by William Boyd
Joking is vital, even in the direst circumstances. Gallows humour keeps you sane. The British soldiers joked all the time. Like surgeons in an operating theatre—or chefs in a kitchen.
Kitchener’s Army was the name given to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who joined up in 1914 eager to “have a bash at the Hun.” And it was Kitchener’s Army, by and large, which went over the top at seven thirty in the morning on 1 July 1916, and had the soul ripped out of it. Sixty thousand killed and wounded in the first day alone. Casualties like that defeat our attempts to describe them, a figure beyond language.
Language—bad language. Soldiers swear, vilely, all the time—swear like troopers, in fact. Anyone who wants to know how soldiers swore in 1916 should read Her Privates We (published in 1930), a magnificant novel by Frederic Manning, a writer who served at the Somme as a private soldier. Manning’s fellow soldiers swear vigorously and colourfully. They craft their own profane music.
Music in film, I believe, should be music written for the film in question. I know there are lots of successful exceptions but a proper film score is so much part of the art form that it seems a missed opportunity just to tag on something from the classics or the greatest hits of the seventies. I wrote out of the blue to Evelyn Glennie asking her to write the music for The Trench. To my amazement she agreed. She and her husband, Greg Malcangi—just the two of them—came up with a film score which fulfilled every ambition I had. It works like a clever drug, subtly, covertly getting to you, like arsenic or nicotine.
Nicotine is what the army marched on, not on their stomachs. World War One saw a massive increase in smoking. Luckily for us, of our thirteen key actors, ten were hardened smokers. But even they found the authentic Woodbines we provided for them a little too much. No filters and high, high tar. On one scene we had many takes, each requiring a fresh fag. One actor begged a five-minute respiratory rest. “Seven Woodbines an hour is about my limit,” he gasped, his face a pale shade of ochre.
Ochre, sepia, chocolate, mud, burnt sienna, charcoal. All the shades of brown and its related colours delineate the world of the trench. Khaki is equally various. No one uniform looks the same. We think of World War One as a monochrome event but it was exceptionally vivid within its limited range. During filming, our world of browns seemed an unusually rich palette. It was only when we had a colonel come into the trench, his breast ablaze with medal ribbons, that we realized how confined our Technicolor spectrum was. The reds and the yellows, the vivid blues and greens, hit our eyes with particular power.
Powerful explosions can make men disappear, atomize them. We had one powerful explosion in which two men are blown to smithereens and only half of one is left. Our prosthetics expert constructed a bit of shattered torso which we strapped on to the back of an actor. When we laid him in the shell crater and the blood and the bits and pieces were added, suddenly only the top half of him was there. We all went a bit quiet.
QUIET! is the most common cry on a filmset. We had horrific problems—not with overflying aeroplanes but with hobnail boots. In the interests of authenticity we had every soldier issued with World War One standard hobnails. Crunch crunch crunch, they went. They drove our sound recordist, Chris Munro, if not over the edge, at least to its very rim.
The rim of a 1916-style tin helmet—and this was the first time in the war that tin helmets were issued—is razor sharp. So many injuries were caused by men bumping into them that an extra, protective, blunter rim was added. This later model is the only kind you can find nowadays. Our costume department had a tiring time painstakingly removing this extra rim with pliers. If they were wearied by their task they showed no sign.
Signs were everywhere in the trenches. After all, the Western Front was a labyrinth some 600 miles long and it was very easy to get lost. Battalions had specialized sign-writers so all the boards and signposts were very neatly painted. It became something of an obsession with me and the props department to get as many signs as possible somewhere in the background. Only that way would they seem, somehow, real trenches.
The trenches at the Somme were solidly constructed, deep, well revetted and duckboarded. The Somme Valley had been a quiet sector until the decision to have a battle there in 1916. People tend to forget that it took place in the middle of the summer. Wildlife abounded. No man’s land was unmown, uncropped pasture. Summer was everywhere except in the earthy confines of the trench, its only evidence in the strip of blue sky above your head. Otherwise, your world was as confined as a World War Two U-boat.
U-boats and trenches seem an unlikely corollary until you consider they share the same cramped, dangerous claustrophobia. I had the idea for The Trench after seeing Wolfgang Petersen’s U-boat movie, Das Boot. The same filthy proximity, the same absence of horizons, the war confined to a few dozen men in a few dozen yards. No escape from the tedium or the smell of fear, from the tea and bully beef or the shit and the vomit.
Vomit, in a movie, is a kind of soup. As chunky or as runny as you want. Annie Buchanan cooked up a beauty. She also does something with egg white when the actors have to spit—ordinary spit doesn’t show up, apparently. Our central character, Billy MacFarlane, vomits when he sees something horrible when he goes for a walk.
Walking across no man’s land into a hurricane of machine-gun bullets seems a stupid thing to do. But the British soldiers who went over the top on 1 July 1916 had little choice. They were trained to advance at a steady walk but they were also burdened with 70-80 pounds of equipment. Think of it as the heaviest, biggest suitcase you would take on holiday. You can’t run, anyway, for more than a few paces with that kind of weight on you. It was like a noose around their necks.
X-certificate is really the only category that applies to warfare. It is the most disgusting, random, horrific experience that we humans visit on each other. Whether one writes about it or makes a film about it one’s prime duty, it seems to me, is to refuse to idealize, excuse or glorify what goes on. When you are young there is a tendency to see the glory and the glamour—which is why, perhaps, armies like their soldiers young.
Young men fight our wars, very young men. At the Battle of the Somme there were boys of sixteen (who had lied about their age) in the army. Think of yourself as a teenager and think what those boys had to live through and endure. It cuts at the soul like an adze.
ZZZZ. Sleep. Catch some zees, as the Americans say. We spent eight weeks making The Trench. There is no getting away from the fact that film-making is exhausting. When we finished I was tired. I went home and slept for three days.
1999
Adaptations
One of the funniest and best loved jokes in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop occurs when the innocent hero, William Boot, who is nature correspondent for the Daily Beast, has his copy tampered with by his sister. William had written his weekly piece about badgers and wherever the word “badger” occurred his sister Priscilla had replaced it with “great crested grebe.” The copy had been filed with the mischief uncorrected and the outcry was predictable. “The mail had been prodigious. Some correspondents were sceptical, others derisive… A major in Wales challenged him categorically to produce a single authenticated case of a great crested grebe attacking young rabbits. It had been exceedingly painful.”
It was an equally painful decision for me, when I came to adapt Scoop for the screen, that I decided to leave the “badger” joke out. It is succinct and very funny on the page but I felt that it simply could not work on the screen. The only way for it to function at all was the laborious one of presenting a close-up of William’s badger article, hold on it long enough for audiences to read enough of it to get the drift, then hold on it still further as Priscilla crossed out “badger” and wrote in “great crested grebe.” Pause to allow people to read the new copy and savour its absurdity. Cut to printed newspaper containing the vandalized article, and so on.
I use the story to illustrate just one of the many problems faced by a screenwriter adapting a much loved classic. The only
way film could serve the novel in this case was to turn it into a visual “book.” This is a joke that works only when it is read. And it would have to be read on the screen too. It seemed to me to be a negation of what film was all about to ask people to read screeds of text from a screen to try and reproduce a joke that would, in any event, fall flat, so ponderous was its execution. When Scoop was broadcast critics predictably bayed for blood—how could anyone be so crass as to leave out the “badger” joke?
The adaptor is really on a hiding to nothing. The novel confers a near total writing freedom, the form is unbelievably generous and capacious. Screenwriting, by consequence, and adapting even more so, offers only a collection of handicaps and constraints. If novel writing is like swimming in the sea, then adapting is like swimming in a bath.
The first and most daunting constraint is one of length. When you write a film the rule-of-thumb calculation is: one page equals one minute. Consequently, very few screenplays exceed 120 pages. By my calculation between 60 to 70 percent of a novel is left out when it makes the transfer to the screen. Your first task as a screenwriter when your chosen text is presented to you is to reread the novel, pencil in hand, crossing out as much as possible.
In the recent adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, David Lodge made the wise decision to refer only obliquely to the American scenes (time has not served them well, they read desperately unfunnily today). He thereby excised a significant chunk of the novel and saved the production huge sums of money. For, as well as length, two other curbs crowd round the tormented adaptor—logistics and budget, though often the two coincide. When I came to adapt Mario Vargas Llosa’s wonderful novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter the very first thing I was told was that this film of the Peruvian novel would not be set in Peru. Similarly, anything in a novel that requires a cast of thousands or period detail or complex special effects takes on the lineaments of a sacrificial lamb. It either goes out or is drastically transformed: the battalion becomes a platoon, the Champs Elysées becomes a side street, a surreal nightmare becomes a sweat-drenched man tossing and turning in bed. Boil down, edit, reduce, discard, cut back, conflate—these are the hectoring instructions that echo in the adaptor’s increasingly frustrated head.
And it is a job that any screenwriter finds very hard to escape from. I would reckon that three quarters of all films made are adaptations of some sort—certainly that proportion conforms to my own career. Cinema loves literature for two main reasons. First, world literature is a vast warehouse of ready-made stories, a great many of which are absolutely free. And, second, in most cases the public has already declared its taste. Any producer suggesting an adaptation of Anna Karenina, for example, is unlikely to be regarded as a vulgarian. Studios and producers are cautious animals, and there’s nothing they like better than climbing aboard a bandwagon or gravy train. A successful or much loved book is perceived as already being on a roll.
So call in a screenwriter and set him or her to work. It is a peculiar craft, demanding particular skills. There is an injunction often presented to learner sculptors confronted with their first block of marble which is to “try to find the statue in the stone.” The adaptor, to extend the analogy, is like a sculptor presented with a finished statue, let’s say Michelangelo’s David, and enjoined to fashion another David from the original. The key to the adaptor’s job, then, is to try and find “the statue in the statue.” You have your mallet and chisel in hand and you have to chip away at the much venerated, not to say iconic, original and make another David. The new statue will certainly be smaller and no doubt cruder, and inevitably, in the chipping away process, it will have lost an arm or other appendages, but if all has gone well the original statue will be called to mind. But it is never going to be a faithful or slavish copy, the very nature of the job rules that out.
Vladimir Nabokov, contemplating Stanley Kubrick’s film of his novel Lolita, diplomatically professed himself well pleased. If ever there was a novel that would radically alter and diminish in its transition to the screen, then Lolita was that novel. But Nabokov, who had tried to adapt the novel himself, and whose script had been turned down, understood the problems inherent in the adaptor’s dogged and difficult task. Film versions of novels, Nabokov said, should not strive to reproduce exactly what was on the printed page, they should aim to be “vivacious variants” of the original. The creating of “vivacious variants” is fundamentally what screen adapting is all about, and with that in mind one should never judge the film by the book, but let the film stand on its own.
1995
Three-Act Structure
At the foot of the greasy pole that is the Hollywood power structure toil the D-boys and the D-girls. The “D” stands for Development and what these minions do is provide “coverage,” in other words write reports on the hundreds of filmscripts that are submitted routinely day in day out to the studios and independent film companies in the hope that someone somewhere will like them.
Almost without exception this script analysis utilizes the concept of three-act structure to construe the merits and demerits of the screenplay in question. “… the conclusion of act one is weak and does not prefigure the emotional highs in act two …”; “… acts one and two work well but there are real problems of pacing in act three …” and so on. There are other buzz- or nonce-words that figure in Hollywood script analysis—“character arcs,” “backstory,” “beats,” “gracenotes,” “pushing the envelope,” etc.—but none—none—has such a pernicious hold as three-act structure.
Now this notion may be a handy device for writing coverage (by and large American filmscripts do not number scenes), but the use of three acts has become widespread in the teaching of screenplay writing and, inevitably, in the writing of screenplays also, and there its use is far less felicitous. No one ever determined that a screenplay should have three acts—why not five? why not two?—and there is no reason on earth why the 120-page screenplay, and therefore the ninety-minute to two-hour film, should have these segments imposed on it. The fact of the matter is that film is a narrative art form, a particularly straightforward narrative art form too, compared to the novel, and the rhythms and cadences of that narrative, its rise and fall, its crises and denouements should be determined, not by some arbitrary matrix, but by the demands of the story (how compelling is it, how entertaining, how suspenseful, etc.) and the characters it is dealing with (how real are they, how sympathetic, how dramatically effective, etc.). Any shape, any structure will do if it works narratively. There is no predetermined mould into which a story should be poured: its justification is provided solely by its success. If there is one area of a film where a strong sense of form may be relevant then that is its ending, but that is because it is the end of that particular story, and not of act three.
1996
The Cannes Film Festival
“It’s Cannes, Baby,” James D’Arcy whispers in my ear as we wait outside the Olympia Cinema on the rue d’Antibes in Cannes on a hot, sultry afternoon. James is an actor in The Trench, a film I have written and directed, and which is about to be screened in Olympia 2. He is here with two other of the film’s actors—Daniel Craig and Paul Nicholls—and we are all, all four of us, a little apprehensive, I think, as we stand here watching the audience of studio executives, international film buyers and assorted journalists from around the world file, stony-faced, into the cinema. One of Paul Nicholls’s lines from the film comes, unbidden, unwelcome, into my head: “They don’t look too happy, do they?” I reflect that this screening is, in effect, the world premiere of The Trench. No audience has ever seen it before. I wonder vaguely, far too late, of course, if this audience is the ideal one to test it on.
I first came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 when I was nineteen. I was studying along the coast at the University of Nice and one evening, with a German girl, hitchhiked the few miles to Cannes and strolled up and down the Croisette for a few hours, rubbernecking, looking for stars. I’m pretty sure I saw John
Lennon and Yoko Ono on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel—but this may be a fantasy that I’m reluctant to let go. I remember little else about the visit but here I am, twenty-eight years later, back again.
In Nice, we quondam Niçois were somewhat disparaging about Cannes. Nice was the real city on the Côte d’Azur, Cannes was a kind of erstatz artefact, a pseudo city, all show and bravura, not worth the bother of visiting. Even Monte Carlo had more heft, more life to it. And certainly, walking up and down the Croisette—as one does, endlessly—all these years later I reflect that film festival time does not show the place in its best light. There are posters for movies everywhere—big expensive posters—stuck on the façades of buildings, specially designed to fit on lamp-posts, even the porte-cochéres and the balustraded ramps of the driveways and terraces of the luxury hotels are artlessly remodelled to promote this film or that. The place is permanently mobbed too, great crowds of people aimlessly wandering, day and night. Nothing reminds you more forcibly that Cannes is, let’s say, 5 percent glamour, 95 percent market. It’s a convention, an American friend of ours reminded us: think of it as a town invaded by sales representatives.
There are many different Cannes, depending on your needs and your function. There is the buyers’ Cannes: men and women scurrying from cinema to cinema burdened with press kits and synopses, sometimes watching only minutes of one film before they furtively leave to watch another few minutes of the next. There is the velvet-roped, red-carpeted razzamatazz of the Official Selection screenings—movie stars, the great and the would-be-great, pausing to wave to the paparazzi before they enter the concrete blockhouse that is the Palais des Festivals. However, one slowly but surely gets the impression, overwhelmingly, that Cannes is an Anglocentric event. Nothing but English spoken, it seems to me, in the cafes and bars and streets—American, English, Australian, European-English accents abound. Where are the French, one asks? All in our hotel, as it turns out.