Features Interviews Christopher Hampton - In His Own Words Christopher Hampton - In His Own Words |
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The Oscars has always had two screenwriter awards – for best original screenplay, and for adaptations. Christopher Hampton has built a career on adaptations, winning an Oscar for ‘Dangerous Liaisons,” and an Oscar nomination for ‘Atonement’. At the Screenwriters’ Festival 2008 he explained his route into screenwriting, what he has learnt about writing for the screen, and why you should think about writing adaptations. “I got into screenwriting because I sold the film rights to my very first play,” says Christopher Hampton. “The film producers asked me if I would like to write the screenplay. So I went out and bought five screenplays by Harold Pinter and the five books they were based on. What was interesting was the better the book, the closer Harold Pinter had stayed to it.” For the record, Hampton says ‘The Go-Between’ is very different, but with ‘The Quiller Memorandum’, “it’s clear Pinter had a lot of fun”. As for ‘The Pumpkin Eater’, it is somewhere between the two. Candidly, Hampton admits: “Despite this excellent material, my first screenplay was completely terrible. I really did not know how to do it.” Over the next decade Hampton wrote seven or eight screenplays, but only a couple were made. As he puts it: “The method eluded me. “I had come to writing screenplays thinking it was rather easy. The theatre is technically very demanding, and complicated. For some reason or other I had kind of worked that out and worked out what to do.” But when it came to films, the problem lay with his idea about what screenplays were about. He loved the idea of writing movies, but had supposed that with so much more freedom to cut from scene to scene, compared to a stage play, that it would be easy. But he found that the more liberty you have, the harder it can be to organise what you are doing while preserving the full attention of the audience. “You have to respect the restrictions of film, and be aware that the more liberties you have as a writer, the more you should respect yourself, and not give into temptation to divert from the lines of progress. “You have to work you how it is that the audience will be impaled on the logic of whatever it is you are doing.” Aged 30, Hampton still felt he had not got on top of the business, but it was in the following decade that he says he started to put together what it is that he knows about writing. It was around this time that he read the biography of Lytton Strachey, which eventually led to ‘Carrington’ in 1995. But before then he was starting to hone his talents. “In the 80s, when I began to write some films that they made, including ‘The Good Father’, things started to make more sense. The crucial experience for me was going to work for David Lean in the mid 1980s.” This was to work on the screenplay for ‘Nostromo’, an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella. Hampton spent a year going each day to Lean’s house “and began to put together what few principles I possess as a writer,” says Hampton. “David Lean was an editor. What preoccupied him most was how you get from one scene to the next,” he explains. “His theory was a film consists of eight to ten to a dozen chunks. Within these chunks there needs to be a very strong rope or narrative. If you did it right, the audience would not be aware of the liberty he would take at the start. That one scene would follow into another, and that would stop your mind from wandering as you sort of half knew what was going to happen and half don’t know. “The question is getting the scenes in precisely the right order.” Such was Lean’s passion for getting it right that he was interested in the last image of one scene and the first image of the next and would ask whether it should be a cut or a dissolve, says Hampton. “He would get the storyboard artist in to have the three images drawn. It was a real education in the sense that I had not had an education as a screenwriter. It’s no coincidence that ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ was the first fully achieved screenplay that I felt I have written.” Hampton adapted the novel ‘Les Liasons Dangereuses’ from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos for a stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, the film adapted from the stage play, came out three years later in 1988. Lean’s version of ‘Nostromo would not be made as the director died from cancer while it was still being planned, although Hampton was by then no longer on the project. Hampton’s screenwriting career has a predominance of adaptations. His first film with his name credited on it was ‘A Doll’s House’. Since then other adaptations have included ‘The Honorary Consul’, ‘Hotel du Lac’, ‘Mary Reilly’, ‘The Quiet American’, ‘The Secret Agent’ and ‘Sunset Boulevard’. Hampton’s second brush with the Oscars, albeit not quite so successfully was again an adaptation: of Ian McEwan’s novel ‘Atonement’. McEwan had decided not to write the screenplay, but had retained the right to select the screenplay writer. One of the challenges for the screen is that the book is structured in four irregular-sized chunks, says Hampton. The difficulty lies in the Hollywood ‘requirement’ for a three act film. However, he is not necessarily keen on having rigid rules for screenplays: “The thing that I got slightly exercised about was when people said there is this formula and that formula, because how can the result of such a formula not be anything but formulaic?” One of the problems for the movie industry is that more than 60 per cent of the films that come out of the centre of the industry “copy what came out last week”, he says. While each project has its own set of problems, he says: “What attracts me to the process is that it’s like being able to translate. I trained as a linguist, so I translated plays from French and German into English. So in one sense you are trying to find the usual equivalence for literary effect.” As for musicals, Hampton had been interested in adapting ‘Sunset Boulevard’ from the film for the stage for some time. “I thought the plot was very operatic and I was talking to English National Opera about an opera,” he says. Writing to Billy Wilder to ask what the rights situation, the response was that, as is the way with Hollywood, the rights were not with the writer but with the studio. Paramount said that the rights were not currently available as they had been optioned. It was then that he brought up the idea with Andrew Lloyd-Weber only to find that it was Lloyd-Webber who had taken out the option. Writing the musical was not straightforward. “The reason why it did not work at first was that we had compromised it. It’s a tough story, but we had softened it.” The show was closed for two weeks while Hampton re-wrote it. He also mentions another possible factor. Hampton does not really like voiceovers in films, unless they are essential. “Sunset Boulevard is a film about a voice over.” Inspired? Click here for another article about adaptations.
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