Frank Cottrell Boyce - "I’ve always called myself a hack."

Antony Gormley's Another Place sculptures
Crosby Beach, Merseyside

Frank Cottrell Boyce broke into writing for television in the Eighties on Brookside and from there moved to Coronation Street before working in feature films. In all he has had 11 feature films made, including Welcome To Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People. While also still writing for television (God on Trial) and radio, he is now also an award-winning children’s author (Millions, Framed) and it was announced in March that the estate of the late Ian Fleming has commissioned Cottrell Boyce to write sequels to Fleming’s novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Here he shares his experiences of working with Danny Boyle, Michael Winterbottom and Russell T. Davies, and explains why he's a very different writer from Peter Morgan and why he happily regards himself as a hack writer rather than an artist.

When you were a boy and wanted to be a writer, did you think in which medium that would be?

As a kid it wasn’t really what the product would be like, it was what the life would be like. It was imagining myself alternately on the deck of a whaling ship or sitting in one of the bungalows on the lot in Hollywood with someone sitting next to me putting cigarettes in my mouth while I type feverishly through the night.

You wrote plays while studying English Literature at Oxford University, but did you always think you’d be able to make a living as a writer or did you ever consider that it might be a bit of a pipe dream?

I didn’t have a Plan B. I’ve never done any other job, but I stayed on specifically at Oxford to do a doctorate because I wanted to be a writer and knew that I wasn’t in a position yet to make a living out of writing.

What was your doctorate on?

It was so right on! It was on pamphlets by Ranters, Levellers and Diggers, who were very extreme political groups during the English Civil War. While I was still a graduate student I wrote some radio comedy and we had a baby. So then there was a lot of motivation to earn. It wasn’t as if I was going to go to London and sleep on a friend’s floor and see if I could make a bob or two. I had to make a living. I was quite driven about it and I wasn’t that fussy.

How did you get your first TV job on Brookside?

The week the baby was born, while my wife was still in hospital, I saw an ad for a job in the typing pool on Brookside. The world has changed so much, but in the early Eighties people still handed their scripts in and someone had to type them up. It’s mad to think of now. So I taught myself to touch type from a book and at the interview they said: “You’re the only male who has applied. You were at Oxford University. Why have you applied for this?” I told them that I wanted to be a writer and so on. I think it was purely that we’d had a baby that week; that I was young but I looked very young and studenty, and they were just charmed. They wanted to help me. So they gave me a trial script. You shadowed a proper writer, went to story conferences and wrote the same script that they were writing in the block of the month. This was all unpaid. Then I think on the third go I started for real. So I was very happy.

Who were the other writers?

I was way the youngest, but they were young. They tended to be school teachers who were having a go. They weren’t established hacks. It wasn’t fun but it was exciting.

Do you feel your degree has fed some of your work, such as making A Cock & Bull Story, a film based on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? Things you might not have read if you hadn’t studied English?

Actually, I’ve always regretted doing English. I did it because I found it incredibly easy. I was much more drawn towards sciences at school, but I didn’t get on with the science teachers at all. I’ve always felt that I let them own biology when actually it belonged to me and I’ve been cross at myself about that ever since. But now you say it, maybe it was quite positive studying English. Maybe I wouldn’t have written Tristram Shandy otherwise.

The film Millions had a long gestation. The script was first written in 1996/7 and film wasn’t made until 2004.

Literally anyone you can name in the British film industry turned it down. And finally Danny Boyle read it by chance and wanted to do it.

He gets writers to read scripts aloud to him, doesn’t he?
Yes. What a great test! I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it. When you hit a funny bit you know that you’ve hit it. And if it’s not working, he doesn’t have to say anything because you just go “Oh, God!”

Wasn’t Millions going to be a musical at some point?
I’d forgotten that. Danny’s always wanted to do a musical. He probably read the script and thought: “This could be it”. And he probably thinks that about every single script, apart from 127 Hours. I’ve no idea how that was going to work. In fact, now someone in America has bought the stage rights to turn it into a musical.

Millions also changed your career because at Danny Boyle’s suggestion you wrote the novel of the screenplay.

‘Suggestion’ is a very polite way of putting it. It was more of an instruction. But writing the novel was like coming home. It was fantastic.

In fact, the novel has had a bigger impact than the film.

Millions as a film was a big ask because except for Nick Park’s films and Harry Potter, which are studio pictures, we don’t make family films in Great Britain. Any family film has got to compete at the very top of the market.

As soon as I started writing the novel to Millions I realised that the books that meant the most to me are the books that I read between the ages of 8 and 12. These aren’t necessarily the books that I admire the most but the ones that had the most impact on me: authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote A Wizard of Earthsea; Tove Jansson, in a different way, who wrote the Moomin books; and Leon Garfield. Nobody reads him anymore.

The other thing about being a children’s writer is that you become aware that fashions change. These are names that seemed godlike to me but don’t produce a single flicker of recognition in children when I’m talking to them now and I have to lie about what I read.

You’ve written three novels, does that mean you’re less interested in screenwriting?

Not less interested at all, but chasing it a bit less maybe. I’m incapable of making choices, so I just keep doing it all. I wonder if this is something that happens with screenwriters because you’re used to having a lot of irons in the fire and not over investing emotionally in any of them because most of them won’t happen. So you get used to letting your fate make your decision for you. It’s not such a good thing.

When I meet directors I’m always impressed that they can go: “That’s what I want to do and therefore I can’t do that”. Whereas I think if you’re a screenwriter you think: “That’s what I want to do. And I want to do that. And that.”

I still love making movies. I’m working on a screenplay of one of my kids’ books and I’ve got a screenplay now about the Homeless World Cup that looks as though it will go this year. To research it I went to the Homeless World Cup held in Milan a couple of years ago. I was thinking: “I’m in Milan. I’ll go to a few matches, shake a few hands, do a few interviews, but basically I’ll go out”. But we never left the pitchside for a second. It was gripping. It was the most amazing sporting event I’ve ever been to.

You’ve used the phrase “hack writer” about yourself a few times. Would you be happy if someone else referred to you as a hack?
I’ve always called myself a hack and I’m quite happy to be one. You do it for the money but not in a bad way. You’re up for an adventure. I’m not an artist. This might be completely humpty-dumpty of me making my own definition, but to me a hack is someone who’s good at it and will play an interesting game with whoever comes along, rather than someone who’ll say: “I have things to say about the world”. I know writers who know exactly what their thing is and I don’t actually know what my thing is. I wouldn’t say I’ve got a voice. I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing. When I see Peter Morgan I kind of envy the fact that he knows what the Peter Morgan take on things is. If you say to him “Do a film about motor racing” he’ll go “Yeah, that’ll be Niki Lauda versus James Hunt”. Whereas I’d be all over the place.

Is it a bit like Archilocus’ hedgehog and the fox – “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”?

It’s exactly that.

What are the differences in writing novels and screenplays?

You’re probably more supported than people think when you are writing a book because your editor plays a bigger part than people imagine. But in comparison to being rung up every night and having someone ask “How’s the script going?” and having someone you can say to “Scene 3 doesn’t really work, does it?” no, there’s never really anyone that close up to a book. You’re very supported writing screenplays.

You made six feature films with director Michael Winterbottom between 1995 and 2005, but nothing since. Was there a falling out?

No, not really. I haven’t spoken to him for years and I’ve never really figured it out for myself. I completely respect what Michael does. It’s great and fine, but it’s just not what I want to do. It’s a lot of effort to make a movie and they’re not quite the movies I want to make.

You’re the only screenwriter I’ve read about who seems happy not to get the attention and likes that the director is the one who’s noticed.

I think all writers don’t want the attention otherwise they wouldn’t be writers. They might moan about it in retrospect, but if they wanted the attention they wouldn’t do it. There’s a great quote on screenwriting from Ben Hecht who said: “It’s easier to achieve fame riding a tricycle”. I don’t even think it’s that unjust. Directors probably work harder than screenwriters and have a bigger impact. A really good director can make a very average script really fantastic.

And you have no ambition to direct.
No. Directing is standing out in the cold with the two most uncooperative groups of people you can possibly imagine: electricians and actors. One of them saying: “Can’t be done” and the other saying: “Why should I?”

The screenwriter Allan Scott said to me that anyone who’s seen the utter tedium involved in directing doesn’t want to do it. And in the year it takes a director to make one film he could write three screenplays.

Absolutely. Danny Boyle has great creativity and reads a lot, but things are spinning off me all the time whereas for him it all goes into one movie every couple of years! That is the price you pay for directing.

So how structured is your writing day?
It’s completely unstructured! My house is full. My kids are home educated. I have a very, very mixed portfolio of things I’m working on, including working with Danny Boyle on the Olympics. However, I’m good at writing on trains and I do genuinely love writing. So, whenever the opportunity comes I grab it and it’s not hard for me to get down and do it. I try to get up early in the mornings, but if I’m not very quiet about it other people will get up early and it’ll become social.

With screenwriting are you one for plotting a lot ahead or seeing where it takes you?

Screenwriting makes you plot it out because you’ve got to pitch and do treatments, but I’m just cottoning on that if you’re writing novels you can take a risk and trust that something will come of it. If you try to preguess too much you kill the pleasure and the potential to surprise. Every ending should be a surprise ending and it’s not going to be a surprise ending if it doesn’t surprise the writer.

As films are very expensive to make do you feel that you have a responsibility to return the investors’ investment?

Obviously Michael Winterbottom doesn’t feel like that at all. He’s never been bothered about an audience. But Danny Boyle’s very concerned not so much about making a profit but about finding an audience. And that is important. Why would you make a film if you didn’t want it to find an audience? Why wouldn’t you just write a poem? Of course, it doesn’t have to be a multiplex audience.

What defines what you do is who you’re doing it for. I’ve got very clear ideas who I’m writing my children’s books for and it’s not a mainstream children’s audience. It’s an audience that I’ve got to go out and get. I’m in schools every week because if I’m not out there then the kids that I’m writing for won’t find my books.

What advice would you give people who want to become writers?

Don’t even think about it if there’s something else that you can do. The most important tool in your armoury would be the ability to take rejection, because no matter how far advanced your career, you are going to take a lot of rejection.

And secondly just read a lot. Danny reads a lot and I think you can really tell when people make films if they’ve come in and said “This film’s a bit like that film plus that film” as opposed to people who’ve experienced a lot and read a lot, where there is something beyond films. Films are incredibly conventional just because there’s so much money involved, so you need to know what else is outside that little box.

What of your work are you most proud of?

God On Trial because it seems extraordinary to me that it got made knowing how many years it took. I love 24 Hour Party People because everyone loves it and also because people kept saying: “Who would be interested in that outside the northwest of England?” I still get letters about it from all over the world. And I’m very proud of Millions.

Looking at your career…

I’ve had longevity. I feel very lucky really that I’ve got a body of work because there’s no reason for it. Somehow I’m still in the game although I’ve never written a hit. But I’m very good in the room and affable. I will keep going until it’s done. I won’t walk off a project. And the collaborative thing does appeal to me. I’m aware that when I’m talking to Danny, or when I was working in TV with Russell T. Davies, my game is being raised.

Are there screenwriting jobs you wish you’d been offered?

I’d love to do a Finding Nemo or a Toy Story, where it’s very smart, very emotional, it’s got something to say and everybody loves it. Danny and I worked for about 2-3 years on an animated movie for DreamWorks that just hit the buffers, but I would still love to do a big animated movie. I’d love to make something universal and show people something that they’ve never seen before.

Christopher Hampton: On adaptations and why it can take 21 sets of revisions to make a soufflé

Christopher Hampton is best known for Dangerous Liaisons, which won him an Oscar for his adaptation of his play, but across film, television and theatre he has more than 50 credits to his name. 15 of his screenplays have been filmed, including Atonement, for which he was nominated for another Oscar, and he has also directed three features himself, is the author of 10 plays, and the translator of many others, including Yasmina Reza’s Art.

But as is quite usual in the film industry, many of his projects haven’t been filmed, although his success rate of one in three is, in fact, very high. Greatly in demand as an adaptor, his screenplays for unfilmed, but perhaps yet to be filmed, projects include Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, on which he spent a year working with David Lean.

With CHÉRI, Hampton reteamed with Dangerous Liaisons director Stephen Frears and star Michelle Pfeiffer. Based on the novel by Colette, it’s set in pre-First World War Paris and is a lightly told tale of the doomed love affair between a retired courtesan and the 19-year-old son of a friend of hers. Here Hampton discusses the art and craft of adaptations and why it can take 21 sets of script revisions to make a soufflé.

How did the film CHÉRI come about?
I’d always loved Colette’s writing and had been preparing a project about her early life, but the producer of the project, Lester Persky, died and the project never advanced. Later a friend suggested that I adapt one of her novels instead and CHÉRI had always been my favourite. It’s one of the classic stories about how people don’t quite understand what love entails. These characters on the face of it aren’t particularly sympathetic: Léa is a retired wealthy courtesan and Chéri is the rich layabout son of another courtesan, but what’s very poignant is the slow dawning in both of them that they find something they weren’t quite expecting. And in the case of Chéri it’s going to mark the rest of his life.

Stephen Frears is noted as a director who likes to have the writer on set.

Oh, he absolutely insists! The one film that we’ve done together where I wasn’t on set with him was MARY REILLY and he was extremely grumpy about it.

What’s the nature of your collaboration with Frears?

It’s very close. He endlessly refines the script. He’s always saying, “I don’t think this scene is quite working,” which makes you think about what would improve it. So when people ask me “What are you doing on set?” the answer is “21 sets of revisions”.

The film uses voice-over from a narrator. Was that always intended or added later?

When we showed an early cut to an audience our sense was that they were a bit baffled about the world in which these people moved. The demi-monde of Paris before the First World War is largely a forgotten world where people had enormous wealth and no overbearing fears. It occurred to us that the period wasn’t really established. Then once we did the opening voice-over we quite liked the tone of it and started to add it at various junctures throughout the film.

The final moment in the film does a striking thing by giving a major piece of information in voice-over.

That occurred to me very late on and at first I thought: “No, I can’t do that.” Then the following day I woke up and thought, “It’s not a bad idea.” I told Stephen and he said: “Oh, you can’t do that.” Then the next morning he woke up and he too thought that it was quite a good idea.

That’s Stephen Frears himself doing the voice-over, isn’t it?
Yes. It started off in quite a casual way as a rough guide in the cutting room. But he did it rather well, so we took it from there.

With his slightly plummy accent and jaunty tone it reminded me of Carol Reed doing the voice-over at the beginning of THE THIRD MAN.

Yes, we certainly had that in our minds.

Is there a general approach that you have to adaptations?

No, although usually at some stage I write a digest of each chapter and what strikes me. Gradually you start to get an architecture. And you work out which scenes you need to fill out and which you can cut.

And what about CHÉRI in particular?

Colette turns out to be very difficult to adapt. That impressionistic style is deceptively easy on the page. Stephen and I both found that CHÉRI was one of the most difficult projects we’d worked on. To find the tone and stick to it was one of the hardest things to do. It’s nice that a lot of the reviews have said that the film is like a glass of champagne or a soufflé, but it didn’t bloody well feel like a soufflé when we were doing it.

Has any project felt like a soufflé when you were making it?
Yes, DANGEROUS LIAISONS was an absolute laugh a minute! We all had a wonderful time. But with CHÉRI there was a lot of head-scratching, thinking: “What’s the best way of doing this scene.”

Do you aim to write a set number of pages a day?

Yes, though it generally accelerates as you go. I tend to start fairly slowly but by the time I get to the end I can do 10 pages a day if I can see exactly where I’m going. It’s usually the case that I spend longer before I start writing than I actually do writing.

Do you revise as you go?

I tend to look at yesterday’s stuff and rewrite bits. The hard work is always between the first draft and the finished article. It’s very hard to work out what works and doesn’t and why.

And then there’s the matter of incorporating other people’s ideas.

Absolutely, although I’m fairly stubborn. But I really am open to the kind of work that I do with Stephen. With him it’s largely instinctive. He’ll say, “There should be something extra here or maybe there’s too much here.” And then it’s just a case of arguing it out or thinking it through.

You write by hand.

Yes, then somebody else types it into Final Draft for me and I can jiggle about with it on that.

Are there things that frustrate you about your writing?

Scenes with lots of characters are very difficult, but they can be very satisfying. Also, I’ve tended to quote Harold Pinter who when asked to write a few scenes showing the couple happy together in THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN said, “I don’t do happy.” I find happy quite hard to do too.

Is that because a happy scene might be lacking in tension?

I suppose so.

It’s a moving moment when Chéri sees that Léa has returned and for the first time he happily takes his wife to bed. It’s an interesting mix.

Those are precisely the things that people would tend to cut. A lot of people would ask: why is he waiting for her to come back and as soon as she does, he goes back to his wife? The answer is, if you don’t understand the psychological accuracy of it, I can’t help you. It’s a script editor culture we live in where people always want explanations underlined. They’re anxious that someone somewhere won’t understand and will have a question. In my view, if people have a question, that’s a good sign, because it makes you think.

Do you ever still write on spec?
Yes, but not very often. It sometimes takes quite a long time to write a script and it’s rather heartbreaking to spend a year on something and then it doesn’t get made.

You’ve had about one in three of your scripts made, which is a very high rate. But how do you feel about others that haven’t been, such as The Secret History and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country?
I have varying degrees of hope for my other scripts, depending on the project. Sometimes things take a long time. CARRINGTON took 18 years and IMAGINING ARGENTINA took 14 to get made.

Your work on screen and stage is mainly characterised by adaptations or is about real people. Why is that?
I feel I have more of a talent for that than for fiction. Fiction’s really hard. A lot of my projects do have to do with things that really happened, with real life.

You said that film is more like a novel than a play.

Yes, I’m not sure whether it’s true or not but it seemed to be true when I said it. Film and the novel share the close-up, as well as a fluidity and the fact that at the end they’re immovable objects, whereas theatre is different every night.

Despite this, in Britain it is writers who began as playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Ronald Harwood and you who are asked to adapt major books for cinema.

That’s an indication that theatre is the most difficult form of all. I guess that if you can get through an evening in the theatre without boring the audience then you’re likely to be able to do it in the cinema.

You’re now adapting John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for Hollywood.

And when they first asked me I said: “Are you out of your minds?”

Because of the place the James Dean film has in people’s memories?
Yes. And in my memory too, as it’s one of my favourite films. I hadn’t read the novel until now but the James Dean film only deals with the final sixth of the book. In the novel the main characters are the earlier generation to Dean’s character. So, I’ve got to about page 100 in the script and the character played by James Dean has only just arrived. I think the real reason that the earlier film didn’t address more of the novel was that the material, such as running a brothel, was just beyond the pale in the 1950s. Then when director Elia Kazan found James Dean I think he had the idea of putting Dean’s character at the centre of the story. But we’re doing something completely different.

Lastly, do you have any words for aspiring screenwriters?

It’s more difficult now for new writers because the doors are guarded by those people trying to homogenise everything. And therefore writers with a stubborn or original streak, which you must have, are finding it even harder. So, firstly, patience. Secondly, cultivate a thick skin because people are going to say very hard things about you. And thirdly, I’m afraid there’s no substitute for perseverance.

April 2009. First published in movieScope Magazine

Director Nicolas Winding Refn - Film: the grotesque medium

Danish film-maker Nicolas Winding Refn came to our attention when he was just 24 with his first feature PUSHER, in which he put the audience in the unusual position of spending 100 minutes hoping a Copenhagen drug dealer would save his skin.

Refn followed this with BLEEDER and then his first English language production, the psychological horror FEAR X, written in collaboration with cult novelist Hubert Selby Jr. While well received, financial problems with FEAR X led to the director declaring himself bankrupt. He then rejected the idea of making a PUSHER sequel, suggesting instead that he make two PUSHER sequels, each focusing on a different supporting character from the original film. Breaking the familiar pattern of the diminishing creative returns of sequels, PUSHER II and III are considered by many (Refn included) to be better than the original film. In 2011, he was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes for his first Hollywood film DRIVE.

In 2008 Refn directed two features back to back. The second of these was VALHALLA RISING, a sci-fi film set in the Dark Ages, but first came the bold, brutal and theatrical BRONSON, about Charles Bronson, “Britain’s most violent prisoner”. At the time, Bronson had spent 34 years in prison, 30 of them in solitary confinement. Originally convicted for armed robbery, his attacks on prison guards and other prisoners, as well as his taking hostage of an art teacher, led to his sentence repeatedly being increased. However, the Koestler Trust, which honours arts by offenders, has awarded Bronson 11 times for his poetry and art.

The release of BRONSON sparked controversy. The National Chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association called the film “an absolute disgrace”, accusing it of glorifying Bronson, while Conservative MP David Davies criticised Bronson’s crimes being turned into a potentially money-making venture. Others have questioned whether the film should have received any public money through the National Lottery. Critics were divided: The Times’ Wendy Ide enthused that “it eschews the geezer-porn of incorrigible bad lads and glamorised violence [and is] considerably more intelligent and interesting than its subject”, while the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw found it “indulgent…unenlightening… and depressingly geared towards the geezer-porn market.”

Although a writer-director-producer of intense, dark films, Refn still believes that for all the violent films he’s seen (and he’s seen a lot), the most violent is SOPHIE’S CHOICE, and that BRONSON not only shares a lot with his own life but even that of Hans Christian Andersen. We met on the day BRONSON was released in the UK… 

So how do you feel about some of the reactions this week? It’s been a bit–

A bit? It’s been insane. But I look at it this way: if everybody likes what you make, there’s something wrong. If everyone hates it, there’s something wrong. Everything I’ve done has always split people very much down the middle. A lot of people who haven’t seen the film have opinions about it, let alone the strong opinions of the people who have seen it. But controversy is very good publicity.

Do you always read the reviews of your films?

Very rarely. I read the ones that like me. The ones that don’t like me, what am I going to do?

Perhaps with the ones that don’t like your film, you might think, later on, that they had an interesting point to make, even if you disagree.

[He laughs]. Well, not really. It’s always nice when somebody likes your work. If somebody doesn’t, then that’s a shame. But I have a very strong belief that art is a very powerful medium. As powerful as an atom bomb, but instead art inspires us to think. And that’s why producing art is something that is still very much part of our lives. It’s very important to humanity.

At the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring there was a riot.

Yes, they were tearing the place up. The police had to come. That just goes to show that even though we’re controlled, civilised human beings, it doesn’t take a whole lot to freak everybody out. Some things need longer to be absorbed. Jonathan Ross in his review of BRONSON on Film 2009 said something very kind. He was very praising of the craftsmanship, but also said that he didn’t quite know how to feel about the film. My reaction to that is: “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Ross. That’s a very good reaction.”

Unlike your earlier films, BRONSON wasn’t a project that you initiated yourself. How did it come about?

The producer Rupert Preston, who has distributed all my films in the UK and with whom I have a very good working relationship, had the project and suggested I take a look. I’ve never lived in Britain and I’d no idea who this prisoner Charles Bronson was. The script didn’t get me very excited as the overall character approach was pretty generic. It tried to psychoanalyse Bronson, which I thought was very wrong and didn’t do him justice. In fact, it made him less interesting. I didn’t know how to work with it but it did linger in my mind.

Then a big change for me came when I read Charles Bronson’s autobiography. About prison he says: “Maybe I always wanted to be there”, which intrigued me – that it’s not like other prison movies about somebody trying to get out, but about staying in.

Then while I was preparing a big budget, Hollywood film that didn’t happen and was trying to get VALHALLA RISING off the ground, a time slot opened up to work on BRONSON. And by this point I really did want to make BRONSON. I rewrote the script [which is credited to Brock Norman Brock and Refn] right before we were set to shoot. And then as I always shoot chronologically, I was able to reshoot about 30 per cent as we went along, when Tom Hardy, who plays Bronson, and I came up with new ideas. It very much progressed as we were shooting.

There are scenes of Bronson in dramatic white stage make-up addressing a theatre audience. What was your intention there?

That’s an example of something I didn’t come up with until the final weeks of the shoot. I felt I needed to use that stage performance for something more than just an explanatory device. When I first looked at the project, there was more of a traditional voice-over in the vein of GOODFELLAS, in which the central character tries to justify his life to the audience. Instead, I came up with the idea that if BRONSON were a play, it would be a one act monologue and by that I’d show that he was a man of many faces and that there’s no real Charles Bronson. BRONSON is not so much about Charles Bronson or even Michael Peterson, his real name, it’s more about the concept of becoming Charles Bronson.

You’ve said that BRONSON's an allegory of your own life. In what way?

When I was young, I wanted to be very famous. In the film Bronson does ultimately become a famous person, but he then realises it’s not that satisfying. It’s really when he opens himself up to artistic expression that he actually becomes a whole person and Charles Bronson is born. In fact, there are a lot of similarities with Hans Christian Andersen’s life. When Andersen was very young, he just wanted to become famous and he tried every kind of art form until he found what he was good at. Then he became a great artist and also very famous.

What contact did the film-makers have with Charles Bronson?

Tom Hardy had a lot of correspondence with Bronson, but I’ve never met him and have only spoken to him once. He was very nice and wrote some thoughts on prison for me. He came up with a line that I put in the movie: “Prison is madness at its very best”.

You’ve made violent films. Where do you stand on the debate that violent films can lead to violence in real life?

I don’t believe that film makes people violent. However, because film is such a grotesque medium and so wide in its appeal, it can show how violent people react. It shows you how to be violent. As a film-maker you have an obligation about what you do because a lot of people are going to see your work. Not that you have to censor yourself, but with great potential comes great responsibility.

But are there things that you wouldn’t depict in a film?

There’s not something that I don’t want to depict if it’s important for the story. But having children [Refn has a five-year-old daughter and another baby on the way] does make you think a little more about what they’re exposed to. I grew up watching a lot of violent films and horror films. But oddly enough the most violent thing I’ve ever seen is in SOPHIE’S CHOICE, where she has to choose which of her two children will be saved and which won’t be as she’s going off to a concentration camp.

You’ve said in interviews that you’re not glamorising violence and that your films are made with a strict moral code. How do you approaching shooting a violent scene?

Violence to me is very destructive and so every time I have violence in my films, there’s always a destructive consequence. Violence doesn’t work without emotion. It’s like pornography, which doesn’t work without eroticism. In my films, it’s not the punch, it’s the attitude to the punch that’s actually more violent. So it gives people images in their heads that they haven’t actually seen. Nowadays we see very violent, almost gratuitous executions of blood, but it can still be scarier to have somebody look at something with us knowing what they’re capable of. The minute we use tricks in films, we are subconsciously telling the audience that it’s a fictionalised world. But emotions aren’t fictionalised. So, it’s about getting the audience within that state of mind that they never let go of identifying the emotion that they’re seeing.

In FEAR X there’s no physical violence, although it’s still a violent film. It was a very difficult film to get made but I was very happy with it. However, it also shows the harsh world of commercial film-making, that physical violence or the act of violence itself does enhance ticket sales. I guess that’s a factor to live with.

Have you ever been involved in any physical violence yourself?

No, thank God! I wouldn’t know what to do. When I was younger, I had a lot of violence in me but I didn’t have the character to let it out in a physical way. Maybe I had too much of a good upbringing. Like Bronson, I was trying to fight for my stage. I still have a very dark side and I make the things that come natural to me.

Where does that darkness come from?

I don’t know. I have very fond memories of my youth, but for some reason a part of me has grown towards a very sinister urge and I was lucky to find film-making as my catharsis. And that’s why the movie BRONSON is so much about my own life. I took Charlie Bronson’s world and fitted myself into that.

And yet some critics still seem to be reviewing it as a conventional biopic.

They’re reviewing what they’d like to see or are used to seeing. But I’ve never been a big fan of biopics. It’s where documentaries have a stronger hold and I’d love to make documentaries. But if you want to make biopics, then you should take artistic licence. That’s why fiction is interesting.

How do you feel about Charles Bronson’s chances of parole?

I’m not from this country and didn’t make the film for a political agenda, so I have difficulty answering that. But I do think that it would be very interesting one day to sit down and have a cup of tea with him.

Are there any film-makers who particularly influenced you on BRONSON?

I really wanted to make a Kenneth Anger movie. I showed some of the crew his films when we were preparing BRONSON. You could do a great screening of BRONSON alongside Anger’s INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME and SCORPIO RISING. When I was younger and perhaps because I come from a very cultured family, I thought that I’d grow up to make art house films. My father’s a film editor and my mother’s a photographer. My parents divorced when I was eight and my mother and I moved to New York. My stepfather is also a photographer. My uncle had the biggest art house cinema in Copenhagen and my grandfather on my father’s side was a very highly regarded designer in Scandinavian theatre. So growing up, make believe was something that was very attractive to me. But for some reason my film-making drifted more towards a genre-orientated world. But I’m still fascinated by some art house films and Kenneth Anger made a very big impression on me because I saw with his work that film could be so poetic and non narrative. I’d always wanted to do something like Kenneth Anger but couldn’t find a feature film story to put it in. Then I had this idea to take BRONSON in the direction of a prison movie about staying in prison, fighting the system that way, and visualised in a very Kenneth Anger-esque universe.

A few months ago I saw Ken and told him that on BRONSON I stole everything I could from his movies. He can be quite a drama queen and I expected some kind of curse. He looked at me for a very long time and said: “Delighted.”

With film everybody steals and is influenced by other film-makers. Otherwise we’d still be doing cave paintings. Anybody who claims they don’t steal is pretty much lying.

So how did this high culture kid end up watching exploitation films in Times Square cinemas?

Although my mother and stepfather were very politically aware Scandinavian socialists and I had this high culture background, we’d also go to see the Eighties blockbusters. But as soon as I was old enough to get the bus home from school, I’d stop in Times Square and go and see a movie. And in those days Times Square was known for showing horror movies and B movies. I was already interested in the macabre and the extreme in film-making. And perhaps because of my high culture background I was instead attracted to pop culture. Artistically I very much consider myself a product of New York.

You’re learning disabled.

I’m dyslexic. I didn’t learn to read until I was 13. My schooling had always been very traumatic. I basically hated everything about the schools that I went to. I was embarrassed about having to go to schools for pupils who were dyslexic or learning disabled in other ways. I think that’s why film-making and TV became an obsessive medium for me because I certainly didn’t like the world I had to spend nine til four in. And being unable to read until late on, images become very much a way of understanding the world. But you have to turn your weaknesses into your strengths. My dyslexia helped me exercise my memory. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t read well that I would remember complete texts off by heart and recite them as if I was reading them. And I could remember every film I’d seen, every scene and every detail in them.

You’re also colour blind.

When I was about 24, I was buying a pair of shoes with my wife. She kept going back and forth between two pairs and finally I was like: “What the fuck? They’re both black.” And she said: “No, they’re not. Oh, my God, you’re colour blind.” I can’t really see mute colours, so I only want very diverse colours in my work. But I’m very happy with that.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is your favourite film. There’s a link between what that film meant to you and how you depict Bronson.

I was 14 when I saw THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE in New York as part of a double feature with THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Watching it I realised that film was an art form, equal to painting or a piece of music. It was John Cage or Matisse or Dali. In BRONSON I had to rethink the ending so I looked at my own life and thought: “If I was on stage, what would I want? Well, music.” Music enhances feelings and from feelings comes art. So that’s what Charlie does: he paints a picture. He becomes what he’s always wanted to be.

BRONSON has a small budget…

The budget was £600,000 and we shot it in six weeks. But we were very lucky. One big contribution was getting Larry Smith (EYES WIDE SHUT) as cinematographer. I certainly couldn’t afford him at his usual rate, but he did it. The bond company were very down on us so I suggested we shoot the whole movie in one location. And we found this creepy old Hammer Horror kind of estate in Nottingham and filmed 90 per cent of the movie there. They had underground ballrooms and tunnels. It meant that we then presented the prison as a kind of metaphor.

You said you shoot your films in chronological order. Exactly chronological?

Exactly chronological. I know that’s not the standard way of making a film, but I like to be in a situation where I don’t have any options other than to go with what I believe in. It’s like exercising my instinct, rather than the mathematical equation that film-making can become. I can mould the film and change it as it unfolds, like a painting.

And I write with that in mind and use very few locations. For the actors shooting chronologically is terrific because it gives them the theatrical freedom. And for me and the crew it’s great because everybody gets emotionally involved with what they’re doing.

What’s your approach to writing?

I’m not a very good writer in terms of the literary work. I write on index cards and I don’t particularly have a story planned, but I have a scene in mind, like a painter. For example, a guy walks into a restaurant and orders a special on the menu. I’d like to see that. Then I’d like to see somebody touch this and then they’re somewhere else. I just write very crudely “Guy looks at…”. And when I have X amount of cards I put them all on the floor and I begin to ask myself: is there some kind of structure here? Is there a theme? And I begin to add them together. It’s like a puzzle and eventually the puzzle will be done. Then I start writing the dialogue.

Do you feel you’re a particularly Danish film-maker?

No, because I dropped out of the Danish film school. So it can be quite lonely in that way because you don’t have anybody who you came through with. But then I had a wonderful moment in LA in January where I was invited to dinner with some American, British and Australian film-makers. Suddenly I felt very much at home, because everybody came from a different aspect of directing but they all had the same problems: searching for money, trying to keep your vision on the screen and being very ambitious.

Do you regard your films as a collective body of work?

I try not to think about my work very much. I do have a very controlling need but that comes more from my fear of not being able to give it my best. And if that were not the case I’d only want myself to blame. For me it’s very important that you make diverse films. I’ve had my ups and downs financially and critically, but I’ve always been happy with my films and have been able to sustain a release. You always make sure that you have distribution in the major territories.

Making FEAR X you had to declare yourself bankrupt. Aren’t we always advised not to invest our own money in the show?

Fortunately, I still like making films more than making money. With FEAR X I was very ambitious. I was in my late 20s and I wanted to make an international movie and I wanted to make it now. We were able to put the money together, but unfortunately the people around me didn’t have everything in place and when the financing collapsed during postproduction we couldn’t sustain that kind of a loss. So I went bankrupt. It was very weird as I was travelling around promoting FEAR X, a film that was actually almost a $1 million in debt. But it was very good because I’d achieved what I wanted to and I was able to get it distributed.

And bankruptcy did something good to me because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I realised that maybe I was on the wrong film-making path and should be careful of not going in the art house direction, which can be so difficult to finance.

And when I then made PUSHER II and PUSHER III I was a much better film-maker: I’d made three films, so I knew know how to make one movie, which is Bergman’s philosophy and he’s very right. I’d made three very diverse movies (PUSHER, BLEEDER, FEAR X), I’d really pushed the extremes in trying so many different ways of telling a story, and so going back into PUSHER II and III I felt very relaxed.

But at first you hated the concept of a PUSHER sequel.

I didn’t want to go back. I wasn’t that happy with the first PUSHER, even though it brought me great attention and made me be able to make more movies. But when I went back to PUSHER II and III I made them the way I should have made the original. It was a great way to complete the circle for me. I’ve been the happiest bankrupt person because bankruptcy brought me back to making PUSHER II and PUSHER III, which reinjected my career with adrenaline.

And then when I had to drop out of the Hollywood film because VALHALLA RISING had a start date, I was very disappointed. But God had a plan: I got to make these two films, BRONSON and VALHALLA RISING, which I’m very happy with and I didn’t have to answer to anybody.

Have you ever thought you may never make another film?

With each film I think: “This is going to be my last movie.” Because I need to give it everything I’ve got. That’s the only thing they can’t take away from me. They can’t say, I didn’t put my heart into it. But once I’m done with a film I don’t watch it. I have a huge archive where everything’s put in nice, neat folders and stored away in waterproof plastic bags, but I don’t have any of my films around my house. It’s important that when you work, you work, and when you don’t work, you do something that’s not about you. My hobby is collecting toys. Each year when we go to Asia on vacation, I can’t wait to get to Bangkok where there’s a toyshop with all the Asian robots and comic books with figures attached to them.

You started young. What advice did you get?

When I was 24 and had just made PUSHER, I had dinner with Elia Kazan. I asked him what advice he would give a young film-maker. He said: “My advice to you is: do it your way.”

You say you’re slowly exorcising your dark side. What kind of movie would you most like to make?

My greatest wish is to do a romantic comedy like PRETTY WOMAN.

Seriously?

Yes. I wish somebody would bring out the other side of me that loves Walt Disney and can react cheerfully to something that’s good. But unfortunately I haven’t developed that side enough yet.

A shorter version of this interview appeared in the March 2009 issue of movieScope Magazine.

Editor Anne V. Coates - From Lawrence of Arabia to Erin Brockovich

Anne V. Coates has edited more than 45 feature films, she won an Oscar for her editing on Lawrence of Arabia and has been nominated for Oscars on a great range of remarkable films including Becket, The Elephant Man, In the Line of Fire, Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich.

A lover of cinema from her teenage days in Surrey, she became an assistant in the cutting rooms at Pinewood Studios in the late 1940s, stepping up to editor herself in 1952. Now based in Los Angeles, in 2007 she was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship. Here she discusses her collaborations with Steven Soderbergh and David Lean, the pros and cons of editing in a digital age and how she’d really like to cut a cowboy film.

Has digital technology changed editing?

Steven Soderbergh said this to me about editing on digital: it’s still the same as editing on film – it’s all about making it funny, making it exciting and saving the actors’ performances. I told George Clooney that and he thought it was really funny and we’ve been friends ever since.

Digital technology hasn’t basically changed editing because you’re still doing the important part of editing, which is telling stories, doing the timing, making it funny if it’s supposed to be funny, making it dramatic, cutting the action scenes in the most exciting way, and saving the actors’ performances. But admittedly it was quite difficult for me to go over to digital because I wasn’t a 15 year old.

At first cutting digitally I felt very remote. When you’re cutting digitally you’re sitting back watching scenes rather than up close and personal as you were on a Movieola. On film I’d cut a scene together and I wouldn’t look at it as I was going along. Then I’d have my assistants splice it and I’d take it into a screening room with my crew and get their impressions. I’d say, “Don’t look at the cuts individually, just see what the story’s telling you, what are the actors telling you?” I miss that.

When I went over to digital I said to myself that I wouldn’t keep stopping and looking at the cuts, but you find that you do. On the Avid, I’ve got a big screen and I can run the scene immediately. But you don’t get the perspective that you had before.

Has the style of editing changed in the digital age?

A little bit, but that isn’t only because of digital technology but due to music videos and commercials, which have had a huge influence on film. Today teenagers watch so much fast-moving film imagery and they can take in a story so quickly, that cutting in feature films has become much faster. But that’s not due to digital technology, just the evolution of film.

Does the ease of using digital technology lead you to experiment more?

Yes, I do experiment more, although I was always into quite a lot of experimentation anyway. Digital technology certainly makes it a lot easier to experiment. But that said, it’s all trick stuff, not emotional, storytelling stuff.

Do you feel that the generation of film editors who’ve grown up with digital are missing something from not having learnt on a Movieola?

All students should learn on film. There’s something about film that’s personal and everything is getting less and less personal. Films shot on High Definition have a coolness about them that film doesn’t have, which I find worrying. It’s getting so technical that we sometimes seem to lose the heart out of things.

What are your first steps once you start on a film?

To assimilate the story so that I’m very secure in it and its nuances. But I don’t work out things a lot beforehand. Of course, one has ideas how one’s going to edit a scene, but until you see what the actors have done, I don’t think there’s too much point. I’m an actors’ editor; to me performance is so important. Even if I’ve got preconceived ideas about a scene, if an actor’s giving a wonderful performance, I’ll adapt my cut to include that in the general structure of the scene. Some editors plan a lot more ahead, but I’m more of a maverick. I just like to see the way the director’s approaching it and follow the performances.

Sometimes you’ve got a really bad actor and you can help the performance by very clever cutting. It wouldn’t be the way that you’d cut the scene if you were getting all equal performances, but if one of the actors is weak, you can help them enormously.

What’s the status of editors these days?

Editors are getting more respect than they used to and people are better informed today as to what an editor actually does. When I first told people what I did, they thought I cut out the bad pieces of film like a censor. They didn’t think that an editor could bring a whole film together and make it dramatic and funny.

And editors are involved more now and should be involved even earlier in the production. It’s helpful to be in on rehearsals, because you gain by seeing what the director is aiming for. It’s the editor’s task to try to reproduce what the director wants, adding your own touches as you go. A lot of directors are not necessarily good at communicating, so that’s why I like to spend time on the floor as you can watch the director and see how the performances are changing. You can learn a lot doing that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen very often, because it mostly doesn’t occur to anyone to invite the editor to rehearsals or on to the set.

Which of your movies has given you particular satisfaction to cut?

Out of Sight. I knew that Steven Soderbergh could be a really interesting, somewhat way-out director, and I wanted him to stretch me. On Out of Sight we did a couple of really good sequences and some great work we didn’t put in the finished film. People have asked if the scene where we intercut George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez flirting with their later lovemaking scene was inspired by the love scene in Don’t Look Now, which also included flashforwards. But I didn’t even think about Don’t Look Now, we just tried it in the cutting room. I cut the two bits separately and then we mixed them together. I also really liked Erin Brockovich, my other film with Steven Soderbergh. It wasn’t such a huge challenge, but it was a wonderful story and Steven shot it so well. I loved working with him.

I loved The Elephant Man, too. And I was also very proud of the work that I did on Becket. It’s not that well known a film but it’s beautiful, with beautiful dialogue and great performances of Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton acting off each other. Other films I loved working on are Greystoke, In The Line Of Fire and Unfaithful.

Who have you learnt from in editing?

Working with David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia was a wonderful experience early on in my career. He’d been an editor himself before becoming a director, but he didn’t teach me just about editing but about my approach to editing. He taught me to try everything and experiment. I could come up with any ideas and sometimes he’d say that they were idiotic but then he’d work on them or he’d say, “That was a silly idea but out of it I’ve thought of something and maybe it’ll work out”. He taught me to have the courage of my convictions and that has left me in good stead. I’m now known as a pretty honest editor.

Of course, he taught me about editing as well. That if you believe in a shot, hang on to it. I was quite horrified at the length we held on to some of the shots in Lawrence of Arabia but he told me: “Wait till the music’s on. You’ll see. It’ll be perfect.”

I’ve also learnt from contemporaries that I’ve liked, editors such as Dede Allen (Dog Day Afternoon, Wonder Boys) and Michael Kahn, who has cut almost all of Steven Spielberg’s films. And I learnt from older editors like Jack Harris, who worked with David Lean on Great Expectations and throughout the 1940s, and Reggie Mills, who cut for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. They were wonderful editors who could make a film almost sing.

Which genres do you prefer?
I like dramas – human stories which approach problems of today with interesting actors giving interesting performances, such as Erin Brockovich. I also like period dramas too, my favourite film being Wuthering Heights, although period dramas aren’t that popular these days.

Editing special effects films is fantastic work, but I’ve mostly avoided them, because you don’t really feel that it’s your film. You have to work so closely with the effects people and cut to suit the effects, rather than the way you really want to do it. Although I learnt a lot on The Golden Compass and it’s great to stretch yourself, I found the process quite frustrating.

And I’ve always wanted to cut a cowboy film. I’m still hoping that one of these days I will.

Unlike some other editors, such as Thelma Schoonmaker working with Martin Scorsese or Michael Kahn with Steven Spielberg, you’ve not established a long partnership with any one director.

I don’t know why that is. I did do five films with Jack Gold, but with others I’ve not. In some cases it’s timing. I’ve got three children and I took time out to have babies and so lost continuity with a particular director. Sometimes, it’s just luck.

In some ways I wish I’d had an ongoing relationship with a director, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be like Thelma Schoonmaker, who virtually only cuts for Martin Scorsese. I’ve enjoyed working with some of the young directors, with new people who have new ideas.

Also, I like taking time off between pictures to travel and I’ve travelled round the world. Film isn’t the end of everything for me. You have to have a life as well.

January 2009. movieScope Magazine