“Anything he wants,” Tanen blithely replied, moving off. David swung round to face me. “That’s it,” he stated. “We’re taking him Don Q.”
“David,” I protested, “it’s a fool’s errand.”
“I’m making the appointment and I expect you to be there,” he shot back with the satisfied mien of a man who has just accomplished something difficult and intends to accomplish more.
So it was that a week or so later we found ourselves in Tanen’s office.
“Well, boys, what is this about?” he commenced, after the usual preliminaries.
David turned to me: Your department, his expression plainly stated.
Forcing myself to look Tanen directly in the eye, I said to him, “We want to make a movie of Don Quixote.”
Tanen nodded, attentively. “And . . . ?”
I knew what that “and” meant. It meant, What’s the gimmick? Is it Quixote in space? With music? Is he black? Does it have a video game tie-in?
“That’s it,” I said. “Just the no-frills, brown-bag Quixote.”
He stared at me.
“Here’s the thing,” I continued, provoked by his gaze and breathing in the wrong places. “Quixote’s always played for sentiment.” I mimed a violinist at this juncture. “Whereas, if you read it, it’s baggy-pants funny, the first road comedy, the first buddy picture. It’s Laurel and Hardy, complete with fart jokes and all kinds of physical gags . . . I even know the line on the poster,” I concluded. “ ‘ You’ll laugh . . . till you cry.’”
Tanen sat back and stared some more. On reflection it occurred to me that he must have been accustomed by this point to hearing all sorts of crazy ideas.
“That’s crazy,” he said as if reading my mind, and then amended hastily, “but that’s not necessarily a criticism.” He thought some more. It turned out that one of his daughters was currently reading and loving the novel.
“Okay,” he said at last. “People will call me crazy.” (People had called him crazy.)
I hardly dared glance at David. We were both holding still as hares in headlights. The planets were lining up . . . or starting to . . .
“Ned,” I said, as he showed no signs of further speech but sat staring at the ceiling as if asking himself what he had just agreed to, “I think I’ll need to go to Spain to do some research. . . .”
“Go, go . . . Don’t break the bank.”
We left him before he could change his mind and now, before heading to London and India, I had Spain on my itinerary. If it’s not Mars, I always like to visit the places I am going to write about. With that experience you’re not merely copying stuff from a book; you have some organic connection to the terrain, the culture. You don’t exactly know what you’re looking for but you find it anyway. It enters through your pores, and the script comes out better, somehow, as a result.
Lauren, baby Rachel, and I left for Europe, and Mari-Carmen Jaffe, Steve’s wife, herself a Spaniard, took us to every place Cervantes had ever been on the Iberian peninsula and to some he hadn’t but insisted Quixote had. I even went into the Cave of Montesinos, fabled and endless in the novel, a mere rocky indentation in reality. I doubt Cervantes would have written about it if he’d clambered into that damp, grubby space, as I did. We wandered around La Mancha, the arid province where most of the novel takes place, and visited El Toboso, a town of no particular distinction now transformed into something of a tourist mecca thanks to Quixote’s alleged exploits there.
After Mari-Carmen returned to California, we stayed on in Spain, renting a house outside Marbella where a mountain outside my office window looked suspiciously like the Paramount logo and reminded me daily of what I was supposed to be doing there. It goes without saying that, other than the broad philosophical approach I had outlined to Tanen, I had no idea how to go about adapting a thousand-plus-page novel to the screen. All I knew for certain was that Los Angeles was not the place to try; the phone rang too often there. Here, away from all distractions, Rachel would learn to eat soft food, and I would fool around with Quixote, whose real subject, I realized on closer examination, was not the Don’s monomania—chivalry--but Cervantes’s: words.
One way you know that the Dark Ages have ended is each country’s discovery—starting with Italy and working its way west—of its own vernacular for purposes of literature, hitherto the province of the classical tongues, Greek and Latin. But suddenly you have Dante writing The Divine Comedy in Italian; in France, Corneille, Racine, and Molière are discovering French; in England, first Chaucer, then Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare are drunk on English; and in Spain, in the same year Macbeth is written comes the first part of Don Quixote, composed in colloquial Spanish. The book is likewise high on the possibilities of language. There are big plots, little plots, poems, short stories, anecdotes, jokes, asides, puns, more poems, more tangents . . . every kind of language was grist for Cervantes’s mill. (This was true for Shakespeare, too: his vocabulary—the vocabulary of someone linguistically intoxicated—was fifty thousand words. It’s been shrinking ever since; I daresay we’re down to about five thou?)
What do you do with all those damn words?
Quixote is also a book about nonconformity and the price nonconformists must pay. The foolish knight became my hero.
I decided that I would make an outline of the book. For every page I would summarize the action. In this way I would memorize the book, trick myself into believing I’d written it (like the man who copied out all of War and Peace so he could tell himself he’d written War and Peace), attaching a page number to each summation. Along the way, I’d be picking and choosing what to include and what to omit.
The outline took forever and came to 150 pages, but at least I now had a manageable précis of the novel with page references for all of it and could begin forming my attack on the Rubik’s Cube d’España.
Being in Marbella helped. Marbella is a completely depraved place. Filled with drug smugglers, white slavers, and dissolute sheiks, it is Miami Beach with a cockney accent, has nothing to do with Spain, and is no place for a nice Jewish boy. Other than occasional forays into delicious eateries, we stayed at our little house, where I kept my nose to the grindstone, trying to remember lessons I’d learned from Volunteers. My job was to make others laugh, not indulge myself. Quixote, stripped of all Cervantes’s literary experiments and digressions, is a fascinating, three-dimensional character. Far from being insane, he is a model of rationality on every subject but one, and Sancho’s curious combination of savvy and gullibility makes him a poignant complement to his mentor. On some gut level Sancho knows better; on another, he finds the Don’s beliefs superior to the reality he’s experienced thus far. Nabokov may be right to dismiss Quixote as a novel, but he’s wrong in the same breath to dismiss these two guys and their vaudeville antics.
Somehow the script got written (how? Can’t say; I was in my usual trance), and before I left for London and India, I sent it off to Tanen. Word came back: he loved it and would see me upon my return.
To be continued . . .
THE DECEIVERS
My little family was now based in London and from there we went to India, where we had the time of our lives with Pierce Brosnan and company, filming The Deceivers. John Masters’s novel chronicles in fictional form the true history of the notorious gangs of cult murderers known as thugs (the eponymous deceivers), roving bands of pseudo-travelers who attached themselves to itinerant merchant caravans only to strangle their victims by night with silken handkerchiefs before burying them in mass unmarked graves and making off with their goods. In 1825, when the novel is set, roads in India were so problematic that a man leaving on a journey might not be missed by his family for upward of a year. The cult was eventually broken by an enterprising English officer of the ruling East India Company (to be played by Brosnan), who penetrated the gang by successfully disguising himself as an Indian and becoming one of the killers, an action that in Masters’s telling arguably causes him to lose his mind.
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The film had been offered to me via my agent by Ismail Merchant of the famed Merchant Ivory filmmaking duo. They specialized in intelligent, literary adaptations but evidently were looking to branch out into more popular fare and widen their stable of directors, as well. I am certain Ismail, a charming man, originally from Mumbai, had no idea who I was, but once I was on his radar (being warm, if not hot, for the moment), he arranged to meet me in New York. Ismail originally had an American actor in mind for the role of the English officer but I demurred.
“Here’s a story about an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian,” I reasoned. “If you cast this actor, you will have an American disguising himself as an Englishman, disguising himself as an Indian. We will be lost in the stunt, even if he pulls it off, and not pay attention to the story and the things we want to take for granted, i.e., that it concerns an Englishman.”
In the end, Pierce Brosnan and I met in Los Angeles.
“Good grief, your eyes are blue,” I exclaimed without preamble at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “You’ll have to wear brown contact lenses.” Brosnan blanched. He’s a gent who takes things slowly, and we probably hadn’t even sat down by then. Actors always start wary.
“I have a pathological fear of putting anything on my eyes,” he objected.
“It’s nothing,” said I, staring to yank out one of my own lenses by way of helpful demonstration, causing him to turn very pale. Indians, excepting Pathans, do not have blue eyes, Amy Irving in The Far Pavilions notwithstanding.
One could write an entire book about making The Deceivers, and in fact there is one with Ismail Merchant’s name on it, though I am not sure who the author really is and don’t find it especially accurate. How could it be when neither Ismail nor his ghostwriter was there for most of the filming? (Commenting on music allegedly composed by Frederick the Great, Voltaire observed, “Never criticize music by a monarch; you may never know by whom it was written.”)
The Deceivers was four months of backbreaking work, but I loved making an old-style, Alexander Korda-type movie. Once I discovered that there was a cavalry charge in the script, I was a goner. My wife felt the same way, provided she got to ride in the charge, which she did, swaddled in a hot, red, woolen uniform among India’s crack 101st cavalry. People were alarmed at the prospect of our taking a nine-month-old child to India. “Why?” Lauren asked. “They have lots of kids there.” I loved India, with all its color and contradictions, the staggering wealth, the appalling squalor—this is shorthand, I know, but if I start on India, I won’t stop, and this isn’t a travel book, it’s a memoir. Besides, I am haunted by the suspicion that my travel writing may come out as hilariously as Robert Newton’s Inspector Fix, bullshitting to Cantinflas’s gullible Passepartout in Around the World in 80 Days. “India? Few know it as I do. The mosques! The minarets! Indian maidens! Statuesque! Barbaric! Ah, the Road to Mandalay . . .”
Despite our awkward early meeting Pierce Brosnan and I got on wonderfully. He responded to my exuberance, and I to his courtly hipness. He even mastered brown contacts, delivering a wonderfully self-effacing performance as the schizoid protagonist who goes searching for the worst thing in the world, only to discover he’s carrying it in his pocket. In the hands of a lesser talent, the transformation of a white man into an Indian could have easily become a stunt, calling attention to itself as an act of empty virtuosity. In Brosnan’s hands, it becomes part of this unlucky man’s tragic descent into madness.
As I became friends with Brosnan, my wife became friends with his. Late at night, he would read Irish poetry aloud while we three sat and listened. Some of us were stoned. Beneath the suave, tuxedoed exterior for which he became known as James Bond, Brosnan is a Yeats-quoting beachcomber.
India was an adventure from start to finish. Ismail had promised to be on site for the entire shoot, guiding Tim Van Rellim, our producer, and me through the tricky intricacies of Indian culture, politics, and what have you. But in the end we were left much to our own devices until the last weeks of filming. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Merchant Ivory Films, and Ismail and James Ivory were busy taking bows at the Kennedy Center while Tim and I ran afoul of such characters as the head of the local Jaipur mafia, who, when we declined to deal with him, had to save face by making sure that our shooting was disrupted if not destroyed. Scores of hooligans stormed through our sets while we were rolling; equipment was sabotaged or stolen; “cultural” societies were founded for the sole purpose of suing us, alleging pornographic distortions of Indian culture.
But nothing could prevent the total exhilaration of our shoot, of India itself, where you can tack superlatives onto anything and be accurate. It was the most, the best, the worst; it was inspiring, dispiriting, colorful, irresistible—you name it. It was also a labyrinthine bureaucracy, whose economic models were India’s long-time ally, the USSR, for whom economics (to paraphrase John McCain) was not a strong suit. This meant, among other things, that everything you brought into the country, you had to take out again when you left. A vacuum cleaner, for example, might deprive a sweeper of his job, so it had to go back with us. There was no Coca-Cola, only their poisonous approximation, and no cars except the ones they manufactured, called Ambassadors. (Driving in India makes you believe in karma.) The crew was great at improvising solutions to the endless problems that presented themselves. One day when we needed our tulip crane for a big shot, I was flummoxed to learn that four of its bolts had been stolen, incapacitating a vital piece of equipment. I don’t deal well with last-minute alterations to The Plan, but my Indian crew managed to mill four new bolts by the time we were ready to roll.
Indian actors are terrific, and Indian people among the warmest, fastest (those superlatives again) friends you will ever make. One of our stars was Shashi Kapoor, the Paul Newman of India, so memorable in other Merchant Ivory films, notably opposite Greta Scacchi in Heat and Dust, where he was just about the handsomest (est!) man I’d ever seen. Now, even weighing in at about three hundred pounds, he drew thousands of enthralled observers wherever we set him before a camera.
The film was designed by the great Ken Adam, whom I’d met on The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and shot by the eccentric Walter Lassally (Tom Jones, Zorba the Greek, etc.).
One of the paradoxical ironies of the movie business is that, if you do your job really well, your price goes up, and people can’t afford you. Ken Adam, designer of Barry Lyndon and all those James Bond films, was thought to be too expensive to hire on anything less, by this point in his career—the irony being that as a production designer, it was his responsibility to make things look more expensive than they really were. Adam took the job at Ismail’s bargain basement prices to prove that this was (still) what he was good at.
Ken was the film’s artistic conscience, ready to lie down in front of the train if that’s what it took to preserve its aesthetic integrity. We needed a Georgian church in which our hero marries at the start of the tale—essentially, Jane Austen’s India. Find a Georgian church still extant in India, if you think you can. We drove hours on someone’s recommendation and came upon what was self-evidently a Victorian church. “Let’s go with this,” I declared. “No one will ever know.”
“I will know,” said Ken Adam, with a glint behind his enormous, thick-lensed glasses, “and if you use this church, I take my name off the picture.”
We kept looking and eventually discovered an exquisite Georgian church in Agra—and I learned something about what makes a great production designer, and how to keep your integrity.
Back in London, where the film was edited, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that my little family had fallen in love with the city, a passion that was to have far-reaching consequences.
The bad news was that I had picked the wrong editor. To be fair—to me—I had chosen him by default, over the phone from Mumbai, when my original choice had inexplicably bailed while I was hunting locations. Maybe his departure was not entirely inexplicable. I had lea
rned only relatively late in the production of Ismail’s reputation. He had his fans and his detractors, and like many independent producers was sometimes late with checks and low on salaries. In the beginning I was dismayed when the owner of our editing equipment would call, threatening to repossess same. I would call Paul Bradley, who ran the Merchant Ivory office in Soho, in a state of high alarm, relating these dire tidings. Paul always had the same answer: “Really? This is the first I heard of it” (i.e., the unpaid bill). Gradually, I became accustomed to this roller coaster, but Ismail’s modus operandi was more than some people were prepared for. (Again, to be fair, the world of the independent producer is a precarious one. Checks are frequently late or go missing. Sam Spiegel, producer of four of the greatest films of all time, The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, was notorious for being dilatory in the check department.)
My editor was a different problem altogether. With the loss of my original first choice, I panicked over there in India and chose a persistent substitute in whom I hadn’t quite believed. Although Bill Dornisch ran a cutting room that resembled a madhouse, with torn, scratched workprint trims dangling everywhere, my editor on The Deceivers, by contrast, ran a surgically pristine editing room where nothing was out of place and the workprint didn’t have a scratch. Unfortunately, he could not, to my way of thinking, cut film. Or, to make allowances, he couldn’t cut this film, and I didn’t do what I should have done in response. Why not? A good question. My congenital reluctance to confront? To make waves? My inability to find an available substitute? In the end my brother-in-law, Roger Spottiswoode, the director of such classics as Under Fire (and former editor for such as Sam Peckinpah) flew to London and made what sense he could of the footage, though by this time Ismail’s funds had indeed run out. The film was not a commercial success but remains very watchable and gratifyingly dark, and Brosnan’s performance remains a standout.
The View from the Bridge Page 20