Miracles of Life (25 page)

* * *

Most writers dream of having films made of their novels, but
for every thousand films visualised and enthused over
during the world’s longest lunches only one is ever actually
made. The film world is a gaudy balloon kept aloft by enthusiasm,
preposterous overconfidence, and all the dreams that
money can buy. Film people – producers, directors and
actors – are enormously good company, far livelier and more
interesting than the majority of writers, and without their
enthusiasm and their heroic lunches few films would ever
reach the screen.

I was lucky enough to have options taken out on my
earlier novels, but unlucky that my career as a writer coincided
with the decades which marked the decline of the
British film industry. Films based on my novels were
lunched, but never launched.

The first time I saw my name (even if mispelled) in the
credits of a film came in 1970, with the British release of
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
. This was a Hammer film, a
sequel to the Raquel Welch vehicle
One Million Years BC
,
itself a remake of the 1940 Hollywood original starring
Victor Mature and Carole Landis. Hammer specialised in
Dracula and Frankenstein films, then much despised by the
critics. But their films had tremendous panache and visual
attack, without a single wasted frame, and the directors were
surprisingly free to push their obsessions to the limit.

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who
was a great admirer of
The Drowned World
. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel
to
One Million Years BC
. Curious to see how the British film
world worked, I turned up at the Wardour Street offices of
Hammer, to be greeted in the foyer by a huge Tyrannosaurus
rex about to deflower a blonde-haired actress in a leopard-
skin bikini. The credits screamed ‘Curse of the Dinosaurs!’

Had the film already been made? I knew that outfits like
Hammer worked fast. But Aida assured me that this was just
window dressing, and they had settled on the title
When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth
. Raquel Welch would not be available.
They were thinking of using a Czech actress who spoke
no English, but this didn’t matter since there would be no
dialogue in the film. My job was to come up with a strong
story.

She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the
head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened
without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter
account of
The Drowned World
, with its picture of a
steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-
inducing water.

She finished and we waited for Hinds to speak. ‘Water?’ he
repeated. ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with water.’

It turned out that they planned to shoot the film in the
Canary Islands. I remembered that the surrealists had made
field trips to the Canaries, fascinated by the black volcanic
beaches and the extraordinary fauna and flora. All Hammer
had seen was the tax incentives.

Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing
in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had
given little thought to the project, but on the drive from
Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas.
I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original,’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we
want that
Drowned World
atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this
could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of
jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His
secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing
less than the story of the birth of the Moon – in fact, one of
the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction,
which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines
stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens
next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was
not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave
you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain.
‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a
stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going
out
! All
those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief
course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other.
I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated,
standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab
sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with
Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful,
already moving on to the next stage of production, casting
the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I
had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them.
I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’
of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea
taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship
and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex
relationships between the principal characters, difficult to
envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were
expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each
other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a
nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment,
some of which survived into the finished film, along
with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that
they misspelled my name in the credits.

In 1986, two years after the publication of
Empire of the Sun
,
a very different kind of film company appeared on the scene.
Warner Brothers bought the rights to the novel, and asked
Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful film-maker, to direct the production. Spielberg at first proposed that he
would produce the film, and asked David Lean to direct.
But Lean declined, saying that he couldn’t handle the boy.
Perhaps Jim was too aggressive and too conflicted for Lean,
who liked his boy actors to be lisping and slightly effeminate.
In any event Spielberg, who had a unique gift for drawing
superb performances from child actors, decided to direct it
himself.

Most of the film was shot in Shanghai and near Jerez, in
Spain, where Lunghua Camp was recreated, but a few scenes
were shot in and near London. The Ballard house in
Amherst Avenue was divided between three houses in
Sunningdale, to the west of London, and Spielberg invited
me to play a walk-on part at the fancy-dress party that opens
the film. I appeared as John Bull in scarlet coat and top hat.
It was on set that I met Spielberg for the first time, and was
immediately impressed by his thoughtfulness and his
commitment to the novel. Difficult scenes that could easily
have been dropped were tackled head-on, like Jim’s ‘resuscitation’
of the young kamikaze pilot who briefly merges into
his younger, blazer-wearing self, a powerful image that
expresses the essence of the whole novel.

A Spielberg production is a huge event, with hundreds
of people involved – technicians, actors, bodyguards, bus
drivers and catering staff, publicists and make-up artists.
Given the costs involved, the sheer scale of Hollywood films
demands the highest degree of professionalism. This is the central paradox of film-making, as far I can see. For hours
on the set nothing is happening, but not a second is being
wasted. The lighting is in many ways more important than
the actors’ performances, which can be strengthened by
astute cutting and editing. Spielberg, of course, is a master of
film narrative, and his films far transcend the performances
of individual actors. He told me that he ‘saw’ the film of
Empire of the Sun
in the scene where the Mustangs are
attacking the airfield next to Lunghua Camp, and the fighter
aircraft move in slow motion in the eyes of the watching Jim.
It’s an unsettling moment, one of many in what I think of as
Spielberg’s best, and most imagined, film.

It was fascinating for me to take part in the Sunningdale
scenes, and strange to be involved in a painstakingly accurate
recreation of my childhood home. The white telephones and
original copies of
Time
magazine, the art deco lamps and
rugs, carried me straight back to the Shanghai of the 1930s.
The large Sunningdale houses were uncannily similar in
their fittings, their door handles and window frames. In fact,
the English architects in Shanghai had modelled their
Tudor-style houses on the Sunningdale mansions rather
than the reverse.

When the fancy-dress party ended, the ‘guests’ were filmed
leaving the house, and I stepped out into the drive to find
a line of 1930s American Packards and Buicks, each with a
uniformed Chinese chauffeur. The scene was so like the real
Shanghai of my childhood that for a moment I fainted.

Other curious reversals occurred during the making of
the film. Several of my neighbours in Shepperton worked as
extras, drawn by the nearby film studios, and took part in the
scenes shot in England. I vividly remember the mother of a
girl at the same school as my daughters calling out to me:
‘We’re going back to Shanghai, Mr Ballard. We’re in the
film…’ I had the uncanny sense that I had chosen to live in
Shepperton in 1960 because I knew unconsciously that I
would write a novel about Shanghai, and that extras among
my neighbours would one day appear in a film based on the
novel.

Another eerie moment occurred when I was on the set
at Sunningdale, and a 12-year-old boy in fancy dress came
up to me and said: ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you.’ This was
Christian Bale, who played Jim so brilliantly, virtually carrying
the whole film on his shoulders. Behind him were two
actors in their late thirties, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer,
also in fancy dress, who smiled and said: ‘And we’re your
mother and father.’ They were twenty years younger than me
at the time, and I had the strange feeling that the intervening
years had vanished and I was back in wartime Shanghai.

The Los Angeles premiere of the film in December 1987
was a Hollywood epic in its own right. Claire and I stayed at
the Beverly Hilton Hotel, just within sight of the Hollywood
sign, where we met Tom Stoppard, the writer of the script, a
pleasant but intensely nervous man. Dozens of stars
attended the charity screening, some in mink coats, like Dolly Parton, and others in T-shirts, like Sean Connery.
Later the nearby streets were closed to traffic and we walked
in procession along red carpets laid in the centre of the road
to a vast marquee where a themed banquet was held with
Chinese food and Chinese dancers bopping to jive numbers.

In early 1988 my American publisher Farrar Straus
arranged a six-city, two-week-long book tour to promote my
latest novel. The schedule was exhausting, a non-stop round
of interviews, book signings, radio and television appearances.
At its best, radio is a thoughtful medium in America,
while television is regarded as nothing but a continuous
stream of advertising, the programmes included. Publicity
and promotion are the air that Americans breathe, and they
take it for granted that in every minute of the day someone
is trying to sell them something.

Many of my bookshop readings and signings were packed,
but others were completely empty, for reasons no one could
explain. Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful,
though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven
Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow
Spielberg to make a film of your novel?’ When I replied that
he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly
corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.’ This
was the only time that I’ve heard success downplayed in
America. Usually it marks the end of any argument about
the merits or otherwise of a film or book. Perhaps American
journalists, who see themselves as the consciences of their nation, resent Spielberg for revealing the sentimental and
childlike strains that lie just below the surface of American
life. There is certainly a missing dimension that European
visitors become aware of within a few days of arrival, a trust
in the idea of America that no Frenchman or Briton ever
feels about his own country. Or it may be that we in Europe
are by nature more depressed.

In London in the spring of 1988 there was a royal command
performance of
Empire of the Sun
, attended by
Spielberg and Steve Ross, the head of Time Warner and a
hugely influential man. I am a lifelong republican and would
like to see the monarchy and all hereditary titles abolished,
but I was impressed by how hard the Queen worked, making
friendly comments to each of us. She was poorly briefed by
her English guide, and had to ask Ross what he did, an
example of British parochialism (though no fault of the
Queen’s) at its worst. Cher, among the Hollywood stars in
the line-up, suggested to the Queen that she might like to see
her own film,
Moonstruck
, then playing on the other side of
Leicester Square. Her tone implied that now would be a good
time for the Queen to cut and run, if she wanted to see a real
movie. It was another extraordinary evening, and one of the
strangest sights was the band of the Coldstream Guards
marching into the auditorium and the Queen standing to
listen to her own anthem. I felt that she was the one person
entitled to sit down.

* * *

In 1991 I was invited to serve on the jury at MystFest, an
Italian film festival of crime and mystery films, which was
then held at Viareggio, near the beach where the drowned
Shelley was cremated by his friends. The chairman of the
jury was Jules Dassin, one of the Hollywood exiles and husband
of Melina Mercouri, and the director of
Rififi
, The
Naked City
and other classic noir thrillers. Another of the
jurors was Suzanne Cloutier, a former wife of Peter Ustinov
who had played Desdemona in Orson Welles’s
Othello
. Nick
Roeg and Theresa Russell were the guests of honour, and we
had a great time in the hotel bar. Claire got on especially well
with a young American film-maker of whom none of us had
heard; he was screening his first film in a small off-the-beach
cinema out of competition. Dassin, a kindly but ailing old
man still recovering from open-heart surgery, found him
particularly tiring. ‘Who is this young man?’ he asked me.
‘He makes so much noise…’ I put out a few feelers and
reported back that the young man was called Quentin
Tarantino and the film was
Reservoir Dogs
. A year later he
was one of the most famous directors in the world.