A Quote by Christopher Hampton
Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.
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When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
I was a barfly, so going to work and acting and rehearsing and then going and sitting in a bar and drinking and then going home was sort of my lifestyle. And there was none of that out here in the '70s when I was lucky enough to get movies, and nobody else that I knew was working in movies at that point. I didn't really have a lot of movie friends.
I get sent horror scripts every week and most of them are putrid. A lot of people think it's an easy medium but it's not. Not if you want to make ones that last.
Fiction allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.
Since I started as a comic person then became a musician to me it was interesting because I have this really great, interesting fanbase that's really smart and energetic and uh how could I steer them towards a medium that shaped who I was? You know, steer them toward comics. That was really the goal, to bring a lot of readers cuz they were reading a lot of comics but most of them hadn't been reading American comics, they'd be reading manga sitting on the floor of a Barnes and Noble.
I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them, get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite it's really true. It takes confidence and courage to know that and then commit to it.
Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.
I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.
I think the mistake people make with horror movies and what makes them successful is a lot of horror movies get made by people who don't really like them, so they don't respect them. And when you like horror and have admiration for it, that community knows that what's important for a horror movie is important for every other kind of movie.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.
I make the joke, all the time, that if you have the word "man" and a number in the title, like Batman 2, Spider-Man 2 or Iron Man 12, you'll get it made. The kind of movies I make, studios don't make them. I've made a lot of movies, and at Castle Rock, we've made 125 movies. None of them get made at a studio. I've got to scrounge around for money, every time. I just like to tell stories. I'm a storyteller, so I want the most people to see it.
I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.
Ultimately, if you want to make movies, you've got to want to make movies every day, when people are paying you to make movies and when they're not, because you're going to get a lot more no's on this business, no matter what it is, than you are going to get yeses.
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