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Dateline: 3rd September, 2006
Christopher Hampton David Chadderton reports on Christopher Hampton's talk to the Edinburgh International Book FestivalThis session at the Book Festival, given the rather redundant title of 'Society and Theatre', was chaired by Alistair Owen, editor of the book Hampton On Hampton which is a selective biography of Christopher Hampton told through edited transcripts of interviews. This session took a similar form, focussing mainly on his experience in films. Early on in the session we were shown a clip from Hampton's adaptation, directed by Stephen Frears, of Valerie Martin's novel Mary Reilly, which was based on The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde but told from the point of view of a housemaid. Hampton had just spent eighteen months working on a film about Vietnam that was never made (Bright Shining Lie) and wrote the script for this in just a week. The film was shot mostly in Edinburgh using the same team as Hampton's earlier films Dangerous Liaisons (including Frears as director and John Malkovich and Glenn Close in the cast), but for a small story of two people in a house it cost a lot of money to make ($42m) which made the producers very nervous. They fired Frears and kept screening it and then re-editing it, and each time it got a worse response at the screening than before. Eventually they asked Frears back, who agreed as long as it was put back to how it was, which they agreed to but then the film was released in a dead month and critics were primed not to take it too seriously. It therefore went fairly unnoticed, except in some other European countries such as France, where the critics loved it. Mary Reilly was released the same year as another of Hampton's adaptations - Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Hampton described Conrad as a 'graveyard for adapters'; he had previously worked on Nostromo with David Lean but Lean died a few weeks before shooting was due to start. Hitchcock did his own version of The Secret Agent called Sabotage. Bob Hoskins suggested the project to Hampton as he had always wanted to play the part, and it became Hampton's second film after Carrington as writer-director. He said that with Conrad, as with Greene, it is important to put across the atmosphere or decor of the book on film. Bright Shining Lie was another adaptation, based on a book of the same name by Neil Sheehan, the lie of the title referring to the claim that the US invaded Vietnam to try to stop the spread of communism. In the film, as in the book, he wanted to portray the feelings of the Vietnamese, rather than showing the torment of the US soldiers as in every other Vietnam film. After months of development, the project was eventually given to Oliver Stone (he asked the production assistant who telephoned him with this news what she thought of the ethics of this decision, to which she replied, 'the what?'). Hampton tried to work along the lines Stone wanted, even diplomatically dealing with some of his more outlandish ideas, but eventually Stone lost interest and the film ended up being made for HBO without Hampton's name attached to it. None of his film experiences seem to have been very positive to hear his stories, even with one of his most famous films, Dangerous Liaisons, from the French novel by Choderlos de Laclos. His stage adaptation, Les Liaison Dangereuses, was running at the Royal Shakespeare Company when he heard that film director Milos Forman had been to see it a number of times. Forman invited Hampton to lunch at an expensive London restaurant but never turned up (Forman later was insistent that it was Hampton who never turned up). Hampton worked on the film with another team, but then it was announced that Forman was directing his own film of the novel (Valmont) and every director contacted for Hampton's project was contacted by Forman and intimidated out of working with them. Eventually their production company agreed to back them as long as their film was out before Forman's, which they managed to do in a very short time and on a low budget. Another piece of 'luck' was that the production company was on the verge of bankruptcy, so felt they had nothing to lose backing a film on a low budget on the same story as one being made by an Oscar-winning director. Although most of this session focused on his films, Hampton claims that his work in film and theatre is pretty evenly split. He said that he loves writing films, but from the moment the first draft is finished, it is hell from then on. With plays, it takes him two to three years to research and write them - The Talking Cure about Freud and Jung took five years - but then the rehearsal process after this is a pleasure. Theatre is more difficult, but, in cinema, he has written a number of scripts for projects with great directors that ended up never being made, some of which may be better than ones that have been made; however he said he feels he always has to write as though the script will definitely be produced. Film and theatre are very different forms, more different than film and the novel: 'novels and cinema are natural bedfellows in a way that theatre isn't.' If he has adapted something for the stage and he then creates a film adaptation, he feels it is better to start again than to try to convert the stage play to screen as it would always 'smell' of theatre. He also mentioned translators, who he feels are very underrated and often not even credited but who provide a bridge from one culture to another. He translated Yazmina Reza's Art, which became a huge West End hit, but Reza was horrified that the audience was laughing so much. He explained to her that the English find art funny whereas the French take it very seriously. Hampton on Hampton is available in Faber paperback, cover price £14.99. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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