|
INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK McGRATH |
|
This was the second interview I did in Cannes, and like the first with Frank Cottrell Boyce, this one also had a bit of a chequered career. It was to be a group interview; six journalists would share 45 minutes talking to Patrick McGrath. Not really what I wanted, but c'est la vie.
|
Gary: | ... I've been trying to connect with those writers who have produced a screenplay. |
Patrick: | Okay. |
Gary: | What I'm most interested in ... because I'm from the Writers Guild ... |
Patrick: | Yeah ... |
Gary: | Is actually your ... almost your technical process of arriving at a screenplay. This is different from the last person I talked to who was Frank Cottrell Boyce who wrote a script from the beginning, because you've adapted this ... |
Patrick: | I adapted this, yeah ... |
Gary: | ... from your book. I guess what I wanted to know is who first said "I know, let's make a film out of 'Spider,'" and did you go through treatments and synopses and drafts, and who gave you notes on your work. |
Patrick: | Well ... it's a good question. I mean ...this is all a good five years. It was my wife who sort of caught me between books, and said, "If you don't write an adaptation of 'Spider' nobody else will." And me who then said, "Don't be ridiculous, this ... you know ... this'll never make a film." But I did it anyway ... and that process which I hoped would take about six weeks, took about six months. |
Gary: | That was to arrive at a first draft? |
Patrick: | That was to arrive at a first draft, yes. |
Gary: | And did you just begin writing a draft from the book? |
Patrick: | I began ... yeah ... what I did was I went to the book, and I began to go through the book with an eye on sort of separating out what was interior experience, subjective experience, and what was external experience ... what was stuff that I could dramatise ... stuff that was happening in the world, and not happening in Spider's head. And then ... once I had, you know, made that separation, then I had a lot of scenes. Fairly straighforward then to take those scenes, take them out of the book, and set them up as in a screenplay. And ... so then it became a matter of somehow pumping in to these scenes the ... the sort of residue of the story, in terms of what is happening inside the mind of this man, why he is remembering his past in a certain way ... why his memories are having such a strong effect on him in the present, and trying to find sort of behavioural or visual means to get that information into the script. So it was very much about finding stuff in terms of Spider interacting with the world. I was using voice-over to get at bits that ... as a sort of short cut to just get chunks of his thinking ... in the end all the voice-over came out, but that at least got me a first draft that was coherent. |
Gary: | And once you got to that stage, once you got your first draft, what happened then? When did David Cronenberg enter the scene? |
Patrick: | Quite late on. That then went to the producer, Catherine Bailey, who my wife had worked with, who to that point had been radio drama for the BBC. |
Gary: | And had you been consulting with her during the writing of that draft? |
Patrick: | No, I hadn't consulted with anybody. I gave it to my wife, so she was the first reader, she gave me notes on it ... I sort of took her notes, and then it went to Catherine. |
Gary: | And you adapted it from your wife's notes? |
Patrick: | Yes, I made the changes. Well, we would discuss them, and by and large her comments were sound. She's an actor herself, she knows what works in terms of what an actor will do or won't do with a scene. So she was able to fairly ruthlessly tell me ... you know ... "no actor can do that, you can forget about it" ... or, "what if you put this here, put something in here" ... or "this scene is not clear, it's not clear what the meaning ..." or "this scene goes on too long ... you know, the point was made four lines earlier, so you could cut it ... you know, you could start it later or cut it," ... so she was sensitive to all those questions of structure and so forth. |
Gary: | Right ... and once it went to Catherine, was that the producer? |
Patrick: | That was the producer, yeah ... |
Gary: | So where did it move from there. |
Patrick: | It moved from her straight to Ralph Fiennes who had been working with her on radio drama, and he took it home and ... I'm told he read it on the way home in the back of the taxi ... and he came in the next day and said, "I want to do this," and he knew at that point that he wanted to play the role of Spider, so he essentially committed himself at that point, and maintained that commitment through all the years that followed, as Catherine began to shop it around, looking basically for a director ... and it went to all sorts of directors, none of whom ... many of whom showed interest and were very helpful ... I remember Stephen Frears came over one evening having read it, and just out of the goodness of his heart just sort of knocked it around with us, talked about it for an evening with us. |
Gary: | And you found that kind of thing really helpful? |
Patrick: | It was very helpful because I was hearing from a director who had looked at it in terms of "how would I go about filming this?" or ... you know ... is it a nice straight line, can I see this story? Or, "What bits of it aren't making sense to me?" ... you know, in terms of the character's motivation ... "What do I need to know to have such a clear picture of what is happening here, that I could go out tomorrow and begin filming?" |
Gary: | And this is still basically a first draft at this stage? |
Patrick: | It's ... with every one of these meetings ... with every one of these ... every time that it's shown to somebody who's sort of in some way connected with the world of film, it's sort of coming back with comments ... |
Gary: | And you'd work on those? |
Patrick: | Those I'd work on, and some I'd reject and some I'd accept, but it sort of ... you know, it's going into the world almost immediately, and every time it comes back ... you know ... it's coming back with comments. Some were more helpful than others. There was a man called Colin Vanes who now works for Miramax, but he was living in London at the time, and he was terrifically useful. He read it ... you know, he works for Harvey Weinstein, and has a very ... I think to keep a job as Harvey Weinstein's ... you know, in Harvey Weinstein's office as a script consultant you'd need to be damned good, and so his ... you know, the morning he gave me was very very useful. One of the directors that was interested was an Irishman called Pat O'Connor, and he was in LA ... I flew out to LA and we had two weeks working on the script when he though he was going to be directing it. So we got a lot of work done ...so it was a process of constant refinement. |
Gary: | And when did David Cronenberg enter the scene. |
Patrick: | Really very recently. It would've been ... let's see, were are we now ... we're May now, we filmed last summer ... which was the summer of 2001 ... it was the summer of 2000 that he saw it, somebody gave it to him ... and that, I'm told, was a bizarre piece of chance ... there was a man in Canada who had been given the script by my agent, who happened to see Cronenberg having a cup of coffee in a cafe ... and so completely undercutting the whole sort of ... you know ... agent sort of filtering mechanism, just went in and said, "Here, you never heard of these people, but they've got Ralph Fiennes and it's your sort of script." And he read it and was on the phone. |
 | |
Gary: | So that's basically a year from him seeing the script to shooting starting? |
Patrick: | A year ... yeah, he came over to London a month later and met me and Ralph and Catherine ... and basically said "I'm on board," and so a year later we were filming. |
Gary: | Was there much consultation and then alteration of the script once David was involved? |
Patrick: | Not a hell of a lot. He was the one who said get rid of the voice-over ... so that took me about an hour to delete all the voice-over. There were one or two other things but they were relatively minor. So the script by that point had become refined enough that he clearly saw the story, clearly saw that he could go to work on it almost immediately, and that whatever wasn't exactly to his liking he was going to fix in the process of filming. And so he did. |
Gary: | And as far as financing, and funding of you as a writer ... you were basically writing on speculation, weren't you. |
Patrick: | Absolutely, the whole way through. Yeah, I understood perfectly what Catherine's dilemma was ... she had ... well she had Ralph Fiennes, but she had an extremely dark story ... that ... you know ... nobody wanted. |
Gary: | But it also means that you didn't have to take notes from an executive who was supplying the money |
Patrick: | Absolutely right, yeah ... |
Gary: | ... and having that pressure on you ... |
Patrick: | ... there were no money men int-(erfering) ... the financial side of "Spider" was hellish, but the creative and artistic side of the making of that film was just a joy, and there were no problems at all. Nobody interfered with any dumb suggestions ... |
Gary: | And once it did have financing behind it to make the film, there was still no interference artistically from ... |
Patrick: | No, no, from nowhere. Cronenberg had a completely free hand and made the film he wanted to make. |
Gary: | That's excellent. Do you think that's just because of his status as a director? Because he's trusted? |
Patrick: | I think so ... partly that, and partly that ... you know ... there wasn't sort of forty million dollars riding on this. The money had come from ... you know ... all over the place ... sort of a million here, and ... bits and pieces ... so there wasn't really one sort of large mogul who was looking after the interests of a studio or something ... there was a number of smallish investors, all of whom had put money in because it was a David Cronenberg film. So nobody was, on the basis of half a million bucks, going to come in and walk on the set and start saying "I don't like this, I don't like that." |
Gary: | Have you had that happen before? Have you been in that position? |
Patrick: | No, I never have. My first novel I adapted, and that was filmed in 1995, but the few times I've been to ... |
Gary: | "The Grotesque." |
Patrick: | It was "The Groteque," yeah ... the few times I've been to Hollywood nothing has ever really materialised. |
Gary: | Very lucky. And did you have much involvement during the process of shooting? |
Patrick: | Yeah, I showed up a lot, really out of ... purely out of interest. Occasionally Cronenberg was able to use me, but I was just fascinated and excited to see it going forward ... and Cronenberg is a relaxed and experienced enough director that he didn't seem to have a ... any problem with having a writer around, which is a problem for some directors, but not for him ... in fact we developed a very good relationship in which he basically insulted me all the time, you know ... "Oh god, here comes the fucking writer again ..." that sort of thing. |
Gary: | That's amazing because Frank Cottrell Boyce said a very similar thing ... he talked about the writer-director relationship ... in a case where they are two different people ... |
Patrick: | Yeah ... |
Gary: | ... and he said that's got to be very trusting and very loyal ... |
Patrick: | ... yes ... |
Gary: | ... to give you freedom to say, "here comes the fucking writer again." |
Patrick: | Yeah, yeah ... it could have been ... and I was not really sensitive to it on the first film that was ... "The Grotesque" when that was being filmed ... and I realised only later that every time I showed up, that poor director was jittery, because here he was mauling my book and my script ... and at the time I was just curious, I wanted to learn what I could about the film making process. |
Gary: | That's interesting ... so that director was actually according you quite a lot of power. |
Patrick: | That's right. That's right. Yeah. |
Gary: | Is that usual? |
Patrick: | I think it is. I think when a director takes on the work ... somebody else's work ... somebody who's very much still alive and around ... they have the feeling that they're sort of beginning to interfere with somebody baby, and that what they're doing ... there's something slightly sinister, or something slightly ... I don't know ... they're monkeying around with something that was already fine before they got to it ... |
Gary: | Are you talking about an adaptation? |
Patrick: | I guess I'm talking about any project where ... yeah, where there's an adaptation ... where you've got the author of a book and then a director is coming in to sort of translate that into another medium. |
Gary: | If you've actually got the author of the book who has then written a screenplay from the book ... |
Patrick: | ... and then written the script, yeah ... |
Gary: | ... it's like a double whammy really, isn't it. |
Patrick: | Right, yeah ... there's another of my books that's sort of in process, it's called "Asylum" and a director came to see me, and ... experienced young man ... and he stuttered the whole time, he sat there and he ... and I sort of checked it out later with somebody who knew him ... I said, "Does he always have that terrible stutter ... it must be rather hard for him, sort of ... you know, shooting a film with that awful stutter," ... but ... "No, he hasn't got a stutter ..." and then they said, "You know why he was stuttering, don't you," and I said "No ..." ... he says " 'cause he was nervous of you, you fool, he was nervous because he was the one who was going to come in and take your work to pieces and put it on screen and ... change it" ... and that would make you nervous of taking something that someone else has produced and then changing it ... you'd be worried that they'd be appalled at the changes and think that you were making a mess of the work. I think that's a real thing that happens with directors who are not absolutely secure in themselves ... about what they're doing. |
Gary: | Which David Cronenberg was. |
Patrick: | Which he certainly is, yeah. |
Gary: | So just finally ... time's up ... the screenplays you've written, has the impetus to begin those always come from you ... no one else has come to you ... I mean you said your wife had said do this one ... but no one outside like a producer or a director said "I really want you to turn that book into a film ..." |
Patrick: | It's occasionally ... not with my own work ... I mean I've had various proposals from producers, some of which I've done, some of which I haven't ... with my own stuff, that's always been self-generated ... particularly with "Spider" because it was really I think ... I would be very surprised if anybody else wanted to attempt it ... and secondly I'd be very surprised if anybody else actually could do it, and I'm not saying that out of arrogance, it's just that it's very tricky material, and I know it better than anybody else ... nobody is better qualified to attack that book than I am. |
Gary: | There were some interesting choices. I spent a few minutes squinting at the diary, trying to read it ... |
Patrick: | It's not ... |
Gary: | I'm a little bit short sighted ... I was going "What does that say?" |
Patrick: | It's heiroglyphics. |
Gary: | Yeah, I know, I worked that out a fair way in ... and I thought "right ... I see now ..." |
Patrick: | Yeah, yeah. |
Gary: | Okay, that's great ... |
... chat ... | |