Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
THE QUIET AMERICAN is open right now in New York and Los Angeles. Last week, both Mr. Beaks and I went to the Peninsula Hotel over in Beverly Hills, and he sat down with Philip Noyce to chat while I spent some time talking to Michael Caine. I’ll have my interview up a little later this week, but here’s Beaks with some great stuff for you to enjoy...
Beaks: Do you see this as a political metaphor, or a love story?
Noyce: It’s obviously, principally a metaphor. It is a love story, as well, but its greatest resonance is going to come from the “refrigerator questions” that we ask ourselves. And that’s just the incredible prescience and insight of Graham Greene at work. I wish I could claim authorship or responsibility here, but I’m merely passing on a series of ideas that were formulated by Mr. Greene way back in the early and mid-50’s.
B: It’s pretty remarkable.
N: Extraordinary insight and observation, which maybe not only proves what a genius he was, but also how some things just never change.
B: Do you think Americans are ready, considering the state of the world right now, for something that’s so insightful, yet so critical of their foreign policy?
N: I think we have to be ready. It does seem so obvious, doesn’t it, when we look back on that Vietnam conflict? And when I say “we”, I’m talking about “we” because we Australians were there with you guys right from the beginning, same as we are now. So I can say “we” without being presumptuous. But it does seem amazing that we didn’t investigate enough to realize that we were fighting Nationalism and not just Communism, and that there may have been another way to deal with that.
I think we are ready for it because we *have* to be ready for it. America’s extreme sense of responsibility for the rest of the world is born out of the nature of the nation itself: the polyglot, the melting pot of all humanity that this country is. And with that comes the inability in this inexplicably linked world to retreat to isolationism again. It’s not possible, and it’s no longer in the American personality. She feels; the nation feels responsible to the rest of us. With that sense of responsibility comes the *enormous* responsibility, being a superpower, to try and get it right. I think we didn’t get it right in Vietnam, and this film reminds us of the need for preparation when we embark on one of these adventures so that the adventure does not become a misadventure, so that, instead of saving, we don’t destroy because the stakes are getting higher and higher.
B: And that we do not, to paraphrase Greene, do more harm out of a (Editor’s Note: the quote Beaks is fumbling with is “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.) …
N: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
B: (Laughs) Exactly.
N: As we stumble towards this latest adventure, you have to say that, hopefully, caution is prevailing, and that the power of the intelligence machine that is at the disposal of America will enable leaders to make enlightened and intelligent decisions. The other thing, and I guess that this book, this adaptation of a novel written back in the 1950s, reminds us what we all already know, and that is that history will guide us toward our future. Understanding history will guide us because all of the options are already there in the past. We’ve only got to look for them.
B: And worry about how they will be interpreted.
N: Yeah.
B: I guess that’s the tricky part.
N: But, hey, let’s not scare off Harry’s readers here. This is a good old fashioned murder mystery; it’s a political thriller and it’s a love story, and it’s all set in this far away, exotic place called Saigon, 1952. And it’s a lot cheaper to buy a ticket to this movie than it is to go to Vietnam because you’re going to be disappointed if you do anyway.
B: Really?
N: I mean, it’s not all like that. Unfortunately, it’s not waiting for you anymore.
B: Let’s talk about the great of use of locations in this movie. They’re so evocative, and history just comes pouring off the screen. Emotionally, how did you deal with that?
N: It wasn’t so bad for me because it wasn’t my history in a sense. I didn’t go there. I did have friends who were drafted; who went to Vietnam and, like their American counterparts, came back wasted and disillusioned, and passed that disillusion onto the rest of us.
Everywhere we went we were knocking up against and confronting Vietnamese history whether we were filming the scenes in the North where Pyle and Fowler meet, and discover, then, the scene of the massacre. This was filmed in an area of some of the bloodiest battles of the French-Vietnamese War. An area filled with Catholic churches – financially, an area where the French were protecting their interests quite vigorously. We kept going to sites of battles.
In the case of the climactic bombing in the square – that changes everything in the story, that galvanizes our characters towards action and towards climax – we closed down the center of Saigon to film the scene, and then found, once the square had been closed down, that people kept coming out of the woodwork who had actually been there on the day that two 500-lb French bombs were exploded as a terrorist act back on January 9th, 1952. And one gentleman who came forward pointed to the spot where we were about to set off our fake explosions – a bomb in a French car – and said that everyday he used to park his car beside the blue car over there. But on this day, he was a little late, and he came around into the square only to see his parking spot disappear.
And, then, another gentleman who we knew was there that day, and we’d already met, was General An. General An was the inspiration for a huge – not a huge – but a significant change, an amalgamation of characters that we made in our adaptation. In Greene’s original, Fowler has a Guyanese Indian assistant, and, then, there was another character called Heng who was a Communist Chinese. Well, we put the two of them together as a result of a meeting that I had with a gentleman called General An. An had been a double-agent from 1949 to 1975. He worked as a censor for the French, and often would accept the communiqués of the English journalist, Graham Greene. He had to take these communiqués and check that Greene wasn’t giving away anything in his dispatches to the London Times. He then worked for Edward Lansdale, the famous American Intelligence operative who many claimed, though Greene denied, was the inspiration for the Alden Pyle character. He then worked for Reuters and Time Magazine in a career as a double agent that stretched right up until the day after the fall of Saigon – the 30th of April, 1975 – upon which he was named a general. What better person to get good spy material than from Time Magazine.
B: That’s such a great twist.
N: And so we made him “Hinh”, an amalgamation of these two characters. So, history butted up against us and it also spoke to us.
B: Just to get into the nuts and bolts of the adaptation… you were working with two remarkable writers…..
N: Yes.
B: …. Robert Schenkkan and Christopher Hampton. I’m curious as to what were the differences between their drafts.
N: Well, Schenkkan broke the back of it and came to Vietnam with me. And Schenkkan, being an American, also wrote a more accessible Alden Pyle. Arguably, Greene had a certain distaste for Americans; I mean, he was anti-American really. And he really did write a caricature. If we would’ve taken Greene’s Pyle and put him on the screen, I think people would’ve laughed and wouldn’t have taken him seriously. And, so, Robert Schenkkan tried to make Pyle credible. Schenkkan also, because he didn’t quite the paralyzing reverence for Greene that Christopher had, felt that he was freer to experiment with Greene’s structure. In the finished film, we more or less stick to (Greene’s) structure, but we have changed it inasmuch as Greene was constantly going from present to past, whereas we only do it once. We have one shift, and most of the story takes place in the past and is started in the present; then, we return to the present at the end of the story.
On the other hand, Christopher Hampton, having worked previously on THE HONORARY COUNSUL, having met Greene and being an Englishman, was imbued with a worthy sense of reverence and a determination that Greene wasn’t going to make him feel guilty in his old age; so, he was constantly wanting to bring the adaptation back to the novel whenever possible. He was constantly checking on the changes that we were making, and saying, “well, what about the way Graham did it; why don’t we do it that way”? And, so, he initiated constantly this debate about the choices. He was speaking for Greene in a funny way. I guess, they probably hung around in the same pubs in London.
B: That must’ve been an experience. I would’ve loved to have been harangued by Greene over pints. It would’ve been an honorary thing in some very strange way.
N: Yeah. You know, I hope Greene is happier with this version than he was with Joe Mankiewicz’s version. I hope he doesn’t think that our version is a perversion because, no doubt, the first one was. That said, we haven’t tried to make a word perfect adaptation; although, we did at times, but we found the more we stuck to his language, and crossed our t’s and dotted our “I’s” as he would’ve, the less we seemed to honor his intentions. I felt that there are some lasting elements to this story that absolutely had to be preserved, and some things that were sacrosanct, but I do feel, you know, they’re two different mediums. And, inevitably, you have to make changes, perhaps moreso if you want to honor the original. In one medium, the cinema screen is in your mind; in the other, it’s before your eyes.
B: I get the idea that (Cinematographer) Christopher Doyle was an invaluable collaborator.
N: Well, Christopher Doyle *is* Thomas Fowler. He’s a man who has reinvented himself in Asia. He’s run away. I’m not sure what he’s run away from because, being an Australian, I can’t imagine why he would’ve wanted to take off and leave us behind. But, nevertheless, he did. He found himself and reinvented himself, just like Thomas Fowler, in Asia. He found a way of escape. It was sometimes into the arms of a beautiful Asian princess, but it was also just into another way of life, another set of values, which are the antithesis, in many ways, of the culture and priorities of the setting that he was running away from. So, Chris knows something beyond just the look of being in Asia; he knows the smell, but he also knows the… feelings of being there, of being a European there, because he would call it his home. And that’s the state that Fowler arrives at at the end of this movie: he’s there, it’s home, he’s not going back. And I don’t think Chris is going back either. He did on RABBIT PROOF FENCE, a film where he had to define what it was like for three little Aboriginal girls to be aliens in their own land. I think Chris felt like he was an alien, felt like I’d taken to prison even though I’d released him into a great, huge expanse called the Australian Outback. You know, I think he just wanted to go back to Asia. And he did do this: when we were shooting QUIET AMERICAN, after a couple of months shooting in Vietnam, we went back to Sydney where we did the interiors on soundstages, and often, on weekends, Chris would leave the set, go straight to Sydney airport, fly to Beijing or Hong Kong, and then come back on Sunday night and turn up for work on Monday morning. That’s how homesick he was to be Thomas Fowler.
B: I’m wondering if you have any plans to go back to the studio system.
N: Hey, I’m not going to say I won’t. Who want to kill the goose that lays that golden egg? And, anyway, what is the studio system? It’s a means of making movies. The question is whose movies and whose stories? That’s the only question. The so-called studio system will finance anything they think they can make a buck off of; you’ve just got to try to convince them that the story you want to make will work. And, then, they’ll sell it like no one else could ever sell a movie because that’s the enduring achievement of Hollywood: they’ve fucking colonized all of us!
B: It’s our great gift to the world. It really is.
N: It’s one of America’s greatest achievements.
B: But I was thinking, you’ve made these two smaller films... and you’re a pronounced David Lean fan.
N: Yeah. Wow! Big screen! Who could ever do that? Storytelling! DR. ZHIVAGO!
B: On such a grand scale.
N: Great scale, but so personal. And the history! I mean, where else do we know about the Russian Revolution, you know, the Bolshevik Revolution. We know more from that than anywhere else. We learn more about Russia, almost, than in any other document, or any other two hours that we could spend learning. And those set-pieces! They’re just amazing. The machine gun battle…
B: Are you perfectly happy sacrificing the physical scale for a greater emotional texture in these films?
N: Well, you know, maybe it’s just the kind of movies I was making, but sometimes you do feel on those bigger movies like you are directing traffic. And that is an achievement, as we know, from watching traffic cops; they really keep things going. But it is an achievement also in the cinema to have four units and be able to choreograph on a huge scale. But it does make it harder to get close to the heart of the matter. And I stumbled into that kind of cinema. I made DEAD CALM, and, then, I couldn’t resist working with Harrison Ford.
B: Who can?
N: Who can? Who could? He was the guy who got me into the Clancy series. And there I was having fun. A big sandbox courtesy of Hollywood. I was a general. I had my own armies. I fired my own missiles, dropped my own bombs, fought my own wars… all of that stuff. But maybe now it’s time to try to even it up because it was always at the expense of the emotional throughline of the characterization and the stories. Maybe now it’s time to get a balance. I never had so much fun as I had on those two movies (RABBIT PROOF FENCE and THE QUIET AMERICAN). They’re not the biggest movies; they may not be the most successful at the box office, but they certainly gave me the most pleasure.
B: It’s funny; you’ve adapted the arch-conservative Tom Clancy, and, now, the arch-liberal Graham Greene. Are you able to reconcile these two?
N: (Laughs) Maybe I’m the guy who makes these arch people, these extremists, more palatable for a wider audience. Arguably, the Jack Ryan that Harrison and I were able to create was much more of a humanist than the one that Clancy created, and the films were imbued with a broader sensibility. That, maybe, didn’t alienate the original readers, but extended the ideas to a wider audience. Hopefully, we’ve done the same thing for Graham Greene, and, especially, for his most enduring, his most insightful of works – THE QUIET AMERICAN – hopefully can be enjoyed by all Americans in ways that the original film wasn’t. Whereas some Americans who have read the novel feel that it’s anti-American, that it’s the work of someone that had a distaste for American sensibilities….. I don’t. I have an admiration, not a distaste.
Our thanks to Noyce. Nice work, Beaks. And if you’re in New York or Los Angeles, you’ve got two weeks from last Friday to catch this one before it’s gone. It’ll be opening wide in January, so this is your shot if you’re interested. It’s worth the effort.
"Moriarty" out.
