Translating Fowles Into Film

August 30, 1981

Translating Fowles Into Film

By LESLIE GARIS

he French Lieutenant's Woman,'' one of the most highly acclaimed and complex novels of recent decades, has been tempting film makers since 1969, the year of its publication. John Fowles's best-selling tale of a young Victorian gentleman who falls in love with a mysterious woman of tarnished reputation has the romantic sweep of a great film, but it has a problem: Although the story takes place in the late 1860's, it is narrated by a distinctly 20th-century author whose wry, intellectual asides enable us to see the story from both a Victorian and a modern point of view. It's a dazzling design for a novel, but it couldn't be less cinematic, and distinguished directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Michael Cacoyannis, Richard Lester and Fred Zinnemann all came to grief trying to develop a script - or even a concept.

The most favored approach - that of the author stepping outside the action to comment, like Anton Walbrook's Master of Ceremonies in Max Ophuls's ''La Ronde'' (1954) - seemed static. It became clear that if there were to be a film, its structure would have to depart radically from the book's. (The British novelist has said that every time a director expressed reverence for the novel, it was obvious the project was once again doomed.)

Now the film has been made and will open in New York on Sept. 18. The screenplay is by Harold Pinter, the renowned British playwright and the author of many film scripts, among them ''The Servant,'' ''The Go-Between'' and ''The Quiller Memorandum,'' all adaptations from novels. It is directed by Karel Reisz, who, with ''Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,'' is one of those credited with starting the British film renaissance of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Meryl Streep plays Sarah, Fowles's enigmatic heroine, and Jeremy Irons, an aristocratic English stage actor, portrays Charles, the obsessed young man. Fowles, who has disliked the two previous movies made of his works, ''The Collector'' and ''The Magus,'' is pleased with what has happened here - which is fascinating, since his fans may be up in arms when they see the film.

What have Reisz and Pinter come up with? A film within a film. Like Truffaut's ''Day for Night,'' the movie opens with a conventional scene, set in Victorian England. Then the camera pulls back to reveal the paraphernalia of film making and the characters talking to crew members. Thus, Miss Streep and Irons play both Victorian and modern roles: the 19th-century Sarah and Charles, and the actors, Anna and Mike, who've been hired to portray them. The Victorian story follows the book; the modern component was conceived by Reisz. It, too, is a love story, for Anna and Mike are having an affair, and the intention is for the two stories to echo each other.

Advance opinion about the film is divided: Some think the device brilliant - a cinematic equivalent of Fowles's contemporary asides - while others resent the interrupted flow of the Victorian love story. Yet no one argues that the movie fails to solve another difficulty: the novel's double ending. In the book, Sarah and Charles play out both a ''happy'' and a ''sad'' conclusion to their romance. The film, with its two threads, accomplishes the same. ''Quite simply,'' says Reisz with a mischievous smile, ''it's part of the fun.''

Whatever the fate - critical or commercial - of the film, the collaboration of these three major talents provides insights into the always tricky problems of translating a literary work into a visual medium.

Reisz (pronounced ''rice'') is a gentle, cultured man, who lives with his wife, the American actress Betsy Blair, and children in London's refined, countrified district of Hampstead. Calm, with an almost priestly bearing, he has a reputation for inspiring actors by fostering a relaxed and supportive atmosphere on the set. ''He's like a father figure,'' says Jeremy Irons. ''He tries to cast right, and then gives the actors freedom to express themselves.''

In the small, restful study in his home, Reisz sits at a desk by a louvered bay window and sips tea. Although he seems thoroughly British, in fact he was rescued from Czechoslovakia by Quakers in 1939, when he was 12. His parents did not survive the Holocaust. All his films - among them, ''Night Must Fall,''french first jump ''Morgan,'' ''Isadora'' and ''The Gambler'' - deal with obsessed characters living on the fringes of normal society.

''John Fowles said that the novel started for him with a vision of that woman walking away and looking back, and she resisted entering the 20th century. But he didn't want to write a historical novel. So he wrote a modern novel about Victorian England. And I knew we had to do something of that kind.''

Fowles showed Reisz his novel in 1969 while it was still in manuscript, but the director was reluctant to begin another big ''period'' picture after having just finished ''Isadora.'' So he turned it down. Ten years later, Fowles asked him again, and he agreed, if Pinter would write the script. Pinter, who had also been approached by Fowles years ago, but was unavailable then, this time said yes.

Reisz has a lot riding on this project. Although his films have won critical praise, he hasn't had a major box-office success since ''Morgan'' in 1966.

In his melodious voice, he says, ''It is a vain hope to think you can say the same thing in a film that you can in a book. You and the screenwriter have to apply your own imaginations and make something that is coherent in film terms. In film, you have no description, no ability to get inside people's minds, and a completely different time span. With such different ground rules, of course, you have to start again. But there are certain basic things in the work that you preserve, because that's what made you want to do it in the first place.''

Reisz, who stresses the importance of a good screenplay, lowers his voice almost to a whisper and says of Pinter, ''He was an angel! He never agrees to do a script unless he can work with the director. We collaborated for 10 months, talking out every movement of the story. Although Harold, of course, wrote every word himself.''

And John Fowles? Was he a difficult partner? ''John was a sort of uncle to the project. When we had a draft, we showed it to him, and he made suggestions, mainly about the Victorian dialogue. He was like a professor supervising his research students. He came in when asked and not when not asked. He told me, 'You and Harold go off and do what you like ... but just don't explain Sarah.' '' Fourteen years ago, John Fowles and his wife, Elizabeth, moved from London to Lyme Regis, a seaside resort popular in the 19th century. It was here that Fowles wrote ''The French Lieutenant's Woman,'' and here that the novel begins. So, for several weeks last spring, Fowles found himself literally in the midst of his own creation, as art directors reproduced Victorian cobblestones on the main street of Lyme, and his characters played out their drama before his eyes.

In the book, Sarah's habit was to walk out to sea on an ancient stone breakwater and gaze toward the horizon, watching for the French lieutenant who had abandoned her. Today, if one traces her steps on that same sea wall, one can look back toward the town and spy, nestled high on a leafy slope, Fowles's grayish Georgian house, with its balanced 18th-century proportions.

Fowles opens the door to his visitor. He is a bulky, bearded man, dressed in rumpled brown, and although his smile is gracious, his strange, narrow eyes - almost like slits in armor - glint with some suspicion and fear.

Behind him, Elizabeth Fowles, a tall, slim, gray-haired woman, greets me timidly and beckons us into the kitchen. There, at a simple wood table, in front of open french windows, the three of us settle in for a conversation.

''I gather you like the film,'' I begin. ''Very much, yes. I mean, it doesn't reproduce the book. But I long ago realized that if you want your book reproduced, then you mustn't go anywhere near the cinema. Go to television and ask for an eight-hour serial. I think what you want in cinema is a good metaphor.''

He gazes outside. There is an overgrown lawn, beyond which a wild two-acre garden descends to the sea. ''You know, no author is ever totally satisfied,'' he says softly. ''You understand, I've had two bad films made from books of mine, so it's awfully nice to have one that's so much better. I knew this novel was far too long for the cinema to swallow, and Harold's cut the book marvelously. Masses he wrote out of it.''

He runs his hand over his face in a woeful manner, and pauses for a long time. A grandfather clock ticks. ''He's got a very frugal mind. That kind of frugality in art is very, very rare. Most artists are much too ... talkative.'' ''What do you miss in the film?'' ''Well, there were one or two ...'' - he laughs in a way that sounds both superior and hurt - ''... places where I wish Karel hadn't cut so fast, because I would have liked to have lingered with it. But that's really the fault of the book, you see. Because the book is so crammed. But I feel this with all films. The tempo ... . That's why I like ... what's his name? ... Eric Rohmer ... and ... Kurosawa. Satyajit Ray is my sort of No. 1. You do get slow, novellike scenes that run on and on. I don't like the Hollywood pressure to keep it snappy and quick.''

He has been in obvious distress trying to remember names. I ask if the device in the film shocked him. ''No, no, no, no. Not at all. I'm rather staggered that nobody else thought of it.'' Fowles, 55, whose father was a prosperous cigar merchant, grew up in a suburb of London and graduated from Oxford University, where he studied French. He taught in France, Greece and London; then, in 1963, the publication and movie sale of ''The Collector'' freed him to devote his full time to writing. ''Daniel Martin,'' published in 1977, is his most recent novel. It is a long, dense, erudite narrative of a screenwriter's disillusionment with his profession, and his quest for a life more appropriate to his temperament.

''Has the dislike for the movie business you expressed in 'Daniel Martin' changed since this recent experience?'' He laughs tightly. ''No. My feelings about the Hollywood cinema ...'' - he pronounces it sin-eh-maaaa - ''... the stupid Hollywood cinema, haven't changed one bit. But that's got nothing to do with my liking the cinema as an art.'' He pauses again. ''But I hate Los Angeles. It's just a ... noncity. It's fizzy, it's cheap champagne. It's quite nice to drink cheap champagne. But with the deal-making, the gossip, the instant miracles ... all that I really hate.''

He spent three weeks there during preproduction of ''The Collector,'' and returned for another short visit when ''Daniel Martin'' was published. Unlike the central character in that novel, Fowles says he has no desire to write screenplays.

''Not after 'The Magus.' '' (He wrote the script.) ''Trying to adapt my own book - never again. I would only be interested in writing for film if I could direct it myself. It's a kind of egocentricity, really. In a prose text, you have complete control. Of course, a lot of writers enjoy this feeling of community in art. I was watching them film here. Everything was discussed. They all supported each other. I do feel a tiny envy of that.''

''Yes,'' says his wife, ''but you envy the sort of people they are. You couldn't play that role. You'd be a dictator.'' ''Oh, I wouldn't be a dictator,'' Fowles demurs. ''I wouldn't shout at people.'' He pauses a long time. ''I would just carry a deep, burning resentment ... which they all would feel.''

They laugh heartily, then turn out toward the sea again. Elizabeth puts the kettle on for tea. At one point, Fowles recalls, Pinter was having trouble with a particular scene, so Fowles wrote the scene. ''Not to tell him what to write, of course, but simply to suggest a way. And Harold made a lovely remark. He said, 'I'll do anything, but don't ask me to write a happy scene.' '' Fowles breaks into loud laughter. ''So I wrote a happy scene which he really couldn't stomach at all. And in the end he didn't use it. He wrote it in his marvelous, neutral, tightrope style. But it can be played happy.''

I ask Fowles about his often-stated complaint that the images in a film ''overstamp'' the audience's imagination.''What I like about the novel is that the reader actually supplies images. And so no one line will ever be read the same, even if it's from 'War and Peace.' Of countless millions of readers, each will visualize it from his own memory stock. And so, one thing I'm a little suspicious of in the cinema is that, although you have to imagine in terms of motivation and psychology, the actual images are given to you.''

He shifts constantly in his chair and his soft, tentative voice delivers sentences to the sea. ''Still,'' he sighs, ''it was interesting seeing Meryl and Jeremy doing the parts, because no novelist actually has a very clear vision of his characters. You have a clear vision spiritually, psychologically, but you deliberately don't describe them physically. Because that's an important thing in your relationship to the reader. The reader fills in certain details. Insofar as I had visualized Sarah, she really wasn't like Meryl. Sarah had these strange, rather large eyes ... exophthalmic eyes. And Meryl's face is more regular.''

''Is Jeremy Irons your Charles?'' ''I think he's just marvelous. Strangely enough, there are almost no young English actors now who can act upper class without playing the idiot. But Jeremy ... someone who is upper class, a gentleman, in quotes, he doesn't make you laugh. ...''

''Are you satisfied that Sarah's behavior is sufficiently mysterious in the film?'' ''Yes, because that was a deliberate intention in the book, that her motives should not be explained. That may well be because I began to realize that I didn't understand her myself. And therefore you make a virtue of your own defects. But you do have to feel how your characters would feel, and that you don't do rationally.''

I ask if the film arouses any apprehension in him. ''Not really. One fear all writers have is that the film will completely deluge the book, and the book will be forgotten. But the book has been so popular for 10 years now that I don't have that worry. It's been a strangely ... pleasant experience.''

Fowles, who has been taking his glasses on and off for no apparent reason, appears unused to human discourse, as if his constant pauses are needed to regain strength after talking. I ask if he minds his isolation.

''If you mean isolation from other human beings ... well, we have friends we, uh, see from time to time. But I don't like to see friends every other day of the week. I've never yet met a friend who could stand up to that. I sort of like seeing them once every two or three months.'' He comes to a complete stop. Silence reigns.

''Are you thinking about another novel?'' ''Slowly, slowly. 'Daniel Martin' was meant to be a sort of last novel. At least a last novel of that very long kind. I can't ever see myself writing a long novel again. The physical effort toward the end is appalling. You're trying to keep 300,000 words in your mind ... it used to make me feel physically sick.''

The hero in ''Daniel Martin'' reacts to his worldly success with a feeling of desolation. Has it been the same for Fowles? ''Your public reputation, I think, does seem worthless to you, yes. This is an appallingly inflationary age in language, and you suddenly realize that what is written about you is rubbish, nonsense. And then you completely lose your self-esteem.''

Then, with a burst of exuberance, he walks out of the french windows and leads me into his garden, a maze of twisting stone walls and overgrown paths that wind downhill through a 10-foot-high tangle of vegetation. Except for occasional glimpses of the sea below, one can see only a few feet ahead, before the path angles out of sight.

''This is a beautiful rose,'' he says, gently nudging a vermilion blossom with a bamboo stick. ''It's medieval, Rosa gallica.'' Deep mysterious smells rise in dizzying variety. He points to a pink flower growing on a crumbling wall. ''Echeveria elegans from Mexico. And this is a Brazilian strawberry guava tree, Psidium littorale. It produces fruits and flowers at the same time. Fruit's a bit pippy, though.'' We pass huge clumps of bamboo and palms, a Peruvian lantern tree, and various alpine flowers he's gathered from all over the world.

I remark that although he easily remembers Latin names of hundreds of plant species, earlier he had difficulty remembering the names of books, movies and writers.

''Ah,'' he responds, ''but I always remember where to look things up. Books are all one needs.'' ''It was a long haul, actually, to adapt this book.'' Harold Pinter, dressed all in black, sits with legs crossed in a brown leather rocking chair. He holds a dark cigarette deep in the V of two fingers, and when he brings it to his mouth to smoke, his hand covers half his face.

''I'd always been interested in the book - very interested.'' His voice is low. The bass tones reverberate around his plush study with the effortless projection of a trained actor. ''Karel and I went down to see John Fowles,'' he continues. ''We met him once. In Dorset. Had a long talk with him which was very valuable. And we didn't come back to him until I'd done the first draft. We asked him for his comments.''

''Did he make many?'' ''Not many, but what he did make were very much to the point. John Fowles was, naturally, very concerned about accuracy. And anachronisms. But on a more profound level, he was helpful in the discussion of the characters as I defined them. He had certain qualifications. Not many, I must say. But it is very difficult to distill, make sense of, such a complex piece of work.''

He looks away to think, as if the process were private. When he turns back, he speaks of his collaboration with Reisz. ''It was a very free and open working relationship. Karel and I would discuss the essential movements of the whole state of affairs. Everything that is in the film certainly was arrived at by following certain logics. For instance, although Sarah acts in ways which are pretty inscrutable, we found an internal logic in her which we feel quite secure about.''

He walks to a tray of liquor set on a lacquered pine shelf. Between two sets of bookshelves are etchings of Beckett and Joyce. He pours some white wine. The glass gleams with moisture.

''In our first discussions, the first draft ...'' - he settles back into the chair, holding his glass decorously by its stem -''... there was much more of the Victorian background, the Victorian facts. But, gradually, we found that those were novelistic considerations, and we refined it to what we finally found to be a love story ... although of a rather bizarre kind.''

''Did you write many drafts?'' ''I wrote one draft. The script suffered considerable sea changes, particularly in structure, but it was all based on my one draft.'' Pinter freely credits Reisz with the modern subplot. ''In our first conversation, Karel said, 'What about this?' '' Pinter snaps his fingers. ''And I grabbed it. It's a kind of distancing, isn't it?''

He pauses for a long time. ''I remain very, very interested,'' he says carefully, ''as to whether a given audience will find the presence of the modern scenes undermining to the Victorian tale. But I'm not a theoretician. I work mainly by instinct and sense of smell, as it were.''

Pinter grew up in Hackney, a working-class neighborhood in the East End of London. His father, Hyman Pinter, was a ladies' tailor, and Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, performing under the name David Baron. He married Vivien Merchant, an actress, who later appeared in his plays.

In 1957, his first play, ''The Room,'' was produced in England, followed by ''The Birthday Party'' and ''The Dumb Waiter.'' But it was ''The Caretaker,'' in 1960, that made him famous. By 1965, the year of ''The Homecoming,'' he had written a prodigious number of plays for television, radio and stage. His most recent Broadway production, ''Betrayal,'' ran during the 1979-80 season.

Of his screenplays, perhaps his most astonishing feat is his adaptation, as yet unfilmed, of all seven novels of Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past.''

''Why do you write only adaptations?'' ''Any original idea I may have ... I don't have very many of them ... always seems to go immediately into ... theater.'' ''Do you derive particular pleasure from working on someone else's material?''

''Oh, yes. Very much indeed. What is it? Well ...'' - long pause - ''of course, the technical demands are, to use a cliche, a great challenge to solve. But also it's entering into another man's mind, which is very interesting ... to try to find the true mind.''

''Do you enjoy the constrictions, or do you feel there's a lot of freedom in adaptation?'' ''Well, there are both. I'm not sure that the word 'constrictions' is quite right. I would say there are boundaries, proper limitations, that you have to adhere to, otherwise you are distorting, playing about, and having your own good time, which is not the idea. But there remains within that the freedom of the medium. And that is the whole point. So I don't really feel ... any kind of constrictions. I always work - and certainly in the case of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' - from a substantial respect of the work itself. The excitement exists in finding out how it can properly live in film. So it was a question of how to keep faith with Fowles's complexity without being tortuous in film terms.''

I ask if the process of screenwriting is more collaborative than playwriting. ''Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes. I don't consult anyone when I write a play. I just write the damn thing.'' ''Is collaboration part of the enjoyment of working in film?'' ''Well, it's great when you're working with a man like Karel, yes. I mean, you have a fervor, It's two minds. Quite apart from the mind of the author.''

''When you were on the set, did you make line changes?'' ''Certainly not.'' ''I gather the movie follows your screenplay precisely.'' ''Yes. Well, you don't take a bloody year to write the damn thing and have the actors change your lines.'' There is an odd menace to his reply, but he sits quite still, in perfect composure. ''In my contracts, I have something very explicit, precise and concrete: The screenplay is decided before we shoot. Done, that's it. I mean, certainly Karel would ring me up during shooting and say, 'Look, can we say ... ?' And then it's up to me to write the new ... line, or whatever it is. It never came to a speech. It was always a matter of phrases.''

''Do you have a greater artistic stake in the theater or in films?'' ''I take both things very seriously. I just do both. That's all.'' ''What would you say is the main difference between writing for films and for the stage?'' ''It's to do with certain images that you get in film you can't possibly get on the stage. A single image of Meryl Streep, for example, silent, expresses a whole volume of things ... immediately. Now you can, of course, achieve the same kind of thing on the stage. But you have to dictate the focus by other means.''

''By purely verbal means?'' ''No. Not at all. I don't work in purely verbal terms on the stage, by any means. I feel that the way an actor is sitting or standing is much to the point. But if there are other people on stage, you have to focus in quite a subtle way, actually. The discipline is very different. In film, you select the image.''

Pinter's own image in London these days is decidedly worldly. While ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' was being shot, he divorced Vivien Merchant and married the woman whose companionship had won him the censure of Britain's yellow press. His new wife is Lady Antonia Fraser, a popular historian, daughter of the Earl of Longford. Pinter and his wife and her six children live in a huge 1820 brick, doublefronted house, with nine-foot pink roses in the front yard, on stately Campden Hill Square. Behind the house, at the bottom of the garden, is a two-story cottage in which Pinter writes. He uses the upstairs study (where we now sit); his secretary occupies the ground floor.

''Have you found through the years that it has become more or less difficult to write,'' I ask, as he pours his second glass of wine. ''Oh, more difficult, without any question. One's judgment is much more critical ... of one's self. There was a kind of wild freedom once. I wrote a lot of poetry, which was doubtless incomprehensible. But the freedom ... of words ... was marvelous.''

Musing about his life as a playwright, he says, ''Plays I start mainly when I'm drunk. And very impulsively. Write down a few lines.''

''Do you start with a character? An image?'' ''Oh, no. I start with words. And I've mostly no idea who's speaking to whom and what's going on. In a film, it's quite, quite different, because you have ... given facts.'' He snaps his fingers again - a startling gesture. ''So one thinks about it beforehand. But even in a film, I start scribbling right away. I like to get on with it.'' He laughs briefly. ''It's good to move fast.''

''So during the period when you and Karel were talking, you were also writing scenes?'' ''Oh, yes. We never stopped talking, you see. But I didn't ever show him anything I'd done. Then I went away for two weeks and wrote a draft. Antonia and I went to the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, which is one of the great old hotels that exist in this country. Victorian. For the first time in either of our experiences, we wrote in the same room. We had a large sitting room overlooking the sea, and we took two different windows, two typewriters, and we banged away. I on 'The French Lieutenant's Woman,' and she on Charles II. And it worked quite well. The music of the typewriters ... sort of mingled and became ... I don't know ... not that they became one, but ... .''

Through the downstairs door of the house, Pinter walks into his garden. Before us lies a rectangular piece of land, as cultivated as a Jamesian drawing room. A dignified border of flowers surrounds a velvet-green lawn, and hovering over all, with queenly authority, is the gracious, balconied back of the brick house.

''Ah! There's Antonia,'' says Pinter, raising an arm to wave. And there, sitting in the garden on this bright summer morning, is a tall, honey-blond woman, wearing a light blue silk dress, stockings and a long strand of pearls. During introductions, she looks at me with some small curiosity, and offers a smile both warm and remote. I leave them there, chatting in the sun, the man in black, and the regal, pastel-hued woman.

Leslie Garis writes frequently on the arts.