For me, film is more omnivorous. Hermann Hesse talked about this— about how a writer is influenced. He said there are various stages of influence. Kind of like chakras. The lowest, least noble method of influence is, say, reading Hemingway and then deciding to write like Hemingway. This is natural, it's something we all go through, but you have to go beyond this to higher and higher levels until you reach the point where you're influenced by reading something like the equivalent of the back of cereal boxes. Somehow just purely mundane or accidental things have such magic to them that they influence you and make you see things.
I tend to think of film in that way. When I'm working on a film I try to open a certain part of my brain and ask myself, What's going on in the world?
O: Those humble sounds you spoke about earlier …
M: And sometimes not so humble. I remember very clearly the moment I got one idea for a sound in Apocalypse Now. It was after the filming, at a party up at Francis's house—I think it was Marty Sheen's birthday. He was a baseball fan, and Francis had made Marty think he was going to miss a baseball game by delaying the party. Then at just the right moment he revealed that there was a helicopter waiting to fly Marty to Candlestick Park to catch the game.
We were all walking down to say good-bye as the waiting helicopter started its engine up. It went whooh whooh whooh, a kind of turbine sound, as it began to whirl up. I immediately saw the existing cut in the film, from the line “Charlie don't surf” to all the helicopters on the beach, with their rotors. It had been, up to that point, “Charlie don't surf”—then bang!—suddenly the film cut to whirling helicopters and there was a lot of noise. But I thought, It would be interesting to introduce this turbine sound about five seconds earlier, so while you're watching the scene on the beach at night, you start to hear an inexplicable sound that gets louder and louder and louder, until, when it's quite loud, Robert Duvall says, “Charlie don't surf,” and then it cuts to the mass of helicopters. You're not quite aware of what the sound is or where it's coming from until the cut happens, and then you realize, if you think about it at all, Oh, that's what it was.
O: When I was working on The English Patient one thing I did not want to read during research was great desert writers. I intentionally didn't read Thessiger or Doughty or Lawrence. I was mostly reading essays full of data about the surface of the earth at the Royal Geographical Society. Articles discussing sand dune formations, the depth of certain wells that could be relied upon during a trek. As in your situation, this felt more like unedited material, unfictionalized data.
M: Some filmmakers, when they're at home, love to have many television monitors going, showing films all the time, so their home is peopled by classic films, part of the atmosphere, to foment the creative activity. To me, that's an impossible way of living—by my own lights, it's ultimately destructive of the creative process. Things become too self-referential—look at what's happened to modern painting or modern music in the twentieth century. All new compositions refer to previous compositions in arcane ways. You build an incredible sand castle, a house of cards with references within references within references. You can see it happening now with films, and I don't know if it's such a good thing. It's fun, occasionally, but not as a steady diet.
Eliot's The Waste Land is like that. James Joyce is like that. To really get them you have to know all this stuff. Well, those in particular are wonderful works of literature, but ultimately, for the health of the creative process, I wonder if it's been a good path to follow….
If you go very deep, however, it's another matter. That's why the great composers of the nineteenth century kept going back to folk music, to roots and fragments of things that had deep meaning for them and for the society in which they lived. Even if that meaning wasn't overt, it gave the music a life form. I would much rather find in film the equivalent of that than make super-ficial reference to films that are only a few years old.
Shadows on the sand: on location in the dunes of Tunisia during the filming of The English Patient.
O: As a writer, it's easier for me to watch film without that element of critical judgement in my head—I still see it as magic. Whereas if I'm working intensely on a book I probably would not be reading a really good novelist. I could read a good writer from another century, but not a contemporary. I'd probably read a terrific genre novel like Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, or nonfiction. (I was told recently that Yeats when writing poetry would read the prose of John Milton in order to prime himself!) I can learn from film especially because it is notpart of my world. Though I'm more likely to be influenced by the craft in a film's editing than in a film's content. I wonder if you, similarly, are influenced by the other arts? Are you influenced by novels or music—or by science?
M: Yes. They're there as spark points. They're part of the phenomena of life. I try to imbue all aspects of reality with that magic. Sometimes I read intention into purely accidental things. That's been part of my approach to life for as long as I can remember.
When I'm editing a film I'm always browsing radio stations as I drive to work, and suddenly I'll hear something in the music that connects with an image in the film. I might literally then find that piece of music, and put it in the film and see what happens.
O: If you had to choose, say, ten films that have altered editing and sound in some way, what would they be? This is one of those terrible lists! I suppose Mand King Kong would be on your list. But what films do you think have influenced and altered the direction, or shown further possibilities?
M: I'll try to think. My mind doesn't really work that way. With some effort I can talk about the history of influences, in an impersonal way. But on a personal level, it's the back of the cereal box again….
O: Stuff outside the genre.
M: Yes. Or just things that to an outsider would look like nothing. I remember the beginning of Seconds—a film by John Frankenheimer. I saw it at school, when I was a film student. There was a shot at the beginning—a handheld shot going down into the main floor of Grand Central Terminal, a very wide shot, a hidden-camera kind of thing.
Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's M, 1931, a film that influenced sound and editing.
This was an ordinary monophonic film of the time, nothing technically spectacular about it, but the sound of the air—just the sound of a vast space filled with people—accompanying that shot made me suddenly realize how much can be achieved with the right atmosphere of sound. It told me all I needed to know about the power of atmospheric sound. There was also a great drill sound at the very end—the slightly liquid sound of a drill going into a skull—after the image had cut to black.
Seconds was not an influential film, historically. And I don't know that anyone looking at it today would be struck by what I'm talking about. But I was primed to receive the information it was sending me.
I also must have seen Touch of Evil around that time. I don't remember a thunderbolt moment, like I remember with Seconds, but clearly Welles's use of source music and sonic perspectives must have registered, must have deposited a layer of rich silt somewhere in my mental geology.
O: By the way, the other day I was watching John Ford's Stagecoach—
M: I haven't seen it since the mid-sixties.
O: You should look at it again in relation to the idea of source music. Late in the film, when John Wayne is led by the woman, Dallas, into the bordello area of the town, they're walking along a path and different music comes from each of the bordellos as they pass them. It's rather similar to the use of street music in Touch of Evil. I remember being told that Welles watched Stagecoach three times before shooting Citizen Kane, but the influence seems more evident in Touch of Evil.
I think we tend not to be influenced by the major works, the Big Waves. No writer is really influenced by Moby-Dick. I remember reading a review of a biography of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. There was a description of how, when they were living in Paris, they didn't like sharing the elevator with other tenants—it mea
nt they would have to wait for it—so Zelda tied a scarf to the elevator door, so that it would remain on the fourth floor all the time. No one else could get it. There was something about the panache of that and the spoiled behaviour of it that I kept thinking about when I was writing my memoir Running in the Family. My book took place at the other end of the world. But this minor fragment of a biography fed the tone of my book.
M: There's an inverted version of that: the idea of the staircase that you wrote about in your literary magazine, Brick.
O: Yes. As a child in Sri Lanka, I knew only one house that had a staircase— most of the houses were bungalows. So whenever I came across a staircase in a book of fiction, that childhood recollection of a staircase would get superimposed onto the scene from The Count of Monte Cristo, or whatever book I was reading.
M: Yes! You imagine that very staircase, even though it's completely wrong on one level—but that's the staircase you imagine. I expect that a lot of creativity comes out of those kinds of juxtapositions. The improbable juxtaposition of The Count of Monte Cristo and that Sri Lankan staircase is especially rich. And if Dumas could peer into your head and see the staircase that you were imagining, he would be horrified! That's not what he meant at all! But in fact it really is very rich.
There's a wonderful quotation from Goethe—he must have been frustrated at some point about the difficulty of communication. He said, “Utterly futile to try to change, by writing, someone's fixed inclination. You will only succeed in confirming him in his opinion, or, if he has none, drenching him in yours.”
O: There's a poet in Vancouver who said, “I'll see it when I believe it!”
M: Exactly. I'm sure Goethe didn't think that way most of the time, otherwise he wouldn't have kept on writing. He was talking in black-and-white terms: Agree with me or not! The richest zone of communication is in the grey area, around things like your staircase, where the reader is somewhat receptive to what the author writes but also brings along his own images, and ideas, which in a creative way do violence to the author's vision and ideas. A synergy results from what the writer presents and what the reader brings. That communication, initially present in neither the sender or the receiver, is greater than the message of the writer alone or the thoughts of the reader alone.
It's similar to what happens with human sight. Your left eye sees one thing and your right sees something else, a slightly different perspective. They're so close and yet different enough that when the mind tries to see both simultaneously, to resolve their contradictions, the only way it can do so is to create a third concept, an arena in which both perspectives can exist: three-dimensional space. This “space” doesn't exist in either of the images—each eye alone sees a flat, two-dimensional view of the world—but space, as we perceive it, is created in the mind's attempt to resolve the different images it is receiving from the left and the right eye.
NEGATIVE TWENTY QUESTIONS
M: There's a great game—I forget whether we've talked about it—Negative Twenty Questions?
O: No, we haven't talked about it.
M: It was invented by John Wheeler, a quantum physicist who was a young graduate student of Niels Bohr's in the 1930s. Wheeler is the man who invented the term “black hole.” He's an extremely articulate proponent of the best of twentieth-century physics. Still alive, and I believe still teaching, writing.
Anyway, he thought up a parlour game that reflects the way the world is constructed at the quantum level. It involves, say, four people: Michael, Anthony, Walter, and Aggie. From the point of view of one of those people, Michael, the game that's being played is the normal Twenty Questions— Ordinary Twenty Questions, I guess you'd call it. So Michael leaves the room, under the illusion that the other three players are going to look around and collectively decide on the chosen object to be guessed by him—say, the alarm clock. Michael expects that when they've made their decision they will ask him to come back in and try to guess the object in fewer than twenty questions.
Under normal circumstances, the game is a mixture of perspicacity and luck: No, it's not bigger than a breadbox. No, you can't eat it…. Those kinds of things.
But in Wheeler's version of the game, when Michael leaves the room, the three remaining players don't communicate with one another at all. Instead, each of them silently decides on an object. Then they call Michael back in.
So there's a disparity between what Michael believes and what the underlying truth is: Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking. The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun comes in.
Michael asks Walter: Is the object bigger than a breadbox? Walter—who has picked the alarm clock—says, No. Now, Anthony has chosen the sofa, which is bigger than a breadbox. And since Michael is going to ask him the next question, Anthony must quickly look around the room and come up with something else—a coffee cup!—which is smaller than a breadbox. So when Michael asks Anthony, If I emptied out my pockets could I put their contents in this object? Anthony says, Yes.
Now Aggie's choice may have been the small pumpkin carved for Halloween, which could also contain Michael's keys and coins, so when Michael says, Is it edible? Aggie says, Yes. That's a problem for Walter and Anthony, who have chosen inedible objects: they now have to change their selection to something edible, hollow, and smaller than a breadbox.
So a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens. To end successfully, the game must produce, in fewer than twenty questions, an object that satisfies all of the logical requirements: smaller than a breadbox, edible, hollow, et cetera. Two things can happen: Success—this vortex can give birth to an answer that will seem to be inevitable in retrospect: Of course! It's the ——! And the game ends with Michael still believing he has just played Ordinary Twenty Questions. In fact, no one chose the —— to start with, and Anthony, Walter, and Aggie have been sweating it out, doing these hidden mental gymnastics, always one step ahead of failure.
Which is the other possible result: Failure—the game can break down catastrophically. By question 15, let's say, the questions asked have generated logical requirements so complex that nothing in the room can satisfy them. And when Michael asks Anthony the sixteenth question, Anthony breaks down and has to confess that he doesn't know, and Michael is finally let in on the secret: The game was Negative Twenty Questions all along. Wheeler suggests that the nature of perception and reality, at the quantum level, and perhaps above, is somehow similar to this game.
When I read about this, it reminded me acutely of filmmaking. There is an agreed-upon game, which is the screenplay, but in the process of making the film, there are so many variables that everyone has a slightly different interpretation of the screenplay. The cameraman develops an opinion, then is told that Clark Gable has been cast in that part. He thinks, Gable? Huh, I didn't think it would be Gable. If it's Gable, I'm going to have to replan. Then the art director does something to the set, and the actor says, This is my apartment? All right, if this is my apartment, then I'm a slightly different person from who I thought I was: I will change my performance. The camera operator following him thinks, Why is he doing that? Oh, it's because … All right, I'll have to widen out because he's doing these unpredictable things. And then the editor does something unexpected with those images and this gives the director an idea about the script, so he changes a line. And so the costumer sees that and decides the actor can't wear dungarees. And so it goes, with everyone continuously modifying their preconceptions. A film can succeed in the end, spiralling in on itself to a final result that looks as if it had been predicted long in advance in every detail. But in fact it grew out of a mad scramble as everyone involved took advantage of all the various decisions everyone else had been making.
On the other hand, the film can break down, too. Some inconsistency— emotional or logical—can pose a question that nothing in the “room”—that is to say, the film—can answer. The most obvious of these failures is the miscasting of a l
ead character: his presence in the film poses a question that's inconsistent with everything else. But films can ultimately fail for much more subtle reasons—death by a thousand cuts: the interference of the studio, bad weather, what the grip had for breakfast that crucial morning, the fact that the producer is going through a divorce, et cetera. All these things are in complex ways encoded into the body of the film. Sometimes for good, and the film is enriched by the process. Sometimes not: then it's aborted, abandoned during production; or stillborn, finished but never released; or released, fatally handicapped, to dismal reviews and no business.
This comparison of filmmaking and Wheeler's game goes some distance, I think, to answering the perennial question: What were they thinking when they made that film? How did anyone ever think that could work?
Nobody sets out to make an unreleasable film. But the game of the film can pose questions that its creators finally can't answer, and the film falls apart as a result.
O: I saw it late in the editing stage of The English Patient. The sequence—which had already been filmed—in which the characters respond to the news of Hiroshima was not going to work. And you and Anthony had to scramble and look for what could be an alarm clock instead of the breadbox.
M: Right. That's a classic example. The key, the little spark that turned into the solution, was something my assistant, Edie Bleiman, said: Well, a bomb is a bomb. She realized the crisis of Hiroshima, which is so important at the end of your novel, could be replaced by the crisis of the bomb that kills Hardy, which sends Kip, at the death of his friend, into a state of depression that even his love for Hana cannot rouse him from—this similar, more personal crisis could serve as the template.
The film was so much about those five individual people: the Patient, Hana, Kip, Katharine, Caravaggio—that to suddenly open it up near the end and ask the audience to imagine the death of hundreds of thousands of unknown people … It was too abstract. So the bomb of Hiroshima became the bomb that killed Hardy, someone you knew. Everything else reorganized itself from that new starting point.