This was the problem.
Tintin is a European phenomenon and one that has never been particularly popular across the Atlantic. Part of the reason for this may be historical. The 1932 album, Tintin in America, is a ruthless satire on the United States, showing Americans to be vicious, corrupt and insatiable: the very first panel shows a policeman saluting a masked bandit who is walking past with a smoking gun – and no sooner has Tintin arrived in New York and climbed into a taxi than he finds himself being kidnapped by the Mob. The entire history of Native Americans is brilliantly told in five panels. Oil is discovered on a reservation. Cigar-smoking businessmen move in. Soldiers drive the crying Native American children off their land. Builders and bankers arrive. Just one day later, a policeman tells Tintin to get out of the way of a major traffic intersection. ‘Where do you think you are – the Wild West?’
There’s a total cultural disconnect too. What would the Americans make of the bizarre relationships that seem quite normal in the world of Tintin? There are his friendships with the not entirely reformed drunk, Captain Haddock, and with the stone-deaf Professor Calculus (who was given no part in the first film). There is a talking dog. There are the idiotic, one-joke detectives, Thompson and Thomson, who can only be told apart by the shapes of their moustaches. But most of all there is the inconsequentiality of the adventures. Marvel and DC comics dealt with fantastical characters but at least they sent them on recognisable journeys, providing them with origin stories, personal tragedies (the villain Magneto was revealed to be a Holocaust survivor), love affairs, psychological issues, political awakenings and all the rest of it. Very few of the Tintin albums have anything that comes close to a proper narrative shape and one of them – The Castafiore Emerald – was deliberately designed to have no story at all.
Tintin has no girlfriend. Although he is supposedly a journalist, he is hardly ever seen to work. His age is indeterminate. He could actually be a child, a grown-up Boy Scout. His dress sense and hairstyle are ridiculous. Unlike all the other characters, who are carefully delineated, he is deliberately drawn as a cipher. His face is made up of three dots for his eyes and mouth and a small letter c which is his nose. Although presumably Belgian, he has no national characteristic that might make him a foreigner abroad. He has no parents, no real home (until he moves into Marlinspike Hall with Captain Haddock), no emotions beyond a desire to travel and have adventures. How could he possibly be the hero of a $135-million Hollywood film?
I had been drawn into the world of Tintin in a rather strange way. I’d originally been invited to work on the computer game that would go out with the first film, The Secret of the Unicorn, working with the French company who had just had a huge hit with Assassin’s Creed. This isn’t something I would normally consider. I don’t play computer games. I don’t particularly like them. And writing random dialogue for nameless pirates wandering around the deck of the Unicorn didn’t particularly appeal to me even if – in an early draft – I had them all earnestly discussing my books. But the truth is that Spielberg is Spielberg and I wondered where the job might take me.
It took me to Wellington and the home of Peter Jackson. Somehow I found myself drawn into the sequel, just as the first film was nearing completion. Even more bizarrely, it turned out that The Secret of the Unicorn had problems and almost by accident I was asked to help with the shape and the narrative flow – even to add a few extra scenes. Some of these actually made the final cut. There’s a tiny moment in the film when a man runs into a lamp-post. He falls to the floor and, in the style of a Hergé illustration, a little circle of tweety-birds flutter around his head. But there’s a twist. The camera pulls back to reveal that the incident has taken place outside a pet shop and the birds are real: the owner is there with a net, trying to recapture them.
I mention this only because it was filmed by Steven Spielberg and in all the writing I have ever done over forty years, it’s probably the scene of which I’m most proud. When he showed it to me in a Los Angeles screening room, I almost leapt off the sofa in excitement. This was the man who had shot Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List. And now his filmography included forty seconds by me. In fact, when I look back at the entire Tintin experience, that’s the moment I like to remember. Nothing else was ever quite as good again.
That said, I loved working with Peter Jackson. In fact I had liked him the moment I met him at the Weta studios in Wellington. He showed me a long corridor with a stationery cupboard about halfway down. This was actually the secret entrance to his office. He pressed a button and the back wall swung open on hidden hydraulics, revealing a huge space behind. A secret door! The Tintin books are full of them. I even have one (although it’s much less elaborate) in my home in London. Jackson was such a pleasant, even-tempered, amicable man that it was easy to forget that, with The Lord of the Rings, he had written, produced and directed three of the most successful blockbusters in cinema history, making himself hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Nothing about the way he dressed or the way he lived fitted the stereotype of the movie mogul. After that first meeting we usually worked at his house, which I remember as being messy, cosy, lived-in. When it was time for lunch, his assistant would phone one of the Wellington takeaways. The food was awful.
Together we had decided to adapt one of Hergé’s double albums: The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. The story begins with a group of professors who stumble, Tutankhamun-style, on the tomb of the high priest Rascar Capac. They are searching for an ancient bracelet which has magical properties and which will in turn lead to the Inca’s lost city of gold. Or something like that. By the time I finished the screenplay, about half the story was Hergé’s and quite a bit of it was mine. I’d added one or two huge action sequences, including a chase on two steam trains that turned into a rollercoaster ride around the Andes, and a new climax that involved an entire golden mountain being melted by a primitive laser. We couldn’t use the actual ending of the book – an eclipse – because it had appeared in another very successful film (Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto) five years before.
So that was how things stood as I went into the meeting at the Soho Hotel. Peter Jackson had already told me he had notes but that was hardly surprising. A screenplay for a film of this size might pass through twenty or thirty drafts before it was ready for production, and I would almost certainly be fired somewhere along the way. I was quite prepared for that. I just hoped I wouldn’t be dropped immediately. It would be nice if they let me have two or three attempts to get the script right. At this stage, incidentally, The Secret of the Unicorn hadn’t been released. I had seen it and I thought it was extraordinary. Spielberg had used a technique called motion capture, which had magically transformed the actors Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis into Tintin and Haddock. Both of them were lined up for the sequel.
I arrived at the Soho Hotel at ten o’clock, as I had been instructed, and I was shown into a room on the first floor with a large conference table, three glasses and a bottle of Fiji mineral water. Peter Jackson arrived a few minutes later. He was as genial as ever, with the crumpled look of someone who had just flown across the world. He had lost a lot of weight and his clothes were hanging off him. We talked about London, the weather, recent movies … anything except the script. Then the door opened and Spielberg came in. He tended to wear more or less the same clothes: a leather jacket, jeans, trainers, a baseball cap. His glasses and beard made him instantly recognisable. As always, I had to remind myself that this was really happening, that I was sitting in the same room as him. He was someone I had wanted to meet pretty much all my life.
Spielberg got straight to the point. I have never come across anyone so focused on film-making and storytelling. In the short time that I had known him he’d never asked me a personal question and it often struck me that he had no interest in me outside what I had put on the page. I had been wondering where he would begin. Did he like my way into the narrative? Did the characters work? Were the action sequences
in the right place? Were my jokes funny? I always dread the moment when a director opens a script of mine. The first words that come out of his – or her – mouth may change the next year of my life.
‘You’ve chosen the wrong book,’ he said.
It was impossible. Peter and I had discussed which books we were going to adapt when we were in Wellington. I had spent three months on this draft. It was the last thing I had expected him to say.
‘I’m sorry?’ I’m not sure those were the exact words I used.
‘The Seven Crystal Balls. Prisoners of the Sun. Those are the wrong books …’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to do them.’
I turned to Peter. He nodded. ‘OK.’
And that, actually, was it. It didn’t matter that Peter Jackson was directing and Spielberg was producing. They both had copies of my script but we weren’t going to discuss it at all: not the plot, the characters, the action, the jokes. There was nothing to talk about.
‘We can do Prisoners of the Sun as the third film,’ Peter said, brushing it aside with a casual wave of his hand. ‘Which book do you think Anthony should start working on for number two?’
Anthony! That was me. I wasn’t going to be fired.
But before Spielberg could answer, the door opened again and, to my shock and utter dismay, Hawthorne walked in. As always he was in his suit and white shirt but this time he’d also put on a black tie.
For the funeral.
He didn’t seem to have any idea what sort of meeting he’d just interrupted – or how important it was to me. He wandered in as if he had been invited and when he saw me, he smiled as if he hadn’t expected me to be there. ‘Tony,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
‘I’m busy,’ I said, feeling the blood rush to my face.
‘I know. I can see that, mate. But you must have forgotten. The funeral!’
‘I told you. I can’t come to the funeral.’
‘Who’s died?’ Peter Jackson asked.
I glanced at him. He looked genuinely concerned. On the other side of the table, Spielberg was sitting very straight, a little annoyed. I could imagine that he belonged to a world where nobody would walk in unless they were expected and only if they were being escorted by an assistant. Apart from anything else, there was his security to consider.
‘It’s nobody,’ I said. I still couldn’t quite believe Hawthorne had come here. Was he deliberately trying to embarrass me? ‘I told you,’ I said quietly. ‘I really can’t come.’
‘But you have to. It’s important.’
‘Who are you?’ Spielberg asked.
Hawthorne pretended to notice him for the first time. ‘I’m Hawthorne,’ he said. ‘I’m with the police.’
‘You’re a police officer?’
‘No. He’s a consultant,’ I cut in. ‘He’s helping the police with an investigation.’
‘A murder,’ Hawthorne explained, helpfully, once again sitting on that first vowel to make the word somehow more violent than it already was. He was looking at Spielberg, only now recognising him. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
‘I’m Steven Spielberg.’
‘Are you in films?’
I wanted to weep.
‘That’s right. I make films …’
‘This is Steven Spielberg and this is Peter Jackson.’ I don’t know why I said that. Part of me was trying to take back control. Perhaps I was hoping I could overawe Hawthorne and get him out of the room.
‘Peter Jackson!’ Hawthorne’s face brightened. ‘You did those three films … The Lord of the Rings!’
‘That’s right.’ Jackson was relaxed. ‘Did you see them?’
‘I watched them on DVD with my son. He thought they were great.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The first one, anyway. He wasn’t too sure about the second. What was it called …?’
‘The Two Towers.’ Peter was still smiling, even if it was a smile that had slightly frozen in place.
‘We didn’t much like those trees. The talking trees. We thought they were stupid.’
‘You mean … the Ents.’
‘Whatever. And Gandalf. I thought he was dead and I was a bit surprised when he turned up again.’ Hawthorne thought for a moment and I waited with a sense of mounting dread for what was going to come next. ‘The actor who played him, Ian McEwan, he was a bit over the top.’
‘Sir Ian McKellen. He was nominated for an Oscar.’
‘That may be the case. But did he win it?’
‘Mr Hawthorne is a special consultant for Scotland Yard,’ I cut in. ‘I’ve been commissioned to write a book about his latest case …’
‘It’s called “Hawthorne Investigates”,’ Hawthorne said.
Spielberg considered. ‘I like that title,’ he said.
‘It’s good,’ Jackson agreed.
Hawthorne glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got the funeral at eleven o’clock,’ he explained.
‘And I’ve already said, I can’t be there.’
‘You have to be there, Tony. I mean, everyone who ever knew Diana Cowper is going to attend. It’s an opportunity to see them all interacting. You could say it’s a bit like having a read-through before a film. You wouldn’t want to miss that, would you!’
‘I explained—’
‘Diana Cowper,’ Spielberg said. ‘Isn’t that Damian Cowper’s mother?’
‘That’s her. She was strangled. In her own house.’
‘I heard.’ It had often struck me that Spielberg, the man who had shot the bloodiest opening in cinema history with Saving Private Ryan and who had recreated Nazi atrocities in Schindler’s List, didn’t actually like talking about violence. I could have sworn he’d gone a little pale once when I was outlining an idea I’d had for Tintin. Now he turned to Peter. ‘I met Damian Cowper last month. He came in for a chat about War Horse.’
‘Poor kid,’ Peter Jackson said. ‘That’s a horrible thing to happen.’
‘I agree.’ Both Spielberg and Jackson were looking at me as if I had known Damian Cowper all my life and not attending his mother’s funeral would be the meanest thing I could possibly do. Meanwhile, Hawthorne was sitting there like some passing angel who’d wafted in to appeal to my better conscience.
‘I really think you should go, Anthony,’ Spielberg said.
‘But it’s just a book,’ I assured them. ‘To be honest, I’m having second thoughts about writing it. This film is much more important to me.’
‘Well, we don’t really have much to talk about where the second movie is concerned,’ Peter said. ‘Maybe we all need to take a rain check and rethink where we are in a couple of weeks.’
‘We can do a conference call,’ Spielberg said.
We’d been talking about Tintin for less than two minutes. My script had been thrown out in its entirety. And before I could start coming up with ideas for The Calculus Affair or Destination Moon or even Flight 714 to Sydney (spaceships … Spielberg liked spaceships, didn’t he?) I was being thrown out. It wasn’t fair. I was in a meeting with the two greatest film-makers in the world. I was meant to be writing a film for them. And yet I was being dragged out to the funeral of someone I hadn’t even met.
Hawthorne got to his feet. It tells you something about my state of mind that I hadn’t even noticed when he’d sat down. ‘Very nice to meet you,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ Spielberg said. ‘Do please pass on my condolences to Damian.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘And don’t worry, Anthony. We’ll give your agent a call.’
They never did call my agent. In fact I never saw either of them again and my only consolation as I sit here now is that so far there has been no new Tintin film. The Secret of the Unicorn got rave reviews and made $375 million worldwide but the response in America was less enthusiastic. Maybe that’s dissuaded them from continuing with the sequel. Or maybe they’re working on it now. Without me.
‘They seemed very nice,’ Ha
wthorne said, as he walked down the corridor.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ I exploded. ‘I told you I didn’t want to come to the funeral. Why did you come here? How did you even know where I was?’
‘I rang your assistant.’
‘And she told you?’
‘Listen.’ Hawthorne was trying to calm me down. ‘You don’t want to do Tintin. It’s for children. I thought you were leaving all that stuff behind you.’
‘It’s being produced by Steven Spielberg!’ I exclaimed.
‘Well, maybe he’ll make a film of your new book. A murder story! He knows Damian Cowper.’ We pushed through the main doors of the hotel and went out into the street. ‘Who do you think will play me?’
Eleven
The Funeral
I know Brompton Cemetery well. When I was in my twenties, I had a room in a flat just five minutes away and on a hot summer afternoon I’d wander in and write there. It was somewhere quiet, away from the dust and the traffic, a world of its own. In fact it’s one of the most impressive cemeteries in London – a member of the so-called ‘magnificent seven’ – with a striking array of Gothic mausoleums and colonnades peopled by stone angels and saints, all of them constructed by the Victorians partly to celebrate death but also to keep it in its place. There’s a main avenue that runs in a straight line all the way from one end to the other and walking there on a sunny day I could easily imagine myself in ancient Rome. I would find a bench and sit there with my notebooks, watching the squirrels and the occasional fox and, on a Saturday afternoon, listening to the distant clamour of the crowd at Stamford Bridge football club on the other side of the trees. It’s strange how different locations around London have played such a large part in my work. The River Thames is one of them. Brompton Cemetery is most certainly another.