What Patrice wanted was to capture the desperation of Jay and Claire’s lovemaking. These intense sessions were called ‘the Wednesdays’ and would punctuate the film, being different each time.
We are, of course, fascinated by what goes on in other couples’ privacy. Their bodies, thoughts and conversation are compelling. They were for us as children and continue to be so. However, I can’t help wondering whether sexuality is better written than filmed. Looking may be more erotic than reading; it is more immediate. But looking may also fail to capture the intricacies of feeling; it won’t necessarily increase our understanding. In fact all it might do is make us embarrassed or conscious that we are watching a choreographed sexual act; it might merely make us feel left out.
Perhaps this is because of the way sexuality is usually portrayed on film. Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized. It will be a sexuality that isn’t sanitized, symbolised or bland, that isn’t selling anything. The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be. Patrice will, therefore, have to make a sexually explicit film. To a certain extent the actors will have to go through what the characters experience, which will be difficult for everyone.
This will, initially, I guess, seem shocking in the cinema. Not that it won’t take long for the shock to wear off, and for the act to seem common. The kiss between the boys in My Beautiful Laundrette seemed outrageous and even liberating, to some people, in the mid-1980s; now you can hardly turn on the television without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels.
Interest in sexuality takes different forms at different times: it might be paedophilia, perhaps, or miscegenation, gerontophilia, lesbianism or fetishism. But there always seems to be some aspect of desire that is of concern. It’s the one thing that never goes away, or leaves people’s minds. Perhaps desire never stops feeling like madness.
Shocking people, however, can be a mixed blessing. It can be amusing to disturb but there can be no guarantee that you won’t be resented for the annoyance you have caused. Recently someone gave me what they considered an ‘important’ novel to read, warning me that it was ‘shocking’. The novel was as they described — it did offend and displease me — mostly because it was violent. The violence kept my attention even as it horrified me. Not that it was a good novel. I was no better off after reading it than I was before. I felt, in fact, that the violence was partly directed at the reader. I had been shaken awake by someone who had nothing to tell me.
*
The conversations between Patrice and me would fertilise the film rather than determine it. I generated ideas for him to use, alter or throw away, as he liked — trying not to become too possessive of them. Certainly, Patrice had his own interests and preoccupations which intersected in some places with mine. He is not the sort merely to find a style to fit the writer. What we tried to do was find a starting point in order to help one another.
Not long after a series of these talks, the French scriptwriter began work. Scripts started to arrive regularly at my house. They got longer and longer. It is always like this and it always seems endless, the continuous sifting of material. Patrice moved to London, looked for locations and began to see actors for the main parts. Almost all the male actors we met were terrified of having others see their bodies: there was no way they would strip for the camera. The women seemed to expect that this would be required.
As the film went into production I was less involved. Some directors, like Stephen Frears, enjoy the writer being around — it is, after all, something of the writer’s world that has to be captured. Therefore the creative work continues on the set, and during the editing. Other directors can become quite paranoid about writers, feeling them to be critical, cramping presences. After the initial meeting, the next time they want to see the writer is at the wrap party, or the première. The writers can seem to have too much authority over the material. On the other hand, it can also be traumatic for the writer to acknowledge that the director will need to change the script in order to possess it, to feel it’s his. Writer and director can become jealous of one another. Not that Patrice is like this. He has worked with many writers.
For me, the writer can have one crucial function. Directors, particularly after they have made a number of films, can become over-involved in the technique of film-making. Writers, too, of course, can become over-interested in language, say, or in certain technical problems only of interest to them. Perhaps decadence in art is like narcissism in a person — there’s no one else in mind.
But audiences, I like to believe, look ‘through’ the film-making and even the performances, to the story, to the characters’ lives and dilemmas. They require a human truth, in order to examine the violence of their own feelings. If they cannot see something of themselves in the story, they are unlikely to see anything else. It should be part of the writer’s job to remind the director of this. The writer’s detachment from the film-making can be an advantage: like the director, he will have a sense of the whole film, but can also function, at times, as a stand-in for the needs and desire of the audience.
During the filming Patrice sometimes dropped by in the evening for a drink. I could see on his face how stressful and difficult making a movie is. On top of everything else, Patrice was making a film in a foreign language, with a mostly English crew, in a city he didn’t know well.
Unsurprisingly, most film directors I know are a walking bag of maladies. They want you to know how tough their jobs are. What exactly is tough about it? I suppose it is hard wanting something to be so good; it is hard to care so much about something which could so easily be dismissed, a mere film when there are so many films. Fortunately, Patrice mostly shot what he needed and was pleased with the actors’ performances.
*
Now the almost completed film rushes at me. The camera moves quickly; the cutting is fast and the music loud, in the modern manner, but not only for effect, as in videos, but to show us the force, speed and impersonality of London today. Perhaps it takes a foreign director to make London look the way it feels. This seems like the city I live in. The method of filming represents, too, the wild fury of Jay’s mind.
At the end of the screening my mind and my feelings seem to be going in all directions at once. I try to clear my head. What do I feel? Relief, confusion, excitement, dismay, delight! Bits of criticism surface. I have to try and say something coherent. My mind feels crowded with important and irrelevant remarks.
As always Patrice is patient; he listens; we talk and argue. I am laudatory, critical and apologetic at the same time. I have ideas for cuts, changes, rearrangements. There are several things I don’t understand, that don’t seem clear. I keep saying that I have only seen the film once. He tells me that that is the number of times, if we are lucky, that the audience will see the film. More screenings, he says, and you’ll be too sympathetic; you’ll understand too much.