Friday, 14 September 2007

A Man Of Few Words

I know a man whom I consider to be an artist who uses words as his tools and screenplays as his form. He has written many screenplays. He is playful yet accurate like a musketeer. He has been paid huge amounts of money for some of them, though only one has been made into a feature. Several years ago, I went out to see him in the screenplay capital of the world. I bought an economy ticket but was upgraded for no apparent reason at the main ticket desk to business class. When I reached the very last desk I was upgraded again from business class to first and flew all the way - 5456 miles - in pure and unexpected luxury. I was in a good mood when I arrived. The screenplay writer met me at the airport and drove me like a needle through the tapestry of an 8-lane freeway, eventually taking me to his house, a kind of musty writer's paradise on a hill. The yard to his house, as we pulled in at speed, was full of old Citroens and various other engine parts. These littered the ground or leaned like stilts against the stucco walls. Inside the house, his scripts were in bits, too. But he didn't half work them. (He is a tall man at the best of times and would sit in his large swivel chair explaining in a deep voice about the motivations of the protagonist.) In the kitchen, I noticed, a long line of ants marked the route in reverse to the outside world. Outside, one very early morning in that world, a coyote stared up at me like a sinister but unsuccessful hypnotist. (I couldn't sleep and was drinking some tea on the balcony.) As many as 5,000 coyotes roamed the screenplay capital of the world, I was told at breakfast. Anyway, I listened to the writer - in several sittings - read out an entire script, zooming in at certain times and zooming out again, and I loved every page of it. Occasionally, we would tear down some steep or long hill at top speed on his Triumph motorbike just to get some air, but by and large we sifted through the script. It all felt very familiar to me, this working companionship with the artist. Here - except for the coyotes - was familiar territory indeed. Now, I wonder, several years later, what is it within me that so enjoys such company? Is it the creative self-reliance of the artist? No, that can't quite be true, as the screenplay writer - unlike the painter - can be finished with their work and yet the real work - the film making - has not even begun. (This screenplay ended up in what they call 'development hell'.) Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the writer has just sent me a picture. He is sitting alone at the back of a parked van on an entirely different continent to the one I have just described. He is in a forest. He is drinking a small flask of what I believe to be tea, and there is a chainsaw to his right, and behind him - in the van - several dozen logs of wood. His only words in the message ask if he has been right to leave behind the screenplay capital of the world. Well, they may not have coyotes where he is now but I have just read that the lynx is alive and well there. Also, his wife, who is presumably taking the picture, is six months pregnant. (The mother of all screenplays.) I wonder if a screenwriter's wife is anything like an artist's husband.

No comments: