Love, Charlie
* Joke!!
Nothing from you Sunday or Wednesday. Hope Rojas has something tomorrow. Didn’t mean you not to write whatever I said. Will send this anyway.
Letter 5
Darling –
This priest outfit must be the most uncomfortable garment ever invented for Jungle travel. Makes you sweat like a pig, comme un porco. How did old Father Firmin keep his dignity, I ask myself. Still I suppose you could say he suffered for his religion in the same way I suffer for my art.
Sunday. My God, guess what? Fat Dick the sound man was peeing in the river last night when one of the Indians came up to him all agitated, making lots of gestures, sign language, sort of swimming with his hands and so on. Dick doesn’t follow him – in fact he thinks the bloke is trying to get off with him which is a bit of a laugh if you’ve seen the Indian women, until the Indian runs off and fetches Miguel who’s one of the guides. Lots more gestures and explanations and Dick zips up his trousers pretty smartish. Guess what? The Indian was telling him about this little fish that lives in the river and – you can guess the rest!!! Not much chance of this particular member of this particular tribe watching British telly the same night Fish Sparks was. And not much chance of Fishy learning enough of the local lingo to set up a sting like this. So we just had to accept he was right all along! Boy did he have the last laugh.
Monday. Here’s a funny thing. While the Indians appear to understand roughly what we’re doing – they’re happy to do retakes and don’t seem at all put out by this great big eye being pointed at them – they don’t seem to understand about the idea of acting. I mean sure they’re acting their ancestors and they’re quite willing (in exchange for some Mickey Mouse presents) to build us a raft and transport us upstream on it and be filmed doing this. But they won’t do anything else. If Vic says could you stand in a different way or use the pole like this and tries to demonstrate they simply won’t. Absolutely refuse. This is how we pole a raft and just because a white man is watching through his funny machine we aren’t going to do it any differently. The other thing is even more incredible. They actually think that when Matt and I are dressed up as Jesuits we actually are Jesuits! They think we’ve gone away and these two blokes in black dresses have turned up! Father Firmin is just as real a person for them as Charlie, though I’m glad to say they like Charlie more. But you can’t persuade them about what’s going on. The crew think this is pretty stupid of them but I wonder if it isn’t fantastically mature. The crew think they’re such a primitive civilization they haven’t even discovered acting yet. I wonder if it’s the opposite and they’re a sort of post-acting civilization, maybe the first one on the earth. Like, they don’t need it any more, so they’ve forgotten about it and don’t understand it any longer. Quite a thought!
Wednesday. Ought to have said more about the job. Not going badly. Script isn’t what I remembered, but then it never is, usually because they’ve changed it. Matt isn’t too bad to work with. I asked Make-Up to give him a few mosquito bites but he refused point-blank. Said he wanted to be the pretty one for a change. Quite funny that – I mean it’s obvious that deep down he thinks he’s jolly good-looking! I suppose I’d better not tell him that thing you said about his face looking as if it was carved out of corned beef.
Thursday. Terrible thing happened. Quite terrible. One of the Indians fell off the raft and was drowned. Just swept away. We stared at the water which was pretty choppy and waited for the Indian to surface but he never did. Naturally we said we’d stop work for the day. Guess what? The Indians wouldn’t hear of it. What good old troupers they are!
Friday. Thinking about yesterday’s incident. We were much more upset about it than the Indians were. I mean, he must have been somebody’s brother or husband or something, but there wasn’t any crying or anything. I half expected that when we pitched camp for the night there’d be some sort of ceremony – I don’t know, burning a bundle of clothes or whatever. Not so. Same old jolly camp-fire life went on as per usual. I wondered if they hadn’t liked the fellow who went overboard, but that’s too obvious. Maybe they don’t distinguish between life and death in some way. Maybe they don’t think he’s ‘gone’ as we do – or at least not gone altogether. Gone to a nicer bit of the river. I tried this out on Matt who said, ‘Hey man I didn’t know you had hippie blood.’ Matt is not exactly the most spiritual and sophisticated fellow you’ve ever met. Believes in making your own way through life, walking tall, shooting straight, balling chicks as he puts it and spitting in the eye of anyone who does you wrong. That at any rate seems to be the sum of his wisdom. He thinks the Indians are rather cute kids who haven’t yet invented the video recorder. I must say it’s pretty funny that a chap like him ends up playing a Jesuit priest having doctrinal disputes in the rain forest. The fact is, he’s one of those perfectly efficient American actors whose careers are decided by their image makers. I told him about taking six months off and doing rep in the provinces just to get back in touch with live acting and live audiences and he reacted as if I told him I’d had a mental breakdown. Say what you like, I think the stage is the place you learn to act. Matt can twitch his face in any direction and crinkle up his eyes knowing that his jailbait fans will be sitting there wetting themselves. But can he act with his body? Call me old-fashioned, but I think a lot of American actors just do a sort of swagger and leave it at that. Tried to explain all this to Vic, who said I was doing fine and Matt was doing fine and he thought we’d gel together on screen. Sometimes I do wish he’d LISTEN to what I say. Here comes the post, or rather the copter. Nothing from you yet.
– love, Charlie
Letter 6
Pippa love –
Look I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it and maybe it’s not fair cos I don’t know what state you’ll be in when you get this, but why don’t we just move to the country and have babies? No I haven’t fallen in the river or anything. You’ve no idea how good it’s been for me out here. I’ve cut out coffee after lunch and almost don’t smoke at all. Well the Indians don’t, do they, I say to myself. The Indians don’t need to support the mighty firm of Philip Morris Inc. of Richmond Va. When things get tough they sometimes chew on a little green leaf, which I reckon is their equivalent of the occasional ciggy one takes when the director is behaving like a prize muffin. So why not cut it down like they do? And that Linda thing. I know you probably don’t want to hear her name ever again and if that’s what you want that’s my promise, but it’s all to do with London isn’t it? Not really to do with us at all. Just bloody London with its grime and filthy streets and the booze. Well that’s not really living, the way we do in cities, is it? Also I think cities make people lie to one another. Do you think that’s possible? These Indians never lie, same as they don’t know how to act. No pretence. Now I don’t think that’s primitive at all, I think it’s bloody mature. And I’m sure it’s because they live in the Jungle not in cities. They spend all their time surrounded by nature and the one thing nature doesn’t do is lie. It just goes ahead and does its thing, as Matt would say. Walks tall and shoots straight. It may not be very nice some of the time but it doesn’t tell lies. Which is why I think the country and babies is the answer. And when I say the country I don’t mean one of those villages just off the motorway full of people just like us buying Australian Chardonnay from the local wine merchant and the only time you hear an ooo-aarr accent is when you’re listening to the Archers in the bath. I mean the real country, somewhere hidden away – Wales maybe or Yorkshire.
Sunday. The baby thing. It’s to do with the Indians in a funny sort of way. You know I said they’re all fantastically healthy and yet there aren’t any old folks even though we thought they travelled around together in a group? Well, I finally got Miguel to talk to them about it and it turns out the reason there aren’t any old folk around is because they don’t live much longer than about 35. So I was wrong when I thought they were fantastically healthy and a good advert for the Jun
gle. The truth is it’s only the fantastically healthy ones who can get by at all. What a turnaround. But the point is, I’m now older than most of this tribe will ever be and that feels like a chill wind. And if we lived in the country then it wouldn’t be me coming home every night whacked out and wanting to be looked after and having a squawking infant instead. If I only took the big parts and none of this TV crap I’d just go away to film, and then when I was around I’d really be around. See? I could make a playpen for him and buy him one of those big wooden Arks with all the animals in and I could get one of those bags you carry babies around in like the Indians have had for centuries. Then I’d go striding off across the moors to get the both of us out of your hair for a bit, what do you say? By the way, I really am sorry I hit Gavin.
Monday. Bit depressed, love. Had this ludicrous tiff with Vic about a line. Six bloody words, but I knew Firmin wouldn’t say them. I mean, I’ve been living this guy for three weeks now and Vic starts telling me how to speak? He said OK rewrite them, so I held things up for an hour and at the end of it he said he wasn’t convinced. We tried it out all the same, because I insisted, and guess what? Bloody Matt wasn’t convinced either. I said he couldn’t tell a line of dialogue from a line of coke and anyway his face was carved out of corned beef, and he threatened to punch me. Stupid bloody film.
Tuesday. Still boiling.
Wednesday. Amazing thing. You know I said about the Indians not understanding about acting. Well in the last 2 days Firmin and Antonio have been getting more and more hostile (which isn’t hard to do given how Charlie and Matt are currently feeling about one another) and you could really sense the Indians getting involved, following it all from their part of the raft as if their lives depended on it – which in a way they did I suppose because we were arguing about whether they had the right to be baptised and have their souls saved or not. They sensed this somehow, I don’t know. Anyway today we had the scene where Matt had to hit me with the paddle sort of semi-accidentally. It was best balsa wood of course, not that the Indians could know, but I duly went down poleaxed and Matt started pretending it was an accident. The Indians were supposed to look on at what was happening as if these two white men in skirts were barmy. That’s what they’d been told to do. But they didn’t. Lots of them came rushing over to me and started stroking my face and wetting my brow and making a sort of wailing noise, and then three of them turned on Matt looking really nasty. Incredible! What’s more they might have done him an injury if he hadn’t pulled off his cassock pretty smartish and turned back into Matt, which calmed them down. Amazing! It was only old Matt, and that nasty priest Antonio had gone away. Then I slowly got to my feet and they all started laughing happily as if I wasn’t dead after all. The good thing was that Vic kept running so we didn’t miss any of it. Now he thinks he can work it in, which I’m pleased about because if this is the way the Indians react to me and Matt then maybe that’s a pointer to how the fans will go.
Thursday. Vic says the lab report on yesterday’s scuffle wasn’t too kosher. Bet bloody Matt’s been getting at him – probably knew the camera had caught him looking shit-scared. I said let’s wait and see how it prints and Vic agreed but I didn’t get good vibes. So much for Truthspiel: when they get it, they don’t use it.
Friday. I don’t think the script’s up to scratch, and the whole thing’s underbudgeted, but one thing I will say for it is that it’s ABOUT something. I mean, it isn’t afraid of the big issues. Most films aren’t about anything, are they, that’s what I find more and more. ‘Two Priests up the Jungle’ (which is what Old Fish Sparks sings from time to time to the tune of Red Sails in the Sunset) – sure, but it’s about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilization. Discipline v. permissiveness. Sticking to the letter of the law v. sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v. doing the wrong thing for the right reason. How great ideas like the Church get bogged down in bureaucracy. How Christianity starts off as the religion of peace but ends up violent like other religions. You could say the same about Communism or anything else, any big idea. I think this film could be really quite subversive in Eastern Europe and not because it’s about priests either. Whether they’d distribute it is another matter. I said to Fish the film has a message for the trade unions as well if they could find it and he said he’d keep looking. Pippa love, think about the baby thing, won’t you?
Your Charlie
P.S. Funny thing happened today. Not serious, but makes me wonder about the Indians.
P.P.S. Can’t think why you haven’t written.
Letter 7
Dearest Pippa –
Bloody jungle. It just doesn’t give up. Bloody clouds of flies and biting things and humming whatsits and for the first couple of weeks you think how extraordinary, well it doesn’t matter getting bitten, everyone else is, except Matt with his NASA US-Govt issue personal mosquito repellent and corned-beef face-protector. But they just go on and on and bloody on. After a while you just want the Jungle to take a day off. Go on, Jungle, it’s Sunday, knock it off, you want to shout as it rattles on 24 hrs per day. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the Jungle it’s the film. You can feel the tension mounting. Matt and me getting edgier with one another off camera as well as on. The film’s all spilling over into the rest of the time. Even the Indians don’t seem so sure that I’m not Firmin all the time and Matt’s Antonio. It’s as if they think I’m really Firmin and then from time to time I just pretend to be this white man called Charlie. Really upside down.
Sunday. That thing about the Indians. To tell you the truth I was a bit miffed when I found out, but now I’m beginning to see it from their point of view. I told you I was learning the language – she’s really very sweet and not a stitch on but as I said no need to worry, angel, riddled with diseases I’m sure, apart from anything else, I mean. It turns out that half the words she’s been teaching me are all wrong. I mean, they’re real words except they’re not the right ones. The first thing I learned more or less was thkarni which means – well she said it meant – this white stork we’ve been seeing a lot of. So when we saw one go flapping by I used to shout thkarni and the Indians would all laugh. Turns out – and I learned this not through Miguel but our second guide who hasn’t said much most of the trip – that thkarni is the Indians’ name – well, one of their many names, to be precise – for you-know-what. The thing up which the little fish in the river swims if you aren’t careful. Same goes for about half the words I’ve been learning from that little minx. I’ve learned about 60 I suppose overall and half of them are duds – naughty words or words for something completely different. I was majorly unpleased as you can imagine at the time but I think what it does show is that the Indians have got a terrific sense of humour. So I was determined to show them I could take a joke and the next time a big stork went over I pretended not to know what it was called and asked my girl. Thkarni she said with a straight face. I looked very puzzled and shook my head a lot and said No it can’t be thkarni because this is thkarni (no I didn’t pull it out or anything – just pointed). And then she knew the game was up and started giggling, and so did I to show there weren’t any hard feelings.
Monday. Getting near the end now. Just the big scene to do. Taking two days off first. I think that’s a silly decision by Vic but I expect he’s got the unions on his back. He says it’s a good idea to recharge the batteries before the big scene. I think if you’re on a roll you better go with the flow. It’s all right, honey, I don’t really talk like that, I do it to irritate Matt, though it usually doesn’t because he’s so thick-skinned and thinks everyone else talks like that anyway, so I guess I do it for my own private amusement. ‘Hey, Matt,’ I say to him, ‘we’re on a roll, let’s go with the flow,’ and he nods like some old prophet in The Ten Commandments. Anyway the plan is today and tomorrow off, then two days rehearsal for the capsizing of the raft, then Friday the big deal. Maybe Vic is right after all, we do need t
o be at our best. It’s not just doing it right it’s covering all the angles. We’ve got to have ropes on us as per contract in case anything happens. Don’t worry darling it’s not really dangerous. We’re doing some covering footage on a stretch of the river where there are some rapids, but the actual capsizing which is meant to happen there doesn’t really. The crew have got a couple of machines which churn everything up to make white water and the chippie ran up some rocks which they anchor to the bottom of the river and look just like the real thing. So no need to worry. I’m quite looking forward to it though naturally we’ve had a few of the old arguments about it. What happens is that both the priests get tipped into the water, one of them hits his head on a rock and the other one rescues him. Point is, who does what? I mean, here are these two, fighting tooth and nail all the way upstream, there’s this huge split of doctrine going on, one of them very authoritarian and hardline (Me) and the other very permissive and soft on the Indians (Matt). I think it would be much more effective if the one who was meant to be the hardhat and who might be expected to let the other one drown in fact saves the other one even though he thinks his ideas about the Indians and his plan to baptise them when they get to the Orinoco are blasphemous. But no, it has to be Matt who saves me. Vic says that’s what’s historically the case, and Matt says that’s what was in the script he read back in Dudesville North Dakota or wherever he hangs his hat and that’s what he’s going to play. ‘Nobody rescues Matt Smeaton,’ he said. He actually said it, can you imagine? ‘Nobody rescues Matt Smeaton.’ I said I’d remember that if ever I found him dangling upside down by one toe from a ski-lift cable. So it’s all going to go ahead as per the script.
Tuesday. Another rest day.
Later
Later
Later
– love Charlie
Letter 8
Jesus Pippa. Jesus. I just couldn’t go on with that last letter. Jolly bits of news from each day’s shooting. Couldn’t go on with it, not after what happened. But I’m fine. Really I’m fine.
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters Page 21