Antonia Quirke - Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

‘That thing about the First World War you said. About John Reed,’ Jim said to me one night. ‘Do you really think that?’

‘Well, of course. It was all about prophets. People like Lenin, and Trotsky.’

‘Sorry, Lenin ?’

‘Well, obviously. But even people like Wilfred Owen, you know. Marcel Duchamp.’

‘Profits, Sally. John Reed said the First World War was about profits’

Jim wasn't ugly at all, I discovered. Faces are like poems – the longer they take to puzzle out, the better, and Jim's was ungettable. It grew in power and meaning every day I knew him. How did the eyebrows rhyme with the mouth? How did the nose get to the cheek? Men with incoherent faces very often have beautiful hands (as a rule, the reverse applies too – either the hands or the face must be more beautiful, and you rarely get the two together). And Jim had sensationally beautiful hands. The tiny network of cracks in the webbing between his fingers was always grouted with pale skin-dust. They were highly coloured like the flank of a rainbow trout, pink and blue stippled, and had the unconscious elegance of Donald Sutherland's – the Gold Standard of manual beauty (incoherent face – see?). And the hands did beautiful things. What was sarcasm in Jim's mouth was softened to wit in his fingers. Using all five fingers of his left hand simultaneously as bookmarks for different pages of the paper, he would tear articles out in right angles with his other hand. He would seem to describe a simple expressive gesture in the air, and the four locks on his front door would fall open. Oh, beautiful dexterity! James Dean was a show-off with his hands, which were the most muscular parts of him. That's why people couldn't stop taking photographs of him – he was always grabbing attention by fiddling with some prop (bongos, a recorder, a cape, a camera). He was a prestidigitator. A hand magician – that very boyish accomplishment. The early turning point of Rebel Without a Cause is Dean dexterously snatching Buzz's knife in mid-air and there is always the bit in Giant when he's under pressure to sell the land he's inherited on Rock Hudson's ranch.

He's playing with a rope and leaning back in his chair, not focused on the other people in the room. Playing with the rope implies: I was happiest in the company of myself as a child. He keeps on playing with the rope, and gets up and walks to the door, still playing, then he flicks it and it forms a knot in mid-air. And although it seems a kind of corrupt, even irrelevant thing to do, so obviously a scene-stealing gesture, you can't help but think: Jesus, that must be acting. Or magic. (In the next scene Dean's showing off with his hands again as he sits on the platform of an oil tower, complicatedly putting one hand down between his legs to take all his weight, then transferring the weight to the other hand – like a monkey, little feet, massive sternum, or a gymnast on the rings, with the shakiness of a flower in time lapse. It's not fluent or graceful – it looks like he's demonstrating the resistance of the air, that oppressive weight Dean always seemed to be bowed under. And which his hair strove up against. Hair which looks like a cartoon of dreams of a better world rising from a head.)

Even with my new salary of £60 a week, I still felt a bit of an interloper at the screening-rooms. I had never, for instance, been to one of the lunches that were occasionally thrown for visiting directors or stars, until, hurrying out of a screening one day, I overheard someone discussing a lunch that was being held down the road for Oliver Stone to mark the release of Natural Born Killers. Feeling very much that I owed the Journal some news , I went along to try and gatecrash.

The party was being held in a private room upstairs from the restaurant. There was lots of sail-bright white linen and untouched fruit juice in iced jugs. Completely on his own, looking plaintive and even a bit lost, sat Mr Stone, so I went over and sat next to him.

‘What paper are you from?’ he asked, exhaling a plume of blue smoke.

‘The Camden New Journal.’

He nodded. ‘Is that like the Village Voice?’

‘Oh, yes. Very much.’

A tall and extremely beautiful Oriental woman came over and sat next to Stone, with a cigarette which was successfully impersonating her own slenderness.

‘Are you with the film?’ I asked her.

‘No. I'm with Oliver.’

Then Stone began to talk in a very low, slow voice. He didn't really pause at any point so I started to take notes.

‘Who are the real killers anyway? Is it really Mickey and Mallory? Or is it the media?. And who are the media? It's just another a word for us , right? Are we the real killers?’

While Stone talked, I wrote down his thoughts in big swirls and hieroglyphics and loops across pages and pages of notebook. A strange thing had happened. I think I must have been pretending, to both Stone and myself, that I knew shorthand. Which I don't. A couple of times he looked down at my notes and then caught my eye and I returned his puzzled look with a calm one, reassuring him that this was indeed an obscure but ingenious system of European notation.

‘… If you think about it, a camera is just another kind of gun. They're both machines you shoot things with, yeah? What I was trying to create in NBK was a thinking mans action film. It's like the anthropologist meeting the so-called “primitive” tribe. They think that when he takes a photograph, he's actually…’

Before I caught the bus back to Camden, I rang the Journal and told them to pass on the message to Eric that I had an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone. They were absolutely bowled over, and literally held the front page for my return. I would be safe at the paper from now on, I felt. But when I read back over my notes on the bus, it was like trying to decipher the markings on the cave walls at Lascaux. All I had was – well, it wasn't English, anyway, just pages and pages of drawings , which in their own way did seem somehow to capture the essence of Oliver Stone's conversation. You could have exhibited them, maybe, but not published them. They were quite undecodable. If I showed this notebook to Jim or Eric, having promised them an exclusive, I would be finished. Inconsolably, I nibbled the top off one of the mini pizzas I had pilfered from lunch, trying not to think of the disappointment and even contempt with which they would greet this fresh foolishness, and decided to leave the notebook on the bus. But what if they rang the bus company and got the notebook back, with me all the while palely cheering from the sidelines, saying things like: ‘Oh, thank God’? I dumped it in a bin and prepared myself for a performance of which I was incapable. But it turned out that none of this mattered in the slightest because when I got to the office I found that Jim and Eric had finally had the fight about Jim's drinking which I should have realised had been brewing for years, and that Jim had either been sacked or had walked out – no one could tell – and had gone back to Liverpool. Had gone to his flat and cleared out. Had gone. Gone.

Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.

In Camden rain falls heavily On elephants and wolves and him in The greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me , Nor woman neither. No, nor women Neither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now: Make that heartbreaking little bow , Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrella And drink the last of Monty's cellar — One can quite reasonably say That you will never play the Dane , Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rain Was artificial anyway. The city's a machine which tries Us; sorts the Withnails from the I's.