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Faber and Faber
Hampton on Hampton
Interview with Alistair Owen
Since the acclaimed London première of his first stage play in 1966, Christopher Hampton has established himself as one of Britain's most prominent, least predictable dramatists. He adapted his most successful play, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, into an Oscar-winning film, Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears. Some of Hampton's other adventures in Hollywood as a screenwriter/adapter-for-hire have caused him rather more headaches. But his reputation precedes him, his brilliance so clearly apparent, and so Hampton was a natural choice to deliver the screenplay adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.
In Hampton on Hampton (Faber and Faber, 2005), the writer eloquently and entertainingly explores the breadth of his varied career in theatre and film with interviewer Alistair Owen. In these extracts from Owen's book, Hampton discusses the origins of his interest in adapting literature for the screen, and a handful of his best-known works.
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON:I started writing plays when I was at school in Egypt, adaptations of The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher with all the boring philosophical bits cut out and concentrating on the blood and guts. Then, when I was sent to prep school in England at the age of ten, I used to put on plays in the dormitory at the end of term. So at that stage I already knew that this was what I wanted to do . . .
ALASTAIR OWEN: It's interesting that the first plays you wrote were adaptations, which have played a major part in your career ever since.
That's right. I fell in love with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, which I read far too early–I was only eight or nine. At the end of the road where we lived in Alexandria there was a clubhouse of sorts for people who worked at Cable & Wireless, and it had this library. I was confined to the children's bit, and I said to my father, 'I'm not interested in these books', so he agreed to take out books for me, and one of the books he took out was Tales of Mystery and Imagination–which became the book of my early childhood. After Egypt my father went to Hong Kong, which had no film certification, so I could go and see X-rated films like The Revenge of Frankenstein at the age of eleven, and I've still got an unredeemed taste for Gothic melodrama dating back to those days . . .
[Through the 1970s Hampton was engaged by producers for various un-credited rewrites and un-produced screenplays, but garnered his first screen credit proper for a Graham Greene adaptation, The Honorary Consul (1983), directed by John MacKenzie and starring Richard Gere and Michael Caine. Two decades later Hampton would work on Phillip Noyce's version of Greene's The Quiet American, again starring Caine. The Honorary Consul, though, proved a tough initiation into the compromises of moviemaking.]
HAMPTON: There were lots of drafts of the script, as there always are with films which actually get made, and from the first draft to the shooting script, the philosophical side was minimized and the action side was maximized–but not to the extent that it was in the finished film. They threw out anything which smacked of sensitivity or reflection . . . All in all, it was pretty educational.
OWEN: Not for Graham Greene, though . . .
Michael Caine recounts in his autobiography that he was in the Savoy Grill and he saw Graham Greene, and Graham Greene said to him, "Dreadful film, but you were very good." But I was talking to Nicholas Shakespeare about The Quiet American, and I said, "I don't know if Graham Greene would have liked it. He certainly didn't like The Honorary Consul," and Nicholas said, "Yes, he did." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "I did a series of interviews with him, and he said that The Honorary Consul was one of the best adaptations of his books there had ever been." So there we are. I think The Honorary Consul was very close to Greene's heart, because in addition to the political aspect, which is also there in The Quiet American, it contains a great deal of his late thinking about religion–all of which I chose to ignore, because it was of no particular interest to me.
Whenever I see it, I rather enjoy it. I don't think Richard Gere was ideal casting, but he's perfectly good in it, and Michael Caine is wonderful in it. It doesn't have much atmosphere, though, and that's one thing you can't do to Graham Greene. The Quiet American has different problems, but it benefits from being shot in Vietnam, because Greene is like [Joseph] Conrad: you have to find a visual equivalent for that atmospheric prose, otherwise they're just stories which don't resonate in the way the books do. In that sense, the thing I was most pleased about with The Honorary Consul was my original opening. I was thinking about how to begin the film, and I decided to use the scene from the book where the doctor and the policeman meet on the banks of the river, then walk across the water on these floating logs and arrest an Indian who's sitting on a raft beside a dead body. It was a very atmospheric opening and no one had any objection to it, so they ordered $20,000 worth of logs, brought them overland to the location and took them out into the middle of the river–where they promptly sank. So now the opening scene of The Honorary Consul is just Richard Gere looking rather plaintively across the water, which is the only thing they could shoot because they didn't have any logs left...
When did you first come across Choderlos de Laclos's novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses?
At Oxford. [My tutor] Merlin Thomas gave us a representative piece of work from each period of French literature, so that we could make an informed choice about which period we wanted to study, and the eighteenth-century book was Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I thought it was the greatest novel I'd ever read; I couldn't believe how powerful and insightful it was. Laclos had taken this very complicated form, the epistolary novel, and produced a compelling page-turner... Madame de Merteuil, for example, is an absolutely unprecedented character in literature. There had been motiveless evil men, like Iago, but a woman of this formidable and cold-hearted kind Laclos invented more or less single-handedly . . .
Before writing the film you worked on David Lean's unrealized version of Conrad's Nostromo. Did you learn any lessons from that which you could bring to bear on Liaisons?
I did learn a lot from David, so I was probably thinking about the way a film works in much greater detail than I'd ever thought about it before. For example, David always paid an extravagant amount of attention to the way each scene flowed into the next. There was a montage sequence in Nostromo, which occurred when the rebel army marches into the town and the church bells start ringing and the various protagonists in various places all hear them and react to them, and we spent a week to ten days just discussing the order this sequence should take. To me, it seemed like a perfectly good sequence in any order, but by the time we got it right, it had an extraordinary inevitability and said that this was the end of an era and that the characters had come to this point of their development–all in one sequence which would only have lasted about forty seconds.
Now, Stephen [Frears] read the script for Liaisons on 1 January [1988]–I put it through his letterbox with a note saying "Happy New Year"–and we started shooting in May, and although there were no radical changes during that time, what work we did was all to do with the same thing: making the film flow properly. For example, the entire opening sequence came out of a long conversation we had very late on. The script originally started with the scene in Merteuil [Glenn Close]'s salon, but I somehow wanted to set up her and Valmont [John Malkovich] as rivals, and the idea emerged of showing the two of them getting dressed. I'd either read somewhere, or the costume designer, James Acheson, had told me, that the process of getting ready for the day was so elaborate, and involved so many people, that these aristocrats weren't ready to have their breakfast until half past three in the afternoon. So Stephen passed me on to Jim, and I said, "What did they actually do?" and he told me lots of stuff which I then went on to use.
Likewise, the whole ending was a matter of endless discussion. There were so many different versions of it that the actual ending was something of an afterthought. I had written that it should end with a caption, "From then on, her soul was written on her face", which is a wonderful line from the novel. But when Glenn saw that, she said, "I can act this", so the final scene was done at the end of a day when we'd finished a bit early, in one take, with Philippe Rousselot on the lighting board artificially cheating down the lights–and even, when he saw a tear coming out of Glenn's eye, slightly cheating them up again. And when we saw it we thought, even though it wasn't written as such, that it was the end of the film. We did shoot Glenn being guillotined, but when we saw it in the screening room Stephen and I looked at each other and both burst out laughing, so obviously that wasn't a good idea...
I read that you became so absorbed in [the making of Dangerous Liaisons] that you ceased to exist outside it, which sounds rather unusual for you.
I fell in love with the whole process of film-making at that time, and being in love with the process of film-making requires the exclusion of almost everything else in your life, so it doesn't necessarily improve your character–although once you're made aware of that, as I was by my wife and daughters, you can try and do something about it. I don't see that you can do anything else as a director because it's such an all-absorbing job, but as a writer I've usually been able to detach myself from the work at the end of the day. And if I don't want to detach myself from it, I'll go away somewhere for a week and finish it without distractions, as I did with the last fifty pages of Atonement. I didn't expect to finish the script in that week, but I did. I don't know how sociable you would have found me in the evenings, though...
[In 2001 Hampton read Ian McEwan's much-acclaimed novel Atonement, was "very moved by it, and let it be known that I wanted to do it." Backed by Working Title, producer Robert Fox optioned the novel for Hampton to adapt and Richard Eyre to direct. In the due course of time it would be Joe Wright who would helm the picture and require Hampton to begin his work anew. But at the time Hampton on Hampton was being compiled, Hampton had recently delivered his first draft for Eyre.]
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON: [Atonement] is really a two-act structure, with the two acts pretty much equal in length–or, if anything, the first act a little longer than the second–which means that you have to manage a tremendous gear shift, from country house life in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk. I thought the best way to do that was the way The Deer Hunter did it, where you just go–bam!–from one world to another. I think The Deer Hunter is a more than dubious film, but it does have this brilliant effect in it: an extreme change of direction which galvanizes the audience so that they trust you to bring the whole thing together again at the end. You also have to thread into those two acts the very short last section of the book, which reveals that it's been written by this character called Briony, who's a thirteen-year-old when the story starts, and that she wrote it to atone for this crime which she inadvertently committed as a girl... Although this last section of the book is a real revelation, there are discussions and observations throughout about the nature of fiction which make it retrospectively logical, and you need to reproduce that so the ending doesn't just come out of nowhere. So that's the other technical difficulty . . .
Everyone seems pretty pleased with the first draft, but it's early days yet. I think the thing to do is to write a second draft which is radically different in the way it deals with that particular problem, because the more different you can make the two, the more clearly people who are reading them can see which of the approaches works better . . .