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 ad
verts, 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 i
t 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?”