Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

by Nick Hornby

  At one point in the afternoon, Matthew Beard, the brilliant young actor who plays Jenny’s first boyfriend Graham, got a laugh from the word ‘hello’; there was no such laugh in the script, and you suddenly see the point of a cast – while at the same time, of course, slightly resenting their talent.

  The Shoot

  I wasn’t there much, so don’t ask me. I had just started a book (Juliet, Naked, available now in all good bookshops), and wanted to make it longer; and in any case, being married to the producer of An Education played havoc with child-care arrangements. Some directors like to have the writer on set, but Lone didn’t seem to need me much, not least because she was so gratifyingly determined to be faithful to the script as it was written. And in any case, any questions she might have had could always be asked via Amanda, who could pass them on, quite often late at night or over breakfast. Lone was always perfectly warm and friendly if I did show up, and actors are always interesting people to waste time with. But that’s what filming is, time-wasting (even, most of the time, for a lot of the people directly involved); past experience has taught me that there is really no other way to characterize it. Our budget was tight, so everyone had to move fast, but this still means that several hours a day, literally, were spent moving lights around, or rearranging furniture. In the words of Homer Simpson: ‘I’ve seen plays that are more interesting. Seriously. Plays.’ All a writer can really do is marvel that an activity so solitary, so imprecise and so apparently whimsical, can result, however many years later, in the teeming humanity of a film set.

  The Ending

  I was struck, in Lynn’s original piece, by ‘David’ coming to find her in Oxford; it seemed like an appropriate ending for the film. And yet any event that happens after the main timeline of the script’s narrative was always going to seem more like a coda than a climax – I can see that now, but it didn’t seem so obvious during the writing nor the shooting of An Education. We shot the scene, and included it in all the early edits, but it never really worked: it didn’t give the actors enough to do, apart from restate their positions with as much vehemence and/or self-delusion as they could muster. The actors, meanwhile, had effectively found their own ending. The bravura performances of Carey and Alfred Molina during the emotional climax of the film, in which Jack talks to Jenny through her bedroom door, and reveals that he and Jenny’s mother had learned that the trip to Oxford had been a con trick, were enough, we felt; that, plus Jenny’s smile to herself when she receives the letter from Oxford (a moment that wasn’t scripted – it was something cooked up on the phone during the shoot). It all works, I think. But if you needed any further proof that film is a collaborative medium, here it is. That ending was created by Lone, Carey, Alfred and Barney Pilling, the editor. And me, I suppose, although not in the way I had intended to create it.

  The Music

  I think 1962 was, the last time that British youth looked across the Channel for inspiration, rather than across the Atlantic. The Beatles and the Stones existed, but hadn’t released any records when Jenny met David; and yes, we could have used music by Little Richard or Elvis, but pop had no kind of cachet among the young, clever middle classes, not yet. ‘I want to be French,’ Jenny says – because she loves French music, French films, French food. London was on the verge of swinging, but only a select few could have felt the first sensation of movement; London right at the beginning of the sixties still bore more than a passing resemblance to its wartime self. It is strange to think, for example, that Jenny would have experienced the privations of food rationing for the first half of her life. This was one reason why the UK needed interpreters of American music like Lennon and McCartney, people to transform it so that it made sense: American rock ’n’ roll, with its cars and girls imagery, was a product of American post-war affluence, but Britain had been ruined by the war. An English teenager waited in the rain for a bus. Jenny’s daddy didn’t have a T-Bird – nobody’s daddy did.

  We wanted to give a sense of the uniqueness and the difference of this time aurally; that meant no electric guitars, no blue suede shoes. Jazz, chanteuses and classical music would all help place Jenny precisely in her cultural context. This didn’t, however, make the music any cheaper. Music publishers can ask £50,000 or more for well-known songs, and this sort of sum is out of the question for any independent production. We lost one Juliette Gréco song we wanted to clear because of a demand on this scale of insanity, and got clearance – at a rate we could afford – for another after Lone and I wrote to the singer herself (the difference between the two was in the songwriters, and therefore the publishing).

  Mostly this was music I knew very little about – it’s salutary to be reminded that what one thinks of as personal taste, an aesthetic that has taken years to achieve, is actually little more than the inevitable product of being born in a certain place at a certain time.

  The Film

  So, was it worth it? Yes, as far as I’m concerned, emphatically so. I am as proud of An Education as of anything I’ve ever written – prouder, if anything, if only because it’s so much easier to take pride in other people’s work. Whatever I think of the writing, I love the work of the actors, and Lone’s direction, and Andrew McAlpine’s beautiful design, and John de Borman’s camerawork, and if nothing else, I can take enormous pleasure in helping to create a structure in which this work was possible. ‘You probably can’t wait to start another one,’ somebody said to me after the Sundance Festival, where An Education was received well, and won a couple of awards. It should work like that, of course. But the simple fact of the film’s existence, let alone any quality it might have, is miraculous, a freakish combination of the right material and the right people and an awful lot of tenacity, almost none of which was mine. And how many miracles does one have the right to expect, during the average working life?

  A Sundance Diary (2009)

  Saturday, 17 January

  The story so far: An Education, a film with a script I adapted from a piece of Lynn Barber memoir which originally appeared in Granta, has been invited to the Sundance Film Festival. An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig, stars Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan, a brilliant young actress, and was produced by Finola Dwyer and my wife, Amanda Posey. Now read on …

  Amanda, Finola and I fly from LA to Salt Lake City. Utah is, I think, the twenty-third US state I have visited, and one I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to: for some reason, they tend not to send me there on book tours. Park City, where most of Sundance happens, is up in the mountains some forty-five minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City; there is thick snow everywhere, but the sun shines bright and warm every day of our visit. The snow thus becomes something of a mystery. In London it would have turned to an unappealing grey sludge before vanishing altogether. We dump our bags in the hotel, which also doubles as the Festival’s HQ, and head straight off out to see a movie that we’ve been invited to by its screenwriters. We have two tickets between the three of us, and the screening is completely sold out, but when we get to the cinema my wife explains plaintively that Finola has dropped hers in the snow somewhere. I wince, and then remember that it’s only through desperate lies like this that An Education got made at all. The flustered usherette waves us through, and we all find seats. The film, 500 Days of Summer, is great, fresh and funny and true in a way that romantic comedies rarely are.

  Afterwards, we catch a shuttle bus from the cinema to a party for the movie. The bus is packed, and everyone is talking about film; in the gangway next to us, a young cinematographer is chatting animatedly to a Canadian documentary maker. In five years’ time the two of them will probably be onstage at the Oscar ceremony, remembering this first fortuitous meeting tearfully. We’re English though (Finola is from New Zealand, but similar national stereotypes apply) so we don’t talk to anybody, apart from each other. That’s why we won’t be advancing our Hollywood careers this weekend.

  At the party, we are all told several times that there is a tremendous buzz around our fi
lm. There are two sources for this: one was an enormously helpful and sincerely enthusiastic preview piece by the respected film critic Kenneth Turan in the LA Times, in which he described An Education as ‘probably the jewel of the festival’s dramatic films, and sure to be one of the best films of the year’; the other is that the film is premiering at the small Egyptian cinema, rather than the 1,400-seater where we saw 500 Days of Summer. Nobody can get tickets, and this only increases our desirability. I can now see that booking us in the smaller cinema was a stroke of PR genius. We’re the best film nobody can see.

  We eat at a Thai restaurant around the corner from the party. We bump into my (English) film agent and two of her (English) colleagues; there are English film-makers on the table behind us. There are twelve English films from these islands on at the festival, a record.

  Sunday, 18 January

  I meet my friend Serge, of the rock band Marah, for a coffee. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, and they are expecting a baby now, this minute. I’ve got them both tickets for the screening, but they have no idea whether they’ll be able to use them. Serge tells me that, twenty years ago, Park City was a proper gold-rush ghost town; now it’s a thriving, cute, middle-class ski resort, full of smart gift shops and restaurants, like a snowy Henley-on-Thames. Those who have been before, like the actor Dominic Cooper (who, like Carey, has two films on at the festival – he is in ours and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, an adaptation of the David Foster Wallace book), tell us that this year it’s much quieter, and therefore much nicer – the state of the economy has reduced Sundance attendances by a third, some reckon. But the streets are crowded, and the movies are all selling out, so it feels like any more people than this would be unnecessary. The Puffa jackets and the ski hats flatten everybody out, turn the film stars into normal people; you can be walking behind a perfectly ordinary-looking man striding out on his own, and then watch him stop to have his photo taken by someone walking towards you, someone who has the advantage of seeing his face. (Well, that happened once. It was Robin Williams.)

  Our screening is at 3 p.m. We meet up with Lone Scherfig, the director, and Carey, and people from Endgame, the US financiers, in the green room, and now I’m properly nervous. Of course, just as you have to share the credit if a film turns out OK, you can deflect the blame if it goes wrong: it was miscast, badly edited, the performances were poor, it was under-funded, and so on. And actually, if it goes right, it will be Lone who attracts most of the praise. But this is a family affair: my wife and I will both be depressed if it goes down like a lead zeppelin (and doesn’t that spelling look weird?). And we were the ones who started this whole stupid, misbegotten project in the first place. I was the one who first read Lynn’s original piece, and Amanda and Finola optioned it. We are entirely the authors of our own misfortune.

  We take our seats, but there’s a long delay while people mill around looking for empty places. The tickets at Sundance aren’t numbered, and some people have passes that get them into any screening they fancy, which inevitably means that attendances can exceed capacity. Lone is standing by the side of the stage, waiting to introduce the film, so her seat is empty; three times a stressed-out official tries to fill it. I look for Serge, but can’t find him. I imagine him in a hospital in Salt Lake, urging his wife to remember her breathing. I wish we were having a baby this afternoon.

  I have seen the film twice before, once in its finished version, and both times it has been difficult for me to read how it’s playing. The first two-thirds contain jokes, and on a good day people laugh at them; the last third is more serious, and intended to move an audience. In other words, the last half-hour is an agony of silence. (I often wonder whether I have always written would-be comic novels simply because it helps me ascertain whether people are awake at readings.) Three people leave in the second half of the film. Two of them come back (one of them, I realize, was Carey). I hate the third. I remember a story that a friend with a bad Sundance experience told me: he said that during a screening of one of his films a few years ago, all he could hear was the sound of slapping seats as industry professionals decided that they’d seen enough to make their minds up. We fared better than that – you could definitely hear the soundtrack – but when the credits came up, I still wasn’t at all sure how we’d done.

  Lone, Carey, Dominic and I go onstage for the Q&A – the people who’ve stayed for it seem genuinely taken by the film, which is a relief. Afterwards, I go outside to smoke round the back of the cinema, and Lone, our Danish director, introduces me to a compatriot, a woman who is a juror on the awards panel.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I hope you enjoyed it.’

  I know she’s a juror, but it wouldn’t kill her to lie politely, I think. To tell a screenwriter that you enjoyed his film is not the same thing as telling him that you will shower him with prizes.

  ‘I cannot tell you that,’ she says firmly.

  ‘Oh.’

  I try to think of another pleasantry that will not compromise her obviously formidable integrity.

  ‘Well … Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ she says, but she still seems to expect a chat.

  I shrug helplessly. ‘I’ve got nothing left,’ I tell her. She walks away.

  I check my phone to see if Serge has left a message about Monica going into labour, and it turns out that they came to the screening and couldn’t get anywhere near it. The tickets we had worked hard to get them were useless. There’s another message from Scott, one of the co-writers of 500 Days of Summer. His tickets were no good either. We only invited four friends, and none of them got inside the cinema.

  One of the points – the chief point – of premiering the film at Sundance is to try and sell the film to an American distributor. An Education was made without any distribution already in place, which means that there was no guarantee that anyone would ever see it in a cinema, a fate that befalls a surprisingly large number of movies. To our delight, we had sold it for UK release shortly before the festival, but the US financiers need American distribution. It’s not our problem, but of course we all want it, too: it’s been made for people to watch, on a big screen. Everything I had read in the trade press about Sundance in the run-up to the festival contained dire warnings about the economy’s impact on sales; nobody was expecting much to happen. Our sales agents were confident that they’d get something, but they thought it would take time, that distributors would need to see all the movies before committing themselves to one or two. We were prepared not to hear anything for a week or two. But when we get to the strange and rather cheerless village hall that is our post-film party venue, we hear that an offer has already been made. We are jubilant. It turns out that it is a very bad offer – insulting, even, if you know enough to be insulted, which I don’t. So I remain jubilant, like an idiot.

  At the party I am introduced to David Carr, whose brilliant memoir Night of the Gun was one of my favourite books of last year: he wants to speak to me for his New York Times blog. It doesn’t seem right. His book is so great that I feel I should be interviewing him.

  He starts with an apology.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to leave your film halfway through. I was called out to interview Robert Redford.’ The man who didn’t come back was David Carr, author of Night of the Gun! And he had a good excuse anyway! I can now account for 100 per cent of the leavers: two weak bladders (or in Carey’s case, completely understandable nerves) and a summons from a megastar.

  When we get back to the hotel late that night, Amanda tells me that there is quite a lot going on: the insulting offer has been superseded by several less insulting offers. Distributors liked the film, and some of them want to buy it.

  Monday, 19 January

  Lone, Carey, Dominic and I have a day of publicity. It becomes apparent quite quickly that Carey’s life has changed this weekend; her other film ended up getting mixed reviews, but her performance was praised to the skies, and everybody loves her in ou
rs, too – which is just as well, seeing as she’s in every single scene. Within twenty-four hours she’s being described as the ‘Sundance “It” Girl’ in Variety and ‘the new Audrey Hepburn’ in the New York Post. It’s exciting to watch – like something out of an earlier, more glamorous age. As we walk through the Park City streets from appointment to appointment, several people want their photographs taken with her. She remains remarkably composed throughout the weekend. She’s a very bright girl, and I am certain that she will be able to handle this year with grace and charm.

  Lone and I are interviewed together by a young woman from a news agency. For some reason, the news agency has positioned itself for the duration of the festival on the second floor of a guitar shop, in what looks like a broom cupboard; underneath them, rock bands are playing short, loud sets. It’s as if they have deliberately chosen the worst spot in Utah for recorded interviews. It takes us about half an hour to push through the music fans to the cupboard, and when we get inside it, it’s obvious that the young woman hasn’t emerged to see any films.

  ‘Tell us about your characters,’ is her opening shot.

  ‘Lone’s very calm,’ I tell her. ‘But I can be moody.’

  She looks confused.

  ‘We’re not actors,’ I confess.

  Flustered, she consults her notes.

  ‘It must be hard, working together when you’re married. Was there any tension?’

  ‘We’re not married,’ says Lone. Still. Where would we be without the press?

  In the evening, Carey, Amanda, Finola and I go to see another film, and then attend yet another party. I think I have been to more parties here than in the whole of 2008. By now it’s obvious that things have gone much better for us than we dared hope: the reviews we’ve seen have been unbelievable (one of the first, on the normally snarky ‘LA gossip rag’ Defamer.com, I wouldn’t have dared write myself), the film is almost certainly going to sell for a decent amount, and to cap it all, here I am giving Uma Thurman a light. I don’t have a lighter, so I hand her my cigarette. (I can only just reach – she’s about a metre taller than me.)