An Interview: Jay Rayner and Bruce Robinson The Observer Monday August 24, 1998   Jay Rayner: Lots has been made of the fact that this [Thomas Penman] is an autobiographical novel: was it painful to write - did it have to be written? Bruce Robinson: As a matter of fact I started writing it in 1973, and because my parents were all still alive - my mother still is alive, as a matter of fact my mother called me two months ago saying 'I'm going to buy your book to burn it.' JR: So relations are still good? BR: Yeah. We get on like a house on fire. I haven't seen her for two years. JR: Do you know whether she's read it yet? BR: No, she won't. My mother has never read anything I have ever written. JR: Did you really take from '73 to '97 to write the whole book, or was there one concentrated period? BR: No, I started it in '73 and abandoned it because too many people were still alive and in '73 for some reason I couldn't see the funny side of it. Then I started writing it two years ago and it made me laugh then because I was writing about somebody else by then. JR: Is it comfortable now you're reading bits of it [ - ] is that a comfortable experience sharing that with the crowd who finds it very funny, although it wasn't funny for you at the time? BR: No it most certainly wasn't, it was bloody awful. He was an astonishingly aggressive bloke my, my er - well he wasn't my dad, that's what the book's about. My mother had a relationship with an American in the war and got pregnant. The American buggers off, he comes back from Crete or wherever he was and here's your baby, you know it coincided with one of his weekends. So I could've been his kid but I wasn't. He found out when I was four that I wasn't his son so he had a go at me to punish her. JR: Now this book comes out of that kind of painful experience. Withnail and I also came out of a painful experience, there's been a bit of benefit for you as a writer, going through horrible experiences, hasn't there? BR: Well, that's what you do, you try and convert - My old pal Ralph Steadman's in here somewhere. He's got a good set of eyes - he sees the horror and makes it funny and I think that for me if I see the horror I want to make it funny if I can. Most of the time you can't because it's just too horrible. JR: Are there still wells of horror which you just haven't written about? BR: Yeah, becoming old- it's horrible. I don't know how old everyone is but it's bloody horrible. I don't enjoy this process at all of getting old, and I think if ever I write another book it'll be about this awful thing, the back, you know, and the feet, you can hardly get out of the bath, you know - , and you look in there and you see these awful sort of eruptions of veins in your head, it's horrible. JR: Was that part of the reason for writing about being young? I mean although you started the novel in 1973, but it's only now that it has come to fruition. BR: No. I mean I don't write because I'm getting old but I don't like the process of it, and if I do write something else then I'll write about being an old bugger. And then in a sense you've got him who's a kid, you've got Withnail - they're all rights of passage aren't they? From him he becomes an adult in this book, Withnail becomes an adult and then he becomes sort of an old bugger. JR: It reads very much like a book that could've been written in the first person. But it's in the third - Is there a good reason for that? BR: Yea, I originally started writing it in the first person, but the book is so much to do with excrement - JR: I have my shit question. BR: OK, ask that then. JR: Well I was going to say why is this book literally full of shit? There's turds everywhere: on the landing, under the bed in Thomas' pants. Shit comes up all the way through it. BR: That's right it's full of shit and it's because when I was younger I had a long period of deep despair and I went to the shrink I couldn't afford, and I got quite friendly with this psychiatrist and we used to talk about things and we talked about shit in relation to the super ego. Now not many people know this, but shit is the first reward, that parents can bestow on a child. If you shit where and when they want you to they reward you, they pat you and say 'Well done good boy good girl'. If you shit out of line, ie don't shit where they want you to, you can punish the parent, and so I did. I did quite a lot of research on that and so this kid punishes the parents by shitting inappropriately and it comes all the way through the book, and then the mother uses dog shit for the same reason although she doesn't understand why she's using it. Anyone who reads it reads a lot of shit. JR: Did you ever come across a story about Salvador Dali laying turds around his father's house? Whenever anybody was due to come round to his house to be entertained he would always, just before, crap somewhere in the house and his father would have to run around endlessly looking for the turd getting rid of it, and after carrying this on for three months the next time someone was due to come round he didn't and Dali found it incredibly funny that his father had to run around the house looking for a non-existent turd. I thought I'd throw that one in - It's one of those things you need. BR: Thank god we know. JR: Why did it take you so long to get round to publishing a novel? I know you'd written more, and that even Withnail and I started as a novel, but this is the first piece of your writing that's been published as a novel. BR: Well basically my trade is screen writing and I write films and everything I ever write gets buggered and ruined and destroyed. I wrote a film that's coming out this year actually - a horrible thing - for Spielberg's company, and I got paid very highly and my wife had said to me: 'You've been threatening this book for years and years' and I had enough money not to work, ie to earn money for a year, so I wrote this. You get so fed up with having your work buggered. JR: Was it the easier process you'd imagined it to be? I mean when you write a film script and then as you say lots of people come along and bugger it up and turn it into a bad film - or they get you to bugger it up and re-write it in ways that you don't want them to. BR: Well I won't rewrite, and what happens, is the most frustrating and enormously horrible process. If you write a book, for good or for bad that is your book, they are your words and you are in control of it. When you write a screenplay you really are like a prostitute, because they pay you relatively huge sums of money to do what they want and then they come along, no-one knows how to do it and as soon as you've written it they're all experts. Suddenly everyone knows what the story should be and they come along and they say: 'Why can't he be a she?' - I had that actually with Withnail - why can't Withnail be a woman? Well, because he's a bloke, you know he's a man. And anyway this thing Spielberg thing I wrote that financed this book is a story about a paedophile, a child killer - an incredibly difficult subject to deal with because I adore children, I have my own children and I don't think killing children is entertainment, I think it's loathsome. So I literally spent three months trying to find a way to write about a child killer that was entertainment because all film is entertainment. So I couldn't find a way to make a child killer entertaining and I really thought for months about how to do it. I finally got the way of doing it, then Spielberg phoned me up and he said, ' [unintelligible] - it's my next fucking picture, I'm making this movie.' And then about two days later I get another phone call from somebody who says 'I hear Neil Jordan's directing the Spielberg film,' which he is and he has and he's made it. What Neil did is show a child in jeopardy, which I totally disassociate myself from. That's the problem being a screenwriter, you know he's changed it. JR: Is your name still on the film when it comes out? BR: Oh yeah, it has to be if you get paid more than $75,000 under the WGA Writer's Guild of America rules, you have to take the credit. JR: Do you wish it wasn't? BR: Yes I wish it wasn't, because I don't want to be associated with that. There are two films coming out this year I don't want to be associated with. JR: Does Thomas Penman make up for that? BR: In a way it does and I'm writing a comedy at the moment, again for me and I hope to direct it if I can. You know, to control my own work, I hate that writing for studios, it's bloody awful. JR: Let's open it up to the floor - does anybody have any questions. Questioner 1: Why does the novel have what looks like a still from the Tin Drum on the front? BR: I don't know - For anyone that doesn't know it here's his picture, you'd think that he was an orphan or something from Romania, but he's not, he's a professional model from N2 in London. JR: He does a couple of adverts on TV. BR: Doesn't he have a great physog? They did a few covers - I had no control over it, and they sent that and I said 'God that's marvellous'. He looks like he's been born at 11 and he can't believe what he's seeing, and that's why I liked it. JR: Did you worry that it would rob people of the chance to imagine what Thomas Penman would look like? Because you'll always have that kid's face in you mind when you're reading it. BR: No - he's slightly younger than I would have liked, but he's pretty good isn't he? JR: Oh absolutely, you can't take your eyes off his face. Questioner 2: The cinematic nature of the pieces that you read earlier beg the question do you have aspirations to make Thomas Penman into a film? BR: I do yeah - I'd like to do it because I wrote it like a film in a sense because I am a film writer not really a prose writer. It'd be a good film I think, it'd be quite funny. How do you deal with the shit though? Questioner 3: It sounds from what you said as though screen writing is a constant hell. Why do you keep on doing it? And how do you manage to have a relationship with the filmmakers since you're obviously quite vocal about how you feel about what they do to your scripts, so how do you manage to keep on - from the fact that you're brilliant? How do you manage to keep on getting the kind of work and people keep employing you, and saying: 'OK this guy screams every time we change his script but we'll still use this script, or we'll use this script and then we'll change it.' BR: There's a very famous book by a brilliant screen writer William Goldman and he makes the point no-one would ever dream of going on a film set and saying to the director of photography: 'Hold on I'll just fix these lights for you,' or of saying to the director or the actors: 'You should do this.' Screenwriters write the script in, say, 1990 and the movie gets made in 1992, and you're history and you're writing something else now. There is a general loathing of screenwriters because they came into it very late. When movies started it was actors and directors and if they needed dialogue they'd put up a card saying 'Help' - you know the girl's on the railway line with the train coming so 'Help!', and then cut to the guy trying to save her. If you look at very early talky movies the screenwriter comes between the boom operator and the makeup man. So we writers got into this business late and we are not liked, you know truly loathed. I wrote the biggest disaster Paramount pictures has ever had. 15 years ago and I wrote this film called Fat Man and Little Boy about the atomic bomb, and I think it's the best thing I've ever done. It took me two and a half years to write this thing and Roland Joffey who'd just come off directing The Killing Fields he walks on water - he's Mao you know in the cinema, and the first thing he did when he came on the picture was fire me. He brought in another writer who completely fucked it up. I'd known so much about the atomic bomb - I'd done so much work on it, and this other guy comes in and he can't do it, and then they get another writer to fuck up the fuck up. Then Roland comes in and makes his parts. By now the thing is in shreds, I mean it's a mess, a terrible mess and Roland's lawyers sent a letter to me saying we want your research material, i.e. they couldn't insure the film because there was some very, very volatile stuff in it. And my contractual obligation was to deliver them two copies of the screenplay so they sent me this thing saying: 'We want your research notes we want to know how you came to these conclusions cause we can't issue the picture', and I sent the fax back saying: 'You've stolen my car don't expect me to supply the fucking gasoline.' And that was the end of that. And so the film cost $68 million and played for four days in New York before it folded. It was a disaster because they hate the writer, you know. - So why do I keep doing it - ? Money! I get paid well. JR: Would you advise someone who's already writing novels not to get into writing films. BR: Stay away from it - it's so soul destroying, it's horrible. And after all these years, I'm now trying to be a writer again.   I stole this article from here: http://www.filmunlimited.co.uk/interviews/robinson/transcript.html Thanks to Erin in San Francisco for telling me about it.