Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I visited the set where my channel 4 film, DIP, was being shot. I felt a rush of pride – here were thirty people all trying to make my words come to life. Far more people than I expected, in fact, and I never quite worked out what all of them did. There was a script supervisor who checked continuity, and a makeup lady who kept rushing up to the lead and gelling down a loose forelock; two producers; a man who periodically told everyone to be quiet; two assistant directors; a clutch of extras. And all these people were crammed onto a bus, the story’s setting. The bus trundled along in the bus lane, stopping whenever the scene required it – which meant a fair few irate drivers behind wondering what was going on. It was a Friday night, so there were lots of people out, with even, at one point, a couple of drunk girls trying to get on board. It was the last day of a four day shoot and all the scheduled scenes were to be shot on the top deck. So actors, director, camera and sound people were upstairs, and everyone else was downstairs, with boxes of crisps and dried fruit and a tea caddy. The monitor was set up where the prams normally go. If you wore headphones – cans – you could hear what the actors were saying. I found it excruciating listening, I just couldn’t stand to hear my words being spoken, so I turned the volume down – but it was great to watch them.

After seeing a scene being shot, I felt a burst of euphoria and thought, this is where I am meant to be, this is exciting, what happens next? But what happens next is that they do exactly the same scene again, and this time shoot it from a different angle. Then they do it again to get some reaction shots from the secondary charcters, then again because that last shot went wrong – the bus went past a billboard and there was a logo in the frame, the stray forelock sprung loose once more. And then they do it again and again and by the time they move on you’ve thoroughly lost interest. I discovered that film sets are really boring places; everyone is waiting around pretty much all the time. They were very nice to me, scrupulous in trying to accord me status, but they all had jobs to do and I hadn’t, I was really just in the way, and I felt like a visiting dignitary, saying ‘and what do you do?’ and shaking hands.

Later I saw a rough cut – an assembly – in a Soho edit suite. Watching it, I felt like asking for all the dialogue to be cut. When you’re writing a script the temptation is to obsess over dialogue – and, after all, when writing a novel, dialogue is the most powerful and vivid thing you can write. But when you see the film, the realise that the dialogue is meh; it’s the pictures that count. And the most powerful images are things that looked like nothing in the script – ‘Asad looks out of the window’, ‘the girl is eating a kebab’; or just weren’t there at all – there’s a big difference between what is written and what is actually shot. Then out of this vast, amorphous lump of filmed material called ‘coverage’ a tiny fragment is sliced up and put together to make the film.

Now the edit is done. They have taken the hum of the engine out and added other sound effects – squeaky brakes, the smack of a punch – and all that remains is to layer the score over the whole thing. I am very much looking forward to seeing it on the big screen, at a screening in the Curzon Cinema in a couple of weeks. Though I will squirm, I am sure.

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1952

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

Ian Fleming is a good writer, and the James Bond books are good books. That needs to be said, because everyone seems to assume that they are pulpy shlock.

Not at all. They’re gritty, low key British noir. Bond might be a secret agent sent to foreign locales to thwart larger than life villains, but he is a complex and sometimes uncomfortable character, aware of the dehumanising aspects of his job, revulsed by murder, grieved by the deaths of his friends.

There are four or five really stand-out novels, but I choose this just because it’s the first and here we see Bond grow into his persona. The plot is very simple, the first outing of the formula – a villain with a plan, a girl, a glamorous locale. In this case, Le Chiffre the communist banker needs to win big at cards at a casino on the French riviera; Bond is sent to stop him. This simple plot is able to carry the book because of Fleming’s fantastic technique. He gets you to believe everything that happens by describing it exhaustively and precisely, in an uninflected style; the writer here is a camera, an expert recorder, and a master of technical jargons – it all assures you that he knows of what he speaks. And nowhere more so than when describing sprts cars, fine dining, foreign travel – it must have been absolutely intoxicating when it came out, in the post-rationing 50s.

There are some fantastically tense gamblng scenes; a couple of murders; a brutal torture scene; an intense love affair with its emotional parabola poignantly evoked – only this one ends with betrayal and death. And at the centre is this fascinating, cool, cruel fish, Bond, who must annihilate his finer feelings to be better at his work. He succeeds, at the end of this, setting up the rest of the series.

And I heard they’ve made a film of it.

Strangers on a train, Patricia Highsmith, 1950

The train tore along with an angry, irregular rythmn

Guy is good egg; a talented young architect on the up – the only flaw in his life is his vicious estranged wife. On a train journey he meets decadent mother’s boy Bruno, who impulsively plans the perfect double murder – he’ll knock off Guy’s wife, if Guy takes out his father. Without apprarent motive, they’re bound to get away with it…

This was the first and maybe the best of a long list of psychological thrillers. Instead of the traditional antagonist/protagonist Highsmith gives us two men locked in a destructive bond. The strange relationship that develops between Guy and Bruno is like an illicit gay affair; they are said to be joined ‘closer than brotherhood’. Bruno says he loves Guy but after he kills Guy’s wife insists that Guy honour his half of a bargain that was never made – then blackmails the man until he cracks. Guy can never quite break away from Bruno’s grip; in one sequence he even saves Bruno from drowning. Cornered, forced into murder and about to be caught, Guy can still describes Bruno as ‘his own cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.’

As in many of Highsmith’s books, the interest is in the perverse psychology of the characters. Her novels are always astute, well written and twisted. Graham Greene called her a ‘poet of apprehension’.

Hitchcock filmed this one, of course, and though it’s a decent film he neutered its perversity by having Guy refuse to kill anyone. Shame.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, 1939

I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot bear and boar; so when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions.

After just failing to assassinate a European dictator (it’s Hitler, basically, but that’s never stated) our narrator is interrogated then left for dead. He escapes and runs, and hides, and then just keeps on running and hiding, and running, and hiding… You’d think that when he’d got himself back to England the tension would lessen – surely he’s safe here – but no! He kills a German agent, which put the police after him, then other evil German agents follow the police, including the sinister Major Quive-Smith, big game hunter extraordinaire.

The second half of the book, when our hero is hiding in a hole in the ground in a wood near Lyme Regis, is brilliant, and really quite bizarre. The trappings of civilisation begin to fall away and he becomes a kind of Robinson Crusoe, marooned in genteel rural England.

Chase books are normally written in the third person, so you see the hunter and the hunted, or if, like this one, they’re in first person, at least the narrator has a co-conspirator to talk to. But this book is just one guy on the run, on his own, for a couple of hundred pages. The singular focus of the story and the relish with which the narrator’s increasingly desperate situation is described makes the book feel much more modern than similar pre-war tales of derring do.

And there are some great touches – for instance, at first he claims his attempt to kill Hitler was just sport, and he would never have fired, but much later he admits that it was a serious attempt to avenge a lover who was captured by the Nazis, and – a brilliant reveal – that the wood he’s hiding in is where they used to snog.

Brilliant, intense and a bit wierd, and much more interesting, for me, than the (ostensibly similar) John Buchan. Buchan is more famous probably because his stuff translated much easier to film. Though Rogue Male, was, apparently, a big influence on David Morrell’s ‘First Blood’ – filmed, of course, as Rambo.

Fifty Two Pick Up, Elmore Leonard, 1974

‘He could not get used to going to the girl’s apartment.’

Three Detroit villains try to blackmail Harry Stanton over his affair. But they’ve picked the wrong guy: tough factory owner Harry plays them off against each other – with the help of his angry wife.

Leonard has written dozens of amazing crime novels, an astonishing achievement. Hard to pick one, really, but I like this cause it’s the first I read, and cause the story is really focused. Leonard started off writing pulp westerns and he keeps those tropes, just shifts cast and locale – this book, for example, uses the western template of a group of outlaws threatening a homesteader who has to take them out without recourse to the law. Others feature bounty hunters, hitmen and the like – all acutely drawn.

Interesting to note that he’s one of those writers (like, say, JG Ballard), who’s getting more influential as time goes on. He’s proved way ahead of the curve of contemporary taste – he was writing snappy crim dialogue when Tarrantino was in shorts and creating a multi-racial cast way before the Wire. His pared down, conversational style has become the model everyone emulates – if you’re a writer, look for his laconic ‘ten rules of writing (a sample couple – ‘don’t start with the weather’; ‘leave out the bits people skip’).