What I don’t get is any sense of the freshness of the thing, of how surprising and interesting it may be to others.
After, I stagger from the viewing theatre, pleased on the one hand that it’s up on the screen at last. On the other, I feel disappointed that after all the work, the effort, the thought, it’s all over so quickly and just a movie.
Frears is pleased. These things are usually hell, he says, but this wasn’t, entirely. Some of it, he says, is the best work he’s done; it’s a subtle and demanding film. Part of the problem with it, he thinks, is that maybe it’s too funny at the beginning and not serious enough. He suggests it could be slowed down a bit. I say I don’t want to lose any of the humour especially as the end of the film is so miserable. It’s a question, over the next few weeks, of reconciling the two things.
30 APRIL 1987
Mick Audsley has been furiously cutting the film for the last two weeks. When we all walk into the preview theatre — including Karin Bamborough and David Rose from Channel 4 — to see how the film’s progressed, Mick’s as nervous as a playwright on a first night. I reassure him. But it’s his film now; this is his draft; it’s his work we’re judging. ‘I’ve taken some stuff out,’ he says nervously. ‘And moved other things around.’
There are about twelve people in the room. Frears’s film Prick Up Your Ears is successful in the States and Bevan’s Personal Services is number three in the British film charts, so they’re both pretty cheerful.
For the first forty minutes I can’t understand what’s happened to the film. It’s more shaped now, but less bizarre somehow, less unpredictable. I suppress my own laughter in order to register every gurgle and snort of pleasure around me. But there is nothing: complete silence.
The film begins to improve around the ‘fuck’ night and takes off when the Ghetto-lites dance and mime to Otis Redding’s ‘My Girl’ and we cut between the avid fuckers. It’s unashamedly erotic, a turn-on, running right up against the mean monogamous spirit of our age. There must be more jiggling tongues in this film than in any other ever made.
I cringe throughout at the ridiculousness of the dialogue, which seems nothing like the way people actually talk. A lot of this will go, I expect, or we can play some very loud David Byrne music over it, though I am attached to some of the ideas contained in the more strident speeches.
At the end I feel drained and disappointed. I look around for a chair in the corner into which I can quietly disappear. I feel like putting a jacket over my head.
Then you have to ask people what they think. David Rose is a little enigmatic. He says the film is like a dream, so heightened and unreal it is. It bears no relation to the real world. I say: We want to create a self-sustaining, internally coherent world. He says, yes, you’ve done that, but you can’t be surprised when what you’ve done seems like an intrusion to those it is about.
Frears says it’s a different film from the one we watched two weeks ago. Now we have to fuse the seriousness of this version with the frivolity of the first version.
A journalist who came to see me the other day asked why I always write about such low types, about people without values or morality, as it seems all the characters are, except for Alice. It’s a shock when he says this. I write about the world around me, the people I know, and myself. Perhaps I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd. Reminds me of a story about Proust, who when correcting the proofs of Remembrance of Things Past, was suddenly disgusted by the horrible people he’d brought to life, corrupt and unpleasant and lustful all of them and not a figure of integrity anywhere in it.
4 MAY 1987
A very confused time for us in trying to work out what kind of film we want to release. We talk frequently about the shape of it, of pressing it experimentally all over to locate the bones beneath the rolling fat. But you have to press in far to touch hardness. There’s barely any story to the thing. If there is a story, it belongs to Shashi. Frears is talking of ‘taking things out’; he says, ‘Less means better,’ and adds ominously, ‘There’s far too much in it.’ It’s painful, this necessary process of cutting. I think, for consolation, of Jessica Mitford’s: ‘In writing you must always kill your dearest darlings!’
7 MAY 1987
Frears on good form in the cutting room. He hasn’t been so cheerful for days. He’s cutting swathes out of the movie. It’s funnier and more delicate, he says. He adds: Your talent will seem considerably greater after I’ve done with it!
He’s put his finger on something which will inevitably bother film-writers. If the movie is successful you can never be sure to what extent this is due to you, or whether the acting, editing and direction have concealed weaknesses and otherwise lifted an ordinary script which, if it were to be shown in its entirety or as written, wouldn’t work at all.
11 MAY 1987
Frears rings and says it’s vital I come in later today and see the film. You’ll have to brace yourself, he adds, ringing off.
The first shock is in the first minute: the shooting. Mick has obviously worried a great deal about this. He has removed the moment when the black woman gets shot, when you see her covered in blood and falling to the ground. Even Frears is surprised that this has come out, but he’s pleased with it. What such a powerful and upsetting moment does, they both argue, is overwhelm the opening. Frears also says that its removal improves the subtlety of the storytelling — we find out later what has happened. I do like the shooting, not for aesthetic reasons, but for didactic ones: it says, this is what happens to some black people in Britain — they get shot up by the police.
Halfway through this cut I can see it’s going to work. The shape is better, it’s quicker, less portentous. Danny’s long speech has gone, as have various other bits of dialogue. A scene between Anna and Sammy has gone, which means that Anna’s part in the film is diminished. Alice’s speech on going down the stairs, before the cellar scene, has gone, which I missed. I’ll try and get them to put it back.
I argue to Frears that in some ways the film has been depoliticised, or that private emotions now have primacy over public acts or moral positions. In one sense, with a film this is inevitable: it is the characters and their lives one is interested in. Frears argues that, on the contrary, the film is more political. Ideas are being banged together harder now: the audience is being provoked. But I can see that my remark has bothered him.
I can’t deny it’s a better film: less grim, less confused and lumpy, funnier and maybe tearjerking at the end. Frears has put the music from Jules et Jim over the scene where Sammy tells us what he likes about London, which brings that section to life, thank God, especially as three or four people have moaned about it being redundant. Next week Frears will shoot a couple more sections for that particular homage to Woody Allen and maybe reprise the music at the end.
After the viewing we talk about there being another scene at the very end of the film, a scene between Sammy and Rosie under a tree, maybe at Hammersmith, by the river. Of course, there’s the danger of sentimentalizing this, of saying that despite everything — the shooting, the revolts, the politics of Rafi — this odd couple end up being happy together, the implication being that this is all that matters. This is, of course, the pattern of classical narration: an original set-up is disrupted but is restored at the end. Thus the audience doesn’t leave the cinema thinking that life is completely hopeless. I say to Frears that at least at the end of Jules et Jim Jeanne Moreau drives herself and her lover off a bridge. He says, sensibly: Well, let’s shoot the scene and if it doesn’t work we can dump it.