Screenwriters On Screenwriting. The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series in association with The JJ Charitable Trust Christopher Hampton CBE 10 September 2010 at BFI Southbank Christopher Hampton: I am going to quote a few extensively in this way. So Laclos was obviously times this evening from one of my favourite film very taken with these Richardson books and books which is Truffaut’s Conversations With thought about what the form entailed. He was a Hitchcock, very illuminating on the subject of military man who did not have enough money to screenwriters. I am going to start with a joke buy himself a troop of well-dressed soldiers and go Hitchcock tells Truffaut in the course of the book and fight in the American war of revolution, which which is about two goats breaking into a film is what he wanted to do. Instead he was a vault. They find a film, and are chewing away on bourgeois with not enough money to be able to the negative and one of them turns to the other afford to go to America so he was looking after a and says: ‘Personally, I much preferred the book.’ very dull garrison somewhere in Western France This is a very familiar response for people who and he set himself the task of writing a book that adapt books. It is also, by the way, the book in would live forever. Immodest task! Strangely which Truffaut famously said the words ‘Britain’ enough, he succeeded. As a soldier and a and ‘Cinema’ were incompatible, an assertion mathematician also what he worked out was that that Hitchcock didn’t disagree with. Rather it would be very interesting if you wrote a book interestingly he agreed and attributed this to constructed of letters, to make those letters part class-consciousness and snobbery rather of the plot, to make the plot depend on the way unexpectedly. letters passed between the various characters; to make them weapons, really. But anyway… I did a bit of statistics at the beginning to prepare for this: I found that I had, When I came to write the play, of course I was rather depressingly, written 45 screenplays of discouraged from writing the play because I was which 15 have been made, which is a third of told that the two central characters never meet, them, which is a pretty good strike rate, I think. that they only write to one another and I Then I noticed that a third of these 15 could explained I intended to make them meet, and I reasonably be described as adaptations of did. That sort of changed the dynamic as far as masterpieces, of great books of one sort or the letters were concerned because they didn’t another. So I thought I would talk about that this have to be writing to each other all the time evening. because they were with each other and it further allowed me to sort of give up on the end of the It is a Hollywood truism that you should avoid novel… or somehow try to respect it in a different good books wherever possible when adapting for way because what happens at the end of the the cinema because bad books make much novel is that Mme de Merteuil, the villain, is better films. I have felt that was a travesty of the unmasked by the distribution of these very letters truth all my life because, quite simply, I feel that a that she’s written. Then she gets smallpox then she good book, a really good book, will yield a better has a trial, which she loses, and loses all her movie if you do it right than an indifferent book. money. Then there is a footnote where the author The question is: What do you do to get it right? says even worse things happen to her, which I And what do you not do? Well, the answer is, I can’t tell you about. I thought this was a sort of suppose, to try to tease out what the particular wink from the author saying, ‘I had to do this aspect of the book is that gives it its particular ending, I had to put this ending on because quality and be faithful to that and steer by that. otherwise I would never have got the book published… I had to have this moral ending.’ So I am going to start by talking about Dangerous when I came to write the play I wrote a speech Liaisons, or Les Liaisons Dangeureuses as it was for Mme de Merteuil where she says one of her once known. This is an absolutely astonishing book rules is never to write letters and so she got away written in the latter part of the 18th century by a with it at the end. However, when we came to man [Choderlos de Laclos] who never wrote work on the film and move it away from the another book; this was the only thing he ever theatre, from those artificial rules of the theatre, wrote. He chose to write this book in the epistolary we fell to thinking about how useful these letters form; this was a form that had been made could be as movers-along of the plot. So we popular… was very popular in France because of reinstated them. The film turned out pretty well the works of Samuel Richardson who had written and there was hardly anything in the way of re- 1 Screenwriters On Screenwriting. The BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters’ Lecture Series in association with The JJ Charitable Trust Christopher Hampton CBE 10 September 2010 at BFI Southbank shooting. I think the only thing that was reshot, as I We actually filmed Glenn Close being guillotined remember, is a shot towards the end where the at one point but when Stephen [Frears] and I saw Visconte de Valmont (John Malkovich) hands the rushes we both burst out laughing so obviously over a bundle of letters, the letters that are going that wasn’t going to work. What I thought was I’d to destroy Mme de Merteuil and we stuck to the end with a quote, just a quote across the screen moralizing ending of old Laclos because it was from the book about Mme de Merteuil which says: rather satisfying we decided. ’From then on her soul was written on her face,’ so we were going to end the film with that quote. Anyway, I’m going to show you a clip in which this Glenn Close said to us one day on the set that she whole mechanism is set in motion. The plot is could act that, she didn’t need this prop, she slightly complicated. Mme de Merteuil wants could act it, so we started to think about how to Valmont to seduce a young girl called Cecile do that. Sideways to this is a remark of the because she’s about to marry someone who’s usefulness of having the writer hanging about on dumped Mme de Merteuil so she wants her the set – something which directors don’t like to revenge. Valmont, on the other hand, wants to do but Stephen insists on – we set to work thinking seduce a woman famous for her virtue, Mme de about this and eventually the light bulb went off Tourvel, so he’s not interested in obeying this whim and of course the film begins with her putting on of Mme de Merteuil. However, somebody is her make-up so we thought the thing to do was writing to Mme de Tourvel warning her off, end the film with her taking it off. We found a warning her about Valmont and so he employs his corner of the studio and literally at the end of a servant to seduce the servant of Mme de Tourvel day shot this little scene once – one take – with to find out who’s writing these letters, and once [DoP] Philippe Rousselot on the lighting board he’s found out, he’s much more willing to join in turning it, turning it, down to fade-out and that’s Mme de Merteuil’s plot. what we did. In fact, Philippe was so skilful that when he saw a tear coming out of her eye, he (Clip from Dangerous Liaisons) faded it up a bit, but not really noticeably so brilliantly did he do it. So that’s a way in which you So, I counted it up, there are actually more than can use an image, a sequence, that’s actually 20 occasions in the film where letters are used to much more powerful than a sentence from a move the story forward … there are other movies book. that use letters. One of my very favourite films is Ophuls’ Letters From An Unknown Woman, there’s I am going to move on now to Atonement which Claire’s Knee, there are all kinds of films that use some people may not think is a masterpiece; I letters, particularly French films, they’re fond of happen to think it is, and it’s one of the only jobs I doing that… but I think this is the first epistolary have ever applied for. I read the book on holiday movie in the sense that everything that happens and came back to London, rang my agent and to the six main characters is moved along by one said I would like to write a screenplay for this book. or other of the character’s writing letters to one This turned out to involve being interviewed by Ian another.