Ronald Harwood - In His Own Words

What makes a screenwriter tick? And what is the process for writing award-winning screenplays? In an interview at the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival 2008, Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood shared his views on writing, filmmaking - and one of his greatest sources of creativity.

Ronald Harwood is disarmingly open about money. 

“If you are financially needy, it’s a great incentive,” he tells the audience of aspiring screenwriters.

And by way of explanation: “The only obligation on my parents’ generation was to make a living." That said, writers should be aware that the need for an income sometimes lowers your standards, he warned. 

With five decades in the business, the other great source of creativity is his daily work habit.

“I get up in the morning and want to work, to write. I have very strong sense discipline. I get up and I write. I want to write.”

And it’s not about posterity. “I’m interested in the here and now, not in the after world and what people will say about me. I like writing. I do not think of it as a disease. I love doing it. If I’m asked why do I write such depressing things when I am so jolly, well, you have to write what’s in you.”

An explanation may lie in the fact that Harwood was born in Cape Town in 1934 into a Jewish family. “The English are secure in their identity, but people like me are not,” he says.

It’s not about any kind of moral crusade, as he does not think of himself as a moralist, but: “That does not mean I am not a moral writer. My first work was about apartheid. Being South African and Jewish, I felt I had a moral responsibility.”

However, he adds: “There’s nothing easier than being a vociferous champion of human rights at a distance. I was 6,000km away. No-one threatened me or my wife.” The real heroes are people, for example, who were very actively involved in the fight against apartheid. “My kind of moralisation has been heroic at a distance,” says Harwood.

Asked whether there is such a thing as Jewish creativity, Harwood says that there is a memory of collective suffering. “All Jews are born with a genetic sense of anti-Semitism,” he says, adding “I get it in very early in conversations that I’m Jewish.”

When working with Roman Polanski in ‘The Pianist’, Harwood went to Warsaw where over three days he viewed Nazi propaganda never normally shown to the public. “You come out reeling. For Roman Polanski, he had experienced much of it in the ghetto.

"I’m obsessed by the Holocaust. I read the trials: I want to understand why, but it’s impossible.”

He suggests that the answer may simply be human beings: “The Holocaust is not just German, it’s a universal human problem. The war dominated my childhood. Perhaps I am still in adolescence. It’s still a compulsion. I’m a father of three and a grandfather of seven, but I still do not know what it means; I still feel 18.”

Is there anything else that has influenced his approach to writing? “My mother was deeply in love with culture, particularly British culture.” He was never taken to museums, and to this day is not that interested in them. But he was taken to galleries and to hear performances. “Art moves me,” he says. This nurturing has helped his abilities, and as a consequence has written about several musicians and performers. “I am interested in performers … I was brought up in a theatre where the leading actor is a gladiator.”

“Without the past I could not have been the writer I am.” He was a child from a “deeply unhappy marriage”, where his parents did not get on. “It was very fortunate for me, that I did not think it scared me. But I did not want to be there when they rowed or were silent.”

Harwood has not expected success, something he sees as “a turning point in life, a life-changing experience.” Laurence Olivier on the second night of Richard III knew from the excitement of that the sell-out audience that they had come to see him, says Harwood. “He knew that he had become something central to life. I do not think it has ever happened to me, in part because of those wretched things, the director.”

“I would like to see screenwriters more highly regarded. Directors have an inclination to sweep away the writer and pretend it was dreamed up as it went along. It’s to do with the way the industry is organised. Do not let them get away with it,” he says.

That said, he acknowledges the better the director, the less demeaned he is made to feel.

Harwood is much more attuned to actors, perceiving a degree of vulnerability there. “We can hide behind our writing, our films,” he says. “But an actor goes to an audition only to be told they are too tall. That’s dreadful. These are people who have to perform a part and are treated like cattle. But writers do not enter this world and are protected.”

There is a difference in approach to his screenplays and stage plays. “I do not write original movies, I adapt. If I have an original idea, it goes into a play,” he says. “The stage is my natural habitat. In the theatre we sit in the auditorium, and that’s to do with hearing.” (audere = to hear in Latin).

For Harwood, the life of a writer has its potential problems. “Writing on your own is not a very natural state. Being alone was not natural to me. I like going out and meeting people; I have plays in rehearsal and I like talking to the actors. I long to have a collaborator. But it’s not my way to do so; I’m not a two person writer, I’m a single writer.”

Harwood says he is not driven by invention. Instead: “My plays are conventional and films are fairly conventional. I cannot do big action scenes, mine are character driven.” He has not written a love story. “I would not know how to write a passionate love story or write about sex,” he says, adding: “Somerset Maugham was very clever to disguise the homosexuality and make it look heterosexual.”

Nor does he think he is a stranger to failure. “I have had terrible, terrible reviews. I’m not a critics’ darling.” However, critics are an “essential part” of the business as they can tell you if your writing is all right or needs improving.

Has he any advice for writers? “When you finish a day’s work, stop when it’s going well,” he says, relating the advice given to him by Graham Greene. “Stop when it’s going well and the next day you go to your desk eager to write.”

Harwood’s own writing day sees him getting up sometime between 6.30 and 7.00am. He has a leisurely time over breakfast (coffee and cigarettes) before showering and then getting down to writing around 9.15. He works through to 12.30 and comes out of his office for lunch, and then sometimes a sleep.

If he is going to work any more that day, he might spend a couple of hours from 5.00pm looking at what he has written, and doing the corrections. However, he will not write any more so as to keep his creativity for the next morning.

As for relaxing, he says he loves watching ‘bad’ television, by which he means “pretentious” drama, rather than soap operas or reality television.

And what about writer’s block? Well, let’s visit Picasso first.

Picasso is supposed to have been in a restaurant when an admirer asks him to draw something. He sketches on a napkin and then hands it to the woman saying that it would be $5,000. “But it only took you a moment to draw,” says the woman. “And a lifetime’s experience,” says Picasso

Back to writer's block. Harwood cites the difficulty he had in adapting ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ for the screen. His wife read the book first and said it was remarkable, so he read it too. Sometime later he was asked whether he would be interested in adapting it. He said yes immediately, without proper consideration. On re-reading the book he realised it was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated.

“For three weeks I was completely stumped. I was going to phone them to give the [advance] money back, but then had the idea that the story would be the camera of the man with the stroke.”

Alluding to Picasso, he says, “I got the idea overnight by being a writer for 50 years.”

This article is based on a conversation between Ronald Harwood and Professor Michael Fitzgerald which took place at the Screenwriters’ Festival 2008 in Cheltenham, UK.

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