The Ability to Kill (26 page)

Crude? Well yes; but, in spite of what the studio writer did, there was just one scene in
Beyond the Hills
that really worked beautifully; and it was a scene that Anders had imagined and written. At that moment—it lasted two minutes—the screen came to life. When he went out to the studio while they were shooting the picture, it was the only scene the director discussed with him. He has had a tantalising glimpse of just how satisfying the medium can be.

It has been said that the problem of screen-writing is to say much in little, and then take half of that little out, and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement. It has also been said, again and again, that the film is still primarily a visual medium. For those unfamiliar with the anecdote of Budd Schulberg’s to which I referred, I have summarised it. It illustrates both contentions.

A playwright employed to work on the script of a film writes a scene lasting five minutes, to explain that a man is tired of his
wife and that she knows it. The scene is wittily written and would be superb on the stage. But on the screen the time convention is different. Five minutes can seem like an eternity. So the producer asks an old silent film director how he would write such a scene at the opening of a picture. This is what the director tells him:

The husband and wife walk together into a lift. The doors close, the lift starts up. The husband has his hat on. At the next floor the lift stops and an attractive girl gets in. The husband politely takes his hat off. The wife sees him do so and wonders why. Then, she looks at the attractive girl and understands.

No word has been spoken. The total time to make the statement is about thirty seconds.

But to return to the plight of our writer. His fundamental mistake was to suppose that when he was asked to write a screenplay he was being asked to use the same talent that had led him to write the original novel. In fact, screen-writing has very little to do with writing as a novelist understands the term. The only common denominators are a sense of story construction—and in this respect the novel is closer to the film than the play—and the ability to create characters who breathe. It was for those things, not his skill as a novelist, that our man was employed; and the knowledge that it was his own novel that he was being asked to adapt only helped to obscure the fact.

Why should that ignorance be so disastrous?

I have said that the novelist has a critic inside him. It is a very necessary part of his equipment, because if he is any sort of a story-teller he also has a considerable sense of omnipotence. In his private world he is an absolute ruler with godlike powers of control over his creatures. This control—call it inner confidence, sureness of touch, anything you will—is vitally important to him. It is at the core of his ability to work as a
writer. What happens when he encounters the film-makers is that, for the first time, that absolute control is challenged. It must be. Between the novelist and his readers the line of communication is almost direct, via his publisher. But between the screenwriter and his audience there stands not only an intricate manufacturing process, but also a producer, a director, an art director, a number of actors, a lighting cameraman, a film editor, and a sound engineer. Many of them are intelligent, talented, and amiable persons. The trouble is that, in their various fields, they are likely to be as omnipotently disposed as the writer, and, indeed, will not be very much good at their jobs if they are not. In the resultant hurly-burly of conflicting egos and interests, even actors sometimes have difficulty in preserving their self-esteem. The novelist, used to the enemies within, but utterly confounded when he finds them outside, generally goes down like a ninepin.

There are several ways in which the novelist attempts to deal with the challenge.

He may refuse it altogether and retire, suffused with indignation, to write one of those novels about his experiences which I began by mentioning. That way, he may in due course repair the damage he has suffered. Whether or not he wholly succeeds depends on how good the book is.

Or he may decide to fight for his work as a screenwriter and attempt to protect it from the film-making machinery; as he would try to protect his work as a novelist if, for example, a publisher’s editor were to propose changes with which he did not agree. In the case of films, however, he will always lose. No matter how energetic he is and how adept he may be at undermining the confidence of his opponents, he can only deal with them separately and they will combine against him. In the film industry the writer is a disagreeable necessity, tolerated by the technicians only because they cannot exercise
their skills until he has done his work. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ I have heard a producer say when the writer delivered his script. ‘Now we can get down to film-making.’ The other difficulty about this sort of contest is that, unless the writer is vastly experienced or suffers from delusions of grandeur, he will find that he is frequently quite wrong in his judgments, and that the scene that he regarded as indispensable has turned out, as his opponents predicted it would, a dreadful bore.

Of course, quite a number of successful screenwriters have attempted to gain control of the situation by becoming producers or directors. The industry’s method of explaining this change of status is to say that the man in question was ‘too good to be only a writer.’ But most of the writer-directors end by employing other writers to work with them on the scripts, and I do not know of any professional novelist who has successfully made that particular transition.

There are, of course, the novelists who, perceiving the challenge, discreetly decide to ignore it. Their plan is to make a killing and then live richly on the proceeds while they work on a new book. The picture that is going to be made does not concern them. If the producer wants to bring in another writer to work on it, by all means let him do so. He, the novelist, wrote a script; his commitment is ended.

What I envy about these happy men and women is their hardihood; and I am unsympathetic when they complain, as they do, that they never have much success where films are concerned. I think that they have a great deal of success; though not often twice with the same producer.

However, most novelists who become embroiled in this maddening business are not so sturdy. The film-industry, in fact, has become a kind of occupational hazard for writers. It is not much use just advising them to avoid it. One might just
as well advise a matador to refuse to fight bulls of a certain breed. All we can hope is that, when the time comes, no permanent harm will be done, and that, even if the man cannot win, the injury he sustains will not be too painful.

What, then, are the prospects for Mr Anders, struggling wretchedly with a new novel that he no longer believes in, and feelings of incompetence and sterility that are beginning to overwhelm him?

A fifty-fifty chance, I would say. What he will probably do after a while is to abandon the novel he is working on, and turn it into an original story for the screen. If he sells it to a producer, he will probably be asked to work on the script and will agree. This time, he will tell himself, it is going to be different. And it may well be—a little different. He will both argue and write a little more persuasively this time. Sooner or later, he will probably know enough about the curious shorthand of the screen to produce a completely integrated and photographable screenplay. And that will be the moment of decision for him. It is not everyone who can fertilise the sacred cow, and he may find the experience deeply satisfying. If he does, then, as a novelist, his goose is cooked. But if, and this is possible, all that he experiences is a sense of anti-climax, a feeling of irritation because his work must now be handed over to others, yet not sufficient irritation to make him want to do the rest of the work himself, there is hope. It will not be long before he is back working in a medium in which he can be fully creative; in which he can forget for a while the sacred cow and its attendant male nurses, and function again not only as a father to the child, but as mother, doctor, and midwife also.

Is this, then, after all, a simple dilemma—fulfilment or frustration? Fulfilled he stays, frustrated he leaves? I think that for some writers it proves to be so. For others, however, the issue is not so clear-cut.

A distinguished producer complained recently that writers in other media—novelists and playwrights in particular—are hostile to the industry. He went on to warn them that the writer who goes into films has to accept the fact that he is no longer his own boss, and to learn to like it.

I have worked with that producer happily on two pictures. He is very far from being a bossy man himself. Perhaps that is why writers like working with him. No one, then, should know better then he that the writer who is not his own creative master is no longer a writer worth employing; he has become a hack. To be one’s own master in this sense is not to be a megalomaniac, impervious to reason and incapable of compromise. The problem of the writer in the industry, indeed, is the problem of the director, the actor, the producer, and everyone else concerned creatively with production. It is the problem of collaboration without loss of self-respect. The effort to solve that problem is, in essence, the effort to attain maturity. However painful it may be, that seems to me an effort always worth making; and not only in the film industry.

Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler was born in London in 1909. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked at an engineering firm, and wrote copy for an advertising agency. His first novel was published in 1936. During the course of his career, Ambler was awarded two Gold Daggers, a Silver Dagger, and a Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain, named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers Association of America, and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In addition to his novels, Ambler wrote a number of screenplays, including
A Night to Remember
and
The Cruel Sea
, which won him an Oscar nomination. Eric Ambler died in 1998.

Books by Eric Ambler

The Dark Frontier

Background to Danger

Epitaph for a Spy

Cause for Alarm

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Journey Into Fear

Judgment on Deltchev

The Schirmer Inheritance

State of Siege

Passage of Arms

The Light of Day

The Ability to Kill and Other Pieces
(Essays)

A Kind of Anger

To Catch a Spy
(Editor)

The Intercom Conspiracy

The Levanter

Doctor Frigo

The Siege of the Villa Lipp

The Care of Time

Here Lies Eric Ambler
(Autobiography)

The Story So Far