The View from the Bridge (9 page)

I felt this was the sort of project a studio might permit me to direct. I had been biding my time for this moment, slowly building up my credibility around town with produced television movies and my (entirely fortuitous) Oscar nomination. The iron was hot; it was time to strike. I optioned Karl's story with my own money and wrote the screenplay in a week. This figure, however, is deceptive. When folks ask how long it takes to write something, they never—I never—include how much mental work precedes the physical act of writing. Most of my writing takes place before I actually put pen to paper. In the case of
Time After Time
, I had lain awake for months contemplating Karl's clever conceit and how I'd make it into a movie if only I'd thought of it, before the penny dropped and I came up with the notion of optioning the thing. I thought a lot about Jean-Luc Godard's
Alphavillle
, a sci-fi movie I had reviewed in college, where all the props are ordinary items with extraordinary names. A book, for example, might be termed “an information container” and so forth. I didn't remember much of the Godard film except for this ingenious and provocative gimmick. When my script was finished I showed it to a producer friend of mine, Herb Jaffe, with whom I had always wanted to work. Jaffe was known throughout the business as a gent, which doesn't begin to do him justice. He was among the legion of people I'd met as a stranger in town who had befriended me—just as Walter Mirisch later reminded me in the aftermath of Verna Fields's funeral. Herb loved the script and was undaunted by the condition of my directing it, and slowly evolved into one of those father figures who seem to play such important roles in my life. In addition, his younger son, Steven-Charles, who coproduced the film, became my close friend and ultimately my producing partner. With Herb as my very reputable producer, another part of my “plausibility campaign” with the studios to direct was in place.

Although
Time After Time
bears a superficial resemblance to
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
(Karl had said my book inspired him to write his), I think there are significant differences between the two.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
is about two specific people, Holmes and Freud, and how their intellectual gifts cross-fertilize. By contrast,
Time After Time
is a movie that juxtaposes types. Wells represents civilized, progressive, constructive humanity; the Ripper is his dark, destructive counterpart. If
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
is about individuals,
Time After Time
is concerned with the flip sides of humanity.

That's my two cents, anyway. Artists are not the best—and certainly not the definitive—critics of their own work. Once that work is launched into the wide world, we lose all proprietary authority, and our opinions are of no more value than anyone else's. Possibly less. An author can't possibly follow his book into the hands of every reader, looking over his shoulder and telling him what to think about what he's read. Or what it means. Neither can a film director explain his intentions from the back of every theater where his film unspools. People will think what they're going to think, conclude what they will. The artist/author's opinion is simply and merely one additional viewpoint. The word “definitive” has no place in artistic or literary discussions. There is no such thing as a “definitive” biography, any more than there can be a “definitive” piano concerto or a “definitive” apple by Cézanne.

Warner Brothers and Orion competed for the screenplay and wound up cofinancing it. To become the director, I had essentially replicated the “leapfrog” system that had successfully led to my becoming a screenwriter: I had consented to sell the film rights to
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
only if I wrote the script; this time I would sell my script only if I could direct the film.

They do say that fun is the past tense of shit, but, looking back, making
Time After Time
was perhaps the most fun I've ever had in the daytime. I barely knew what I was doing, had never directed a film of any kind before (unless you count my youthful contribution to
Around the World in Eighty Days
) and, though terrified, I enjoyed every heady minute of it. I worked with temperamental but excellent actors and I surrounded myself with an excellent and supportive crew, to all of whom I made the same speech: “I know nothing. You must teach me. You must not mind teaching me. And having taught me, you must not mind if I then want to do it my way, anyway. Don't go away angry. Don't go away at all.” Those who could smilingly endure this catechism and say yes were the ones I wanted. I proposed Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells. Warner objected—“He always plays the villain!” “Yes, but this time he'll be the hero—that's acting,” I explained, remembering Herb Ross's advice about sticking to my guns. A young, slow-talking brunette from Arkansas gave a terrific reading as the heroine. She was completely different from the blonde, fast-talking, city-chippie, Jean Arthur type I had contemplated when I wrote the script, but she'd made me see the part in a different light. I fought for and landed Mary Steenburgen. When Malcolm asked me who his leading lady was to be, I grinned and predicted, “You'll love her.”

Warner Brothers suggested using Mick Jagger as the Ripper but I had trouble visualizing him—not as the Ripper (certainly!) but in his alter ego as a Harley Street surgeon. When I demurred they said, “You mean you won't even meet with him? I then realized—better late than never—that in order to appear reasonable I needed to go through the motions. Besides, there was always the possibility that they were right and I was missing a bet. A meeting with the living legend was duly convened at his hotel suite. Jagger's latest tour was coming to an end and he was understandably fatigued. We had beers and made self-conscious, desultory small talk for twenty minutes or so (about what? I can't recall), and then I departed, my mind unchanged. David Warner made a splendid Ripper—and a convincing Victorian doctor.

There's lots to say about making a movie; directing is fun. Orson Welles called it the biggest set of electric trains any kid was ever given to play with. There are also an astonishing number of moving parts and the director must keep track of all of them. It is therefore also extremely hard work, both intellectually and physically. You must be in top shape or you'll collapse. The job goes on seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day; there's no let-up. If you are not shooting, you are preparing to shoot, thinking about the film, watching dailies, dealing with actors, losing locations, answering to your backers, and always,
always
trying in the tumult to hear the small voice that whispered to you while you were writing the thing.
Is this what I imagined? Is it better? Is it worse? Should I settle or go for another take?
I remember reading someplace that Steven Spielberg said the hardest and most important thing to do while directing is to listen to that small voice in your head that reminds you of what kind of film you set out to make in the first place. It is almost impossible, sometimes, to hear that all-important voice amid the din of movie battle. The best directors have great inner hearing.

If you are both writer and director, you face a double-barreled pressure. When you're working on the script, you can't be directing; when you're directing you can't be working on the script. So: make sure that script is ready before you go. Directing a movie is like having a picnic on Mars—once you set out, there's no going back for the salt. The script
will
change as you work but try to have it in the kind of shape where it will be able to withstand change and still be true to itself. And you. Like the Constitution, which has had many amendments, but still manages to express the essential notions of the Founding Fathers.

Malcolm and Mary were great together—you really believed they were falling in love. I told myself I was a really good director. . . .

There are some strengths I bring to directing that are extremely useful and other qualities that are liabilities. In the main, I am healthy and haven't ever become incapacitated on a shoot; I know something about scripts and have become good at writing them; I understand the mechanics of storytelling and the integral part that character plays in narrative. We learn about a character from the choices he makes. (Character is destiny, says Aristotle.) My background in theater helps me to deal with actors and performances. You'd be surprised how many directors know nothing about stories or actors—or maybe you wouldn't. In addition, my writing ability is also of use in the editing room, where I know about cutting and pasting and being ruthless with what doesn't work. Also, I like people, which is useful if you're a director. I can usually charm or coax them to give me what I want.

So much for the good news.

The bad news is that I came to moviemaking late, especially working with the camera. While Steven Spielberg was playing with lenses, I was playing with typewriters, and the difference is all too obvious. The camera and its possibilities were alien to me—a fine situation for a film director. And remember, I'm a slow learner. The British have evolved a great system: you direct endless commercials and hone your technical skills along the way; in the U.S. commercial directors don't direct movies and vice versa. (The closest thing to that kind of training nowadays in America is music videos for MTV. But music videos arrived after I did.)

In addition, while I like people, I have difficulty confronting them. If I can't coax or manipulate them to get what I want, I sure as hell can't threaten them. Directing is government by consent of the governed. It's an agreement presumably made by actors and crew alike to trust the director and do what he says. But if an actor acts up and I can't figure out how to defuse him, I don't do head-to-head.

There are some directors who believe themselves—rightly or wrongly—to be omniscient. No one can tell them anything—about story, acting, filming, or editing. Crew members who make suggestions get fired.

That isn't the kind of director I ever believed I am or aspire to be. Filmmaking to me is a collaborative process, and that's much of what interested me about it. When I write, I write alone and I have complete control. I am limited by only my ability. When I direct, I work with gifted people and I try to take advantage of what they know and think,
always reserving the right to say no.
I am a pillager of other people's ideas, and on
Time After Time
I found that I (and the film) benefited from this policy.

Let one example suffice. We had just shot a scene with Malcolm and the unit had broken for lunch. A lighting man came down from high up in the gaiters (the scaffolding suspended on cables above sets on a soundstage, which supports crew and lights) and tapped me on the shoulder.

“You're the writer of this thing, as well as the director, aren't you?”

I owned that I was.

“Well, if you're asking me,” the man went on, “he's saying the wrong thing there,” meaning Malcolm as H. G. Wells in the scene we had just completed.

“Really?” I didn't know whether to pursue this or not. I was hungry. “What should he have said?”

“Well, if you're asking me . . .” and the man went on to supply a line far better than the one we had just shot. It was a reprise from an earlier moment in the script and so terrific, echoed in this scene, that I kicked myself before realizing that, as the director, I was entitled to come back after lunch and shoot the lighting man's line instead of my crappy piece of dialogue.

I cherished this moment (a) because it helped the film and (b) because the atmosphere on my set encouraged this sort of participation, of which there were to be many other instances. We sometimes limit people by using them to fulfill only their “official” job capacities. The cinematographer takes the pictures, the script girl sees to continuity and so forth, the gaffers arrange the lights.

This seems very shortsighted to me. These people have been around and seen a lot. Their ideas aren't always right, but I can always reject them. I carry in my head a vision of what the film is supposed to be (the little voice) but I can evaluate suggestions that may help me achieve that vision. Once my crew realized that I was interested in what they thought and had to say about the work, we became a much more cohesive and “European”-type unit. In America if the director turns to the prop man and asks what he thinks of a scene or a line, the man is terrified to respond; it's not his department. His department is props, a fiefdom he guards jealously, and when he looks at the dailies, he is interested in only whether his props did the job they are supposed to do. In Europe there's much less territoriality about job responsibilities and much more overlapping involvement with the total project. There's less fear, less concentration on covering your ass. To me this is a much more interesting and appealing way to work. Hollywood technicians and artisans are the equal if not the superior of any in the world; the problem lies with a system seemingly cribbed from the assembly line.

Warner Brothers wanted changes in the finished film. Some of their ideas were good; others I didn't like. They wanted more close-ups; I didn't see the need. They wanted Mary Steenburgen to appear more roughed up at the end and asked me to reshoot; again, I thought they were wrong. If audiences were studying whether she was “roughed up” instead of simply being flabbergasted to find her alive at this point in the tale, we were in big trouble.

A week or so later, my editor, Donn Cambern (who cut
Easy Rider
), found himself on an airplane with someone in the biz who asked him what he was working on. When he said,
Time After Time
, his seat partner sighed sympathetically, “Oh, that's the one they hate.”

Cheerful tidings. Warner Brothers hated the film. Naturally. Among other things I had used the services of Hungarian film composer Miklós Rózsa (
Ben-Hur
,
The Asphalt Jungle
,
El Cid
, etc.), who was considered passé. Warner wanted a pop score, which would have been ludicrous. Our hero was a Victorian man, through whose sensibility we were seeing our world; I wanted the music to reflect his values and life experience, not ours; let rock music be another phenomenon he encounters in the late twentieth century, heard on radios or televisions.