Since then I have collaborated with more than a dozen directors. Most of my work, including the prose, has passed through others’ hands before it reaches an audience. If being imaginative alone can be difficult enough, I am both scared and intrigued by what others will do with what I have started.
What will you think or say if you free associate, if you let your mind run without inhibition? There are plenty of anxieties there. What, then, will it be like making mistakes, saying daft things, having strange ideas, in front of someone else? Will you be overwhelmed or forced into compromise by the other; or vice versa? Will you feel liberated by them, or will new fears be aroused? Which fears might they be?
The challenge of collaboration is to find a process where both of you can be fearlessly foolish; to see whether your union will be a dilution or expansion of your combined abilities. You want to be surprised by the other, not limited by them. Neither of you wants to waste time pursuing an idea that is uninteresting.
However, collaboration is like friendship or like writing; you can only start off with a vague idea of where you are going. After a bit, if you’re lucky, you begin to see whether or not there is a worthwhile destination ahead.
Most artists with a distinct voice soon develop their area of interest — the characters, scenes, moods — which they will work on for most of their lives; and most artists, like most lives, are repetitious. A collaboration is an attempt, then, to enlarge or multiply selves, to extend range and possibility. You might make something with another person that you couldn’t make alone. Whether the purpose of this is the final product — the film — or the intimacy of partnership, the pleasure of meeting someone regularly, to talk about something that excites you both, I’m not sure. Probably it is all of these things.
Each of the many directors I have worked with in the theatre, television and cinema has been interested in sponsoring a different aspect of my work. There was a particular thing the piece said to them, that they wanted to emphasise, or to say through me. Then, once the work commenced, I began to write for them, for their idea of the project, and to their doubts and strengths. This process makes you become a different kind of writer — a different person, to a certain extent — with each director.
I can think of scores of good collaborations. The ones that come to mind are from dance, or theatre, or music. I think of Miles and Coltrane; Miles and anyone; and of Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin and Jan Garbarek; of Brian Eno and David Byrne. The list could be endless.
It would be a mistake to put the purity of isolated creativity on one side, and collaboration on the other. In a sense all creativity will be collaborative: the artist works with his material, with his subject and with the history of his chosen form.
As well as this, most artists, I assume, relish a certain amount of the unexpected, of chance and contingency, of something odd but useful that might just turn up. What did you see, hear, say, yesterday? How might it be incorporated into the present work? Something going wrong in the right way can be fruitful. Another person could be the ‘contingency’ that helps this to happen. Maybe all artistic activity is a kind of collage, then, the putting together of various bits and pieces gathered from here and there, and integrated into some kind of whole. How are the elements selected or chosen? I don’t know. It has to be an experiment.
Which isn’t to say that all attempts at collaboration always work. A couple of years before I met Patrice, I was asked by a director to come up with an idea we would then develop into a script.
Together, he and I sat in an expensive rented room every weekday afternoon, for a month. Most of the time he seemed to have his head in his hands, while I made notes on various stories I was writing, and then put my head in my hands. What we could never do was put our heads in each other’s hands. We would go round and round, and back and forth, but rarely forwards. Occasionally we’d have an idea we liked, or break into laughter, but we remained mysterious to one another, too guarded and too respectful. I expected him to take the lead, to tell me what he wanted. Or maybe he expected me to take the lead and tell him what I wanted. The project disappeared into a miasma of misplaced politeness. After these sessions, on the tube going home, I would become claustrophobic, thinking I would go mad or start screaming. The work became like being at school, or in a hated job. I suspect the problem was that we were both trying to do the same thing, write, and were inhibiting one another.
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There was little hesitation in Patrice; he didn’t lack tenacity or appear to doubt that this was a film he wanted to make. A film never leaves you alone, even when you’re not with it, and there is always more you could be doing. A film, a project beginning in a room with a couple of people saying ‘why don’t we try so-and-so’, ultimately involves scores of people, a huge amount of money and, more importantly, an enormous store of hope and belief.
Patrice and I started to meet regularly in London. We decided early on that Intimacy was too internal, and, probably, too dark, to make a film — a conventional film, that people might watch — on its own. It could, though, function as the background to, or beginning of, another film. We needed something else ‘on top’; more stories, characters, action.
I showed him a collection of my stories in manuscript, Midnight All Day, to see whether there was anything in them he fancied. Some of the material from the story ‘Strangers When We Meet’ went into the film; parts of ‘In a Blue Time’ were utilised, and, possibly, ideas from other stories; I forget which.
During our meetings we improvised stories; we gossiped; we talked about the theatre, literature, our lives, our relationships with parents. If our age seems ‘unideological’ compared to the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s; if Britain seems pleasantly hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable.
So we talked about bodies, about death and decay; about Lucian Freud and Bacon, and the hyper-realism of some recent photography and how close you could get to the face without losing the image altogether. We talked about how many contemporary visual artists are interested in the body and its needs: the body rather than the mind or ideas; and the body on its own, in relative isolation. The history of photography and painting is, among other things, the history of how the body has been regarded.
We talked about what bodies do and what they tell us. After the twentieth century it is, it seems, a culture of disgust and of shock that we inhabit, in which humans are reduced to zero, the achievements of culture rendered meaningless — a stance often called the human condition. Yet this kind of fastidious despair can become an aesthetic pose, creating its own cultural privileges and becoming a kind of vanity.
We talked about my character Jay, about London and the speed with which it is changing into an international city, about the couple who meet without speaking. Why don’t they talk rather than touch? What is the terror of communication? If you speak to someone, what might happen? If you don’t, what other possibilities are there? To what extent are people disposable? What do we owe them or they us?
Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another’s bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity. We talked about what sex enables people to do together, and what it can stop them doing. Impersonality frees the imagination, of course; but, in the end, the imagination isn’t sufficient when it comes to other people. What we usually need is more of them and less of us. We have to let a certain amount of them in. But that can seem like the hardest, most frightening thing, particularly as you get older, particularly when you feel you have failed before.