Voices on the Art Form

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 How do you go about telling a story that involves characters you wouldn't have had direct experience with? Dangerous Liaisons, for instance.

This film (The Hi Lo Country) is exactly the same! I have no explanation on that. I mean, you'd have to ask a psychoanalyst that. You know, when I started to work on this film, or Dangerous Liaisons, or any film that's been successful, I really had to be told everything. In fact, I find it very difficult, because of my makeup, to make things about the life that I know about. In others words, if you say "Make a film about outside your front door," I wouldn't know where to start. Whereas, I have no experience of life in the upper classes, I don't know people who behave like they did in Dangerous Liaisons, but I can recognize myself in the story. I can recognize the way people could behave. So it's not like you're making a documentary about people or anything like that. It just suits my temperament to tell stories about people I know nothing about!

It's ridiculous, but you were there, when they took me up to northern New Mexico everything had to be explained to me. And I'm still learning.

But it seems that the exploring part is what really engages your interest.

I think that's probably right. It doesn't give me any pleasure, it's just a fact of life. And it's quite painful, because you have to, in the end, stand there and say, "I really don't know what this is about!" You say to anyone, "Please, will you tell me what this is about!" and gradually you try and understand it. And, of course, you then think, well all right, I'll now explain this to the audience. I'll tell this story because it's a good story. So I start from a position of almost total ignorance and try and sort of fill in the map. . . . Sometimes it works, and sometimes I suppose you never find the answer. I like sort of learning things, I guess.

When you do prepare, and this is more of a practical question, do you just ask people questions all the time?

All the time! I think I'm probably a rather good listener. I just ask people to talk, all the time. It must drive them mad! . . . and you just go on, until you understand. It's also observation, so I don't just accept what people say to me. You know, I have my own opinions about what people say to me.

You do strike me as using your intuition a lot.

Yes.

Well, you'd have to.

You have to decide who to trust.

Regarding Prick Up Your Ears - it's amazing to me that a story can be told where a world that is very 'unknowable' to someone like myself or maybe people in the audience . . .

Or me!

. . . could be made so clear and so immediate to the point where, at the end of that story, you had a sense of why it happened.

Yes, but that's what I was sort of trained to do. In other words, if I don't understand it, no one else could. . . . Basically, I have to understand. The person making the film is often the journey to understanding. I mean I don't understand on day one. It's often what other people say about it, when you understand things. What they pick out.

The first film I made in Ireland is called The Snapper. I had an enormously enjoyable time making it. I could respond to what was in front of me. I don't mean to be immodest - the Irish clearly adored the film. Afterward I discovered that what it was about, it was all to do with the separation of Church and State. I knew none of this, but actually that was what was going on. The fact that it was a story about a girl having an illegitimate child was a perfect metaphor for things occurring in people's lives, not when their daughters were pregnant, but simply how they lived in relation to the Church. It was never discussed. Yet afterwards I realized that the writing was so truthful that without their even knowing it, it was describing what was happening in people's lives.

It was quite amazing, and again it seems to be with this that Max Evans, by the truthfulness of his writing, describes things that he can't have known about, almost. He can't have understood the economics, and things like that when he was that old. But if you describe things, everything is in there. So you simply say, "Well I'll describe this moment truthfully, and I'll express all the complexity in this moment." Once you simplify, of course, you run the risk of . . . well, there's a point in every film where you have to simplify or else you'd go mad. Accepting the complexity of people's feelings: Writers who include the complexity by telling the truth about the world, they tell things that they probably didn't even know they were doing.