The Peruvian Nobel laureate on winning literature’s biggest prize, his feud with Gabriel García Márquez and coming to accept that he is ‘not a politician’
By the time Mario Vargas Llosa got to Roger Casement's grave, he was already besotted. "He was a hero, very imperfect, very human and for me this made the character sympathetic. More than sympathetic," says the Nobel laureate at his publisher's offices in London. "But certain people find it hard to accept heroes who aren't perfect." At Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Vargas Llosa found the grave for the Irish patriot hanged by the British in 1916. "It was very sad because around him there are always flowers on the tombs of the leaders of the Irish rebellion, but on Casement's tomb there is not one flower.
Iknew Samuel Beckett’s reputation. He didn’t like photographers. He didn’t want them around really. It’s hard to believe I took so many photographs of him. During the 1970s, I photographed him and his rehearsals at the Royal Court theatre in London, and eventually did a book with his biographer James Knowlson called Images of Beckett. In 2015 my photographs of him and his plays were projected on to the chapel of King’s College Cambridge as part of its 500th anniversary celebrations. It’s been a long, unexpected association.
‘A subject speaks through me. I’m not in control’ … Maggi Hambling at her new show. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Interview
'There are plenty of schlongs in art' – Maggi Hambling defends her nude sculpture of Mary Wollstonecraft
Her tribute to the feminist icon caused outrage at last month’s unveiling, but the artist has no regrets. She hits back at her critics – and explains why this women’s rights pioneer had to be naked
Stuart Jeffries
Wed 16 Dec 2020
Maggi Hambling is listing her favourite sculpted penises. “The Elgin marbles,” she says. “Michelangelo’s David. And Shelley’s, though it is rather small.” She means the Shelley memorial, Edward Onslow Ford’s attempt to depict the sea-shrunken corpse of the drowned poet. She takes a drag on her cigarette, exhales and giggles.
We’re sitting on the pavement outside the Marlborough Gallery in Mayfair so Hambling can have a cigarette. It’s stupidly cold but this is the only place we can do the interview, unless the artist quits. And that’s not going to happen. She is an incorrigible smoker, refusing to be photographed without a cigarette in hand. Until recently, the gallery made an exception, allowing Hambling to light up inside. “But the people in the offices above objected to the smell,” she says. “They threatened to close down my show.” So she has evicted herself from her own exhibition for the length of four cigarettes and a coffee.
‘I thought I had six months to live’ / Self-portrait, November 2020 Tracey Emin after her treatment. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist
Interview
Tracey Emin on her cancer: 'I will find love. I will have exhibitions. I will enjoy my life. I will'
As she recovers from a brutal summer of cancer treatment, Tracey Emin takes us round her new show – and imagines spending the next 30 years painting in her pyjamas to the sound of birdsong
Stuart Jeffries Monday 9 November 2020
‘I am so lucky,” says Tracey Emin as we stand in the grand galleries of the Royal Academy. I can tell, from her brown eyes, that she’s smiling beneath her face mask. As we roam rooms painted moody blue for her new exhibition, in which her paintings, bronzes and neons are juxtaposed with the oils and watercolours of Edvard Munch, Emin adjusts her stoma bag occasionally and laughs a lot. “I’m in love with Munch,” she says. “Not with the art, but with the man. I have been since I was 18.”
With the long-awaited fifth season beginning next week, Guardian writers meet the actors who play their favourite characters in the show
Stuart Jeffries, Kira Cochrane, Tim Jonze, Esther Addley and Sarah Phillips
Wednesday 21 March 2012 20.00 GMT
Don Draper
A man to project your fantasies on
What's it like to be too handsome? The actor who made his TV debut as "gorgeous guy at bar" in Ally McBeal in 1997 stops fiddling with his bagel and looks at me glassily across the coffee table of a Soho hotel room. "That's ridiculous. What's too good-looking? That's a ridiculous thing to say. There's no such thing as too good-looking."
Isn't there? Maybe there is. There was, reportedly, a moment in 2007 when creator Matthew Weiner and director Alan Taylor hesitated over casting him as the lead in Mad Men. Was this guy, with his lantern jaw, bedroom eyes, covetable hair and other annoyingly scintillating attributes, too damned perfect to play Don Draper? Maybe they should go back to one of the 79 other actors who had auditioned for the role.
Was it like that? Hamm shakes his head. "It wasn't like they came up to me and said: 'So Jon we would like to cast you but ...' That seems silly in many ways because I'm not ..." He pauses for ages, pours a coffee and sips it. Hamm speaks very, very slowly during this interview in a pleasing baritone as though he's the lead in The Leonard Cohen Story (which, incidentally, must happen: imagine Don Draper trying out Famous Blue Raincoat on his girlfriend in a freezing 4am New York apartment).
Not what? "... I'm not Brad Pitt, for God's sake." This is true in a trivial sense. But also false in a more substantial one. When a Newsweek reporter was asked to research an article headlined Why the Ladies Love Jon Hamm a couple of years ago (tough gig), she heard the following from friends: "He looks like he would know how to throw me to the wall and do me right" and "He has that whole 'strap a sword to me, I'll cut down men and then ravish you' thing." Aren't these precisely the fantasies that Pitt, certainly circa Thelma and Louise if not Tree of Life, unleashed among his target demographic?
When I put this to Hamm, he smiles Oliver Hardy's dainty smile and plays with his meal prissily. He talks like Kris Kristofferson on downers and eats breakfast as if a graduate of Little Lord Fauntleroy's Finishing School. Hamm's wearing a button-down plaid shirt, blue jeans and a brown jacket – the sort of blah outfit you can pull off if you can look in the mirror and think: "Clooney isn't all that." He looks younger, more boyish, less self-assured but more carefree than Draper.
"I think a component of this character," Hamm replies finally, "is that he is presentable in the world and Matthew saw that in me – that he's a person in the room who maybe you wanna talk to. Or you're attracted to or whatever it is. And I'm glad to have that capacity."
This is why the last time we saw Don Draper, in the finale to season four, was such a disappointment for so many women (and no doubt men). There, you remember, he proposed to and was accepted by his secretary Megan rather than choosing Dr Faye Miller, the no less gorgeous but more intellectually, and probably emotionally, challenging shrink. "Even though Don ended up making this overture to Megan," said Matthew Weiner, "and the audience felt sort of peculiar about it, so did the people in the office." Peggy (the clever and idealistic copywriter) even had to be counselled by Joan (the voluptuous and pragmatic secretary) for the affront to having her illusions shattered.
Don, I suggest to Hamm, went for the easy option, choosing the 25-year-old cutie on the other side of the office wall who could manage his kids and work schedule, rather than the woman who might tear his world up into interesting shreds. "I agree with everything that you say, but I don't write the story. That is part of the reason why we are challenged and why we are fascinated by this man. Over the first four seasons we came to see how he chose Betty and how he came to be with Betty. I think what Matt did really wonderfully was to show how cyclical these things are. Early in the season when Dr Miller said: 'Guys like you are married in a year. Don't worry about it,' Don is taken aback. But it turns out to be true. At the end of the season Joan says practically the same thing to Peggy: 'Why are you surprised? And why do you care? Who gives a shit? You can't be so affected by this.'" Don, that's to say, isn't as interesting as our romantic projections.
So is he resentful that Weiner took his character in a direction he may not have liked? "I can't be that. I've given over to Matthew, I think wisely, complete domination and ownership of Don. This sounds strange but he's the creator and he's the guy who moves the chess pieces and I'm here to service that."
Insanely, we're meeting so Hamm can promote a season he can't tell me anything about. "If I did spill, you'd love it!" he says. Does Don marry Megan? Does he get it on with Peggy? Or Joan? Roger Sterling? "It'd be more fun to talk about it after it's happened so that you could ask: 'What were you thinking? Why were there dinosaurs? And then there were the Muppets and the episode when you were all skating, that was ridiculous." Just reveal something! Hamm gives me his taut-lipped, raised-eyebrow look. He even knows how Mad Men will end in three seasons' time, but of course won't say.
Is he worried about being typecast as the mohair-suited lothario? "I get 60 or so scripts about sharp-suited ad men in the 60s, sure. But I'm never going to do that again. This is something that very well could have been a pilot, nothing more. The reason I pursued it was that I was fascinated by this character from the pilot and I think I can say that that fascination has resonated for more than a few people. I don't think I've necessarily been pigeonholed but I could have been. I think with the good graces of other people who have helped me, I've been able to take on other roles almost diametrically opposed to Don Draper."
He means, among other things, his comic performances in Tina Fey's sitcom 30 Rock and in the Kristen Wiig-scripted film Bridesmaids. "When those people say, 'Hey, do you wanna come play in our sand box?' you go: 'You kidding me? Yeah!' I didn't stumble into those things." (It's striking that two brilliant women comedy writers re-imagined Hamm by riffing, probably not unconsciously, on Don Draper's sexy persona.)
Managing his career to ensure he doesn't get stereotyped is a problem Hamm never expected to have. The St Louis-born, English-lit grad arrived in Hollywood aged 25 with a five-year-plan. If he didn't make it in acting by 30 he would leave town and do something else. For the life of him, Hamm says, he can't imagine what. During those five years he waited tables, worked as a porn movie set designer ("I moved furniture around sweaty naked people") and played bit parts in TV shows and films of mostly dubious merit.
Today, 41, he has arrived. He's hungover from partying at the Baftas. "I was standing next to Stephen Fry and I thought 'Wow! I can't believe I'm doing this.'" Presumably Fry thought the same thing? 'I don't think so. But still I just flashbacked to my 19-year-old self pirating Fry and Laurie videos."
Only after the interview do I realise how much sense it makes that Jon Hamm loves Fry and Laurie. After all the double act did proto-Mad Men in their sketch as two crazy businessmen, drinking huge 10am whiskies, bawling business things that don't, ultimately, make sense, and fretting about women (Marjorie in Stephen Fry's case). Maybe mid-80s Uttoxeter wasn't so unlike mid-60s Madison Avenue.
Hamm has teamed up again with Bridesmaids stars Wiig and Chris O'Dowd, as well with Megan Fox, for the upcoming Friends With Kids, a film written and directed by his partner of 14 years, Jennifer Westfeldt, which he co-produced. Its premise is that a pair of thirtysomething best friends notice the toll that having kids has taken on the couples they know and resolve to bypass that stress by having a child and then having a platonic relationship while dating other people. Like that's going to work. Was that a phenomenon he and Westfeldt noticed among their friends? "There are parallels. Jennifer would say that she was inspired by true events." Would he ever consider a similar arrangement? "What – having a kid with Jen and then leaving her for someone else? That, my friend, is not on the agenda. She's a truly inspiring and talented and amazing woman. I have this thing for strong women, you see."
Talking dirty … François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock.
Photograph: Philippe Halsman/Magnum
‘Actors are cattle’: when Hitchcock met Truffaut
Hidden necrophilia in Vertigo, glowing milk, an on-set spat with Montgomery Clift … in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock revealed his tricks, and the often shocking meanings behind his films, to fellow director François Truffaut. Now their talks have been turned into the revealing film Hitchcock/Truffaut
Stuart Jeffries Tuesday 12 May 2015 07.01 BST
T
here’s a derangingly perverted scene in the 1958 film Vertigo. The femme fatale Judy, played by Kim Novak, appears before Scottie, James Stewart’s retired cop, in a sleazy motel room. She’s dressed as the dead woman with whom he’s obsessed. “I indulged in a form of necrophilia,” the director Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut during a week-long series of interviews they did in Hollywood in 1962.
Scottie has insisted that Judy dye her hair blond and wear the outfit he bought. Only then will he be able to have sex with her. But there’s a problem. Scottie can’t consummate his desire because one detail is wrong: Judy is wearing her hair down. The dead woman, Madeleine, wore it up. “This means,” Hitchcock explains to Truffaut, “she’s stripped but won’t take off her knickers.”
Scottie sends her back to the bathroom and sits impatiently on the bed. “He’s waiting for the woman to come out nude ready for him,” Hitchcock adds. “While he was sitting waiting, he was getting an erection.” Then Hitchcock tells Truffaut to turn the tape off so he can tell a story. We will never know what it was, but the safe money says it was really dirty.
Kent Jones’s engaging new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut teems with such moments: the 30-year-old tyro French director asking his hero to explain how he made his films, and the 63-year-old responding in detail, often revealing the lubricious impulses behind such masterpieces as Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. For 50 years, these conversations have existed in book form. Jones has set them free, juxtaposing the audio recordings with relevant scenes from the films.
Hitchcock clearly revels in disclosing some of his secrets. As we watch the superbly sinister scene in the 1941 thriller Suspicion in which Cary Grant slowly, but implacably, ascends a spiral staircase towards Joan Fontaine’s bedroom, we may well wonder why the glass of milk he’s carrying looks so ominous and hyperreal. Because, Hitchcock explains, he lit it from inside with a little lightbulb. Truffaut gasps.
Truffaut had seduced Hitchcock into doing 30 hours of interviews by means of an imploring letter: “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love of cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself.” Hitchcock, flattered, telegrammed back in French from Bel Air: “Dear Mister Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes, and I am very grateful to receive such a tribute from you.”
At the time, Truffaut had made just three films, including his semi-autobiographical debut, Les 400 Coups, while Hitchcock was editing his 48th, his extraordinary and probably self-revealing account of sexual repression, Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.
Truffaut’s aim was to liberate Hitchcock from his reputation (one that the Englishman cultivated) as a light entertainer and celebrate him for what he was, a great artist. “It’s wonderful that Truffaut got Hitchcock to talk because directors of his generation didn’t often,” says Jones, head of the New York film festival, and the director who collaborated on Martin Scorsese’s survey of Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. “They were dismissive about their art, at least publicly. John Ford would say, ‘I only make westerns.’ Howard Hawks would say, ‘I only make comedies.’ They weren’t inclined to talk seriously about their work, partly because they needed to survive in the studio system.”
Hitchcock and Truffaut were from different cinematic cultures. Hitchcock had made the first of his pictures in the silent era and went on to work in Hollywood. Truffaut was initially a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Thanks to critics such as Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Godard and indeed Truffaut (all of whom who would become the iconoclastic hipster directors of the Nouvelle Vague), cinema for the first time became, as director Olivier Assayas puts it in Jones’s film, self-conscious. For the first time, it reflected on itself as art rather than dismissing itself as mere entertainment. The Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews were part of that revolution.
Truffaut and Hitchcock began their interviews on 13 August, Hitchcock’s 63rd birthday. Four years later, the interviews were published. “It has been an incredibly influential book,” says Jones, adding that it was pivotal in the education of film-makers such as Coppola, De Palma, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin and Schrader. Today’s generation, it seems, is no less in awe. “When I asked David Fincher if he’d read it, he said, ‘Only, like, 200 times.’”
There are only two moments when Hitchcock clams up. First, as Truffaut suggests, quite sensibly, that the lack of realism and plausibility in Hitchcock’s movies (think of the scene in North by Northwest when Cary Grant emerges unscathed from a fireball caused by the crop-dusting plane that’s been pursuing him crashing into a fuel truck) is because his pictures yield to a deeper logic, the logic of dreams. “Hitchcock just doesn’t want to go there,” says Jones. “He’s not comfortable with that level of disclosure.”
Yet, as Fincher, one of 10 present-day directors whom Jones interviews for the film, argues, one of the exciting things about Hitchcock is that his fears and fetishes, his nocturnal terrors and his sexual daydreams, are all over his work. Indeed, for Fincher, one of the lessons of Hitchcock’s cinema is that any film-maker who thinks they can stop their psychopathologies leaking on to the screen is, as he puts it, “nuts”. Jones says: “I think David’s right. Hitchcock does what he wants, and indeed, if you look at those film-makers who try to do what others want, or what they think the audience want, they come unstuck.”
The other moment is when Truffaut, again quite sensibly, argues that Hitchcock’s trademark omniscient shots (the terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds; the camera descending from Olympian heights to find the compromising key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand in Notorious) could have been made only by someone raised, as Hitchcock was, a Catholic. Hitchcock asks Truffaut to turn off the tape so he can go off record. “Again, we don’t know what he said, but he clearly didn’t want to reveal his motivations,” says Jones. Instead, in Jones’s film it’s left to another Catholic director, Scorsese, to clinch the point: the God-like perspective of Hitchcock’s aerial shots induce terror.
“In the book of the interviews,” says Jones, “Hitchcock came over as stilted and formal, which you can hear he isn’t.” Quite so: Hitchcock is often droll and cantankerous. “Actors are cattle,” he tells Truffaut, underlining his reputation for giving them no scope but to fulfil his artistic vision. “He can’t mean that,” says Jones. “Yes, he started in cinema during the silent era, well before the post-war era after which, as Scorsese says, the power shifted to the actor. But he wasn’t contemptuous – he had immensely fruitful relationships with actors.”
True, but Hitchcock was always boss. The film recalls his on-set spat during I Confess with Montgomery Clift over a split-second moment in which the actor was required to look up at a building as he crossed the street. The method actor who had trained with Lee Strasberg said he needed to consider whether his character, a guilt-ridden Roman Catholic priest, would look up at that moment. Hitchcock didn’t care what Clift thought: he needed him to look up at that precise moment or everything leading up to and from that glance would not make sense. Truffaut, when Hitchcock explains this to him, agrees: if Clift refused, he would have ruined the story arc. Happily, Clift ultimately glanced upwards and the scene makes sense.
Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules et Jim. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Truffaut, for all that he was profoundly influenced by this father figure, gave actors more leeway. He tells Hitchcock about a scene in Jules et Jim that his three actors improvised. Hitchcock is incredulous: he could never allow that.
Later, Jones reveals, Hitchcock worried that he was too rigid in his commitment to narrative rigour. Perhaps he should have given his actors more freedom. In one telegram to Truffaut, he says how difficult it would have been for Mondrian to paint like Cézanne: by which he means how difficult it would have been for Hitchcock to direct like Truffaut, or indeed like others in the Nouvelle Vague, still less like the great American directors of the 1970s who allowed their actors a great deal of freedom.
It’s a point taken up by Fincher, who wonders how Hitchcock would have got on directing such actors as De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman. “Sadly, we’ll never know,” says Jones. “But he did have conflicts with actors who were less willing to respect his authority, not just with Clift on I Confess and Paul Newman on Torn Curtain.”
In any case, he did try to loosen up, to mutate, as it were, from Mondrian to Cézanne. “There is some 16mm test film provisionally called Kaleidoscope/Frenzy, in which he tried to be freer and give some young kids in New York the chance to express themselves as actors.” But that film was never made. Instead, in 1972 he made Frenzy, his penultimate – and psychosexually deranged – film, in which Barry Foster strangles his victims with a necktie, grunting: “Lovely! Lovely!”
Almost two decades after Truffaut and Hitchcock recorded their interviews, the Frenchman was still lecturing the world on his hero’s merits. “In America,” Truffaut told the American Film Institute in 1979 during a homage, “you call him Hitch. In France, we call him Monsieur Hitchcock. In America, you respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love.”
The following year, Hitchcock died. All too soon Truffaut followed him in 1984, aged only 52, and at the height of his powers.
