Hauptsache eine gute Story
Interview mit Barry Gifford, geführt von Arne Sommer am 20. August 2005 in Kiel anlässlich der Aufführung von “Lost Highway” im Kommunalen Kino in der Kieler Pumpe. Eine gekürzte, ins Deutsche übersetzte Fassung ist zuerst im Mitgliedermagazin “Script” (Ausgabe 4/05) des Verbandes Deutscher Drehbuchautoren e.V. erschienen.
Arne Sommer: From your CV I gather that you’re a novel writer first?
Barry Gifford: I am primarily a novelist. In that sense I’ve always been a literary person. I write novels, poems, essays.
How did you get into screen writing?
The first novel of mine to be bought was “Port Tropique” back in 1980, 82. I was asked to write the screen play, which I did. The movie was never made. And that’s how I began. Then I was hired by a producer at 20th Century Fox to assist on a project they’re working on. And then, in ’91, I started writing the first screenplay that was actually produced: “Perdita Durango”.
So ’91 you already wrote it and then it was produced, I think, in ’97?
It took a while with “Perdita Durango” because the original director was fired and they had to find another director. It went back and forth for a while but then finally it was done.
So your first draft was done in ’91 and then it took like maybe 4, 5 years?
Well, actually, what happened was that it fell into other hands and went through a couple of more drafts; finally Álex de la Iglesia, who directed the film, went back to my original draft and used it in conjunction with his own revisions and then the movie got made.
So was it because of the Writers’ Guild that the other two writers got credits?
I don’t know what they do in Spain. Because it was really a Spanish and Mexican production and so they have their own rules or no rules or whatever. They did, of course, give me the lead credit for the novel and the adaptation.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about adaptation now. You’re an interesting special case because you adapted your own novel. How did that work? Did you simply have the story in mind and then started to write the screenplay from scratch or did you actually go back to your novel to pull out stuff?
It took me a long time to learn how to write a screenplay. With “Port Tropique” they asked me to do it and I wrote a screenplay. I’d never written a screenplay before. So I figured, well, I better read one. Even though I was something of a cinephile, I thought of something that was close to what I wanted to do. And I went out and I bought a copy of John Huston’s screenplay of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” because it’s a movie that I admire greatly. Huston, of course, was the director; he did his own screenplay based on B. Traven’s novel. So that’s basically what I did. I numbered the scenes. I wrote it like a shooting script. The producer didn’t like the screenplay. So he hired a British screenwriter to do a version. After that they didn’t like that one so they hired a director and his partner to do a screenplay. And then someone else wrote a screenplay, too, sort of unsolicited, so there are really four screenplays that exist. And finally the movie wasn’t made. I have the rights back now. – A couple of years ago I had an occasion to go back. I went back and looked at these screenplays and I realized that mine was better than the other two. Better than the ones by the professional screenwriters at the time. The reason being that mine was the furthest from the novel itself! That it was more in the way of being inspired by the novel, which turned out to be the best way of writing a screenplay.
When we did “Wild at heart”, Lynch asked me to write the screenplay. I said: “well I don’t have the time”, because in fact I was writing the novel “Perdita Durango” and then the following “Sailor and Lula”-novels, there are six altogether. He said, “Alright I do it”. He did it in six days and he sent it to me. Did it in six, rested on the seventh. You’ve heard that story before. And he had taken 80% of the dialogueue from the novel. Because the novel is carried by dialogueue. There’s a preponderance of dialogueue in most of my novels. In the case of the novel “Wyoming” it’s 99,5%. So, in any case, he sent it to me and I became a kind of creative consultant on the project. But so much of the screenplay was already written, was in the novel, and then there were scenes that he invented later: the “Wizard of Oz”-stuff that he grafted onto it. So I learned a little by seeing what David was doing. And finally, after a longer process, I realized that the only thing that the writing of fiction and the writing of screenplays have in common, is that they both necessitate the use of words. It’s an entirely different language. And once I figured it out then it became fun.
As my friend Richard Pryce, who is a novelist and a screenwriter and has also done the adaptations of his own work, e.g. “Clockers”, “Sea of Love”, “The Color of Money”; what he said was that for a long time he stopped writing novels because the screenplays were so easy. It was 20% of the work of writing a novel. And if the reviews were bad, he wasn’t the only one who got blamed. He could shift the blame and say “Oh, that’s the directors fault”, “the actors couldn’t cut it” or whatever it happened to be. He wasn’t really disingenuous when he said that either. There’s a lot of truth to what Richard was saying. I don’t know if it’s 20% of the work. Sometimes it feels like 120%. Depending on who you’re writing for. And the hoops that you have to jump through.
If you compare adaptation to an original screenplay, do you think that’s true as well? That it’s like 20% of the work of a novel?
My approach is different. I mean “Lost Highway” obviously was an original screenplay. It began as an adaptation of my novel “Night people”. There I didn’t want to base it on the novel. So we just took a couple of things, a couple of sentences really, from the novel and fashioned the screenplay after that. I honestly prefer writing original screenplays. As I said to Lynch at the time, “lets not do ‘Night people’, I don’t want to go through this comparison business any more.” Like with ‘Wild at heart’“. I said, “You know, we’re fairly intelligent guys. Maybe. Let’s see if we can come up with an original idea.” And through a process of elimination we came up with the scenario. I would rather write original screenplays.
Or I think the ideal form to adapt is a short story. Because then you have so much room to operate. I’ve done that a couple of times now. I just finished one basically from a short story of mine called “The Old Days”. And hopefully we’ll be making it very soon. I really like that. Remember Hemingway’s story “The Killers”. It’s a terrific story. Very short. Few pages. And I particularly admire Robert Siodmaks version of it. The first one. The first fifteen minutes of the film are the short story of Hemingway. The dialogue, everything. And then they flash back and create this back story. Which is also terrifically done. I really like that. I really like the opportunity to do that because you have the premise, you have the basic situation, the setting and characters for the most part, and then you can invent!
So would you say that’s true for a good adaptation, that you have to just take out the premise of what you adapt and go from there and turn it into something completely different because it’s a different media?
You have to have a story. You don’t even need a good story, you just need a story. Often the best adaptations are made from mediocre or worse novels and stories. It doesn’t have to be well done literary. I always think of A.I. Bezzerides’ screenplay of Mickey Spillane’s “Kiss me Deadly”, directed by Richard Aldrich. It’s a great film made in 1955. I happened to know Buzz Bezzerides, so we talked about this. They kept nothing of Mickey Spillane’s novel – which was just this pot boiler dime story novel – except the title! It had a great title! “Kiss me deadly”! We don’t want to lose the title! So they reinvented the whole thing. – Recently I participated in a documentary film made about Buzz Bezzerides. He wrote “Thieves Highway”, which was originally his novel, “The Long Haul”, “They Drive by Night”. Various people talk about Buzz’s work. So they have Mickey Spillane on there who’s like in his 80s now. He looked good and has a 29 year old wife, by the way, it keeps you looking good. He said, “I hated the movie when I first saw it. But then people kept telling me what a great movie! You must have written a great book.” People began to think that the story told in the film was his story. So he says, “Then I began to take credit for it.” Good for him.
If you compare novel writing and screen writing, from the perspective of liberty, because in screen writing you have a lot of people telling you what to do and you have a very strict form you have to adhere to…
I don’t agree at all. Gus Van Sant, who is a big friend of mine, after he made “Drugstore Cowboy”, which is a terrific film, he wanted to make “My Own Private Idaho”. So he went to our mutual friend Matt Dillon, who was the star of “Drugstore Cowboy”, and he had this sort of 80 page rambling paragraph after paragraph scenario. But it wasn’t strictly speaking a screenplay. As Matt told me, “I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t commit to the film because I couldn’t see the film. It was just sort of Gus’s rambling notes for 80 pages.” So instead he casted Keanu Reaves and River Phoenix and almost made a very great film. So I don’t think that there are strictly speaking any rules. In this case Gus was the director, so he knew what he wanted to see, and Gus is actually a really smart guy and he knows how to block out scenes and create the scenes that he needs. He knew what he was doing. So in this case, with a more impressionistic filmmaker, the actors have to trust the director. You can make very conventional films, too. If you make a studio film like Gus was going on to make with “Good Will Hunting” and “Finding Forrester”, with movies like that, which are pretty straightforward Hollywood type movies, yeah, sure, you have to have that conventional sort of screenplay. But now of course he’s gone back to making Gus-movies. Which is better for him, and for us, for the most part.
I wasn’t so much talking about the so-called writing rules and more about the fact that you actually have to write so that the director can make a picture out of it. I mean in that case it is a strict form. Because you only have maybe 90-120 pages?
It depends on the director.
But do you enjoy writing novels more than you enjoy writing screenplays?
Writing fiction is really what I do. After almost 20 years of writing novels I started writing short stories for the first time. Before the short stories were included in the novels in a way. I always appreciated the form. I think in some way I was intimidated by the short story writers I admired the most. Chekhov, Henry James, you name them! It was a form that I didn’t want to attempt in a very strict way until later. And now I love doing it. The publishers don’t love it so much because they cannot make as much money. There’s a marketing problem. But it doesn’t bother me, because as long as I write movies I can get paid once in a while.
That’s a tough question to answer. I like to go back and forth. Because I love movies. And I don’t mind writing movies at all. As long as I have the freedom to do what I want. But I only work on films that really, I think, can be special. That can be really interesting. Or someone buys the novel of mine or a short story and then asks me to do the adaptation. Then I have a vested interest at least to take the first shot with the screenplay. So that’s really my feeling, they’re just two different things entirely, you know, sometimes you want to have strawberry ice cream and the next day you want to have vanilla ice cream. Right?
Out of curiosity, because I like the film so much, how did “City of Ghosts” come about? How was the whole project started?
“City of Ghosts” is a long story, I give you the very short version. Matt Dillon wanted to direct a film. I know Matt since he’s a teenager, practically, and so he called me to write the film with him. He had just come back from a trip to Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. He was very impressed by the region and the history. And he’d done a lot of reading on the history. And he wanted to set a story there. I made a couple of suggestions to him in terms of what books to read, in terms of novels, and films to look at, one of which was “An Outcast of the Islands”, by Joseph Conrad. A film was made of this, “Outcast of the Islands”, by Carol Reed. So Matt got hold of a copy of the film, he looked at it, and he said “I see what you mean. Let’s do a kind of a Cambodian western.” An adventure story in that old fashion way. So that’s how it began. We wrote a story. Got the producers for the development. And then eventually after a few years actually of writing in various places, not consistently, we got Universal Artists to make the movie, and that’s how it got done.
Did you go to the region together?
Not together. I wasn’t there for the filming. Because I had to be in Mexico and Cuba at the time. It took a long time to develop this. But what Matt did, I thought, that was very intelligent, was that he got a really good cast! Gerard Depardieu, James Caan, Stellan Skarsgård, who is one of my favorite people as well as actors. – I’m still waiting for him to make me the Swedish meatballs that he promised. Because he brags about his cooking ability. Stellan’s a great guy! Anyway. – Matt worked really hard! It was his first film as director, he also stared in the film, and it was the first film shot in Cambodia since in 1964 when they shot two or three weeks of “Lord Jim” there. We were the first in that long period. Now there’ve been a couple more. I like movies like that because they take me back to a Saturday morning at the North Town Theater in Chicago, you know.
What I like about the movie is how it captures the madness, the two-facedness of Asia that is charming and deadly at the same time.
A lot of research went into this film. And we did seven drafts of that screenplay.
Did you collaborate in the sense that you wrote it together?
Yes, we wrote it together completely. Except when Matt was in Cambodia for the filming. He would call me most nights and tell me what was going on. “We need to do this. We cant do that. We have to change this, what about this?” Some things I agreed with, some things I didn’t. But basically that’s how it went. It was kind of an adventure in film making – as well as an adventurous film. It was very ambitious for a first film. To take a crew into Cambodia. Sort of like making a film in Cuba, you gotta bring your own lightbulbs. There’s no infrastructure there to speak of. I think in this he gained a lot of credibility. Because atmospherically it was wonderful, I thought. It was a true film in that sense. I like it. I think it’s also underappreciated.
I think it wasn’t even released in German cinemas. I only got hold of it on DVD.
Well thank goodness for
DVD. It’s funny, you know, how this works. United Artists decided this was an art film. We tried to tell them it’s not an art film. You don’t put it into the art theaters, this is a movie that’s going to do well in the larger multiplex theaters. And in fact it turned out to be true. It did tremendous business in places like the AMC 25 in Times Square, compared to the Angelica in New York. A little theater showing art films like Jim Jarmusch films, it didn’t work there. But it worked in the big multiplexes. I ran into all kinds of people who were not cinephile, they are not art film students, they don’t know John Ford from baseball player: They said, “Oh yeah, that was a good movie!” That’s what we wanted to make! We just wanted to make a good movie! With a good story.
Thank you very much!