After, we drive through London and go to a pub. It’s a shock that London and other people’s lives are continuing while we’re making a film. Film-making is an absorbing and complete world; the relationships are so intense and generous, the collaboration so total, that the rest of the world is blanked out.
24 MARCH 1987
In the studio at Twickenham at last and off the street. Here we’re shooting all the material in Sammy’s and Rosie’s flat. It is easier to watch the performances in this calmer and more controlled place, even if the atmosphere is slightly flat.
It seems to me that Shashi is going to turn out to be very good, portraying a complex and dangerous character, a murderer and a man eager to be loved, a populist and an élitist. Frears is carefully and patiently teasing out the power and subtlety in Shashi by getting him to act simply and underplay everything. You can see the performance developing take by take. After eight or nine takes Shashi is settled, a little tired and bored, more casual and relaxed. Now he is able to throw the scene away. And this is when he is at his best, though he himself prefers the first few takes when he considers himself to be really ‘acting’. Sometimes he can’t see why Frears wants to do so many retakes.
Ayub improving too. He is inexperienced as an actor (it is of course difficult for Asian actors to gain experience), but Oliver is doing a wonderful job in making him look like a matinée idol. The balance of the script has gone against Sammy. It is Rafi and Rosie that I’ve developed as there is more scope for conflict with them. Sammy doesn’t believe in a great deal, so it’s hard to have him disagree much with anyone. His confusion isn’t particularly interesting. Rosie is a more complex character and harder to write, especially as she isn’t a character I’ve written before.
25 MARCH 1987
I turn up on the set and find that Frears has Rosie going out to meet her lover not only in that ridiculous coat, but wearing only her underwear. He seems to think that someone would go to see their lover, via a riot, wearing only a thermal vest and a pair of tights. I certainly wouldn’t. I hope I’ll be able to watch the film in the future without suffering at this moment.
Thank God I’m leaving London in a couple of days for the Oscar ceremonies. I’ve been on the set every day, though I’m not sure it’s been as essential as it was on Laundrette. There hasn’t been much rewriting this time.
28 MARCH 1987
Los Angeles. I wind down the window of the cab as we hit the freeway and accelerate. Air rushes in, gloriously warm to me after an English winter of freezing balls. I pull three layers of clothes over my head. LA is blazingly green and bright: how easy it is to forget (one’s senses accustomed to dullness) that this industry town is also subtropical; its serious and conservative business takes place among palm trees, exotic birds and preternaturally singing flowers. Everything is as resplendent as if I’d taken LSD. Walking into the hotel, the Château Marmont, a small, friendly European place on a hill, the grass appears to have been sprayed with gloss and the air pumped full of perfume. It is eucalyptus.
The phone calls begin as soon as I open the windows of my room: from agents, press people, producers, recommending the numerous totally beautiful human beings I should impress in the next few days. I say to my agent: But most of these people do not interest me. She says: Dear, all that is important is that you interest them — whatever you do, don’t discourage them. As long as they’re saying your name as they eat all round this city you’ve got nothing to worry about.
As we talk I eat some fruit. Swollen nature in my hands: strawberries long as courgettes, thick as cucumbers. Here the most natural things look unnatural, which is fitting in a mythical city in a hotel in which Bogart proposed to Bacall, where John Belushi died, where Dorothy Parker had an apartment and Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer would come to tea and no one wanted to be the first to leave, and in which, when I get into bed to read — Robert Stone’s Children of Light — I find myself staring into a novel about a burned-out screenwriter living at the Château Marmont drinking and drugging himself while a screenplay he wrote is being shot in another country.
29 MARCH 1987
At breakfast the waiters are discussing films they’ve seen recently. Then they start to worry about the Oscars. They can’t believe that Betty Blue is the French entry in the Best Foreign Picture Category. What about Vagabonde? At another table a young man is hungrily explaining the plot of a film he’s written to an older man. ‘This film could change lives,’ he says, not eating. The other man eats croissants as big as boomerangs. ‘It’s about an alien disguised as a policeman. But it’s a good alien, right? It’s about the renewal of the human spirit.’
Later, with some friends, I drive through this baking city to Venice Beach. I’m being shown the city. How attractive it is too, and not vulgar. I notice how few black people there are. What little poverty. I’d have thought this city was bereft of unhappiness if I hadn’t stayed downtown on my last visit here. That time the manager of the hotel said, when I checked in: Whatever you do, sir, don’t go out after dark.
Venice Beach — so called because of the rotting bits of Venetian architecture still left over from a time when a minor Venice was being contemplated here. It is in its wild spirit something like the Venice, Italy, I saw a few weeks ago, though less stylish and more eccentric, which you’d expect in a country without an aristocratic culture. Herds of people cruise the boardwalk. A man is juggling a chainsaw and a ball, hurling the humming saw into the air and catching it. A dog in sunglasses watches. A man with pierced nipples, with rings hanging from them, also watches. All along the beach there are masseurs, rolfers, shiatsu experts, astrologers, yoga masters and tattoo freaks. Further along, at Muscle Beach, in an enclosed area, men and women work out, twitching, shaking, vibrating, tensing and generally exhibiting their bodies to the crowds.
Back at the hotel the phone rings constantly. People tell me: The greatest day of your life is approaching. I try to think of the one day in my life in which I had more happiness than any other.
Later, to a cocktail party given by Orion, the distributors of Laundrette in the US. It is as interesting as a convention of carpet salesmen. I sit next to a woman whose husband is an executive in the company. In her early twenties, she tells me how she hates it all, how you just have to keep smiling if you want your husband to be promoted and how desperate she is to go home and get some drugs up her nose. Everyone leaves early. Drive the LA streets at eleven and they’re deserted. It’s like Canterbury. Everyone goes to bed early because they work so hard.
30 MARCH 1987
After lunch in Santa Monica near the beach, to the Bel-Air hotel with its lush gardens, its white Moorish architecture and its private suites and cottages in the grounds with their own patios. Here, you go somewhere, get out of your car and someone parks it. When you leave the restaurant, bar or hotel, the car is waiting outside. If you’ve got the dough, there’s always someone around to save you doing something yourself. I’m beginning to see how addictive such a luxurious place as this could become. Once you’d really got the taste for it, how could you be detoxicated? To which clinic could you go to dry out from the juices of wealth and pleasure that had saturated you in this city?
It’s interesting how few notable American film directors actually live in Los Angeles: Coppola, Pakula, Pollack, Scorsese, Demme, all live in other cities. The directors and writers who do live here are British, often successful in British television, now flailing around in the vacuum of Los Angeles, rich but rootless and confused, attempting the impossible task of finding decent work, exiled from a country that doesn’t have a film industry.