I've mentioned Mark Evanier enough here that many people might think they're now best friends with him. And many people here, I suspect, even stumbled on these grounds thanks to being directed here by the good fellow. So, I figured it only made sense to make my Email Interview with Mark the next one. (For those new to these parts, these Email Interview were done initially for the Writers Guild of America website. I sent basically the same standard questions to members of the Guild, and they did all the heavy lifting.) One note of clarification in this interview. When I identify the speaker as "ME," that's not me. It's Mark Evanier. E-mail Interview with Mark Evanier Edited by Robert J. Elisberg Mark Evanier is a longtime writer of "Garfield & Friends." His many and varied television credits include "Welcome Back, Kotter"; "That's Incredible"; "Bob" and "Pryor's Place." Evanier also admits to having been named in 1996 as one of the 100 coolest people in Los Angeles by Buzz Magazine. [Subsequent to this interview, a new series of "Garfield" returned to the air, and once again Mr. Evanier is the head writer. He is the writer and co-creator with Sergio Aragones of the comic book, Groo the Wanderer. And each year at Comic-Con hosts more panels than might possibly exist. Also, recently his blog here, News from ME, was named by Time Magazine as the 17th best blog in the United States.] >> Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing? ME: Comic books, cartoons, comic strips...then things like the Dr. Doolittle books and Dr. Seuss. I was literally determined to become a writer that early in life. Laurel and Hardy were an enormous influence on my creative impulse, such as it is, as were Mad Magazine, the Marx Brothers, Stan Freberg, Bugs Bunny and loads of comic books. After that, I read all the authors everyone reads in English Lit classes, though I read them before I took those classes. But I decided I wanted to be a writer about halfway through "A Cat In The Hat." >> When you write, how do you generally work? Are you a good procrastinator? ME: Take a long walk, work all the problems out in your head, then race back to the computer (formerly the typewriter) and write it as quickly as you can, then fiddle with it afterwards. I write best at a time when the phone isn't ringing, which usually means late at night. The invention of the laptop computer has made it possible for me, when deadlines press, to go hole up in a Las Vegas hotel room and write. Music or a movie on the TV can act as a good "audio night light" while working on projects where I know where I'm going. For the real intense/uncharted territories, silence is usually required. And I don't procrastinate, so much as I put off writing something until I've mentally solved all the outstanding problems. >> What sort of characters interest you? What sort of stories? ME: If there's an over-all theme to my work, no one has noticed it yet, self-included. I do specialize at times in stories of people who think their way out of a dilemma. Beyond that, the only thing that most of my stories have in common is that each is about something that is tenuously related to something I care about in "real life." >> How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story? Do you have any specific tricks to help, or just tough it out? ME: Often, when you get stuck on page 19, you should go back and tear up page 18; it means you took a wrong turn somewhere. But most often, a roadblock means you've lost your way; that maybe you have deviated from (or unnecessarily complicated) your basic idea. In those cases, you try to take an emotional step back from the work to locate the spine of what you're writing. You may find that you've strayed, in which case you need to get back on the path. Or you may find that you've started writing a different story, in which case you have to decide on one and go with it. >> What is your best experience as a writer? ME: I wrote eight years' worth of the "Garfield & Friends" cartoon show. After the first few episodes, I was left largely alone, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to keep it fresh, and to continually explore new levels of the characters. I also wrote certain comic books where I had not-dissimilar experiences...and I enjoy greatly, a series of columns I've been writing for years in various venues, none of which pays me a dime. Many of the things I do for TV are so collaborative in nature that it's a welcome change to write something that's done when it leaves me. >> Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? If so, what things did you learn? ME: I apprenticed in the comic book business with a gentleman named Jack Kirby, considered by many to be the most imaginative artist-creator that the field has ever seen. Jack was a wonderful, modest man whose unbounded love of people permeated his work. He also had a work ethic that boggled the mind; he was incapable of giving less than 110% on any project, even when he knew his work would be mangled or, as too often happened, purloined. I learned from him to give every project your all, to be prolific, and to invest everything you do with a chunk of your heart. Would that I could always apply everything I learned from this man. >> Why do you write? ME: I write because I discovered early-on that I could; that, however skilled I was at it, I was even less competent at everything else. But really, at the risk of offending others who may be answering this question, I am suspicious of anyone who has too pat a reason for writing. "I feel like it" is a perfectly valid explanation...and maybe the only valid one. Folks should accept that and not force us to make up complex rationales involving primal needs to tell tales, or childhood traumas leading to self-expression. We write because we are writers. (The money is also a valid reason, too...)
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This is an especially gracious and interesting interview I did with Marc Norman, who won two Oscars for Shakespeare in Love. To be clear, the "interesting" part all comes from him, as he shows here why he's such a good storyteller. I find particularly fascinating his discussion of the technique he uses for getting past a roadblock in a scene he's writing. As I've mentioned previously , these come from a series I put together several years back for the Writers Guild of America website. I did the easy part, sending the screenwriters and TV writers largely the same basic questions about the process of writing. They did the heavy lifting. E-mail Interview with Marc Norman Edited by Robert J. Elisberg Marc Norman won two Academy Awards for co-writing and producing Shakespeare in Love, winner of the Oscar® as Best Picture. Among his many other screenplays are Waterworld, Bat-21, Zandy's Bride, Breakout, The Killer Elite and Oklahoma Crude. He also wrote one of the first "ABC Movies of the Week, The Challenge. For the stage, Norman wrote and directed Ormear Locklear, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum. He has also directed for television. Among his novels, Norman wrote Fool's Errand and Oklahoma Crude. [Subsequent to this interview, Marc Norman wrote the wonderful book, What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting. If you're interested in storytelling and how movies got from there to where we are today, you can find here.] >> Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing?
MN: I suppose the movies that come to mind are "Citizen Kane," "Red River," "The Maltese Falcon," "Casablanca," "Rules of the Game," "Paths of Glory," "Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Amadeus." The interesting thing is that I saw all but the last three in l6mm in a storefront theater on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley between 1960-64. That was my film education. The theater was run by the wife of a lawyer who lived in Oakland and wanted something to do on her own, so she opened a revival house. She was Pauline Kael [later film critic for the New Yorker magazine]. In terms of books read, the great American novels of the century when I was in high-school: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Wolfe. In college, the Brits. Chinese poetry. I got a lot from Dickens. Also from Chaucer. I was reading all the time. I pretty much hoovered libraries. In terms of writing, I started out writing poetry at Berkeley. I never considered being a novelist--I didn't think I was up to it although I've published three since). After blowing off he idea of teaching as a career, I drifted into writing. It seemed to me that being a Hollywood screenwriter was an interesting way to fail. Poetry's helped me a lot with screenwriting. Poetry and chamber music--I think those are two good things to have in your head when you're writing a movie. >> When you write, how do you generally work? Are you a good procrastinator? MN: I've pretty much established a method I like for writing over the years. I start with a pen and paper (20 pound buff, Razor Point IIs) and just sort of free-associate, jotting down ideas for scenes, characters, snips of dialogue. I don't direct it for a month or so--I let it wander. Then I start making conclusions, but I don't force them--one thing I came up with early for myself was hold off decisions about anything until the last possible moment. The form that moment takes is a kind of mental water breaking at the end of a kind of mental pregnancy--the thing has to be born, I'm sick of notes, it's time to get on with it. I'd say the proportions of time spent between notes and actual draft writing is about three to one. And I rewrite as I go along. I like my first draft to be my last draft. I probably actually do four or six or eight drafts in the course of my first reaching page 120. I bought a house in 1973 because there was an unfinished room over the garage and I thought I could work there. I was right. I haven't moved since. Music? Not even. My neighborhood's very quiet, but maybe fifteen years ago, I decided to build some furniture and I went out and got some power tools, and to use with them, I bought a pair of industrial strength ear protectors. One day I was writing and somebody was chain-sawing up on the hill behind me, so I went down to the garage and fetched the ear protectors and put them on. Ever since, I use them whenever I write. I have a fetish attachment to them--those ear protectors have gone with me all over the world, even though they don't pack very well. I have never understood how any writer with a family, children, and monthly bills can procrastinate, so I have nothing to offer on this question. >> What sort of characters and stories interest you? MN: I was never sure what kind or characters attracted me, except maybe ones that work in movies, or characters that bankable actors want to play. But looking back, I suppose what they have most in common is that they're all makers. They're making something-- homo faber. I think I've always admired people who make things because I saw it as a concrete acting out of what interests me most in all the world, and that is creativity. I love creativity, in myself, and other people--it's what I like most about us as a species. But it's abstraction, isn't it, something hard to show, absent some thing that's being made. So Lena in Oklahoma Crude makes an oil well, and Hertzog in the script with his name makes a revolution, and Shakespeare makes a play and we wait to see if it works or not. It's a natural dramatic structure, the making of something, and I suppose it's the one I gravitate to most often. I just finished a script about young guys making hotrods. >> How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story? MN: I was always a little annoyed the press on "Shakespeare in Love" described his problem at the beginning of the film as "writer's block," because that wasn't my intention, and in fact, I don't think there is such a thing. It's not that we're "blocked" as writers, that there are moments when nothing at all comes--stuff comes, but what comes sucks, and we don't know how to get anything better, and we refuse to write anything until it does. When I'm at that point of not liking what I'm writing, I may try to analyze it systematically, in terms of remembering my earliest intentions, things like that. But I usually have the best luck just turning it over to the actors. I did some directing once, and I've imported a technique I picked up there into my writing. The technique is simply to admit to the people you're working with you haven't a fucking clue what you're doing and asking if they can help you. In writing, I do the same thing in the rehearsal hall of my mind. I take my characters out of the scene, I put them in an open, well-lit neutral space, and I say, "okay, I give. You guys take over. What do you want to do?" And sometimes they'll bumble around for a while, and they'll do some real external things like fuss with their costume or their walk, the way actors do, but usually they get around to saying, "well, this is what I think I want in this scene." And the "want" of characters seems to me to be the best sort of kick-starter for a fresh take on a scene or a theme or a plot that's gotten stuck. It's a little simple minded, but you can argue that all dramatic writing consists of a number of people who want things, most often badly, and those things conflict with each other. It's rare this isn't a useful technique. In fact, I reel stoked when the characters have taken over and are dictating the structure and the dialog, because that means my subconscious (or whatever) is working for me, and I don't have to muscle the thing so much out of my forebrain, which I don't have much respect for, and seems to me to be the elephant's graveyard of cliches. >> How do did you develop the story for "Shakespeare in Love?" MN: I mentioned I was an English major at Berkeley, but I avoided Shakespeare in favor of other writers back then. Treating Shakespeare as a young man just starting off in his career when I began the screenplay seemed a promising, if simple minded idea--young Sherlock Holmes, young Gandhi, you get the idea. All great men were young once. And I did reread most of his plays, and I suppose I got some of the swing and lilt of the Elizabethan/ Californian style of dialogue I came up with from that. There isn't much to read about Shakespeare himself (there's maybe five unarguable facts), but there's a fair amount to read about his world, the world of Elizabethan theater, and that's where the research hit paydirt. Because what I discovered was our business, the entertainment business, in fact the commercial entertainment writing we do, not on some quaint ye-olde English tea shoppe level, but full-bore, cut-throat, the way we know it with lawyers and goniff producers and blood on the floor, the business we're all still in. And that was the mainspring-- Shakespeare in Development Hell, showing promise, writing crap, and not knowing how to get off the merry-go-round, how to get better. Everything else followed from that. >> What is your most memorable experience as a writer? MN: I once worked for Sam Peckinpah [director of "The Wild Bunch"]. I showed up at his office for our introductory meeting. He had a couch that folded out into a bed in his office--he was lying on it, on crumpled sheets, naked as a jaybird in a particularly cracker-scrawny way, getting a huge vitamin B-l2 shot plunged into his ass by his secretary. He looked up at me and smiled, as if to say, "Welcome to my nightmare." He was about half dead from alcohol at that point, and couldn't keep food down. The working relationship went downhill from there. I once wrote a script for a Swedish director I thought was pretty good. He was going to shoot it in Big Sur with Gene Hackman and Liv Ulmann. He came from a pretty low-key Swedish film industry--you'd call up Sven and you'd call up Liv, and you'd put the Arri in the Volvo and pick them up and drive out into the country and make a scene. The studio promised the director he could work the same way, but they lied, and when he showed up to work the first day, there were thirty trucks, a hundred guys yelling on walkie-talkies, and a DP who wouldn't let him touch the fucking camera. He went into a sort or Nordic catatonia and shot my script exactly the way I wrote it. That's the only time that's happened to me. I see these both as great, life-affecting experiences, by the way. Peckinpah was hell, but I learned a lot from him. You learn the most from your enemies. >> Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? MN: I had lots of help from guys early on who helped me get jobs. Burt Nodella got me out of the mail room at Universal and working with Leonard Stern on "Get Smart." From Leonard, I went to New York and worked for David Susskind. None of them mentored me as a writer--I wasn't that lucky--but I was very lucky to have guys like these who paid me while I figured out what to do with my life simply because it was their nature to be generous. Susskind wanted me to marry his daughter. God knows what would have come from that. >> Why do you write? MN: As to why I write, I used to say it was because I was incapable of anything else, which of course is a description of a compulsion--something that has power over you, something whose reins you don't hold. But lately, I explain it more along the lines or the "making" stuff I mentioned earlier. I think I like to make worlds and populate them. You're sort of God, and you're sort of a miniaturist at the same time. You can make up a world and you can design the door knobs they use. I used to make model airplanes--all of us did when we were kids. Most of my friends threw them together, sloppy, with great globs of glue, and then blew them up with firecrackers. I worked for hours, painstakingly, on mine, getting books of pictures of the airplane or ship or tank in question from the library and adding details, tiny bits of things, rivet heads, all to the purpose of realism, which is another way of saying, the illusion of reality. And I suppose I'm still operating along those lines. I like inventing people and putting them in settings so finely drawn that the viewer, for some short period of time, forgets he or she is yoking at an artifice and thinks it's real. That's my performance. That's my, for lack of a better word, magic. There was a big spike of interest in science-fiction around the turn of this century. In that incarnation, the themes weren't galactic battles and aliens--they were ghosts, spiritualism, seances. Somebody asked Joseph Conrad why he didn't write a book in that genre, since it was so popular with the public. He replied, "Because it would imply that the quotidian was not miraculous." That's always rung a bell with me. I find the lives we lead here, in our flawed world, endlessly fascinating. Last week, I came up with the "Why in the world didn't I think of that before??!" idea of posting some of the "Email Interviews" I originally wrote for the Writers Guild of America website. You can read more about what those were here, but the short version is that it was an easy way for me to get content for the website -- I came up with a set of generic questions about the process of writing that I'd sent to screenwriters and TV writers, and they'd do the heavy lifting. Occasionally, I'd throw in a few new, specific questions, but usually not. Last week, I started at a high standard, difficult to top, with Anthony Minghella, who gave easily the best, most thoughtful, generous of his time, and detailed Email Interview. This week, we go from the sublime to the sublime. This is Larry Gelbart. And to writers, that's pretty much all you have to say. Larry Gelbart was just a gem of a guy. Here's my favorite Larry Gelbart story, which I think encapsulates him well. In the early days of the Internet, the Writers Guild had a BBS, which was like a precursor of today's chat rooms. One day, I was having a private chat with Larry (a sentence that even today as I write it, I am in awe of). To make clear, we'd never met in person, just through Internet exchanges. Offhandedly, I mentioned that I'd seen the revival of his musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, when it played in Chicago with Phil Silvers before going to Broadway. And there was a new song added to it that was so wonderful, "The Echo Song" -- but they didn't make a new cast album from this Broadway production, the song was never included in later revivals, and I'd spent a couple decades trying to track the song down. I asked if he knew whether or not there was a recording of it. He answered that he wasn't sure, but he'd check with Steve the next time they talked. That's nice, I thought, though I didn't know who "Steve" was. Maybe his assistant. Then it hit me -- he meant Stephen Sondheim. Well...yeah, that really was nice. Mind you, I didn't have a clue when they'd next talk, and I didn't suspect he'd even remember the question whenever that was, but still, what a nice thing to say. And then a week later I got a note back from Larry. "I spoke with Steve today. He said that he has a recording of it being done in a little revue, and he'll send me a copy. What's your address?" So, today, I have a copy of this little-known song via Larry Gelbart through Stephen Sondheim. That's the kind of person Larry Gelbart was. Eventually we met, became friendly, and it only got better. Pretty much anyone who met Larry Gelbart likely says the same thing. (Unless you really pissed him off...) And so, here is the piece I did with the good fellow. E-mail Interview with Larry Gelbart Edited by Robert J. Elisberg Larry Gelbart is part of the legendary writing staff for the classic television variety series, "Your Show of Shows," which was followed by its cousin, "Caesar's Hour," a combined group which included Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar, for starters. Gelbart soon became well-known in a different venue for writing with Burt Shevelove the book for the Broadway musical, "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum." The show was successfully revived on Broadway in the mid-1970s, and it recently returned to the New York stage in April, 1996, where 34 years after its original opening it is once again a hit -- for the third time. Gelbart also wrote the book for the Tony Award-winning best musical, "City of Angels," and the play, "Sly Fox." However, it is for his work in television that Gelbart is probably best known, developing the series "M*A*S*H." He also created the acclaimed, though short-lived series, "United States." Additionally, Gelbart wrote the award-winning HBO movie, "Barbarians at Gate." Gelbart received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay of "Oh, God!" He has also written such feature films as "Tootsie" and "Blame It On Rio," among many others. In his spare time...well, Larry Gelbart doesn't tend to have a whole lot of spare time... RJE: Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing?
LG: When I was a very young kid growing up in Chicago, my second greatest pleasure - my greatest joy was coming from seeing a movie - was to reenact the ones I had seen for my friends. I was captivated by the stories, the stars, the handsome people, the funny people. I don't think I wanted to write for movies - I think I wanted to be a movie. I just wanted to live in all those glamorous or even terrible places and fight duels and kiss women and be surrounded by excitement and laughter and music and escape. I haven't changed. I still enact movies for friends (and employers) only they are ones that don't exist yet. Not a lot of books in my house when I was a kid. Didn't care all that much about them in school. Except for history books. But I lived inside my radio, populated as it was by people just as exciting as the ones I would visit at the movies. RJE: When you write, how do you generally work? LG: Incessantly. Slowly, at first, fiddling with outlines, piling up research when necessary. When I finally attack the work, I will be at my desk early - sometimes 4 a.m. and go until dinner. I don't go out to lunch, take as few calls as possible, and try to stay away from playing Solitaire. RJE: Do you have any specific kind of music playing or prefer silence? LG: No music. Silence preferred. Although for the four that I wrote for "M*A*S*H" my office was right next to the Fox Sound Editing Department, and I wrote daily against a background of car chases, screeching brakes, sirens and gun shots. Ah, well, war shows are hell. RJE: Are you a good procrastinator? LG: One of the best. Fifty-two years of experience. RJE: What sort of characters interest you? LG: Any kind, really. Preferably people I've never written before, so I can get to know them - and find parts of me that they might house. RJE: What sort of stories? LG: Any kind that lets me deal my anger, my helplessness, my vulnerabilities. RJE: How do you work through parts of the script where you hit a roadblock in the story? LG: Write another part of the story. Come back to where you were stuck with the benefit of unblocking process that went on without you ever knowing it. RJE: Do you have any specific tricks to help, or just tough it out? LG: Tough it out. Stop working. Pull out some crabgrass. As I said, some part of you keeps right on working. RJE: What is your best or most memorable experience as a writer? LG: Working on my latest screenplay, "Weapons of Mass Distraction." A complex piece, several story tiers, very novelistic. And using no outline whatsoever. The first time I've ever let a story reveal itself to me in the writing. RJE: How did you get involved with M*A*S*H? LG: Gene Reynolds, an old friend, was a staff producer at Fox. When the TV head, William Self, sold CBS on paying for the writing of a TV pilot script based on the feature, it was Gene's idea to hire me for the project. RJE: "Barbarians at the Gate" is an incredibly detailed, complex story that takes place in what is generally considered the dry world of finance. Moreover, it was not only based on a book, but on real people, as well. What were the particular challenges in solving the problems of adapting it? LG: "Barbarians at the Gate" offered many challenges. The first one was just reading it. So many characters, so many tiers to the story. My second job was to read it again. This time, with a pen in hand to eliminate, to weed, to lose people and events, to get to the essentials. Actually, I think I dropped almost all of the first 200 pages of the book, except for material that gave me some specific insights into F. Ross Johnson, the central figure in the story. Then, I cut out a whole layer of characters by removing the banking community, so vital to the sale of RJR Nabisco, but so complicated and so thick with additional characters. I have had some experience with dealing with dense storylines, populated by a great many players. What was very different about BAG was that for the first time ever I was dealing with nonfictional characters - real, and still live, people. There was great concern at Columbia Studios (which commissioned the script) and at HBO (which finally produced it) that I did not expose them to any legal problems in the way anyone was depicted. (I had been able to negotiate my own personal immunity.) By using actual dialogue and situations from the book (which had prompted no litigation from the principals) and by using extensive research prepared for me - a wonderful job done by a woman named Bobette Buster - I managed to keep out of any legal problems by making any new material consistent with the published and public record of the Johnsons, the Kravitzes, et al. It all seems so easy to relate right now. The actual job took almost three years. A publication asked recently for a look at my drafts - from the first to the sixth or seventh or maybe even the seventeenth, I don't remember. When stacked one atop the other they measured a foot and half high. From now on, I'm going to try to keep my scripts under twelve inches. RJE: Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? LG: His name was Bill Manhoff and he was the head writer of "Duffy's Tavern," a radio show, where I apprenticed as a teenager. He had the skill, the patience and the generosity to teach me lessons that have served me a lifetime. When I worked under Bill Manhoff's tutelage on "Duffy's Tavern," I had just turned 17. Other than having the knack of being able to be funny on demand - on being able to provide jokes that fit a specified situation - I was not familiar with the vocabulary of the trade, the articulation to describe what kind of punchlines those situations might require. If that sounds vague, perhaps it still is to me after all these years. I guess what I learned most from Bill was just punching away until what seemed the right line finally dawned on me or anyone else in the room. That deadlines weren't frightening - that writing comedy for a living you couldn't afford to think it terms of writing blocks or not completing the work on schedule. There was no question but that the work would get done. Simply because it had to be. RJE: Why do you write? LG: To find out what I think. To discover what I really feel. Several years ago, when I was part of the group that created the Writers Guild of America website, and served on its first Editorial Board, I created three columns. One of them, perhaps my favorite, was called Email Interviews. The intent was to bring attention to screenwriters and TV writers, most of who labored in deeply undeserved anonymity. Do an interview, include a photo to give that anonymous screen name a face, and include a page of the writer's work, to show that someone actually came up with those words of their favorite movies and TV shows, and an actor didn't just make them up. What I particularly loved about the column and made it a personal favorite was that I got a great deal of praise for it while doing very little. You see, the trick for the column was based on the premise that the Internet is a hungry beast and needs a great deal of content to be fed, but I didn’t remotely have the time to do the work required. And no one else on the committee was volunteering. So, I figured out with a way to generate a lot of content while doing a minimum of work. O wouldst that life were like that… What I did was come up with a bunch of questions about the writing process and email them to the writers who agreed to be interviewed. When an interview went well, people would send me hosannas about how great my interview was – when all I'd one was email pre-written questions, and the interviewee did all the work! Pretty smart, eh? (Me and Tom Sawyer, we're just like this...) Now, in fairness, there was more work involved. For one, it was really hard tracking down the writers and getting them to agree to the interview. The Writers Suspicious Gene would kick in (“Why does someone want to interview me?? What’s the scam here?) And the really, really, really hard part was getting the writer to send in a photo of themselves and a page from one of their scripts. That was a numbing process, often taking months, and for which I think I deserved the praise, though for the wrong reason. Also, for some writers, when I thought there was something particularly noteworthy to ask, I’d add questions, or do a follow-up. So, there actually was work. Just not precisely what most people thought. Anyway, I figured it might be nice to post some of my favorite of the Email Interviews from time to time, using the original introductions, updated where necessary. (No script pages, alas, I don't have access to those.) And foolishly, I’m going to start with what’s probably the best. Don’t expect them all to be at this high level as a standard. This is just as freaking good as it gets. And it’s from a brilliant writer, who was as thoughtful and warm and outgoing as any famous writer I’ve met, though I only met him a couple of times. Everything I subsequently read about him said the same thing. And the time he took answering the Email Interview questions was testament to proving that. And he passed away much, much, much, much too early. It’s Anthony Minghella. He was busy finishing up making a movie at the time, and apologized for taking so so. That he did the Email Interview under such conditions was impressive enough. That he put this much thought into it goes further. And then, he came back with wanting to do a follow-up answer -- he hadn't had time initially to answer my question about The English Patient and wanted to give it proper consideration. It was all worth the wait. E-MAIL INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY MINGHELLA EDITED BY ROBERT J. ELISBERG Anthony Minghella wrote and directed the film, The English Patient, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director, and for which he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. In addition, he wrote and directed Truly, Madly, Deeply and the upcoming The Talented Mr. Ripley. His many plays include Made in Bangkok (which won the London Theatre Critics award for Best New Play), A Little Like Drowning, and Two Planks and a Passion. For television, Minghella wrote the trilogy What If It's Raining, was a regular contributor to the series, Inspector Morse, and wrote all nine episodes of The Storyteller for Jim Henson. His award-winning radio plays include Hang Up" (winner of the Prix Italia) and Cigarettes and Chocolate. Minghella is currently adapting Charles Frazier's bestselling novel, Cold Mountain, which he will also direct. >>> Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing? AM: I became interested in writing by a circuitous route. As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs. Throughout my university course I continued to write music and lyrics, often for plays being produced in the university's Drama department, which was my undergraduate centre. In my final year I threaded a group of songs together into a kind of musical with some dialogue embroidering and contextualising each number. A local playwright, Alan Plater, saw the resulting event and called me and asked me in his capacity of chairman of the theatre company based in the city, whether I'd like to write them a play. Up until that moment I'd never imagined being a dramatist. But I wrote the play and stumbled into a career. Most of my life has worked that way. Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child. My parents, Italian immigrants, owned a small cafe in a seaside town on the Isle of Wight, a little island off the southern coast of England. It was adjacent to the local cinema, and the projectionist rented a couple of rooms in the back of our building. So I was introduced to the movies, a la cinema paradiso, in the thrilling arena of the projection booth as well as through the normal access of Saturday morning pictures and then, later, as a teenager attempting, hopelessly, pointlessly, to explore two desires at once, by dating in the back row. I remember the emergence of wonderful American cinema in the late sixties and early seventies, of taking my father on our one and only family cinema trip to see "The Godfather." I remember watching "The Blue Angel," with Marlene Dietrich, and bursting into tears. I remember discovering Fellini and I Vitelloni. I drove sixty miles on consecutive nights to see a Francesco Rosi movie, "Illustrious Corpses." I wanted to be Robert de Niro. I discovered Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer, Kurosawa and then Kieslowski. And because I spent ten years at University, studying and teaching, I had the luxury of being able to read and read and read. >>> When you write, how do you generally work? Do you have any specific kind of music playing or prefer silence? AM: I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it. I find any excuse not to write, despair of writing, measure my achievements like a schoolboy and give myself undeserved rewards for completing a page, daren't leave my room when I'm working in case I finally have a fully-formed thought, and preside over the process convinced that in a drawer somewhere exists the finished piece of work, and that I'm permitted, to the delight of some cruel spirit, to have fleeting access to the drawers, sometimes for thirty seconds, sometimes for an hour, but then it slams shut and will never advertise its next opening. I know that the minute I leave the room to annoy my family, to catch the end of a football game, to lie down, the drawer springs open and waits until it hears me take the stairs... I always listen to music, my passion and vice is music, I will be denied access to heaven because of the number of CDs I own, and I have gluttony for all types and colours of music. I might listen to Hungarian folk songs, Portishead, Ella Fitzgerald and Van Morrison in the same work session. And I always listen to Bach. My work has been a shameless advertisement for Bach, from my plays, through my first film, "Truly Madly Deeply," through "The English Patient" and most recently, in "The Talented Mr Ripley," which has The St. Matthew Passion in the first scene. >>> What sort of stories and characters interest you? AM: I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love. I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see. >>> How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story? AM: I've been writing for over twenty years, all my adult life, and so I suppose that I've made peace with myself and my hopeless, undisciplined technique. I've stopped unravelling everytime I'm unable to write. I wait. The drawer opens. Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.' I also make notes. I rarely understand them afterwards, but it's better than a blank page. I also love to read poetry. So I might read poetry for an hour when I'm stuck. Just remembering how careful you have to be with words, how much we're obliged to be poets as screenwriters, is energising. Raymond Carver is good for writer's block. Or C.K.Williams. Or Ann Carson. Or Michael Ondaatje. >>> With the original novel of "The English Patient" being such a difficult, sprawling work, what were the particular challenges in adapting it? AM: (This answer is taken in part from my introduction to the published screenplay) Michael Ondaatje's mesmeric novel, "The English Patient," has the deceptive appearance of being completely cinematic. Brilliant images are scattered across its pages in a mosaic of fractured narratives, as if somebody had already seen a film and was in a hurry trying to remember it. In the course of a single page, the reader can be asked to consider events in Cairo, or Tuscany, or England's west country during different periods, with different narrators; to meditate on the natures of winds, the mischief of an elbow, the intricacies of a bomb mechanism, the significance of a cave painting. The wise screen adapter approaches such pages with extreme caution. The fool rushes in. The next morning I telephoned Saul Zaentz in Berkeley, the only producer I could think of crazy enough to countenance such a project, and suggested he read the book. He has made a brilliant career out of folly, and is one of the few movie-makers who loves to read. I have never seen Saul without a book within his reach. He called me back a week later to tell me not only did he love "The English Patient" but that Michael was coming in from Toronto to give a reading from it that weekend at a bookstore near Saul's home. I encouraged him to see this as an omen. When I began work on the screenplay a number of things were quickly evident - I was completely ignorant about Egypt, had never been to a desert, couldn't use a compass, couldn't read a map, remembered nothing from my schoolboy history lessons about the Second World War, and embarrassingly little about Italy, my parents' country. I promptly borrowed a cottage in Durweston, Dorset, and loaded up my car with books. I began adult life as an academic and nothing gives me more pleasure than the opportunity to tell myself that reading is a serious activity. I waded through eccentric books on military history, letters and diaries of soldiers in North Africa and Southern Italy, pamphlets from The Royal Geographic Society written before the war. I found out about the devastation visited on my father's village near Monte Cassino, discovered we had a namesake who was a partisan leader in Tuscany, learned about the incredible international crucible that was Cairo in the 1930s. The one book I didn't take with me was "The English Patient." I had been so mesmerised by the writing, so steeped in its richness, that I decided the only possible course available was to try and write my way back to the concerns of the novel, telling myself its story. I emerged from my purdah with a first draft of over two hundred pages (twice the length of a conventional screenplay) which included, even after my own rough edit and much to the bewilderment of my collaborators, episodes involving goat mutilation, scores of new characters, and a scene about the destruction of a wisteria tree in Dorset which I swore privately would be the most memorable in the film. Needless to say none of these inventions survived to the first day of principal photography. Over successive drafts - each of which were subject to the ruthless, generous, exasperating, egoless, pedantic and rigorous scrutiny of Michael and Saul - some kind of blueprint for a film began to emerge. We met in California, Toronto, London and, best of all, in Saul's home in Tuscany where I am ashamed to admit there were memorable discussions held in the cool, aquamarine pool, our chins bobbing on the surface of the water, punctuated by bouts of what we called water-polo but which was essentially a form of licensed violence to work off our various pent-up hostilities and at which Michael proved to be a master. I loved Michael's book, he became the film's champion on the hard road that followed. At the very least, film adaptations become a pungent advertisement for their source material, like hearing a friend recount their excitement at having read a great new book. For that is what the role of the adapter seems to me to be - the enthusiastic messenger bringing news from somewhere else, remembering the best bits, exaggerating the beauty, relishing the mystery, probing the moral imperative of what he or she has read, its meaning and argument, watching for gasps or tears, orchestrating them and, ideally, prompting the captive audience to make the pilgrimage to the source, while asserting the value of the film in its own right. The adapter must attempt to be the perfect reader. But, as Italo Calvino said of storytelling - the tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it. It seemed to me that the process of adaptating "The English Patient" required me to join the dots and make a figurative work from a pointillist and abstract one. Any number of versions were possible and I'm certain that the stories I chose to elaborate say as much about my own interests and reading as they do about the book. And that is just as true of my film of "The Talented Mr Ripley" and the fortthcoming "Cold Mountain." >>> What is your best experience as a writer? AM: My best experience as a writer was probably working with Michael Ondaatje. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it, and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. But the best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life. >>> Was there any particular writer who acted as a sort of mentor to you? AM: I talked about the British playwright, television and film writer, Alan Plater. He gave me the first prod of encouragement. Samuel Beckett, whom I never met, was a true mentor, because he wrote with such truth and wit and compassion and severity. >>> Why do you write? AM: I want to be glib and say I write because I am. It's almost true. Certainly I never feel more myself than when I'm writing, I never enjoy any day more than a good writing day. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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