wrote a few more gags for Dr Murray, because it would have been a terrible shame not to exploit that acerbic and laconic sense of humour.

How did you stay philosophical when Stars and Bars and A Good Man in Africa failed both critically and commercially?

They were not great critical or commercial successes, but I don’t think of them as films which have failed. Bits of them don’t work, but they both have tremendous casts and they’re both really entertaining, which is not bad given the vagaries of the business. Again, getting the films made was probably the great achievement. We had hellish problems setting up Stars and Bars, then it was flushed down the toilet by Columbia, post-Puttnam, so it never had a chance. It might have been ahead of its time. If a quirky comedy about an Englishman abroad had been released in 1999 instead of 1988, it might have been seen in the context of all these British films which play to their strengths in the same way. Lots of works of art are perceived not to have delivered at the time of their presentation to the marketplace but can be savoured later on, when all the fuss has died down. The effect of criticism is transient and ephemeral, but these films pop up on television in their post-release life and are watched and appreciated. You want everything you do to be as big a success as possible, but you should also be trying to make the best film that you can. If you try to second-guess the market and write a sub-Hannibal Lecter film and it bombs, then you must feel like a complete whore, but if you’ve done your best and you’re pleased with the film, then it has to take its chances. The Trench didn’t get a US distributor, but there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s the film I wanted to make and if it’s too dark and sad to play commercially then so be it. You’re striving all the time — I think this is true of every artist — to be popular and preserve your integrity: “Can I have both, please?”

That aspiration was certainly true of Charlie Chaplin, whose life you tackled for Richard Attenborough. What attracted you to that project?

It came at a very good time for me because I’d just finished writing Brazzaville Beach, my brain was empty and I literally had nothing to do. Everybody knows a bit about Chaplin — about “The Tramp” and United Artists — but the true story is unbelievably dark and intense. “The Tramp” was not Charlie Chaplin. He was very left wing but ran his studio like a fascist dictator. He was vastly wealthy and became obsessed with young girls. Having written The New Confessions by then, I found that whole period of American film-making fascinating. Also I really, really liked Dickie. You think, “I get to work with Richard Attenborough. How fantastic is that?” He has this habit of saying, “Steve used to say to me …” and you think, “Who’s Steve?” and after a while you realize it’s Steve McQueen. He has a phenomenal history, he’s known everybody and is an amazing man.

In The New Confessions, you had several hundred pages to explore the life of its fictitious director. In Chaplin, you only had three hours or so.

The biopic is the hardest genre to pull off without it ending up as some sort of documentary. Again, it’s an adapting problem, but instead of having a book to adapt you have a life, so it becomes a question of choosing key moments or filmically interesting moments and somehow alluding to the rest. The studio executive on the project, Barry Isaacson, came over here and we thought, “Let’s choose a template, given what we know about the man.” We decided to choose Raging Bull — which sounds silly, but that film also covers a long period and is very dark and intense. To a degree, it distorts Chaplin’s life just to look at his neuroses, but that’s what’s really interesting about the man.

Presumably the character played by Anthony Hopkins, a book editor going over Chaplin’s autobiography with its elderly author, was invented as the means of “alluding to the rest”?

The scenes of Chaplin as an old man were exclusively the work of William Goldman. I didn’t write a single word of them. My first draft started with Chaplin as a boy of seven, and ended in his late sixties when he was banished from America. My thinking was that his banishment was the end of the story: “We made you, so we can throw you out.” After that he lived in Switzerland and had lots of kids. We thought that Robert Downey Jr could pick it up at seventeen and age up to about seventy, but taking it to eighty and having him wear twenty pounds of prosthetic make-up was stretching credulity a bit far, in my opinion. The history of the film was fraught, because it collapsed and Attenbor-ough had to set the whole thing up again. It was ready to go, but Universal were unhappy with the budget. Tom Stoppard did a pass at it before they put it in turnaround, then a year later it went to Carolco and his revisions were lifted out and William Goldman was brought in to write the extra scenes.

Including the scenes where Chaplin accepts a Lifetime Achievement Oscar?

We always envisaged that as a bookend device: Hollywood admitted that they were wrong and welcomed him back. We showed him preparing for the ceremony, then had a huge flashback, and right at the end he picks up the award.

Were you present while the film was being shot?

I flew out to LA with Dickie to look at the locations, I got to know Robert during the making of it and I went to see it being filmed here. In spite of its terrible ups and downs, a very happy group worked on the film, and what emerged is a really intriguing portrait. It’s possibly Atten-borough’s darkest film, and Downey is absolutely brilliant, but powerful men just wanted to get their fingerprints on it. Look at the first version of Blade Runner: “Let’s stick in a voiceover.” Look at the director’s cut: you don’t need a voiceover. These things happen.

The screenplay credit actually reads …

Me, Bryan Forbes and William Goldman. It was decided in arbitration. In theory the first writer should get the first credit, but in fact I was the second writer.

Can you explain how a Writers’ Guild credit arbitration works?

There can’t be more than three writers credited, unless two of the writers scrabbling for those three credits are a writing team, so if you’re claiming a credit you have to write a declaration of why you think you earned it. You never write to claim a shared credit, you always write to demand sole credit, however unjust that may be. And you have to do it, because if you opt out, your credit is gone. You then submit all the drafts of the script you’ve written, and it goes before a kind of secret Star Chamber court.

Comprising other screenwriters?

The Writers’ Guild publish a list. Any member of the Guild could be called upon, but there seem to be about 200 or 300 writers who make up these committees. You don’t know who they are, and there’s no right of appeal, but certain things usually apply. The first writer nearly always gets a credit, even if there’s not a comma of theirs in the script, then the subsequent writers need to have changed something like thirty percent of the script to even qualify for consideration. But, by definition, the last writer on the script is going to have more of his work in the film, so if there have been seven or eight writers before him the whole process can be very unfair. There are instances where a well-known writer has written an entire film and not got a credit, and the credited writer has picked up an Oscar or a Golden Globe. It’s a source of great bitterness, this tendency to rewrite, and is one of the besetting sins of Hollywood. It pits writer against writer and involves an unseemly scrabble for prominence. I was subsequently asked to rewrite a script — a comedy called Hot Water, which has never been made — and I decided to meet the original writer to clear the air and make it non-adversarial. His advice was, “Tear it apart.” The time when I was rewritten, in the case of Diabolique, I withdrew from the arbitration, and they gave sole credit to a very interesting writer, Don Roos. I’d probably have got a credit because I was the first writer on the film, but I didn’t want my name associated with it in any way and just thought, “To hell with this!”

Why is there this tendency to rewrite in Hollywood?

Hollywood is governed by a fear of failure, and what happens is that as a film is being greenlit the studio hires another writer at vast expense — a quarter of a million dollars, half a million dollars, paid by the week — to put in some more gags or to look at the beginnings and endings of scenes, to “put it through their machine,” as the saying goes. Most celebratedly, Robert Towne was called in to polish The Godfather, and wrote the scene before Brando keels over in the garden. I won’t name any names, but when Kindergarten Cop was being greenlit the studio hired a very well-known screenwriter to put in a few more one-liners. The work came in and it was utterly useless, but if you’ve paid a celebrated screenwriter hundreds of thousands of dollars, what could be wrong with that? I call it the “only a fool” syndrome. If you’ve got a really crap script, but Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts will accept huge sums of money to be in it, then, well, only a fool wouldn’t make that film. It takes the curse off the decision. And sometimes it pays dividends. If you’re a hugely intelligent person, like Tom Stoppard, you can tinker with anything and improve it: come out of this scene a bit earlier, start the next scene a bit later. A script is endlessly malleable. But the process is driven by a fear of failure, it seems to me, rather than a genuine search for excellence.

In the case of Diabolique, there was already a classic adaptation of the novel by Boileau and Narcejac, so why did you agree to give it another shot?

I knew the film well; I didn’t go back to the novel. The brief was very clear: update it from fifties France to contemporary America. Again, it was a good moment; I can’t remember what I’d just finished. And it was for Warner, who I hadn’t worked for. When you take on these studio jobs you look for something challenging. Chaplin, Diabolique and The Gunpowder Plot are all very interesting assignments. In updating an old film all sorts of things had to be considerably altered, while at the same time delivering the mood and the menace of the original. The headmaster’s wife dying of fright has to be made ultra-plausible today, so you have to lay in her medical history. And, in contemporary mores, would you tolerate your husband openly sleeping with another teacher at the school? The updating was really quite complex. I did a lot of hard work and wrote a script which everybody seemed pleased with, then the studio put it in turnaround and it was picked up by a large independent company — who brought in Don Roos. I was sent the shooting script when the credit arbitration approached, as I was obliged to be, and it was apparent that they had basically remade the old film. All my stuff, the modernity, the plausibility, had gone, so I said, “It’s all yours.”

How long did it take you to write?

I worked on it for several months, made two trips to LA and did a lot of free work because I liked the producer. You’re contracted to do a first draft, a set of revisions and a polish — three passes — but I must have done at least another three polishes to try and get it right. This is another thing the Writers’ Guild is up in arms about. Writers want a film to work, and it’s very easy for producers to say, “Maybe if we just fiddle with those scenes in the middle,” so you do the extra, unpaid work in good faith and it turns out to be a waste of time. I now resist polishing and polishing because there will always be more work to do when a director comes on board. It would seem sensible to wait before you say, “This is the finished script.”

We’ve talked about the film adaptations of your novels, but you’ve also written a couple of unproduced adaptations of your short stories. Cork, first of all.

In a lot of my short stories, I take real characters and write something fictional about them. “Cork” was inspired by a Portuguese poet called Fernando Pessoa, who led an extraordinarily schizoid life. He wrote under different pseudonyms — he called them “heteronyms”—and took on different identities. He’d take on the personality of a rustic pagan poet, for example, and then a tortured intellectual poet, and he’d write in that particular style. It’s unapologetically complex, intensely erotic, has an unhappy ending and requires two brave actors. Various directors have been attached to it, and in the course of its life one of the actors we saw was Catherine McCormack. When the project languished, Catherine rang up and said, “Could I option the script?” I think she was sick to death of the kind of movie roles she was being offered and thought, “I must find interesting work which I can have some sort of influence over.” I’m often asked to option my short stories and always say no, because you never get them back, but I said, “Let’s see if my producing team, with you added, can put it together.” The more we talked about it, the more we realized she had very strong opinions about it, so Mark Tarlov said to her, “You should direct this film.” Of course, I think she was hoping for someone to offer her that, and without a second thought she went for it. The current state of play is that she’s going to direct and star in it, which is unusual because not many women do that. It’s not unprecedented, but it’s a tall order for your first movie as a director. So we now have a script, a producer, a director and a leading actor; we just need to cast the other role and get some money. I’ve also adapted another of my short stories as a short film, a ten-page script, which in a funny way was more challenging than taking a short story and expanding it.

What was that?

Two young film-makers approached me and asked if they could option a story of mine, “The Care and Attention of Swimming Pools,” about a mad pool-cleaner in LA. I thought the producer wanted to do it as a feature film, but she said she wanted to do it as a short, so I said, “Why don’t I write it for nothing and let’s see how we go?” I wrote it, we got it financed, they spent six weeks out in LA setting it up and then it all fell apart. There was a Screen Actors’ Guild strike at the time, so the cast and crew were all sitting around, prepared to work for scale, then overnight the strike ended and everybody was working again. Rather than blow the money — there was a lot of private equity involved — the producer thought, “Let’s come back and fight another day.” They were young and very enthusiastic, and I thought, “I can move this process forward a huge amount by not insisting they pay me to option the story or write the script.” It was just an interesting experiment.

Do you find it more or less satisfying, adapting a story rather than a novel?

More satisfying, in a way, because you tend to add on rather than cut out. If you’re looking to literature for inspiration for a film, a short story is better than a novel because you have the germ but there’s often not enough material to fill 90 or 100 minutes, so you’re forced to open it out and think about other elements which can work filmically. It’s more creative expanding something than boiling it down, which is what happens with novel to film adaptations.

Presumably Cork is a full-length script, ninety pages or so?

Cork is actually very tight, about eighty pages, but because of the nature of the material it will run to a full-length feature. I used to think 120 pages was about right, but now I think all scripts should be between 90 and 100 pages, because any film which crosses the two-hour barrier brings all sorts of industrial problems in its train. A film will always expand from the script. The Trench, which was a ninety-page screenplay, is a ninety-seven-minute film. The Gunpowder Plot would be a long film — two hours fifteen, two hours thirty — but the script was only 105 pages, because I knew the film would balloon if it got to 115 or 120. All our scripts for Armadillo, which is three one-hour chunks, were fifty-four or fifty-five pages, and as a result we have no length problem. It’s better to make these tough decisions on the page than in the cutting room. Of course, there’s usually a chunk you can lift out during editing if you have that problem, but it’s always soul-destroying to lose a sequence which cost hundreds of thousands and took nine days to shoot — and you can usually spot the joins and have to do a bit of reshooting to smooth things out. In some ways, length depends on the genre. Chaplin was always going to be two hours-plus, but a comedy or a thriller which is much over an hour and forty minutes is asking a lot of itself.

Why do you think the scripts you write for yourself to direct are less exotic and more confined than the scripts you write for other people?

It’s knowing my own strengths and, by definition, weaknesses. The Trench minimized the hassles for me as a first-time director. We shot a lot of it in the studio and it was fantastic working on a set. You started work at eight and knocked off at seven. You didn’t have to worry about rain or aeroplanes flying overhead. Offices were there. Cutting rooms were there. It was a great experience and, so, planning my second film, I thought, “Softly, softly.” This one will be maybe seventy-five percent studio-based and twenty-five percent location-based. I won’t be going to live in a hotel for six weeks, so I’ll be able to do the work without all that endless hanging around involved in film-making. And having cut my teeth on the war movie, I thought that the kind of film I’d like to do next would be a complicated and sophisticated thriller. Chinatown, Body Heat, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor are films which made a big impression on me. Film does genre really well: that’s where it seems to excel and is particularly true to its own art form. I’ve also got this hankering to make a film about Billy the Kid, which again is genre, but nobody wants to make Westerns these days. I wrote about the Kid in The New Confessions, where the hero makes a film about him, and I’ve read a lot about the real Billy, revolting little scumbag of a human being that he was.

Many screenwriters try their hand at directing in an effort to exercise greater control over their work, but your screenwriting experiences have mostly been very positive — so what drew you to become a director?

I originally wanted to be a painter, so this desire to direct may be satisfying the painterly side of my nature, reflected in the compositional and choreographical elements of film-making. I remember seeing The Conformist when I was nineteen, and being struck as much by the look of the film as by the story it was telling. One of my favourite films is Electra Glide in Blue, which is beautifully shot and blew me away when I saw it in my early twenties. I think that aspect was drawing me towards being a director rather than thinking, “I must have more control”—although, of course, directing a film as well as writing it is very alluring. I would never abandon writing novels to become a film director, but, as time has gone by and yet another director drops out of a project, friends have said, “You should direct this,” and I realized that one day I would direct, but I wanted to do something tailor-made for me. And, in the end, I enjoyed it so much that I want to do it again. But because I’m a novelist, and have the ultimate creative control there, I don’t mind sharing the burden sometimes. I enjoyed the making of Armadillo. Howard Davies is a brilliant director, and I’ve learned a lot from him and other directors. I enjoy being a benign presence behind the scenes and I’ll always write scripts for other people to direct, but I would never direct an adaptation of one of my novels and I would never direct a script by anybody else. I would only direct an original script of mine.

Why would you never direct an adaptation of one of your novels? An adaptation of your second novel, An Ice-Cream War, has spent many years in development hell, for example. Why not take the director’s chair for that film?

Because I know what’s involved in adapting. For me, creatively, it’s truer and fairer to the art form to write something which is purely a film. The Trench can sit on the shelf with any of my novels because, although it’s a huge collaboration, it’s exactly as I hoped it would be. I couldn’t say that a film version of An Ice-Cream War would be part of my body of work in the same way.

You could direct The Galapagos Affair, too. What prompted you to option such dark and difficult material yourself?

I have a desert-island obsession. These myths are buried deep within us: Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson and so on. I read a review of John Treherne’s book and thought, “What an extraordinary story.” A nymphomaniac baroness, an American millionaire in his white yacht, the mad German philosopher who swaps partners; the ingredients intrigued me. And at this stage in my screenwriting, I was thinking about optioning books to give myself more independence. The book had in fact been optioned by Nic Roeg and the option had lapsed, so I took it over and wrote a script, then set about seeing if I could find a producer and director. It eventually wound up at Working Title, and Tim Bevan and Mel Smith were hugely taken with it. We worked on it for a long time and they spent a lot of money — Mel had even done location recces in Australia — and then it all fell apart because of the nature of the material. It revived with Sarah Radclyffe as producer, but by then the PolyGram writing was on the wall, and because I’d signed no contract and received no money, I was able to take the book and script away and live to fight another day. I occasionally think about directing it, because it’s been on the go since 1985, but again it’s an adaptation, and something makes me think that any films I direct will be original.

Have you learned anything from writing these original screenplays for yourself to direct which you can bring to bear on writing adaptations for other people?

I really don’t know. I’m reluctant to create rules like, “If you’re writing a scene and it’s seven pages long and it isn’t over yet then you’re in trouble,” because in fact you may not be. Or to insist, “Don’t put in any camera moves,” because camera moves might actually be useful. But I’m now much more aware of the issue, “Is this going to be a problem to shoot?” When I was writing for other people, that was their problem not mine. Take a dinner-party scene, for example, with ten people chattering away around a table. There’s really only a bog-standard way of filming that kind of scene, and because I know how long it takes and how much coverage you have to shoot and how it still looks like a bunch of people talking at a table, I now think, “Maybe this scene shouldn’t take place at a dinner party after all. Maybe it would be more interesting if they were walking through a park.” It’s not going to justify the sheer effort of shooting it, because you can do it in a more elegant or intriguing way. If you look at the opening of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino set himself exactly that problem and obviously thought, “To hell with this,” and got someone to walk round and round with a steadicam. If you weren’t in shot when you were talking and he didn’t have coverage for it, so what? It’s actually quite a good way of shooting a lot of people talking at a table, although you may find when you come to cut it that a really crucial line is masked by somebody’s head, whereas if you’d storyboarded it and shot it from five or six different static positions you’d have got your coverage. The directorial influence makes itself felt more in the details than the big picture. Some establishing shots are key, for example, but do you really need to see people arriving in their cars and unlocking their front doors? You know you’ll cut that during editing, so why write it in the first place? Unless you happen to be Michael Mann and have seven cameras running simultaneously, there’s no interesting way of shooting someone arriving home. So maybe a better way of writing a scene like that is to have someone inside the house hearing the car pull up, followed by the driver bursting through the front door. Everyone will be able to envisage what happened outside. That sort of writing decision is all as a result of having stood behind a camera.

The vast majority of your scripts are adaptations. Do you think that Hollywood somehow perceives British screenwriters as more literary?

I think that’s a fair point. Maybe the classic serial generates that feeling. Masterpiece Theatre is hugely popular in America. But I also think it’s an industry-wide taste — or problem. For every original script commissioned there are four or five adaptations. Again, it’s driven by this fear of failure: “It’s a really successful book. Let’s make it into a movie.” The art of film is not best served by constantly doing adaptations, because of the problems inherent in shifting from one form to the other. It’s like putting pop songs on soundtracks. Isn’t it better to have a proper score? Isn’t that what film music is all about? It’s not about taking ten hit records and sticking them on so you get a great CD. Similarly, I feel, in a vaguely purist way, that film is best served if the script was always destined to be a film.

Which, looking at your filmography, is rather ironic.

That’s my point. That’s the nature of the beast. I bet most screenwriters would rather write something based on their own ideas than on this best-selling novel or that work of non-fiction. It’s not just books; they’re adapting TV shows, comic strips, other films. Traffic is an adaptation of a British television series. That’s why, in any scriptography, there will always be three to one in favour of adaptations. I was quite lucky that the first two scripts I did were original scripts. I think you have to separate adaptations and original scripts, because there are totally different sets of mental gears engaged in producing them.

How quickly did you adapt to writing scripts?

You can learn the grammar of a screenplay incredibly quickly. That’s why there are so many screenwriters out there. Any resting actor can produce a screenplay which looks exactly like a Robert Towne screenplay in terms of format but ultimately you have to fall back on whatever storytelling ability you have. You also have to understand what you can do with film and what you can’t. You’d have to be a very talented director, for example, to make a forty-five-page dialogue scene work. My advice to aspiring screenwriters is that if you see a film you really like, get hold of the screenplay and read it watching the movie simultaneously, with the remote control close at hand. You begin to understand the rhythms and cadences of film. Why is this scene so arresting? Stop. Rewind. Look again. Because you’re hearing this person talking, but you’re actually seeing the other person listening. And you realize it’s much more powerful that way. You learn.

Though that might not be written down.

It’s surprising how much is written down. I know, having directed myself, that you do a master shot and close-ups and reverses so that you can cut it any way you want. But if, for example, one character is announcing the news of the other character’s wife’s infidelity, then you will often write in the script, “Hold on a big close-up of John.” That’s simple storytelling. It’s more important to see John’s reaction than it is to see Fred speaking the words. And if you, the writer, think the moment should be played that way, then you haven’t even got a chance of getting it done like that if you don’t write it down. The rule of thumb is: if you want it in the film, make sure it’s in the script. Of course, stuff that’s in the script often doesn’t get shot, which is particularly galling for the writer. You come to the editing stage and say, “Where’s that close shot of Sally turning round as he walks off?” “Oh, we never did it.” “But it’s on page forty-three.” “Well, we were pressed for time.” But a good film writer will put these shots in, all the same.

Or not, depending on the advice you listen to. Aspiring screenwriters are often told precisely the opposite: the fewer camera directions the better.

In fact, the first screenplays I read were by Harold Pinter, who’s extremely sparing with directions, so my first screenplays were similarly spare. I don’t think William Goldman even puts scene headings in, it’s just “Cut to …” But there are moments where a scene has no dialogue so you have to write directions, and you would be better off writing them in a way that you think they would be well shot.

Of course, a script — particularly a spec script — isn’t simply a blueprint for a film, it’s also a sales tool for a project, so it has to be as readable as it is shootable. For example, directions in parentheses to indicate how the dialogue should be spoken.

It’s called “grandstanding” in Hollywood. When I was writing for Universal and Warner it was understood that this kind of thing would go in. It makes an easier read for overtaxed executives, because you’re telling them what the emotion is and they don’t have to deduce whether a character is happy or sad. Now, because I’ve worked more with actors and I understand an actor’s take on a script, I tend to strip that stuff away. Actors hate things like, “Ted (with a thin smile),” because you’re saying, “This is how I want you to act it.” But if you’re writing a film for a Hollywood studio you write it in a different way. A script has to be so many things in its life, and is going to be read by so many people who have a vested interest in saying no, that you want to give it your best shot — and there are all sorts of ways you can garnish it so it seems user-friendly. Hollywood is very conventional, in its own way. They want the script to be presented in the right typeface — Courier — to be printed on the right paper — American letter-size is not the same as our A4—and to be bound with three clips — brass not silver — else they’ll say, “Foreign,” and throw it away. British screenwriters who take their scripts down to Kall Kwik and get a plastic binding are handicapping themselves. When I was writing a lot in Hollywood, I used to buy great stacks of American paper and brass clips precisely so that it “looked right.”

You also get the impression from screenwriting manuals that if the spec writer doesn’t place the heroine in jeopardy on page twenty then the executives aren’t going to read any more of the script. Or even that much.

And not just spec writers. As a gun-for-hire screenwriter you can find yourself having to do things which you regard as mind-bogglingly stupid to satisfy some berk at the studio. In my opinion, these screenwriting courses are designed so executives can come back from them and say knowing things to writers about “character arcs” and “three-act structure.” It’s just jargon, really. Why not have a five-act structure, like Shakespeare? I don’t know any screenwriter who doesn’t regard these courses as laughable, but they have to take the jargon on board because they know they’ll go into meetings with people who’ll be spouting it. Fundamentally, all these decisions are to do with telling a story. Does the story demand that the heroine should be in jeopardy after twenty minutes? That’s the only true criterion.

Do you have a rigid writing routine?

I do for writing novels. I have the same approach for screenwriting, to a degree, in that I spend a long time figuring everything out before I start. That’s true whether it’s an adaptation or an original. As a rule, I make notes and draw diagrams and do scene lists, so that when I sit down to write the script I have the whole thing planned. From page one, I know exactly how it’s going to end. Then I write the first draft as quickly as possible, which may only take two or three weeks, because compared to a novel a screenplay is so short. There are maybe 10,000 words in a screenplay: a couple of chapters, if that. And then I can look at the 110 pages and reorder them and fiddle around with them. That’s where the similarity ends, in a way, because the script is now at a stage to show people and talk about. It’s unfinished in the sense of, “Who’s going to direct it?” or, “Who’s going to put money into it?” You know that there’s going to be more changes required, so you consciously don’t make it word perfect.

Though you have said that the first draft should be fairly close to the final draft.

I think so. You shouldn’t submit a first draft which wouldn’t make a perfectly good film. There are always changes — often nothing to do with the story but to do with the input you get from the producer and the director and the actors — but if in a parallel universe the film company said, “We’ll make this,” the draft which you present should be the film which you want, not just something “along the right lines.” Then, if you’re going to make changes, they’re usually not substantial. One of my working maxims is, “All intelligent suggestions gratefully received,” but if you present something which is polished then it has to be really quite a bright idea for you to say, “Actually, you’re right.” If somebody says, “I don’t like the ending,” you say, “Why? Come up with a better one.” That sort of script note drives you mad: “I just feel the character of Julie isn’t sufficiently developed.” “Really? In what particular areas? Because I think she’s pretty damn developed.” There’s an endless process of tinkering required as the various investors are given notes by their script readers, and one of the main attractions of being a writer-director is that you can say, “The director is very happy with this script as it stands.” But if you’re working with people you’re sympathetic with, that process is mostly beneficial. We did a lot of work on Armadillo before we submitted it to the BBC, so the notes which came back were pretty valid — or else we had cogent counter-arguments if we thought that some suggestion was a mistake.

When you choose to adapt something or are offered something to adapt, do you respond to the material in an emotional or an intellectual way?

I suspect the two are related. If a story appeals to me, it’s bound to have things in common with the stories I write myself, to a greater or lesser degree. As a novelist you always write the books that you would like to read yourself, so that feeling probably governs your choice of commissioned work too: “I wouldn’t mind seeing this movie.” I don’t think I would write a horror film, for example, because I don’t particularly enjoy that genre, but there are all sorts of other genres I would tackle. You might not think I’d like to write a Western, but I’ve got this very dark Western in mind. Your choice is shaped by your own tastes and inclinations, and if you’re not intrigued or stimulated then sure as hell the work you do is going to be similarly lacklustre.

2001