William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

1992

As I began to write and publish my novels I always hoped that this would encourage a door to open to the world of cinema. And it did, relatively quickly, thanks to the arrival of Channel 4 and their decision in their first season of “Film on Four” to ask non-film writers to write a film for their new channel. I was duly commissioned and the first film to be made from one of my scripts was Good and Bad at Games in 1982. Since then twelve of my scripts have made it to the screen, one of which— The Trench— I also directed. I suppose I must have written some three dozen scripts in total over the years since Good and Bad at Games. A success ratio of one-in-three is actually not bad going for a screenwriter. The debilitating aspect of the job is that so much of the work you do goes both unseen and unpublished, therefore the key thing, from my point of view, is that films must be made from time to time: otherwise all the effort and frustration that inevitably comes with the job begins to take its toll. Luckily enough — and a lot of luck is involved — I seem to have been able to keep that sporadic momentum going. An added bonus for a moonlighting novelist is that the film world provides a refreshing sense of collegiate mutual endeavour. After the long solitary work required on a novel it is a pleasure to collaborate. Equally, after collaboration, it is a pleasure to return to the closed study.

No such collaboration, however, is involved in the job of TV critic, yet I was very pleased indeed, in 1981, to be offered the job of writing the television column of the New Statesman, taking over from Julian Barnes, who was moving on to be the Observer’s TV critic. Not only was I joining the staff of a magazine I revered but I was also to be paid a sum of £80 per week and provided with a free television and video recorder. I started on 1 May 1981 and lasted until 25 February 1983. It is the only regular column I have ever written and the most sustained work of journalism I have ever attempted. I found the unfamiliar discipline both a challenge and rewarding and discovered that, amongst the consumption of ephemera that two-years’ television-watching inevitably encourages, there were films and programmes that were not only stimulating but proved enduring. But because I wasn’t a professional journalist I grew increasingly conscious of the sheer amount of writing I was doing. This, more than anything, made me call a halt: when I left I calculated I had written some 80,000 words of television criticism — a reasonably sized novel’s-worth.

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!”