Nicci French Blog

Summer Interlude

Nicci:

On Wednesday, we interrupted our intensely rainy (good for mushrooms, I guess), windy (good for sailing), familial (good for the soul and for memories) holiday in Sweden, and returned to the UK for one night only to see the performance of our play, which was simultaneously broadcast live on Sky TV. The play was a half hour drama, with a single set and four fantastic actors. We sat in the audience and had the strange and rather thrilling  experience of seeing our script inhabited and brought to life, so that there were actually moments when we forgot that we were the authors of the piece. When we finish a novel, that's the end; with a play, it's only the beginning. We were bowled over by the conviviality of it all - the enthusiasm and commitment and collaborative pleasure and adrenalin. But now we are back in Sweden (it's still gushing with rain) and thinking about our next novel. 

At the Movies

A reader left a comment on the blog some time ago:

I recently read Killing Me Softly and last night watched the film. I was amazed at the differences including the fundamental switch in murderer. I was wondering how you felt about the film?

We get asked this a lot. To put it briefly....

Our only role in the film was as observers, meeting the filmmakers, visiting the set a couple of times. It was great fun. 

Anyone who has been on a film set will know that it mainly seems to consist of hanging around while someone fixes the lighting, then shoots five seconds of someone opening a door, then shoots it again. The fact that this chaotic process involving lawyers and executives and technicians can be turned into a story that can make you laugh or cry is a miracle. Sometimes the miracle doesn't occur, as in the case of Killing Me Softly. 

Like many films, it just didn't work out. There were probably two main reasons:

1) As observed above, the script made changes which meant that the story became almost meaningless. 

2) Chen Kaige is one of the greatest directors in the world. But he couldn't manage the transition from Chinese historical pictures to a thriller in modern London.

But Hitchcock made drastic changes when he adapted John Buchan's The 39 Steps. And the novel on which Dr Strangelove was based wasn't even a comedy.

And John Woo (admittedly from Hong Kong) and Ang Lee (admittedly from Taiwan) have adapted pretty well to making commercial pictures.

Anyway, nobody died, and our book survives unchanged.

For me, there was only one traumatic aspect to the experience. When Heather Graham signed to do the picture, she told one of the producers that she wanted to meet Nicci to talk to discuss the sexual aspects of the novel. Why didn't she want to meet me to talk about the sexual aspects of the novel?

NB If anyone else wants to ask a question, just leave it as a comment and we'll do our best.

Dictionary Corner

I've just discovered a Swedish word that we lack an equivalent for in English:

Bjorntjanst. Literally it translates as bearfavour and it means a counterproductive favour, someone who tries to help you but leaves you worse off than you were before. When your three year old and your four year old make you breakfast in bed, they are doing you a bjorntjanst, I suppose. We need an English word for this.

It joins those other words for slightly uncomfortable expressions that we lack in English, esprit d'escalier and Schadenfreude. We have the experiences but we don't have the words.

Summer light

This morning I woke at four in the morning to hear cranes calling out from the Swedish lake. This is where we come every summer. Some holidays are about discovering new places, the shock of the strange; here, we know every stick and stone and each year repeat what we did the year before, until time loses its boundaries and memories are a haze. The familiar pleasures include the long slow dawn and dusk; the swallows in the eaves, the wind on the lake, the chantarelles in the forest, yellow and fluted and smelling of apricots, and the wild strawberries outside the house whose mineral sweetness is the taste of a Swedish summer. 

Playwriting

We've written a play, which, scarily, will be broadcast live on 29 July (on Sky Arts at 9pm). We just went to the first readthrough with the cast of four: Lee Boardman, Adam James, Nicola Stephenson and Paul Thornley. It's directed by Susan Tully.

Fascinating, and a completely new experience for us. When you write a novel, that is it; but a play is only a basic set of instructions which actors then take over and inhabit. Even on a rough first reading, these four remarkable actors took the play away from us and made it their own. In a good way. 

Seeing them perform the piece live on the 29th should be a remarkable experience - for us at least, and also bloody terrifying. 

Lady's Man

We went to see Leonard Cohen last night at an old racetrack in Surrey. There were certain negative aspects: a four-mile traffic jam through suburban Surrey to get in, gentle rain falling, the slight detachment you get from performances in front of vast crowds. However, a few thoughts:

1) The main technological advance in rock concerts since I was a teenager is the sound quality. The sound at the concert was better than on most of Leonard Cohen's albums...

2) And much better played as well. Cohen had a band consisting of guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, acoustic guitar, sax (and other wind instruments) and three backing singers. I've never heard such a spot-on performance. To use the traditional expression, the band was tighter than a gnat's arse.

3) The other major technological advance at rock concerts - utterly pointless, though - is the mobile phone camera. What is the point of pointing your phone in the vague direction of the stage a quarter of a mile away?

4) When I grow up I'm going to wear a suit like the one Leonard Cohen had on last night. And the hat.

5) If I had ever tried a line like 'touch your naked body with my mind' on a woman, I'd have received a slap on the face or a sarcastic sneer. But when Leonard Cohen delivered it, with his world-weary charm, his rugged poetic handsomeness, I could hear the approving, yearning sighs of women around, not necessarily excluding the feminist author, Nicci Gerrard. 'With my mind' indeed. It's always louche characters like Leonard Cohen who use utterly transparent lines like that. And it works for them as well.

Nicci: Oh he was beautiful! Old, worn, graceful, courteous, intense and playful. He put Bob Dylan to shame.

New Yorkered

I've just read the extremely long New Yorker profile of Ian McEwan. Very belatedly (it appeared in February). And I can't link to it (you need a subscription).

A few thoughts.

1) There is that weird New Yorker style. On the one hand, there is the pedantry about his 'new country house': 'a renovated seventeenth seventeenth-century brick-and-flint cottage', which bears all the scars of the legendary fact-checking department; and then they mention his teenage reading 'such as "The Cain Mutiny". Which I'm going to call a spelling mistake without even bothering to check it.

2) Crikey. What an amazing life. In his fifties, McEwan suddenly learned he had an older brother who had been given away on a railway station before he was born. Ian McEwan was born in to an Ian McEwan novel. And his first marriage didn't just break up; it ended up with a police chase across northern France with the English press in hot pursuit.

3) There is an interesting moment where the author, Daniel Zalewski (the New Yorker's features editor), asks McEwan's friends what they think of his novels. Martin Amis thinks McEwan's greatest achievement is 'the first two hundred pages of "Atonement"'. (I agree.) James Fenton mentions 'the beginning of "Enduring Love". Galen Strawson, to whom McEwan always gives his first drafts, says: 'Ian's novels are very, very accomplished. But none has the unity of drive that the best novels have."

With friends like these...

4) Which of us could withstand a New Yorker journalist writing 20,000 words, talking to our friends and relations?

Nicci: I've reviewed and been reviewed; I've interviewed and been interviewed. When you are in a small room talking to an author/actor/director etc, you feel like their friend, their confessor and confidante, and the instant you leave, you turn back into the journalist. You take their story and make it into your story of their story. When I read interviews that Sean and I have given, I feel that - however fair and accurate and kind it is - I am reading about a stranger, someone I don't know. Like listening to your own voice on tape.  

Nicci Gerrard Meets Jimmy McNulty

Go here to see Dominic West reading an extract from Nicci [Gerrard]'s The Moment You Were Gone. Weirdly, it's a shock to hear him reading in an English accent. I have to admit that it's a particular thrill. He is our hero, after all. 

French Drivers

Nice piece in Slate about the best stunt scenes in movies. This one is awesome. I think you might have difficulty getting Health and Safety to sign off on it nowadays.

Thought for the Day

Three unnecessary synonyms:

Evening Star/Morning Star

inflammable/flammable

thirty-all/deuce