My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Michael Hirst and I started meeting regularly. He’d already done a draft of the script that he wouldn’t show me; we began again from scratch. I wanted to be true to the novel’s shape. I was convinced that we should tell the story as much as possible the way McCullers had, creating her forgotten world and her strange people without reference to psychologising or explanation, as sparely as she had done. It is a ballad after all, a simple narrative of a town in which three powerful outcasts, a giantess, a dwarf and a criminal, work out their appalling destinies before the horrified gaze of the townspeople. Edward Albee, adapting the novel for the stage, had endowed these townspeople with the gift of tongues, enabling them to comment and moralise on events; in addition, as if that were not enough, he had created a narrator, to comment and moralise on the comment and moralisation. Mrs McCullers had not liked the play: ‘There are barely fifteen lines of dialogue in my novel,’ she said. ‘In Mr Albee’s play they never stop talking.’ To be sure, in her persona as the writer, she says some enormously eloquent things, including some of the most famous and devastating words about love ever uttered; but it is impossible that the townspeople could know or say any of them. Michael and I struggled over many meals to find the true epic quality to the story. Halfway through our work, I discovered a letter of hers in which she described her novel as ‘my strange fairy story’, and that crystallised our thoughts. The script began to take shape.

  Meanwhile there was dinner with Vanessa. I got to the Red Fort after a performance of Single Spies, and things were in full swing, with fifty Russian Jewish actors washing down their onion bhajees and tandoori quails with large gulps of Stolichnaya, as the Indian waiters looked on with anxious amazement. Ismail was in his element, and so, evidently, was Vanessa, making impromptu speeches which were immediately translated to great acclaim, the Stolichnaya flowing ever more merrily down the hatch. Ismail was introduced and so was I; we were cheered and toasted. Somehow, in the midst of all this, Ismail managed to pop the question. ‘Vanessa!’ he roared. ‘Will you be our Miss Amelia?’ he said. She turned her face, radiant and flushed with delight, to us. ‘Why not?’ she said, and threw back her head and laughed with roguish joy.

  At this point, I felt a cold hand of fear on my heart because I knew it was all going to happen, and I would have to become a film director. Of course, nothing was signed. There was no money, apart from anything else. But the combination of Ismail’s determination and Vanessa’s joyful commitment, were curiously reassuring. In fact, whatever reservations one might ever have entertained about Ismail when it came, for instance, to negotiating one’s fees (‘We are not Hollywood! We make films for love!’), he has never, in my experience, said that something would happen which didn’t. Michael and I continued to wrestle with the form and tone of the script; one day we had a breakthrough. Perhaps the Reverend Willin, a minor character in the novel, could attain an eloquence denied to his congregation. Perhaps, like a Graham Greene priest, he was a broken man whose head was wiser than his heart and he might be able to articulate McCullers’s great truths about love. That, our only departure from the novel, gave us a great release, and we delivered a first draft which, with the addition of a few subtle hommages to The Night of the Hunter, seemed us to be a script that Mrs McCullers, had she been the screenwriter, and chosen to tell her story as a film, might have written. That was the criterion.

  My next collaborator was Bruno Santini, with whom I had done many stage productions, but who had never designed a film before. We gathered our materials, starting with the astonishing photographs of Walker Evans, recording the bleak, blasted, but not unbeautiful lives of the people of the dust bowl in the 1930s. His images guided us in our search for locations. We had to find, somewhere in America, a town that time had forgotten. We knew we couldn’t afford to build one, so we set off under our own steam, and at our own expense, to roam through the southern states of America. Received and patiently ferried around by the respective Film Commissions, we passed with increasing melancholy from Georgia (where Carson McCullers had been born and of which she often wrote) to Mississippi, from Louisiana to Texas. The dryness and the dustiness she describes were easy enough to find, but there wasn’t a single site that hadn’t somehow been invaded by the late twentieth century. As we took our leave wearily from the Film Commission in Austin, Texas, Bruno spotted a set of photographs of what appeared to be a Western Town. ‘Oh, that wouldn’t interest you,’ they said, ‘it’s a movie set that Willie Nelson built on his ranch, for a movie he was in.’ ‘Well, we’d better see it,’ we said, appalled at the idea of returning to England without having had even a glimpse of our nameless town. And so we drove out, and it was instantly evident that this was it – a little dusty street in the middle of – not nowhere, but an estate so vast that it might as well have been. Not a strip of tarmac, not a telephone pole, not a modern building in sight. Nothing daunted by the place’s name (Willieville) we photographed it as lovingly and thoroughly as a lover, and returned, via steamy New Orleans, to London. Ismail immediately accepted that this was the location, with as little comment as he had offered on hearing that we were taking ourselves off on recce – with as little comment, indeed, as he had offered when I suggested that Bruno, who had never designed a film in his life, should design Ballad. If he trusts you, it appears, he trusts you. We reckoned that it would cost half a million dollars to convert Willieville into Carsonville. This was the first money talked on the project. It was becoming more and more real.

  All of this took place in summer of 1989. There followed, for me, a period of American nomadism, going to Chicago to start work on a book about Orson Welles, to Kansas City to act in Mr & Mrs Bridge for Merchant Ivory, to Los Angeles to act in Postcards from the Edge and then to direct Stevie Wants to Play the Blues at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, finally holing up in the snow of Toronto to shoot a final scene for Mr & Mrs Bridge with Paul Newman, only really returning to England in February 1990. At every point (and especially in Kansas and Toronto, of course), Ismail was keeping me abreast of his struggle to raise money for Ballad. Nobody wanted to invest. His track record spoke, one would have thought, for itself, not to mention Vanessa’s. Mine, I appreciated, left a little to be desired, but that, apparently, was not the problem. It was Carson McCullers. The novel, wrote distributors and producers from all over the globe, was not ‘satisfactory’ – was ‘difficult’. A six-page letter from an Australian demolished the work, informing us that McCullers had set herself a task as a writer that she didn’t have the genius to bring off; more candidly, a Japanese investor wrote to say that the story was ‘too sad. At this time Japanese people want to be happy.’ But still Ismail plugged on, setting dates for the start of filming and a schedule for editing and release.

  I arrived in New York in March to start casting the rest of the film. Vanessa was in place, of course, and the crucial part of the hunchback dwarf, Cousin Lymon, was settled, too, on a happy inspiration. While we were in Los Angeles, my partner Christopher Woods had approached the casting department of the theatre and asked if they knew of any extraordinary ‘little guys’, as these actors are formally known in the States. They produced a photograph which showed a face of such mingled melancholy and mischief that we knew he must be our man; and lunch the next day, which added titanic appetite and pugnacious political argument to these qualities confirmed us that Cork Hubbert, stand-up comedian, was our man. Marvin Macy, the third of the trio, was another matter. Actors seemed to find it daunting – or was it the book? Or me and my inexperience? Or Vanessa and her genius? Then, with his usual dramatic fatefulness, Ismail stormed into the casting suite as we sat, surrounded by photographs and directories and clumps of our own hair pulled out at the roots in despair, and cried, ‘Sam Shepard will do the part. Sam Shepard will be our Marvin Macy!’ I knew Shepard a little and had greatly liked his work in various movies, but I had not thought of him for McCullers’s bad angel. ‘Well, I –’ ‘We will have him,’ raged Ismail, ‘we will have him! We must!’ and
swept out.

  ‘And who,’ growled Shirley Rich, the veteran and brilliant casting director, in the ensuing silence, ‘who do you want for the Reverend Willin?’ ‘Rod Steiger,’ I said, moodily. ‘You’re joking,’ she said, and, knowing in my heart that no one of his stature was going to consider doing a two-scene part in a tyro director’s first outing, I said, ‘I know, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it, but he’s exactly the actor to turn what might be thought of as a speech into something someone actually said.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t understand. He’s my friend. I’ll get it to him tonight.’ And the next day Rod Steiger called and we spoke and he said it was the most exciting thing he’d read in years – ‘The shit you get sent! You wouldn’t believe’ – and that he’d do it. And that was encouraging. A few days later, Sam Shepard agreed to play Marvin Macy: Ismail’s will-power at work again.

  Money was still a problem. Ismail put me up in his apartment in New York during the casting period, and one morning as we walked down 52nd Street and across Fifth Avenue to the casting office, he told me that we were only halfway there financially, but that we would start shooting anyway. It wouldn’t, he said, be the first time that had happened on a Merchant Ivory film. ‘I want to just shoot the fucking thing. Shoot it! Get it on film! Then we can edit it later. When they see the footage, people will invest.’ We hope, I thought, having somewhat less faith in my unshot master piece. He told me that he’d spoken to a group of potential backers the day before, and they had turned him down. He had rounded on them: ‘You are fools! When all of you are dead and forgotten, this film will still be remembered.’ How can he possibly have such confidence, I thought, beginning to twitch a little. But that’s what he is: a confidence man, in the most literal sense, and possibly a few other senses too.

  We cast the rest of the major speaking parts mostly from New York stage actors. One, an actress of great experience and distinction, had never acted in a film before. As for the townspeople, we would cast those from Austin, Texas. I was despatched to Philadelphia to meet the cinematographer, a senior English Director of Photography, now resident in America. He was very charming, and told me not to worry about technical matters, above all not to read any How To books, just look at movies and keep my wits about me. He professed himself excited by the novel, by the visual notions that I suggested, and by the world that I sought to evoke. Then he picked up the script – which he had not yet read, I’d just brought it with me – weighed it in his hand and said: ‘It’s too short.’ ‘How can you tell, Larry?’ I said, thinking of Gone with the Wind: ‘Scene 20: Atlanta burns.’ ‘I may be wrong, though I don’t think you’ll find I am. I reckon you need an extra half an hour.’ Gulp. I went back to New York with this news and everyone thought he was probably right. Michael and I, desperate not to disrupt the bare language of the version we’d come to, introduced at the beginning of the film material that we’d decided to exclude; but everyone thought we’d cracked the problem very well, so no more was heard about it until much later.

  Now finally we moved to Austin. Bruno had gone out the week before, and an army of carpenters had effected the transformation. I strode about feeling like Pharoah surveying the construction of the Pyramids, as one building was doubled in size and another was halved, one was demolished and another new one put in place. I was accompanied in my striding about by my first assistant director, Gary Marcus, thirty years old and a veteran of forty films. On a preliminary visit to Austin I had worked with Michael Peal, a brilliant storyboard artist (he had storyboarded the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I had suggested all kinds of shots, and, to my amazement, he thought they were feasible, even, well, rather exciting. He then drew them with wonderful dexterity and at lightning speed, so that by the time I returned to Austin, we were able to walk through a shot list in some detail. ‘Can I put the camera here?’ I’d nervously ask Gary. ‘You can put it wherever you like,’ he’d say, ‘you’re the director.’ The original cinematographer, the speak-your-weight script-measurer, had fallen away, his current film running considerably over schedule, so Walter Lassally, an old associate of Merchant Ivory, an Oscar winner and a famously peppery character, had replaced him. He was, as many Directors of Photography are, distinctly unimpressed by the storyboard, and disinclined to create too detailed a shot list before seeing what the actors did with the scenes, but we walked through every scene, and found extraordinary locations, swamps and so on, and learned how to endure the unrelenting sun and to protect ourselves against the blood-thirsty chiggers, a demonic species of mite that bores its way into your flesh and itches you to the point of insanity.

  Feeling the absence of an opportunity to address the whole cast the way I would have done in the theatre, I sat down and wrote a three-page document describing how I was going to approach the piece, and why. I detailed the style that we’d evolved, and the way in which we were going to shoot the film. Walter and I, in conversations in London, had decided on a manner, partly borrowed from John Ford but with reference to Eisenstein, of extreme close-ups and wide shots – tableaux shots, we called them – that we hoped would created the fairy-tale atmosphere. I also suggested the acting style that was called for. Too often in the theatre as well as on film, STYLE is something created by the production or by the design, but not actually embodied in the playing. I asked the actors to eschew psychological complexities and to accept a world in which things happen because they do. This document I distributed to everybody in the growing army which constituted the film: grips, gaffers, best boys, props people, set decorators, carpenters, accountants, secretaries, sound operators, caterers, security men, press officers, actors. I wanted everybody to know why we were here, and what we were trying to achieve. People were appreciative. I had no idea whether it would make the slightest difference.

  My townspeople had been recruited by the appalling but necessary method called, surprisingly cheerfully by the participants, the cattle call. This was arranged by the local casting director – our second, after the first had been sacked by Ismail for dilatoriness (‘Tell her to get out! This is not Hollywood! Tell her to sit in the Ganges!’). An ad was placed in the local newspaper showing a Walker Evans photograph over a caption saying: ‘Can you look like this?’ They had turned up in their hundreds, all in some sort of costume acquired from the local Goodwill Store. We selected them by appearance alone, and then slowly discovered more about them, and whittled our group down to thirty, each of whom I spent a half an hour or more with, getting them to invent names, characters, relationships and life stories for themselves. This they did with astonishing speed and imagination and emotional power – astonishing considering that hardly more than two or three of them were professional actors. They were pastry chefs and cabinetmakers and farmers and psychiatrists and, in one case, a Professor of English literature. They came up to Willieville where they were ensconced in a large barn, converted into a series of cubicles, each one furnished – I insisted on this – with a large mirror. Across the road, there was another large barn, in which Christopher, who was in charge of costuming the townspeople, had set up shop. Here he established The Wheel of Fashion, in which each day the group would receive their costume from the sad, tattered garments of the people of Carsonville and pretend to be the delighted recipients of a game show prize; here too, they would have a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette or two, and unburden their hearts.

  Two days before we started shooting, Sam Shepard, with whom I had just had a long and enthusiastic phone call from Greece, where he was filming, fell ill, and withdrew from the part of Marvin Macy. We continued our preparations, but with heavy spirits. Ismail seemed, briefly and for the only time in all our acquaintance, to despair, and I sank down even further. It seemed that the entire film would collapse, and then: ‘Simon! Wonderful news! Keith Carradine will play the part.’ He had read the script and decided to rearrange his life to be with us.

  We started shooting on a Thursday, without Vanessa. She was due on the Saturday, so we began with a key sc
ene, that of the arrival of Cousin Lymon, one of our boldest visual statements, and a test of the actors’ abilities to endure the slow and intense poetic playing that I was sure the film needed. Once the first shot was set up, I found myself unable to shout ‘Action!’ I left it to Walter, who was operating the camera as well as directing the cinematography. By the second shot, I found my voice, and Ismail appeared with a tray of sweetmeats, telling everyone to ‘Eat! Eat!’ It was, he said, a tradition, to celebrate the beginning of the film and draw down the gods’ benevolence. Quite which Hindu god was the god of film-making this devout Muslim never quite explained, though I noticed that he had a highly ecumenical approach to religion in general. On arrival at Willieville, he discovered that some of Willie’s staff seemed to have some traces of 1960’s pantheism, ‘but now,’ he said, ‘they have become converts to me.’

  We finished shooting that first night at 4 a.m., and, quaffing the champagne he had given me (thus, presumably, getting Bacchus on our side, too), I shed a little tear. The next day was almost second night in feeling, but after we finished, early, Ismail had arranged another propitiatory event: a family of Pakistani musicians had been summoned to play for us and as they sat on the porch of Miss Amelia’s house, chanting and playing their winding, ecstatic melodies under the epic and darkening Texan sky, it seemed that the ancient soul of an America that lived before the memories of men was called up, and that The Ballad of the Sad Café had found its proper home. Ismail turned to me and said, ‘This raga is 1,200 years old. The words are exactly the same as Carson McCullers’s: in love there is the lover and there is the beloved, and these two often seem to come from different countries.’ At the height of the musical ecstasy, Vanessa, impossibly tall and wearing dark glasses, arrived out of the dark, her blonde hair flowing over her shoulders.