By now I am sucking and licking on light ice-cream with whipped cream and grenadine. Shelby is into her stride. Perhaps my lack of response means I am thinking about what she is saying? The script hasn’t necessarily improved at all, it’s become cruder, more obvious. Why have you developed the black women, Vivia and Rani? Well … I almost begin to fight back when she starts to fumble in her bag. She brings out a letter. There, read this please, she says. It’s from someone who cares.
The letter, from a reader in the company, is addressed to me. Its tone implores me to see sense. ‘The version I read in October was just about perfect and the fifth draft has been tinkered with entirely too much … The fifth draft seems a little preachy and one-dimensional. It’s lost so much for the sake of clarity and it’s not nearly as successful as a film … I hope you’ll consider going back to the terrific screenplay you wrote in October.’
I leave the restaurant burping on caviar and heavy with ice-cream. All afternoon I wander the city. Two dozen wasps are free within my cranium. Perhaps all those people are right. I don’t know. Can’t tell. God knows. My judgement has gone, swept away by the wind of all this advice. Eventually I settle down in an Irish bar — a grimy piece of Dublin — and have a few beers. I toast myself. The toast: long may you remain waterproof and never respect anyone who gives you money!
30 JANUARY 1987
Motivated entirely by greed I stay in the hotel room all day writing a 1,000-word piece about Frears for an American film magazine. They promise me $1,000. On finishing it, sending it round and listening to their reservations, I realise how rarely any kind of writing is simple and how few easy bucks there are to be made. Whatever you write you always have to go back and rethink and rewrite. And you have to be prepared to do that. You never get away with anything.
5 FEBRUARY 1987
London. Good to talk to Frears again. We both say that some of the people around us have made us gloomy by expressing doubts, by emphasising the difficulty of what we want to do. We want to work confidently, with certainty, and with pleasure. Frears is an extraordinarily cheerful man who takes great pleasure in his work and in the company of others. There’s no poisonous negativity in him. It’s as if he knows how close dejection and discouragement always are, that they are the converse of everything you do, and how comforting it is to let them put their arms around you.
He says this is the hardest film he’s made. He said the same about Laundrette, and I remember feeling glad that we were doing something risky and dangerous.
10 FEBRUARY 1987
Meeting at Channel 4 with David Rose and Karin Bamborough. Karin says I’ll have to give Sammy more substance as he’s such a jerk and constantly making glib, flip remarks. Stephen and Tim Bevan sit chuckling at me, knowing there’s some autobiography in the character. We tell Karin that Ayub is such a delightfully complicated person and so intent on playing the Oedipal relationship that he’ll give the character depth. I also explain that the end will be rewritten. At the moment Rafi just hangs himself. It seems an ignoble act whereas Frears and I want it to be a justified thing, chosen, dignified, something of a Roman act.
Shashi sends his measurements in and hasn’t lost any weight. We feel he’s too big for the part and should look fitter and trimmer. The plan has been for Shashi to arrive a few weeks before shooting and then Bevan will shunt him off to a health farm. But so far, no sign of Shashi. Some of us are wondering whether he’ll turn up at all.
As we’ve been concentrating on casting the other parts it now seems that Claire Bloom may not be available. A real nuisance. Fortunately the problems with Meera have been worked out and she’s going to be in the film.
12 FEBRUARY 1987
I go into the production offices off Ladbroke Grove to talk about casting. There is a row of offices with glass partitions. About twenty yards away I can see Bevan waving his arms. He dashes up the corridor to tell me there’s been a call from the States to say I’ve been nominated for an Oscar. I call my agent and she says: Goody, that’ll put a couple of noughts on your fee.
I think of a letter Scott Fitzgerald wrote from Hollywood in 1935 where he was working on the script of Gone with the Wind: ‘It’s nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try about three years. The point is once you’ve got in — Screen Credit 1st, a Hit 2nd, and the Academy Award 3rd — you can count on it for ever … and know there’s one place you’ll be fed without being asked to even wash the dishes.’
Later in the day Frears and I drive to west London to check out an actress for the part of Alice. Frears says what a strange cast it is: a mixture of inexperienced young people, a rock singer, a famous and glamorous movie star who’s never worked in Britain, and a theatre actress without a great deal of film experience.
The irascible actress we’ve come to see, in her genteel west London sitting room, starts off by flapping the letter we’ve written her and saying how flattered she is to be offered the part of Anna. Surely though, at her age, early fifties, she shouldn’t be expected to have two Ws tattooed on her buttocks.
I look at Frears. As he sits there in her high-backed leather chair with his ripped green-striped plimsolls resting on her cream carpet, I can’t help thinking of him as a punk at heart. He is a little distracted, though perfectly polite. I know what he doesn’t like to do is explain things. Art Malik has complained to me that Frears wouldn’t explain Sammy’s role in the movie to him. Frears said he didn’t know that much about Sammy’s role in the movie: it’s all so much in Hanif ’s head, he says; let’s hope we can pull it out some time near the day. Malik was horrified by Frears’s flipness. But Frears wants people to work intuitively and spontaneously. He wants them to work things out for themselves and not be lazy; what they’ve worked out they’ll bring to the film. He also expects other people to be as intelligent as he is.
Frears pulls himself together and hastily explains that the actress is being considered for the part of Alice, not Anna. She then looks at me as if I’m a very small boy and asks, severely, what the film is about. I explain that it concerns a number of relationships unfolding against a background of uprising and social deterioration. ‘That’s easy to say,’ she says. ‘Very easy. Now can you tell me what it’s about?’ I tell her I’m not one of those people who think plays or films ought to be ‘about’ anything. ‘What are you trying to say then?’ she asks, putting her head in her hands and making a frightening gurgling noise. At first I think she’s choking; I consider hammering her on the back. But surely she’s crying? When she looks up I can see she’s laughing hysterically. ‘Oh, poor England’s changed,’ she says. ‘And I don’t know where it’s gone. A black boy attacked me in the street the other day. Before, you’d never even lock the door to your house.’
Frears is knocking back a fat slug of whisky and looking in the other direction. The actress starts up on a rambling monologue about her career. She keeps you alert because you have no idea what she’s going to say next. In some ways she is rather like Alice, delicate, decent and unable to understand why her world has changed.
16 FEBRUARY 1987
Roland Gift who is playing Danny comes over. He admits being nervous of Frears’s method of working, of not rehearsing. I tell him of the dangers of over-preparation which kill spontaneity and creativity; also that he’s in the film partly because of what he’ll bring of himself to the part, not because of his technical abilities as an actor. The idea is to avoid performances. British actors, because of their training, tend to be theatrical on film.