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?