Ian McEwan / Interview / Patrick McGrath

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

by Patrick McGrath

Bomb 22

Fall 1990

Ian McEwan is the author of two story collections, a number of television plays and screenplays, a libretto, and four novels: The Cement Garden; The Comfort of Strangers; The Child in Time; and, most recently, The Innocent (Doubleday, May 1990), a brilliant, vividly macabre book built around two central images: a tunnel being dug under Cold War Berlin, its function to permit the British and Americans to eavesdrop on their Russian “allies”; and a pair of extremely heavy suitcases. These are schlepped round the city for what seems an interminable length of time by a mild-mannered Englishman called Leonard; his discomfiture largely results from the fact that the suitcases contain the dismembered corpse of an oaf called Otto. I talked to Ian McEwan about his new book in the lobby of the Berkshire Place. A harpist plucked softly in the background.

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Patrick McGrath Cold War Berlin is a plausible and familiar setting for an espionage novel, but at the same time it’s a zoned, sectored, occupied city, littered with ruins and haunted by memories of violence. Was this the attraction of Berlin as a setting?

Ian McEwan Not really. The attraction originally was to Berlin in the present. I was there in 1987, when I had already decided to write a novel set in the Cold War, but at that time I hadn’t any clear idea of the exact period. What attracted me then was the reification of the Cold War in terms of the Wall, and the absurdity of it, the banality of it, the fact that everybody steered their lives around it quite efficiently, and yet there were the dogs, the raked sand, the guns—the most incredible investment of technology, deadly technology, to prevent people from simply crossing from one street to the other. It wasn’t until much later that I chose the period, the mid-’50s, and that came after I saw a reference in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher to the tunnel. The idea was then lodged in my mind that I could write a novel set in the Cold War which would conclude with the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and that this would be mirrored in some personal reconciliation.

 

Harlem - the new theme park

By Gary Younge

This article is more than 20 years old

'The Negro capital of the world' has long been associated with urban deprivation and cultural richness. Now, as the big corporations move in, Gary Younge asks if it is in danger of loosing its soul

Gary Younge

Saturday 14 October 2000

This article is more than 20 years old

O n Saturday night, Johnny's Recovery Room, a down-at-heel bar on Harlem's main drag, had been marinating in Motown and malt whisky. A woman who had been staring into space for at least half an hour had fallen off her perch on a bar stool only minutes after Gloria Gaynor had finished I Will Survive. She landed with a thud, remained there for a short while before being picked up and offered another drink. Minutes later an equally drunk man had danced out to Midnight Train To Georgia and cheers from the bar.

But now, on 125th Street in the cold light of Sunday morning, the last partygoers are outnumbered by churchgoers. Saints and sinners pass each other as though in different worlds. The faithful, suited, booted and ready to pray, walk purposefully clutching Bibles in small suitcases, while the feckless, in last night's gladrags, sit on stoops holding cans of beer and bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags, watching the coaches go by.

Large, plush, air conditioned vehicles are cruising Upper Manhattan with eager cargoes of tourists. Japanese, Germans, Koreans, British and even some Americans are now regular features in Harlem's Sunday landscape and cast a curious, slightly nervous, eye over the drunks who cast an ambivalent, slightly mocking, eye back. Later the tourists head for one of a select group of churches - to watch rather than worship - and then on to Sylvia's for soul food and a story to tell the folks back home.

"Harlem wears to the casual observer a casual face," wrote James Baldwin, who was born there. "No one remarks that - considering the history of black men and women and the legends that have sprung up about them, to say nothing of the ever-present policemen, wary on the street corners - the face is, indeed, somewhat excessively casual and may not be as open or as careless as it seems."

His essay, Harlem Ghetto, was written in 1948 but is as pertinent now as it has ever been. For surrounding the church-day nonchalance are signs of fundamental change. Some, like the Gap billboard, the Starbucks coffee shop and the scaffolding around the Abyssinian Baptist church are comparatively subtle. Others, like the Harlem USA shopping mall, the new buildings and the huge HMV store, are not. All are indications of the economic development pouring into the area over the past five years, a combination of government money and corporate investment that is changing the texture of life here not just commercially but culturally.

To some this marks the second Harlem renaissance, mirroring the area's heyday early in the last century, when it was home to a new wave of African-American literature, art and music that exuded confidence and originality. It presents another opportunity to emerge from a public perception of urban decay and deprivation. "We are only minutes away from some of the most expensive real estate in the world, yet there are still buildings in Harlem that remain vacant," says Darren Walker, chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a non-profit organisation, affiliated to Harlem's biggest church. "Rebuilding and filling them makes us a more attractive neighbourhood." To others the change represents a threat to spiritual integrity - gentrification that will drive out the poor and destroy all that has made Harlem aesthetically distinctive. "It's a corporate takeover," says Leon Griffith, who works in Record Shack, a music shop. "It's all about money. It has always been a place of hustle and now they just want us to look like downtown Manhattan."

What is at stake is far more than the fate of a small patch of real estate: it is the historical legacy that earned Harlem the title of the "Negro capital of the world", the urban backdrop for great dramas of the American 20th century; where Malcolm X was assassinated, Marcus Garvey marched, reds and blacks rioted, and everyone from Cab Calloway to James Brown performed. This is the place that inspired some of America's finest cultural moments, driving Langston Hughes to poetry, Zora Neale Hurston to prose, and Sarah Vaughan to song

Harlem is no stranger to change. It was settled by Dutch immigrants in 1658, and by the 19th century had become a wealthy suburb for European immigrants, particularly the Irish, Italians and Jews. But as African-Americans left the rural poverty and racial oppression of the South and headed north in search of opportunity, a few mostly Jewish and black estate agents with empty buildings and an eye for a profit awaited them. Ralph Ellison's protagonist took that journey in his landmark novel, Invisible Man. In a few years just before the first world war, the racial complexion of Harlem was transformed.

The impact on Harlem was huge, and the influence of black politics no less so. The move from country to city and field to factory, at a time of great social turmoil around the globe, inspired both activism and ideology. Revolutions in Ireland, Russia and Germany, and the radicalising effect of the war, forged a new consciousness whose often contradictory strands - internationalism, communism, anti-racism, pan-Africanism - were woven together.

"Hitherto it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than experience," wrote Alain Locke, a professor of philosophy at the historically black university of Howard in Washington DC. "The chief bond ... has been that of a condition in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self determination."

This change in ideas and the activism it engendered gave rise to the "New Negro" - by self-definition an urban, more radical northern relative of a down-trodden southern cousin. Poverty and discrimination may still have been widespread, but now America's black urban population felt politically and culturally equipped to deal with it differently.

The mood was articulated by poet Langston Hughes in 1926: "We younger Negro artists ... intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too ... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves." The birthplace of this political and temporal construct, said Locke in 1925, was Harlem, which "had the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia."

This burgeoning spirit of self-assurance and defiance found its expression in the Harlem Renaissance. Although the term is often used, and universally recognised, its definition has always been elusive. Its period roughly spans from the end of the first world war to the beginning of the depression. This was the era that saw the emergence of some of the greatest names in black American letters.

Jean Toomer's Cane, a volume of poems and novella, marked the beginning of the literary renaissance. He had been raised in Louisiana and later abandoned writing for mysticism. Zora Neale Hurston, a flamboyant, spirited young woman from Florida, challenged the sexism and class-snobbery of the renaissance, who did not publish her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. until the late 1930s. She ended her life in poverty, dying in a Floridan welfare home, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, has since called her "one of the greatest writers of our age". Langston Hughes, "poet laureate of the renaissance", also wrote short stories and novels but made his greatest impact with a book of verse, The Weary Blues. Claude McKay, Jamaican-born, racially-militant, politically radical wrote Home To Harlem, the first black novel on the bestseller lists. He was the enfant terrible of the renaissance: he converted to Catholicism late in life and moved to Chicago to work in a school.

There were renaissance artworks, too: the sculpture of Meta Warwick Fuller, the paintings of Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden and William Johnson; the documentary photography of James Van Der Zee and the photographic portraits of Carl van Vechten.

The renaissance was literary and artistic, but it was backed by the impressive soundtrack of the golden age of jazz. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and James P Johnson were in their prime, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson were innovating, applying orchestral discipline to their creativity. The jazz age coincided with the renaissance, but it was not part of it. Artists rarely passed up a chance to play in Harlem, but their geographical axis was further south and west, their following more working class.

Even though the "New Negros" of the renaissance, led by writers and artists, proudly asserted their intellectual independence, they were mostly financially reliant on white patrons. Their talents had to catch the attention of white editors and publishers who introduced the work to the mainstream in books or literary magazines. Beyond that, Harlem was in vogue. Black people lived there, but fashionable white people longed to be seen there, enjoying the success vicariously.

The geographical proximity of all these black stars gave social and artistic momentum to their work. "In those days there were a great many parties in Harlem to which various members of the New Negro group were invited," wrote Hughes in his autobiography, The Big Sea. "These parties, when given by important Harlemites were reported in full in the society pages of the Harlem press."

It was a movement and a moment; a literary, artistic and musical expression rooted in a time and place which, because of the nature of that time and that place, flitted between the political and the cultural, the interests of the elite and the needs of the many. "Nothing will do more to change the mental attitude and raise [the Negro's] status," claimed essayist James Weldon Johnson, "than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art."

The renaissance ended when Wall Street crashed, and its many white patrons withdrew. "That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem," wrote Hughes. "The white people had much less money to spend on themselves, and practically none to spend on Negroes, for the depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall."

The renaissance stalled, and left behind the human, geographical and economic space that had given the renaissance its name. In the dire days of the 1930s, Harlem descended into urban decay and cultural desolation. As early as 1930, in a prophetical essay, Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson foresaw inevitable change of a nature that still resonates today. "Will the Negroes of Harlem be able to hold it? Residents of Manhattan, regardless of race, have been driven out when they lay in the path of business and greatly increased land values. Harlem lies in the direction that path must take; so there is little probability that Negroes will always hold it as a residential section."

At the corner of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Boulevards there is a huge Disney store on one side and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the other. The Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated, the Cotton Club, where jazz heroes made their name, and the Harlem Opera House, have all been knocked down. A few blocks up you can see the brick imprint of what was the Teresa hotel, to which Fidel Castro famously decamped during a UN general assembly in 1960, claiming that he was being mistreated in Manhattan, and had more solidarity with the people of Harlem.

The Apollo theatre, which once hosted Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin, still stands, although control of it has now been turned over to Time Warner. James Brown made his name on amateur night there, and that night's blend of ruthlessness and playfulness - booing unpopular acts off stage to the accompaniment of a clown-like executioner - continues. So do the step shows and religiously-inspired soul performances. But most of those in the expensive seats are Japanese, Korean and German tourists, not local African-Americans.

"It's like we don't exist any more and those of us who do exist are constantly looking for money to survive," says Dr Barbara Ann Teer, founder of the National Black Theatre. "We need to develop an understanding of what we have begun to call culturenomics. We need to create the kind of cultural expressions that we can sustain here economically. We have to develop a support system of our own."

Harlem is still poor. It maintained a rich cultural life and varied economic existence through the 1950s and early 1960s, though the emergence of a monied black middle class meant that resources and talent left the area, which then become a byword for urban decay and crime. Tours have become popular, but tourism has yet to take off. Since the Teresa shut it no longer has a hotel, although there are plans to build one. The crime rate has plummeted, but unemployment remains high at 18%, four times the national average.

Harlem will receive almost a billion dollars in public and private funds over the next four years. But Leon Griffith says the money that is coming in goes out again just as fast. Record Shack, which has become a local institution since it started in the 1960s, has been struggling after an HMV opened around the corner. "They may bring jobs to the area, but at the same time they are destroying our businesses," he says. "We can't compete with HMV. I live in Harlem. So the money that used to stay in the community is now leaving it and we are losing control."

According to the president of the 125th Street business improvement district, Barbara Askins, only 35 to 40% of retail businesses on the main drag are minority-owned. As more corporate fast-food outlets open, small joints whose names are a taste of Harlem life - "No Pork on my fork" and "Nuff Niceness" - will be threatened. Rents are rising; many are moving to the Bronx and Queens. Barbara Ann Teer says: "They are bringing in the corporations and they are employing the workers. But they are not paying the workers enough to live in Harlem."

The coach tourists are received by some - but not all - with mixed bewilderment and contempt. "Sometimes tourism here is handled like it's a jungle safari," says Lloyd Williams, president and CEO of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce: "Like they're in the wild kingdom, looking at the animals running around."

In this atmosphere only the very strong, very big, or very canny survive. Sylvia's soul food cafe has opened Also Sylvia's next door, to cater for the tourist trade. Its 38th anniversary was sponsored by Rupert Murdoch's local television franchise, Fox Five. ADC, the non-profit wing of the Abyssinian Baptist church, employs a small army of estate agents, financiers, developers and lawyers. They have helped build a supermarket, day care centre and two schools, but are currently working on a deal with Gap and a chain-restaurant, the International House of Pancakes.

"One of our goals is to ensure longterm sustainability and for this we need to have a balance," says Walker, of the ADC, who interrupts our conversation for an urgent call with his broker. "There is enough opportunity to protect the interests of poor people and the rights of the indigenous community to remain here while allowing for some people to move in. There were lawyers, maids, doctors, bus drivers in the past, and we are striving to make it socio-economically diverse."

True, much of Harlem's past has been mythologised. The first renaissance may have been culturally black-led, but it was "white-owned" economically, which caused tension, particularly between Hurston and her patron, who wanted her to concentrate on the exotic rather than the anthropological. There was always a significant white presence in the renaissance period, and it was always greeted with a degree of ambivalence. In 1927, author Rudolph Fisher wrote in an essay, The Caucasian Storms Harlem: "It may be a season's whim, then, this sudden contagious interest in everything Negro. If so, when I go into a familiar cabaret, or the place where a familiar cabaret used to be, and find it transformed and relatively colorless, I may be observing just one form that season's whim has taken."

The issue now is neither should Harlem be economically developed - it already is - nor whether such development would change the character of the area - it has already done so. The issue is more on what terms will change take place and who will benefit as a result? Weldon Johnson said in 1930: "The next move ... will be unlike the others. It will not be a move made solely at the behest of someone else; it will be more in the nature of a bargain." Many in Harlem wonder now whether they are selling themselves short, or whether the price is too high.

THE GUARDIAN

Philip Roth / The pleasure of betrayal

Philip Roth

The pleasure of betrayal

A third successive masterpiece from the America's pre-eminent fiction writer

12:00AM BST 12 Oct 1998

PHILIP ROTH famously hates autobiographical readings of his fiction. At the same time, he does not always make them easy to avoid. Try this, for example . . .

In 1996, Claire Bloom published her memoirs, at the heart of which was a devastating account of her 20 years with Roth, whom she branded "Machiavellian". Among much else, she claims, he cruelly banished from their house her musician daughter, Anna - by an earlier marriage to Rod Steiger - and later made passes (unsuccessful) at Anna's best friend. At one point, Bloom visited Roth in a mental hospital, where he was so luridly hostile that she became a patient herself.

Now meet Roth's latest protagonist, Ira Ringold. Ira - a postwar radio actor - is married to Eve Frame, a Jewish actress who has a musician daughter, Sylphid, by a previous movie-star husband. True, Ira makes passes (successful) at Sylphid's best friend; but the marriage is doomed, primarily because the mother-daughter relationship is so pathologically unhealthy - and because, underneath her "English genteel" pose, Eve is a fragile hysteric. At one point, she visits Ira in a mental hospital where she is so melodramatically distressed that she becomes a patient herself.

And after the marriage fails, Eve publishes the lying memoir which gives the novel its title. Painting herself as blameless, she brands Ira "Machiavellian". "Isn't that the pleasure of betrayal?" comments one character. "It's a way to pay someone back for a feeling of inferiority they arouse in you . . . Yet knowing Ira as she did, how could she publish this book and not expect him to do something?"

One of the many astonishing things about I Married a Communist, then, is that the chilling personal subtext - which I defy the most scrupulous literary purist to be able to ignore if they have read Bloom's book - does not unbalance it. Like last year's American Pastoral, which landed Roth the Pulitzer, the new novel stands alone as the portrait of a largely good man destroyed by "the existence America had worked out for him". There, the 1960s did for Swede Levov; here, Ira is battered by McCarthyism.

His story is told over six Connecticut nights in 1997 by his brother, Murray, to Nathan Zuckerman, Murray's former pupil, a boyhood worshipper of Ira's, and Roth's usual alter ego. This structure has its risks. Leaving the bulk of the narrative to one observer looking back nearly 50 years certainly allows all perspectives to be explored. It can also - despite Murray, at 90, being fluent in perfect Rothian prose - make the events feel occasionally under-dramatised; the raw material for a novel rather than the novel itself.

But to attack a book as riveting and rich as this for not being even better would be an act of some ingratitude. With the fierceness of its intelligence, and with a stream of set pieces as good as anything Roth has produced, this is his third masterpiece in succession - and, more remarkably, his second in two years. Philip Roth's Indian summer blazes on.

TELEGRAPH

Richard Price at Hotel Chelsea

Richard Price

New York Conversations

Richard Price at Hotel Chelsea

06 October 1998

by Mikael Colville-Andersen

[These interview transcripts are a part of conversations with various writers at the Hotel Chelsea in New York and at Vassar College. The interviews are published in the book 'New York Conversations', by Mikael Colville-Andersen.]

RP: The way it has been explained to me, the difference between writing in Europe, and specifically in Denmark, and writing in the studios, are the opposite problems.

The pressure on me is that I have to write stuff that is marketable and commercial and appealing to the maximum number of people possible. And there s competition between studios, I mean, I can bounce around from place to place. And so, American screenwriters, if they can get away with it, will always complain about selling out and "not letting me write what I really want to write and oh you people in Europe, I mean, you re so earnest and sincere and individualistic...". And when I first said that to Mogens (screenwriting teacher at the Danish Film School) he said "please don t tell us any of that crap, we re so bored and sick of hearing that. We wish there was competition, we wish there was pressure on us for maximum audiences, so please just tell us how to sell out.

So, with that in mind, I don t know what to say...

You know, in terms of writing, I always feel that in screenplays, whatever needs to be technically achieved or brought in rein to make a story shootable or whatever, is secondary to just writing the best story that you can.

I mean, not even thinking about it as "all right, this is going to have to be a movie or this is going to have be a short story" or whatever it is, but I d just rather have a story that s compelling and singular and then worry about what we have to do to get this thing functional. I think that my priority would be to just tell the story that I think I can tell the best. Get that down, and once I have that down I can chip off, you know, bulbous edges and rough spots and smooth it down and make it shootable.

Question: How do you get it down?

RP: Well, I don t know, I mean...

Question: Do you write it as a short story first?

RP: No, no, no, I would write it, but I would be more concerned about "is this about this story?", and the characters and just make it a good story. Then, once you have the story down, look at it in terms of, okay, realistically as a film can I have two people talking for 35 minutes on a park bench? Maybe not, but at least I've got their conversation written down and maybe there s something in that conversation which is to the heart of what I want to do. So, can I move any of this conversation somewhere else?

Can I do something else to make where they are more visually interesting. But the first step is to get down what you want them to say and then you have it and you can play with it, you can erase some of it, you can move some of it around, but the first step is to get it down there. Don t jump over that and think in terms of movie feasibility. Story comes first.

Question: You said don t think about movie feasibility.

RP: In the first pass, I wouldn't. Of course, you have to think about it because it s not easy to not think about the movie. But it s much better to have something to work with.

I've taught film and I've taught fiction writing - short story and novel fiction writing - and I tell everybody the same thing. Why should I see your movie or why should I read your book? What do you know that I don t know? And that s the eternal challenge. What can you bring to me that I don t know already? And that s why the first step is to find that story which is unique to yourself.

Question: Do you work with a three act structure?

RP: Well, there s a danger. There s a guy around here, I think his name is _____ or something... okay, you've heard of him... but beware. Remember, it s art. It s 2 plus 2 equals 5. Beware of rules. Rule one is there are no rules. Rule two is see rule number one.

I think its dangerous for beginning filmmakers to get too hung up on, you know, "well, this is the manual and this is what the guy in the book said. Beware of this, emphasise that. You need all your brains to just write.... you know, just make your characters come alive. Make your events compelling. Every ounce of your brain devoted to following the rules is one ounce of brain NOT devoted to making this story kind of magical and singular.

I've never read any of those books... I mean, I purposely wouldn't read a book like that or take a course... you know, they got those quickie 3-day intensive courses. It s like Berlitz French, you know... "stay with us for 3 days and you won t be able to go to the bathroom, but when you come out, you'll be ready to make a big, stupid Hollywood movie.

Just write. Just think of your story.

The way that I learned to write a screenplay was, well, I went to movies. I just went to movies. But I sat down and instead of just watching the movie, I said, okay, I m the writer of this movie. And I just tried to follow the movie like the writer, just follow the dialogue. Okay, now we re over here, now we re in the car, now we re in the funeral home. Just imagine you re the writer, you know, just osmosis. I don t want to make it cryptic and mysterious, but just trust your instincts. It s like writing a play: Somebody says something, somebody says something else, then they go over here and somebody says something, somebody says something else, gun goes off, then we go over here, blah blah blah. You know, it s simple.

The more you study technique, the more distracted and befuddled you might get. If you want to be a writer, you don t start out by taking a course in secretarial skills. You start with your story. You can think how can I make this sentence more shapely, but just get the sentence down.

Question: How did you get into screenwriting? Did you just write a screenplay and go out there?

RP: No, I published two books. Novels, that were both made into movies. A lot of the people out in Hollywood who had read my books thought I would make a good screenwriter because they had a lot of dialogue and they moved very quickly. But they thought I d make a good screenwriter for all the wrong reasons. The ability to write dialogue is not... I mean, of course it s a good ability to have but good screenwriting is not about writing good dialogue. The minute it comes out of an actor s mouth, it s going to sound more realistic. Or it s going to be so bad it s going to be obvious you re going to have to let the guy ad lib here.

What makes a good movie, at least a good American movie, is your ability to move a story along and, in a way, it s almost more like architecture. Once you have that story down, you re planning. It s like a race course or it s like you have to build something very quickly. Your ability to keep it moving and interesting.

I went in there and they said, you write dialogue, you'll be wonderful. I said I don t know what I m doing and they said yeah, don t worry about it, just do it. I said but, but, but. And they said, tell you what, write the first ten minutes of the movie. Write the first fifteen minutes of the movie. And this was the producer, who s now like this huge octopus of a producer. And he said, just write the first fifteen minutes of the movie and show it to me. So I sat down and wrote 95 pages and I hadn't even introduced the main character yet. So he looked at it and said, okay I know what you mean.

You do that once and you re sick of it. You get this nauseous feeling in your stomach. I m just killing trees for nothing. And you learn by banging your head against the wall, therefore you learn not to bang your head against the wall. So, in a way, that s how I learned. I mean, it was a crummy writing experience.

Question: What did you do after the 95 pages?

RP: I had to start all over again. But this time the main character came in right away. It s like when you have kids. Sometimes they have to learn to do their homework. You re on them every night. Do your homework, do your homework. But sometimes you think, okay, they re going to get their ass kicked so bad at school the next day, it will be a valuable learning experience. It s like negative reinforcement. If I stop behaving like this, it will stop hurting.

And that s how I learned. Just trial and error. But I would not get hung up on any particular rules like there s gotta be three acts. I've always heard that, and when I sit down with people at meetings, they're like "where are we, what act is this?" And I m like, it s act nine, or something... I don t know.

The danger is that when you've written a script and you've rewritten it and rewritten it and you have a big actor involved and you re a year and a half into getting this movie made and the actor or director looks at you and asks "What s this movie about?"

I don t know, it s about me getting paid and out of here. They re always trying these philosophical panic attacks.

Question: How do you use research?

RP: What do you mean research?

Question: Like Color of Money, how do you...

RP: Oh, you mean going out and learning enough to sounding like an authority about pool?

Question: Yeah, how much does that give to you as a writer?

RP: Well, that s very different from writer to writer. For me, going out and spending time with people who I want to write about but who I don t have an intimate knowledge of or how they go about their day is very important to me. And I always find something which is.... you know, every day is a little baby epiphany. I never know what it is. I don t usually go out because I want to learn how a pool hustler hustles, for example. I mean, I m going to find that out anyway, but there might be something I m going to see or hear if I m out there that day, which has nothing to do with my stated mission, but in itself, is more revealing that what I thought I was going to go out and see.

It depends. Are you writing about things you know? Then you don t need to do research. If you re writing about a historical time period, or people who do jobs, like a policeman, who you might not...

Question: You followed the policeman, didn't you?

RP: Yeah. I hung out with these cops. I enjoy it, but it s a personal preference. It s not mandatory. Jane Austen is ten times, a million times the writer that Robert Louis Stevenson is. Stevenson, who died in Tahiti, and Jane Austen, who never left the house. It s an option. Do I go out and learn something? Depends what you want to write about.

I would go out with these policemen, when I was writing Sea of Love and later, when I was writing Clockers, and I would go to murders, I d go to homicides. I d be in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and there d be this dead body with 90 million bullet holes in it, looks like Swiss cheese and the people are in the street and this and that and I d be watching them how they process a crime scene and how they interview people in the street.

All that is clinical, technical data. Or I'll pick up little moments of intimacy. With that kind of stuff I'll take copious notes, but what happens and what stays with me longer is a week later with one of the cops who was in this crime scene processing unit. He had about three girlfriends and they all lived in the same building. He was the super of the building - it was his second job to be a super of a tenement in the Bronx. They were all Puerto Rican and he s Irish and all their husbands are in jail so he s letting them slide on the rent and he s being nice to the kids and they wind up liking the guy, mainly for what he isn't.

He s not going to hit them, he s not going to take their money, he's not going to give them AIDS, he s not going to go off to jail on a moments notice because he did something stupid, he s not going to be abusive to the children. So these nots make him very attractive.

I go out with this guy one night, with one of his girlfriends, and this woman takes her son, who s this six year-old kid whose nickname is Machito, which should tell you something. And he s like Ferdinand the Bull - he s this little hyperactive, chubby kid. We re at this restaurant and this kid is zooming around, I mean, this kid is really hyper. And I m having this dinner and it s worth ten murders. I m watching how this woman calms him down. She s like, "whatta want? Just relax. What? You wanna coca cola? You can have a coca cola. You wanna ice cream?" She s plying sugar into this hyperactive kid at eleven o clock at night.

And this cop is looking at her and they re kinda necking at the table at this Chinese restaurant down in Manhattan. People in the Bronx, when they go down to Manhattan, it s like they've travelled thousands of miles. The Bronx is like urban hillbillies, even though it s only fifteen minutes away by subway, it s two solar systems away mentally and culturally.

So, we re down there and it s a big deal. And I m watching this kid and she s saying, well the doctors want to give him Riddilin - I don t know if you know what Riddilin is - pill happy doctors give it out.... hyperactivity in kids is like a disease du jour right now so basically, a lot of kids are promiscuously over-medicated. They re handing Riddilin around like it s a bus pass. And she s saying, "no, I don t want my Chito to take Riddilin, he s gonna turn into a cow... he drives me crazy, but at least I know that s him."

So I m listening to this stuff, and I m thinking, this is all going to go in, in some way, shape or form. I m thinking of all the stuff I've seen around the bodies and stuff. And, anyway, the bill comes in for this meal, and I m treating everybody. So I go to pay with my American Express card, which is this card. (shows the card) American Express comes in blue, gold and platinum and I have a gold card. And all of a sudden the kid, he sees me take out the Gold card and his eyes get huge and he says, "oh mommy look!", and he grabs my card. And I m thinking how does this kid from the Bronx, who lives in this hellhole, how the hell does this kid know the difference between blue, gold and platinum American Express cards? And he points to the image in the middle, which is a Roman Centurion, and he says, "mommy, look, there s one of the guys who killed Jesus!" And that was his take on credit cards. I mean....

When I go out there, shit like this always happens. I didn't know it was coming, I didn't plan to have it to happen, and it happened. So, what I stumble on is always so much more interesting than what I set out to deal with.

Question: But you choose to be with this cop outside of his work hours.

RP: Yeah. I m writing about a cop. I m not a cop, I don t know any cops, so I m starting to make connections.

There are certain archetypal, perpetual characters, in American film at least. You know, cops and robbers. Why do another cops and robbers story. How many cops have we seen this year alone - 30? 40? So I just want to go off-hours. I want a more fully realised character.

But research depends what you re writing about. Sometimes research can take you away from any particular kind of intimacy, because you get hung up on the externals of stuff you don t know. And you want to capture these externals, like you re a journalist, or an investigative reporter and that s not really art. So it depends.

Question: How much time did you spend with the cops before Sea of Love?

RP: As I was writing the story... I mean, I had a rough idea for a story, so I go out a couple of weeks, a couple of months. I m not living with these guys, I m seeing them maybe once or twice a week, for a couple of hours.

They show me around - this is how we do this, this is how we do that. All very interesting, but I swear, every time I went out there, I came back with something I had no idea I was looking for.

I'll tell you another amazing thing that happened with these cops. I got this friend, I doubt... you might have heard of him... he was an underground filmmaker in the 1970 s. His name is Amos .... . He did a lot of films when the punk-underground scene was happening, in all the arts, that s when he came in as a director where he d make a film for 30,000 dollars and you spend the rest of your life being invited to film festivals.

Amos did a number of films, he was a true independent guerrilla filmmaker. At some point, he wanted to do a movie that involved cops. So I said to Amos, look, why don t you come with me. I'll take you out to the homicide squad in Jersey City, New Jersey and they'll talk to you. These cops, they re obsessed... they want to get into movies. Actors and writers want to be cops, cops want to be actors and writers, you know... So, anybody in films, they'll be happy to meet.

So Amos comes down. Now Amos is kinda this funky downtown guy. He s kinda stocky and he s got a shaved head, he s got a thick neck. And he dresses in this kind of weird, Sohoey kinda way: a fedora, a Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts and black shoes with white socks. But he makes it work. He knows exactly what he s doing. You know, he s always visually interesting. Oh yeah, not only is he bald, but he s decided to grow sideburns, along his jaw.

Now police are basically suburban, middle-class people. And I bring Amos out and he s kinda dressed like that, with this little fedora on and the baggy shorts and I say to the cops, this is a friend of mine, this is Amos. He wants to make a film and he wants to learn stuff. They look at him and say "hi, Amos, howya doin''". They re acting so friendly to this guy. Like, "Amos, do ya wanna see where we keep the evidence from a homicide?" - and they re talking kinda loud. "Do ya wanna see what type of gun we have?"

And they re talking like this and I m thinking, why the hell are they talking like this for. Amos is saying, cool, great, thanks. So we go home and the next day I get this call from one of these cops and he s almost in tears and he says, "Rich, I didn't know you had it in you. I think that s one of the nicest things you ever did." What did I do? "Well, bringing that retarded guy around."

(Laughter)

Do ya wanna see our guns? And then I thought, hmmm, if I didn't know Amos, maybe....

Question: Can you tell us if you have a routine? A writing routine? You get an idea, a beginning an ending and you sit down and do what?

RP: At this point I can start films in about 3 or 4 different ways. For example, Freedomland, I sold it to Paramount. Now I m supposed to write the script for this. So I m about to start, I m not looking forward to it, it s my own book, it s 600 pages and I've got to make into a 110 page singing telegram.

And before I start, I get a call. He says "how would you like to make a lot of quick money?" You know the movie Shaft? The black detective movie from the 70 s, a big blaxploitation movie. Richard Roundtree was a big pop icon in the 70 s. They re remaking Shaft with John Singleton directing. And Scott says, well, we've got a script for Shaft and could you give us maybe two weeks on it? Just quote unquote punch up the dialogue?

Punch up the dialogue, in Hollywoodese, means forget everything, you re going to work non-stop for three months and you re going to throw everything out including the words "the" and "and". So that s what I m doing. I thought, oh, it s going to be fun and who cares, it'll be fun to work it. So that s one way I get involved in a movie.

The other way is, if I have an idea, I will approach particular studios with particular individuals that I've worked with before and pitch. I'll tell the story and try to tell it as fast as I can, 15 - 20 minutes, cause that's the attention span. And the danger is talking too long because if they get bored listening to your pitch, how interested are they going to be sitting through a two-hour movie that s gonna cost them 50 million dollars. So the trick is to get and out of there before their eyelids starting drooping.

That s another way I can do it. The third way is that they'll come to me and say that they've acquired this book and we think you'd be good to write this screenplay adaptation. I mean, there s all sorts of ways I can do it.

Question: Let me expand on that then. You have an idea for a film, your own idea. What do you do when you sit down at your computer. What s your personal routine?

RP: Me personally? Oh, you re talking about the technical elements. I thought you meant the business of it.

Okay, what I do is I have an idea. Basically, I write the idea down or keep it in my head and the idea is just a couple of paragraphs long. Then I'll try to break it down. I will basically work off a series of lists.

Let s say I have a story. And let's say I can't figure out the end or, I hate to say it, the third act. What happens to these guys? How do they get out of it? How does it come to a head?

First thing I do is I figure out that. I don t want to start writing until I know how I want to finish the damn thing. Because otherwise I m gonna end up 80 miles into the Black Woods, you know, sixty pages into a screenplay... and you do not want to get lost narratively in your own screenplay when a screenplay is so tight and small. You really should know what s gonna happen. Roughly, at least. Beginning, middle and end. How do you want to end it. You've got to work out your ending. It might change as you write, but at least before you start know your ultimate destination.

Let s say I've figured that out. I'll just write down, bang, bang, bang - these are the three big things. These guys start out this way, all of a sudden they re in the shit and they get out of it. Then I start just breaking it down.

From the beginning to this big quicksand dilemma in the middle. Just off the top of my head, I'll chip in six ideas for scenes for how to get there. Okay, you've gotta show this, then that and then that. I m just writing down short phrases for each event. And now I've broken it down from the beginning to sort of the middle and I've got six or seven strokes. Then I look at them and see if there s any mini-strokes or can I start moving on. And that might be enough to feel like I can start because I know where I m going. Even though what I m writing right now doesn't look like it's going to lead anywhere, I know in my head, seven ticks to the middle. They re like rungs on a trapeze.

The trick is to have enough in the outline... and once again, this is different for everybody, but this is for me... the thing is to have enough of an outline to not ever feel like I don t know where the hell I m going. Things might change but I don t want an outline so tight that I don t have any room to improvise. I don t have any room to change my mind. So the trick is to have it there, but not to have it so that its strangling me. Like scene 1, 1A, 1ABC, C sub-section, etc. If you write it that tight, you might as well mail it in, or like your daughter can do it.

But that s the trick for me, to know roughly where I m headed. Now, what can possibly happen is that when you actually write that very first scene, or the second or third scene, something in what you just wrote is going to make you see that, well this fourth thing I m going to do just doesn't feel right anymore. Things come up in the act of writing, in the physical act of writing, that you can, in no way, anticipate before you write. Characters come alive as they come out of your hand in a way you can t second guess. And that s always gonna happen, it should happen and you gotta allow for that to happen. Hopefully, it s not gonna all of a sudden make you realise that what you really want to write about is the history of the FBI and how they screwed the Oklahoma Indians in 1920 to get all the oil rights, or something like that.

Hopefully, you re not gonna go off on such a tangent that you might as well start all over again. But you just gotta allow for those in-moment discoveries.

Question: So you use seven beats to the middle...

RP: Seven, five, twelve, I don t know. Enough to make me feel like I sort of know what I m doing. I'll more or less get there if not with these seven beats, then by the third beat, or four through six ... it s not really relevant. I have a much better idea now because these characters are living in me. I've broken the ice with them. I've consummated my relationship with them on paper.

Question: Do you ever do a biography for your characters?

No, but I gotta feel like I can answer questions about my characters in my own head. I mean, if you ask me what would this guy do if he had one night in New York and unlimited money, I could probably answer that, but I wouldn't have thought about that until you asked me that. The character is probably alive enough in my head, in my imagination, to fill out a biography if I had to, but I don t see a point in doing that. On paper. I mean, it would kinda like a lucky thing, like carrying a rabbit s foot in your pocket, but I don t see the point in doing a biography.

Each character has gotta be individual enough from any other character. Maybe this is where dialogue comes into it, not just action. They say What s the deal with dialogue in the movies. Well, dialogue is not really that important. However, good dialogue is that when a particular character speaks, after you've heard that character two or three times already in the script, you've seen his name in the script, you've seen two or three other characters - their names and how they speak - 20-30 pages into the script, if you heard a line of dialogue, you d should be able to say, oh, that s probably that guy speaking. And if you write good dialogue, the dialogue will be singular. Dialogue is how people string together words to express their personalities and thoughts. It s like a fingerprint. Everybody s slightly different in how their speak. So that s where dialogue is important.

But that s the frustration of just being a writer. Movies are about visuality, they re not about the page, they re not about the words that come out of people s mouths. It s about the looks on their faces, it s about how they hold their hands on the bar. It s about how their eyes move and they move secretly. So I would write roughly the most banal conversation I could think of but I would also be writing in stage directions, not technical stage directions like close-up, POV or anything like that but like a novelist would write. Little physical observations of how I envision this non-verbally and the director is free to interpret that.

I just want to make it a great read. I want someone to read it and see it. I m gonna try to be efficient with this descriptive stuff. I don t want it to read more like prose than like a screenplay, but I m gonna put in what I think could be significant cues, significant physical acts, actions to help this non-conversation that the characters are having come about.

Question: How much time does it take before you present the script to anyone else?

Well, usually I'll work it all the way through. I don't type, so I'll get it typed up and then I'll look at it. And when it's typed and you look at it, it's a bit a shock, cause you've been working in handwriting and it's visually different so you have to get over that shock. You gotta read it two or three times because the first time you read it, everything seems wrong so you've gotta calm down and then read it again. And you cut a little bit or you add something. Then I'll send it off. Not too much, I'll just play with it a little bit.

But usually I m having a running dialogue with the people at the other end of this process. I mean, people are gonna know the story, because I want to know that I've got an arrangement and so they'll know the story and they re gonna throw their two cents in. Be it a producer or a director or somebody. So it s not like they don t know what they re gonna get. But I want it to be as good as possible before they see it, without killing myself.

Question: We've been talking about rules and research and tools of inspiration. Do you use other tools, or what are the main tools you use?

RP: Either a story comes to me full-blown and I feel that I understand the people enough to just sit down and write, which unfortunately is rare, or I'll just go out, I mean, the stories are out there, you know. Just going out there, I m going see what I think I want, but I didn't really know until I went out there and that's really what I want.

Research is... if you don t really know what the world is like, the world you re writing about, it s hard to say what your story s gonna be. But sometimes it doesn't take much, like this weird epiphany like the kid with the credit card. You can really go to town on that. and it s nothing to do with kids or credit cards but the whole world that leads to a reaction like that.

EUROSCREENWRITERS

Filmography for Richard Price