Adventures In Motion Pictures Essay Research Paper

Adventures In Motion Pictures Essay, Research Paper

Adventures in gesture picturesThe author of prose fiction, when he foremost turns his manus to screenwriting, frequently does so with a condescending air. Surely this can & # 8217 ; t be so really hard, he thinks ; all that & # 8217 ; s required is to come up with the bare castanetss of a narrative. So he goes to work expecting a speedy occupation with easy money at the terminal of it, and perchance a spot of glorification. He is shortly disabused of these disdainful premises. It becomes evident that what he has at his disposal is simply an ordered sequence of dramatic images. With these he must make the work he one time did with all the infinite resources of the English linguistic communication at his dorsum. My ain escapade in the screen trade had been in advancement for some old ages before I attempted to turn my novel, Spider, into a book. I had been to Hollywood a figure of times. My version of my first novel had been produced in Britain. I understood merely how hard it was to compose a movie, peculiarly a movie in which the narration is driven as much by psychic events as by external incidents. Narratives with any deepness of psychological complexness tend to throw up a job of imagination & # 8211 ; how to happen the ocular correlate of some complicated interior event, an act of misperception, say, with an associated flash of paranoia, concealed from the universe but integrated into a underdeveloped form of skewed logic. I had attempted in my one produced book to draw this off with a neurotically repressed character called Sir Hugo, who may hold murdered his prospective son-in-law in a tantrum of sexual terror, and so blamed it on the pantryman. The movie was called The Grotesque, with Alan Bates playing the bloody-minded Sir Hugo, and Biting the predatory pantryman, Fledge. It bore in its necessities a strong resemblance to Joseph Losey & # 8217 ; s The Servant, although I wasn & # 8217 ; t consciously cognizant of the influence until subsequently. I had tried to show a complicated thought I had come across in Freud, one that linked paranoia to homosexualism. A adult male is attracted to another adult male but out of shame is unable to acknowledge it to himself. So he reverses the current: alternatively of stating, I love him, he says, I hate him. But this excessively is unacceptable. So he reverses the current once more: he says, non, I hate him, but instead, he hates me! He so finds & # 8220 ; grounds & # 8221 ; of such hatred in the other adult male & # 8217 ; s behavior. In merely such oblique motions of inversion and reversal, says Freud, does the unconscious head operate. A secondary dynamic involves Sir Hugo & # 8217 ; s married woman, played in the film by Theresa Russell. The baffled adult male, unable to state of the object of desire, I love him, says, alternatively, she loves him! And so he compounds his paranoia with morbid green-eyed monster. All this I had tried to work into the screenplay ; the consequences had been let downing. To seek once more with Spider seemed pure folly. The trouble ballad in the fact that Spider, the character, was non, like Sir Hugo, simply neurotic ; he was floridly psychotic & # 8211 ; a schizophrenic adult male gyrating out of control after being prematurely discharged from a top-security mental infirmary. His thought, to set it mildly, is eccentric, and, at least in the novel, Spider & # 8217 ; s thought is all we have & # 8211 ; there is no manner out of Spider & # 8217 ; s mind other than decease. He is unable to redact world, nor can he see that the building of psychotic belief he has constructed to account for his traumatised childhood ( a really rickety construction, upon which he has established his every bit rickety individuality ) is apt at any minute to prostration. So this strange, delicate animal wanders the bare topographic points of the East End of London while his wavering head efforts with turning despair to cleaving to a few last scintillas of coherency. Again, it & # 8217 ; s barely the material of film. Small happens in the present, and what seems to hold happened in the yesteryear is really a gross deformation. Cinematic imagination is loaded with authorization: you see an event occur on the screen, you tend to accept it, to believe the narrative you are being told. How, so, to pass on the thought that what you are seeing on screen did non go on but that its significance lies in the fact that a given character believes it did, in order to hide from himself what really did go on? I came up with assorted solutions, none of them satisfactory, none of them peculiarly elegant, including the extended usage of voice-over, which is non truly good plenty. Voice-over means that the author has failed to work out his job in strictly cinematic footings & # 8211 ; that is, through imagination. My married woman, Maria Aitken, had urged me to accommodate Spider, non sharing my ain agnosticism about its filmic potency. I was between books, and I agreed to give it six hebdomads. It took six months. But so, to my amazement, things happened fast. Maria gave the book to the independent manufacturer Catherine Bailey, confident that Catherine, who wanted to spread out from Television and wireless into movie production, would non compromise the severe character of the piece. Catherine was so bring forthing a Shaw drama for the BBC, with Ralph Fiennes. It is a hazard to give a book to an histrion before you have a manager, but she thought Ralph would do a perfect Spider. So she gave him the book, he read it the same dark and quickly committed to the function. A novelist demand ne’er demo his work to anyone, until he decides to manus his manuscript to the publishing house. But we all have our particular, sure readers who see the book before it goes away ; they even read it while it is work in advancement, and their reactions we take highly earnestly. Screenwriters, by contrast, are inundated with other people & # 8217 ; s sentiments about from the start and have small control over who gives these sentiments. Everybody in the manufacturer & # 8217 ; s office can hold a spell & # 8211 ; an interesting experience for the author in Hollywood, where most of the manufacturer & # 8217 ; s people are about 12 old ages old. They glance at a piece of work so elaborately constructed that its internal mechanism resembles that of a Swiss ticker and happily suggest alterations of seismal effect. What if the cat & # 8217 ; s ex-wife shows up, they say, and she & # 8217 ; s death of malignant neoplastic disease? But the cat has no ex-wife, you gasp, incredulous, and do you even begin to gain what a deceasing malignant neoplastic disease patient would make to this narrative? OK, they say, but what if you make him a pro football participant alternatively of a head-shrinker? Such things do non go on in London movie production offices, at least non the 1s I & # 8217 ; ve been in. Nevertheless, the suggestions come midst and fast, and the more people who see the book, the more suggestions there are. The consequence of this is finally to film over the author & # 8217 ; s ability to measure the quality of the book, as it changes in response to plausible thoughts arising elsewhere. The hunt for a manager for Spider took several old ages, and by the terminal of that clip I no longer had any clear impression whether the book was good or non. Assorted managers had at assorted times been & # 8220 ; attached & # 8221 ; to Spider, or had shown an involvement. Stephen Frears drove across London one eventide, out of the goodness of his bosom, to sit at the kitchen tabular array and discourse it with us in deepness. I spent several yearss in LA, in a suite at the Chateau Marmont, working on it with Pat O & # 8217 ; Connor. I learned that conveying in a good manager is a slippery proposition, peculiarly if the budget is little. Movie managers frequently have big households to back up. Timing is all. And so one twenty-four hours in the summer of 2000 the book was given to David Cronenberg in Toronto. He called Catherine, who invited him to come to London to run into us and Ralph. Everybody got on famously, and by the clip he left five yearss subsequently we had our manager. In fact, he was the really best manager any of us could hold imagined for this instead dark and complicated stuff. Cronenberg & # 8217 ; s handling of what I had seen as the job of Spider & # 8217 ; s interiority is deft, perfect, inspired. The movie is a chef-d’oeuvre & # 8211 ; a clear, slow, agonizing image of a adult male & # 8217 ; s journey into psychic dark. On the ot

her hand, the story of the financing of Spider is a baroquely twisted tale of gothic proportions, involving bad calculations, outrageous betrayal, brutal vindictiveness, scheming manipulation, dogged obsession, high moral courage, breathtaking brinksmanship, plus amazing feats of self-sacrifice, loyalty, recklessness and hard work. It would require at least a slim volume to tell that story, for it involves the arcane minutiae of film financing in volatile combination with much that is base in human nature, and much that is fine. Suffice that a month before the start of principal photography, the financing was withdrawn and Catherine Bailey was faced with the task of finding $9.4m elsewhere. That she did so is little short of miraculous, but even so, like Spider’s sanity, the entire edifice teetered on the verge of collapse throughout the production period. On the artistic side, meanwhile, all went smoothly – the very reverse of the usual Hollywood situation, as Cronenberg wryly remarked, where the money’s not a problem but the work is hell. His set was a calm, efficient workplace. The atmosphere was serious but jokey. One of the jokes was him saying, “Oh Christ, here comes the fucking writer again.” In fact, he is far too assured and focused an artist ever to be disturbed, as some directors are, by the presence of the writer on the set. Many of his key people had been with him for years, including his cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, and his sister Denise, the costume designer. Ralph Fiennes liked and trusted him, and so did Miranda Richardson, who co-stars with Ralph and plays not one but three women, including Spider’s mother – a performance of such consummate skill that some viewers will be unaware of her multiple roles. As regards the script, the changes David wanted took me a morning to complete. The voice-overs had to go, and strangely, nothing was lost. All that suffering, the hell seething in Spider’s sick soul: it was there in Ralph’s eyes. In the summer of 2001 the exteriors were shot over a three-week period in Hackney and Kennington, and then the company decamped to Toronto to shoot the interior scenes on a soundstage. The London crew had not yet been paid, but had continued showing up for work anyway. Catherine stayed behind in London for a week to reassure them that their money was on its way. Then came Cannes. Cronenberg had spent the winter doing post-production work in Toronto. The film was cut together and edited. A score was composed by Howard Shore, who won an Oscar for Lord of the Rings and had been a Cronenberg pal since their teenage days. The score was performed by the Kronos Quartet, although when I tiptoed into a mixing studio on the west side of Manhattan to watch Shore and Cronenberg at work, David whispered to me that he thought we might have no music at all. As there was little enough dialogue in the film, and the voice-overs had been entirely excised, having no musical score was a fine, bold, formal gesture – very exciting. In the end, Howard’s lovely, haunting music was used, but sparingly, and there are scenes in the film of great import or suspense which go forward in utter silence. The film was submitted to Cannes and accepted into competition, one of the 22 official entries out of the thousands that had applied. The Cannes film festival is an extraordinary event, manic, grotesque, at times sublime. You walk along La Croisette, past the great hotels and the massive billboards advertising the American blockbusters, and the characters come at you in waves, all with their name tags and cellphones, wheeling and dealing, the spivs and the conmen, and the exquisitely beautiful boys and girls. You see major players – here is Juliette Binoche, all in black, leaning over me to murmur something into Stephen Frears’ ear, and here is Sting, showing up at our pre-screening party to wish us well. And here is Homer Kaye Dyal III, a large, loud, hearty man from Georgia whose production company has just set up in Fort Lauderdale. They did Larry Clark’s last film. Homer and I became firm friends over a bottle of champagne. But when it comes time for the big screening, you realise that the essence of Cannes is not the business aspect – the networking, the distribution deals, the signing of the talent, the financing. It is not even celebrity. The essence of Cannes is a reverence for the art of cinema so profound that the chosen films are accorded a degree of pomp and circumstance one would expect for a visiting head of state. It all begins at the pre-screening party, when at a certain point everyone except the red-carpet elite is kicked out and has to struggle down La Croisette to the Palais des Festivals et des Congres on foot. The elite, comprising the key production and creative people, plus spouses, is then assigned places in the fleet of silver Mercedes waiting on the street outside the party. Behind steel barriers stand shouting, cheering legions of paparazzi and fans. A scrupulous sense of hierarchy and protocol attaches to all these arrangements, and, of course, we are all splendid in black tie and evening gowns. We climb into the cars, which are then sent off at precise intervals, forming a convoy (with outriders) which purrs down La Croisette to arrive at the Palais just as the last of the audience have taken their seats. Then comes the red-carpet experience, and one tastes for a few seconds the beefy tang of public celebrity. It is not heady, or exhilarating, it is terrifying. Four abreast, we advance along a broad swath of carpet: composer, star, director, writer. The photographers scream the names of star and director, desperate for the eye-contact shot. One lonely voice cried, “Patrick!” He won’t work again, I thought. I could hear the astonished photo editor: “The writer? You got the writer?” It all seems to last for ever. We wheel to left, to right, we are blinded by flashlights. We clutch one another as though drowning. We understand Norma Desmond’s descent of the staircase at the end of Sunset Boulevard. She thinks they’ve come to pay homage; in fact, they’ve come to take her away. What if the crowd turns ugly? And then up the steps and into the lobby, almost deserted except for the powerful young men with headsets, the enforcers of this extraordinary ritual, plus a few privileged photographers, including, bizarrely, my brother Simon, a software writer from Kew who has no business here except to root for me but who has somehow blarneyed his way into the exclusive zone. Then on, into the auditorium, where 2,000 people all in evening dress rise as one and applaud us as we make our way to the row of honour. It is not us they celebrate, it is Cinema. We are merely an instance of Cinema, we are not Cinema itself. Our moment will pass, others will take our place, Cinema is for ever. We watch the film. The silent concentration of the audience is intense. The film is a masterpiece. The lights go up. The audience rises once more – the Cannes audience famously critical, an audience that will boo, or walk out, if the movie is bad – and for many minutes they applaud us. I am pushed toward Cronenberg. We fall into one another’s arms. It is the most extraordinary hug I have ever experienced. Many faces are streaked with tears. Our departure from the Palais mirrors our arrival, but with this difference: the film has been shown, and the reaction to it has been positive in the extreme. The motorcade pulls away from the kerb, and the lights of the Palais fade in the rear-view mirror. The crowds on La Croisette gaze curiously into the cars, wondering who we are. Later that night, an Australian producer in dinner jacket and cummerbund tells me he was refused admittance to the screening because his shoelaces were the wrong colour. ? Patrick McGrath. Spider will be shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 22 and 24, and will be released in Britain in January 2003