William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

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.