William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

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.