Subject
Interview with LOLITA Script Writer Stephen Schiff
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE. NABOKV-L wishes to thank Suellen Stringer-Hye, the creator
of our long-running VNCollations, for initiating and conducting the
following interview with Stephen Schiff, scriptwriter for Adrian Lyne's
new film of LOLITA. We also thank Jeff Edmunds, the editor of the Nabokov
web site ZEMBLA <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm>,
for permission to reproduce the ZEMBLA Schiff/Stringer-Hye interview. The
ZEMBLA version includes some visual material not found below. Most of all,
we thank Stephen Schiff for participating in the project.
As a bonus, NABOKV-L contributor Brian Walter appends some
additional information gleans from AN NPR interview of Schiff.
D. Barton Johnson
-----------------------------------------------
INTERVIEW with STEPHEN SCHIFF
by
Suellen Stringer-Hye
SS-H: In the preface to _Visiting Mrs Nabokov_, Martin Amis says the
literary interview is nearly dead, but at least it gets you out of the
house. In this case, the interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, staff
writer at the New Yorker and screenwriter for Adrian Lyne's cinematic
interpretation of Nabokov's _Lolita_, did not even do that. I was in front
of a computer, volleying questions, roughly one a week, from my world to
his. I never met him. I do not know what he looks like, where he lives, or
what he has for breakfast. For better or worse, all of the "human
interest" Nabokov deplored is absent from our interview. Like a radio
personality who one is surprised to see converted incorrectly to video,
I'm sure I have pictured a Stephen Schiff who it would take a few seconds
to surrender to the real should we happen to meet. From a Nabokovian point
of view, it was, however, the ideal interview. Unhampered by the required
illusion of spontaneous conversation, we were free to regard both query
and response in unhurried reflection. Schiff's answers to my questions
are lengthier than is common in oral interviews but taken together they
form both a profile of the screenwriter as well as a preview of the film.
The email interview has not yet been perfected but at its best it will
combine the intimacy of a private correspondence with the immediacy of
computerized communications. I hope we have captured some element of the
two.
Before Stephen Schiff began his career as a screenwriter, he was
better known as a journalist, writing and speaking about film and culture
in a number of different venues. As the Critic-at-Large for "Vanity Fair"
from 1983-1992 and as a staff writer at the "New Yorker," where he has
been since 1992, Schiff wrote in-depth profiles of such notables as Vaclav
Havel, Philip Roth, Mick Jagger, E.L Doctorow, Steven Spielberg, Jack
Nicholson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Redgrave, among many other
cultural figures. Additionally, he has written articles on topics ranging
from the New York City Ballet to Daytime TV Talk Shows. Before branching
out into cultural criticism, Schiff established his reputation as a film
critic, first at "The Boston Phoenix" where he was Film Editor from
1978-1983 and later as the film critic of National Public Radio's "Fresh
Air" from 1987 until February, 1996, when his screenwriting commitments
made continuing in film criticism unfeasible. He has appeared on
television on both network and public TV-- for two seasons as a
correspondent on CBS-TV's prime-time news magazine "West 57th " and as a
frequent guest on the critically acclaimed PBS interview program "Charlie
Rose". His articles have been frequently anthologized and reprinted, often
in textbooks for writing and journalism courses. Since penning the
screenplay for Lolita he has written an adaptation for film of Carl
Hiaasen's most recent best-seller, Stormy Weather, which has already been
purchased by Twentieth Century Fox.
I asked Schiff how he got started on this illustrious path.
________________________________________________
SS: I went to Wesleyan University during the early seventies, a time when
very weird courses of study could pass for serious, albeit immature,
inquiry. By which I mean: I was allowed to put together my own major
under the rubric "University Major," so long as I could justify my
course selections in a way that would convince certain stern deans. I
took courses in history, English, linguistics, symbolic logic,
philosophy, anthropology, American Studies, and God knows what else
and called my major "Myth." Needless to say, it prepared me for very
little in the real world except cultural criticism, which in fact is
what I've been practicing since I began writing for a living in
Boston, in the late seventies.
Before that, I was a musician for several years, but the more
musical work I got, the worse my life seemed to be. I always knew I could
write, and I was known in my tiny circle for conducting obsessive rap
sessions after virtually every movie I saw. Eventually I decided I would
try my hand at getting something published, and film criticism seemed an
attractive option, first because I loved movies (and had ever since I was
a kid growing up in a small, one-theater town in Colorado), second,
because the early to mid seventies were a golden age for movies, and
third, because it seemed to me that practicing movie criticism would allow
you to write about an unusual variety of things: sociology, history,
visual aesthetics, performance, narrative, politics, and so forth.
It so happened that I was living in Boston at the time, and that
Boston was a hotbed of film criticism. A town full of colleges, it was
also, therefore, a town full of impassioned moviegoers. The interesting
writing about film--and music and TV and theater--was at two so-called
alternative newspapers, "The Real Paper," now defunct, and "The Boston
Phoenix," which continues to thrive, though most of its cachet has
vanished. A fan of one of my bands had recently become the film critic of
"The Real Paper"; his name was David Ansen, and he is now the lead critic
of "Newsweek." I went to him and said, "You know, I'd be a really good
film critic." He replied, "Can I see what you've written in the past?" I
said, "Oh, you don't want to read any of that stuff." Oddly enough, he
accepted that and sent me off to review a film called "Cleopatra Jones and
the Casino of Gold," no doubt realizing that if I failed to produce a
coherent, readable piece, it would be no great loss to "The Real Paper" or
its readers. But I did OK, he published it, and a small career was
launched.
Very small, at first. When I wrote for David I was making fifteen
dollars a week. By then, I had broken up all my various bands and had
written a musical, which was running in Boston at the time. My chief
source of income was from being a session musician and general dogsbody at
a local recording studio, but I wanted to do more writing. I gathered up
my clippings and took them to "The Boston Phoenix," where the film critic
at the time was Janet Maslin--that's right, the woman who is now the lead
film critic of The New York Times. I began working as a second-string film
critic for her, but she was almost immediately hired to become the film
critic of "Newsweek" (she would hold that job for a few months and then go
to the New York Times, whereupon David Ansen would replace her at
"Newsweek"). She, in turn, was replaced at "The Boston Phoenix" by David
Denby, for whom I worked very happily for a year until he was scooped up
by "New York" magazine, where he remains the film critic to this day. And
when he went, I replaced him as film editor and lead film critic.
Gradually, I had to turn down so much studio work that I stopped being
asked, and that was just as well: my musical career ended, and I've never
had any regrets about that.
I remained at the Boston Phoenix for years; at the same time I was
film critic of "Glamour" magazine and then of the "Atlantic Monthly," but
those were not jobs one could make a living from. I kept waiting to be
called to New York as my predecessors had been, but it wasn't until 1983,
when Conde Nast revived the celebrated but long-dormant "Vanity Fair" that
my chance came. The new "Vanity Fair" had hired a film critic, but he was
a man named Gore Vidal and, as it happened, he lived in a foreign country
called Italy--not a good place for an American film critic to reside. A
big national search was conducted, and I was picked to be the film critic
of "Vanity Fair." I did that job for several years, spanning the
editorships of Richard Locke, who presided over exactly one issue, the
late Leo Lerman, who succeeded him, and Tina Brown, who transformed it
from the failure it was into the great success story of the eighties.
Tina, to whom I have become deeply grateful and devoted, thought that film
criticism was a waste of time; I, somewhat blindly, thought it was a very
high journalistic calling, and whenever she told me I was being wasted on
it, her words fell on deaf ears. But when Eddie Murphy refused to be on
the cover because of something I said in one of my reviews, Tina decided
that a film critic was an extravagance she didn't need, and I became a
writer of features, essays, profiles, and so forth. I continued to ply my
film criticism on National Public Radio, but now I branched out
culturally, writing about books, authors, playwrights, ballet,
photography, music, and so forth. Then when Tina became the editor of "The
New Yorker," I was the first writer she asked to join her, and I happily
consented. She then asked me whether I wanted to be the magazine's film
critic. At one time, it had been my dream job, but now that it was
actually being offered to me, I tried to imagine doing it week in and week
out, with the quality of movies being what it is today, and I felt the
walls closing in. So I said, No, I guess not--which was what Tina had been
hoping I would say: her opinion of film criticism had not altered in the
least. Anyway, "The New Yorker" has been an even more congenial experience
than "Vanity Fair" had been.
_____________________________________________
SS-H: It was rumored that Harold Pinter, David Mamet and Tom Stoppard all
tried their hand at the screenplay for the remake of _Lolita_. Is this
true, why did their efforts fail, and how did you come to be the final
writer for the film?
________________________________________________
SS: Anyone who writes about movies as long as I have inevitably gets
asked whether he would like to write a screenplay. My answer has always
been "No," because 1) I've never quite viewed writing without prose as
real writing (wrong, dummy), and 2) just because you can write and you
often write about movies doesn't mean you can write movies. Be that as it
may, around 1987 or '88, the Nabokov estate was optioning various
properties to Hollywood (the agent involved was Irving "Swifty" Lazar),
and friends in the movie business called and said, "You ought to try your
hand at writing the screenplay of 'Lolita.'" Since I regarded "Lolita" as
just about the best book I had ever read, the suggestion gave me pause,
and I set about composing a screenplay in the most naive fashion
imaginable: it was all dialogue, and wherever there was supposed to be
action, I wrote "stage directions to come." After I'd gotten about forty
pages into it (which, to my surprise, took no time at all), my Hollywood
friends called again and said, "Hey, forget about it. In the current
reactionary political environment, nobody's going to dare make 'Lolita.'
Sorry we led you astray; have a swell life." So I did: I continued writing
for "Vanity air" and then "The New Yorker," and I didn't think much about
screenwriting at all. But I did experience a twinge when I read that the
director Adrian Lyne was indeed planning to make "Lolita," and that he had
hired James Dearden (who wrote Lyne's hit "Fatal Attraction") to do the
screenplay. Then I read that Lyne had decided not to film the Dearden
screenplay and had hired Harold Pinter. Then, in the fall of 1994, I got a
call from an old friend, the producer Richard Zanuck, who, as it happened,
had become the producer of "Lolita." He had gotten wind of my hapless
forty pages and asked to see them; apparently the Pinter script had not
worked out. I dug the poor things out and sent them along, and a few days
later, I got another call: "Here's what you do. Take the cheapest car you
can find to the airport. Get the cheapest plane ticket available to Los
Angeles. Book the worst room in town. And come for a meeting with Zanuck
and Adrian Lyne. And guess what? You might not even be reimbursed." "All
righty," I said. I went. I spent the day meeting with Messrs. Lyne and
Zanuck, and, truth to tell, had a pretty good time. A few weeks later, we
met again in New York, but, by that time, they had determined that they
were going to hire David Mamet to write yet another version. However, they
seemed to like what I had done so far, and I was brutishly stupid enough
to think that I ought to just keep at it--actually, it was the most fun
I'd had at a keyboard in years. The Mamet script arrived, and it, too, was
rejected. By that time, I'd finished mine, so I sent it in. And then the
stretch limo came; the first-class plane ticket arrived; the room at the
Four Seasons Hotel was waiting, complete with fruit basket. Suddenly I was
living a satire of Hollywood. Did I love it? You'd better ask my agent.
I've made this story sound rather blithe (not to mention long), and maybe
that's not quite appropriate. My screenplay of "Lolita" was and is a labor
of love, and I worked very hard to make it as worthy of its source as I
possibly could, even though that often meant inventing things that had
nothing to do with said source at all. There were also, of course,
rewrites and new drafts and cuts and emendations, but that's par for the
course with any piece of writing. There are only a few more things to add.
First, there was never any Tom Stoppard script. Second, I think probably
any one of the other screenplays would have made a fine (though very
different) film. Mine was chosen, it seems to me, because it most
resonated with Adrian Lyne's own vision. In any case, I feel lucky and
very grateful that it was.
__________________________________________
SS-H: How does Lyne's and/or your vision/ version differ from say,
Kubrick's or Nabokov's? Without giving away too many telling details, can
you say which elements of a complex novel you and Lyne chose to express?
----------------------------------------------
SS: Right from the beginning, it was clear to all of us that this movie
was not a "remake" of Kubrick's film. Rather, we were out to make a
new adaptation of a very great novel. Some of the filmmakers involved
actually looked upon the Kubrick version as a kind of "what not to
do." I had somewhat fonder memories of it than that, but I had not
seen it for maybe fifteen years, and I didn't allow myself to go back
to it again. My only source material, in fact, was the novel itself.
But as much as I had always loved that novel, I also knew I would
have to throw away a lot of it--even some of what I loved best.
Part of Humbert's tragedy--and a large part of his comedy--is that
his enormous intelligence is always defeated by his obsession. He can't
get outside that obsession to see who Lolita is, to see that she is
actually a fairly ordinary little girl, more charming than some and
probably more sexually precocious, but still a child. Humbert's world is
completely internal, a world of language and fantasy, but in the movie I
have had to externalize it. The ornate curlicues of Nabokov's prose, which
are so much fun to dip and slide with on the page, simply don't work in a
movie; in the mouth of a flesh-and-blood actor they often sound
pretentious or precious or absurd. The best you can do is hint at them,
and, even then, you have to be very careful.
In the pages of "Lolita" the novel, Lolita the child is so much a
figment of Humbert's imagination that she barely exists. On the
screen, you have to make her into a person, and you also have to
create a relationship between her and Humbert, a relationship that
the book's completely unreliable narrator, Humbert himself, allows us
only glimpses of. "Lolita" the novel has surprisingly little
dialogue: Nabokov is likely to hint at what is being said only in a
line or two, such as, "I launched upon a hilarious account of my
Arctic adventures." Well, the screenwriter has to make up that
"hilarious account" out of thin air--noting, of course, that it may
not be as hilarious as Humbert pretends. An enormous amount of the
dialogue in this screenplay appears nowhere in the book, and where
Nabokov does provide dialogue, his ear for the rhythms of American
adolescent speech circa 1947 is not always perfect.
Almost from the beginning, it seemed to me that Adrian Lyne's
conception for the movie was absolutely right: first, that Humbert
had to be sympathetic to an audience even as the audience was
realizing that what Humbert was doing was heinous. After all, that is
very much what Nabokov accomplished--you can (and should) adore
Humbert even as you condemn his deeds. Second, there is a moment
during Humbert and Lolita's cross-country travels in which they are,
in effect, a couple--a very odd couple, to be sure, but a couple
nevertheless. Nabokov leaves that mostly to the reader's imagination,
but I felt I could not, and some of the most vivid scenes in the
movie are scenes in which these two are on the road together, testing
each other, confounding each other, and, yes, loving each other.
Perhaps it doesn't quite go without saying that our version is
sexually much franker than the Kubrick version, in which nothing more
erotic passes between Humbert and Lolita than a peck on the cheek. It
is my feeling that sexuality plays approximately the same role in our
screen version as in the book, and is no more nor less emphasized.
Finally, "Lolita" is not just a book, it is a puzzle. No one who
reads it once can get it all; it was meant to be read at least twice, and,
when it is, its various tricks and motives--especially the ones involving
Quilty--make themselves clear. But I had to write a movie that an audience
could take in entirely the first time; I hope that what we have achieved
is something like the effect Nabokov intends after several readings,
though our means are entirely different. (Kubrick, on the other hand,
made a film that might better have been titled "Quilty." Very much in the
thrall of Peter Sellers, he allowed Quilty to take over the movie, with
Sellers improvising vast swatches of dialogue. If you look at the Kubrick
movie today, the Sellers stuff still seems amazingly energetic and funny
and alive; the rest of the story plods by comparison. The other strange
choice in the Kubrick film, of course, is Sue Lyon, who, even though she
was only fifteen when she played Lolita--the same age as our Dominique
Swain--could easily have passed for a twenty-year-old porno star.
Dominique can easily pass for a twelve-year-old, which we all think is a
very good thing.)
I just want to add one note: I would never claim that we are filming
Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." I would say only that we are attempting to
translate into a kind of exciting sign language--the language of
film--what one of the century's greatest masters of prose rendered so
incomparably on the page.
--------------------------------------------------
SS-H: You said that the only source material used in writing the
screenplay for "Lolita" was the novel itself. Did you also look at the
Nabokov screenplay written but not used for the Kubrick film? If so, do
you think it would have made an interesting movie; if not, why not?
-----------------------------------------------
SS: I'm afraid my answer to this question is rather boring: no, I didn't
look at the screenplay Nabokov wrote, since I wanted to be influenced
no more by his take on himself than by Kubrick's take on him.
Unfortunately, I still haven't allowed myself to read the Nabokov
screenplay, though maybe I should hurry up and get to it, the better
to respond to your questions. One more notes: I have been given to
understand that the published version of the Nabokov screenplay is
already several generations removed from the screenplay Nabokov
originally wrote and submitted.
----------------------------------------
SS-H: In Camille Paglia's essay, "Lolita Unclothed", the author
Anne Rice is quoted , "...Lolita has become today ...the image of
the seductive young girl who is every man's dream of sensuality..." .
Lolita the myth, the mirage created by Humbert from his childhood and
his reading list has not popularly been differentiated from Dolores
the girl, perhaps because, as you say it takes several readings to
understand that there is a difference. The Kubrick film captured the
invented (in part by Humbert, in part by Dolores Haze herself )
Lolita's charm and ravishing enchantment but very little of the real
girl Dolores Haze. From your description, the new film will portray
much more of the everyday but will it still attempt to convey the
magic?
-------------------------------------------
SS: I don't know in what context Anne Rice made her comment, but if
Lolita is viewed simply as an enchanting young seductress, then I
think Nabokov's point is lost. It is true that when the seduction
finally takes place, she instigates it, but "Lolita" isn't "Blame It
on Rio"--this isn't the story of a naughty young thing and the
walking midlife crisis she seduces. Nabokov's Humbert identifies
Lolita as one of a small and distinct class--the class of
nymphets--and I don't think the properties of that class are quite so
coarse and obvious. Lolita is bewitching, but not always by
intention; sometimes what bewitches Humbert about her is her very
childishness, for it is that quality rather than any sexual
precocity, that identifies her as something other than mere woman. Of
course, our Lolita has magic, but it is not the rather porny allure
that Sue Lyon had in the Kubrick film. Dominique Swain, the
remarkable young girl who plays Lolita, lives very much along the
line between childhood and womanhood that Lolita lives along, and she
slips back onto the childish side at least as often as she surprises
us by her womanliness. The magic I tried to give her in the
screenplay is the magic of a very vital, very alive young girl, and I
do think the audience will have no trouble perceiving it.
-----------------------------------------
SS-H: It was reported in the media that "Swifty" Lazar sold the rights to
Lolita_ to Caroloco productions for 1 million dollars. Did Mr. Lazar
actually possess the rights to the film or did he simply broker the
sale? What role did the Nabokov estate play in this transaction?
----------------------------------------
SS: I'm afraid I don't know too much about the details surrounding the
rights to "Lolita." I can say with some certainty that Swifty Lazar was
the agent of the agreement between the estate and Carolco; I'm fairly
certain that he never had any ownership of the property or any option on
it. And I imagine, though I'm not a hundred percent sure, that the man
whom he was optioning the book from was Nabokov's son (and translator)
Dmitri, who would have been acting as executor of the estate.
------------------------------------------------
SS-H: Has Dimitri Nabokov seen the sceenplay and if so, what was his
opinion of it?
-----------------------------------
SS: I had long thought that there might be opposition to the film from the
right, particularly the so-called Christian right, because of its subject
matter alone. And my general feeling about that was that, as experience
has shown, many of those people are so unthinking in their approach to the
arts that they are liable to protest the film without even seeing it,
without knowing that its source is one of the great literary works of the
20th century, and without in any way questioning the peculiar but common
assumption that when a work explores certain themes or actions, that is
the same as endorsing them. In any case, nothing I could do was going to
have any effect on opposition from that quarter. What I cared about more
was another sort of knee-jerk response--the one that was likely to come
from the intellectuals, for whom the very idea of turning so beloved a
novel into anything so tawdry as a movie (let alone a movie directed by
the man who made "Flashdance") was bound to be viewed as sacrilege. Since
I believed (and believe) that we were making a very good and faithful
film, I hoped at least to open some minds to it, and to that end, I sought
Dmitri out. I knew he was coming to New York to promote his remarkable new
translation of his father's short stories; in fact, I had been invited to
a party celebrating his arrival. So I weighed the risk: if I showed him my
screenplay and he liked it, the film would have gained the most valuable
and respectable of allies; if I showed it to him and he hated it, his
animosity could be very damaging.
I telephoned him. When he answered and heard who was calling, he
immediately said, "Oh, Stephen, hello, I love the screenplay you
wrote of 'Lolita.'" At which point he no doubt heard a long and
relieved exhalation. As it turned out, he had been sent the
screenplay as part of the movie company's contractual agreement with
him. I then asked him whether he would be willing to support the film
in some public way, but he, quite rightly, pointed out that there was
no way he could know whether the final film would reflect what was in
the screenplay he had read. So I invited him to come onto the set,
watch some filming, and meet Adrian Lyne, Jeremy Irons, Dominique
Swain, and Frank Langella (By that time, Melanie Griffith's role had
already been completed and she was no longer on the set.)
He accepted, and a few weeks later we were in Hammond, Louisiana,
where the Enchanted Hunters sequence was being filmed. Dmitri proved to be
ebullient, charming, and very, very tall. He has been, in his eventful
life, an opera singer (basso) and a race-car driver as well as his
father's translator, and he did seem to like what he saw on the set. His
only objection seemed to be to the car we were using to represent the
"Melmoth"--the car in which Humbert and Lolita tour America. We had
selected a beautiful old wood-paneled station wagon--a "woody"--which,
truth to tell, was never what Vladimir Nabokov had in mind. Dmitri, who
knows and loves cars, had a little trouble with that, and for
understandable reasons. After all, it was not at all like the car he
remembered traveling around America with his father in, and those travels
were the basis for the ones in "Lolita."
----------------------------------------------
SS-H: Have you read any of Nabokov's other writings? If so which ones and
what is your opinion of those works?
________________________________________________
SS: Yes, I have read several. I have always been a great admirer of style
in writing and a supporter of the notion that a style of sufficient
beauty, grace, and profundity IS substance; those who decry high
literary style and hanker for simple prose expounding simple truths
are, I think, missing much of what is greatest in the heritage of
literature. Among American prose stylists of the postwar era, Nabokov
has no peers, and so, given that and the tenet above, almost
everything he has written is worth reading. Still, there are better
books and worse books. There are, from my reading, three
masterpieces: "Lolita," "Pale Fire," and "Speak, Memory," which I
regard as one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. I am also
an admirer of "Laughter in the Dark," "Invitation to a Beheading,"
"Pnin," "Bend Sinister," and especially "Ada, or Ardor," which is at
least as rich as "Lolita" or "Pale Fire," but whose convolutions,
delightful as they often are, interfere too much (I think) with the
narrative momentum. If "Lolita" and "Pale Fire" are books full of
tricks, "Ada" seems to me a book full of booby traps, so I cannot
love it as well. I have also read "Despair" and "King, Queen, Knave"
and found both a bit disappointing--they seem rehearsals for a
Nabokov book, or pale imitations. Still, if these are failures, they
are failures on a very high level.
Many of Nabokov's other books have been filmed, though not often
very successfully. Would it be kosher to ask whoever is reading these
words whether they have favorite Nabokov books (or even stories) that
they think worth filming? By the way, I refuse even to contemplate
movie versions of "Pale Fire" or "Ada."
__________________________________________
SS-H: What other novelists do you admire?
__________________________________________
SS: I hardly know where to begin. I assume you're not asking for my list
of the greatest novelists of all time--that familiar compilation of
Proust, Joyce, Austen, Eliot, Flaubert, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Rabelais,
Sterne, Richardson, Dickens, Musil, Gogol, Kafka, James, Wharton,
Twain, Melville, Waugh, blah, blah, blah. Shall we do more
contemporary authors? I think the greatest living American novelist
is John Updike, and in so saying, I am betraying my Nabokovian
predilection--after all, who more than Updike is the heir to
Nabokov's musicality? I love Roth as well, and Bellow and--well, off
the top of my head: Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, early Norman Mailer
(up through "The Executioner's Song," which, whether it's a novel or
not, is his masterpiece), Stanley Elkin (rest in peace), Richard
Yates (likewise), both Amises (Martin and the late Kingsley), Anne
Tyler, Robert Stone, Elmore Leonard, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie,
Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Helprin, John le Carre, Milan
Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ivan Klima. I'm sure I'm forgetting
several that I absolutely love, but that's a pretty good start.
______________________________________
SS-H: Who will do the soundtrack for the new film and what sort of
musical atmosphere is the director hoping to capture?
_______________________________________
SS: No composer has yet been chosen for the film's soundtrack, though a
great many are hoping for the job. I think what Adrian Lyne is after
is something at once poignant and very spare, but we'll see what we
wind up with.
_________________________________________
SS-H: Will Lyne try to achieve through music, the effect of a 1940s
America?
___________________________________________________
SS: Although Adrian Lyne's fealty to the demands of the period will
result in his using a certain amount of music from the late forties--pop
songs that would have been on the radio, for instance--I don't think he
intends to make the movie's score particularly redolent of the forties. If
you think about it, such an approach could be the kiss of death, because,
even though the movie's look will evoke the period quite accurately, a
movie's score has to evoke contemporary emotions. A movie's score is its
emotional touchstone; it has to be very immediate, and it has to speak to
an audience in a language that requires no transposition (to use a musical
term). What you see will be 1947, but what you feel must be right now.
---------------------------------------------------------
SS-H: Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's _Lolita_ but it
was significantly altered by the time the filming was finished. Do you
think Lyne's vision will be consistent with yours in the end, and that he
is capable of translating onto film an artful version of Nabokov's
masterpiece?
___________________________________________
SS:: From what I have seen of the dailies (what has ready been filmed
and printed) and from what I've seen on the set, I do feel that Adrian
Lyne and the actors are being as true to my screenplay as they can be.
Inevitably, things change during the actual shooting process--actors
stumble into an inspired improvisation, the set doesn't quite work the way
I envisioned it, and so forth--but I seem to have become that rarity, a
happy screenwriter, one who feels that not only is justice being done to
his work but that where the director and actors depart from it, they
depart for an even sunnier clime. Do keep in mind that Adrian and I worked
together on the script for months before filming began, so that, by the
time the cameras rolled, we were both happy with what was on the page.
What I had not anticipated was how sensitive and indeed how inspired
Adrian's approach to the material would prove to be. I come from a
relatively literary world; even so, I know of no one who has read "Lolita"
so many times, so attentively, and with such devotion. Adrian is not by
nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any
lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting
this most splendid novels to the man who made "Flashdance," and I did,
too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped
trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. From working with
him, and from all that I've seen of the filming, I dare to hope that he is
making a masterpiece, and that with this movie he will surprise the world.
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Special Collections
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM
From: "Brian D. Walter" <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu>
To: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: Schiff Interview Addenda
About a week before Suellen Stringer-Hye's interview with him appeared on
the Nabokov Web-Page, Stephen Schiff was interviewed for NPR's Fresh Air
series. The vast majority of what he said in this interview about the
forthcoming film of LOLITA was covered -- often verbatim -- in Stringer-
Hye's interview. But embedded within the considerable overlap, there was
the stray gossipy tidbit that Nabokovians might be interested in, and it's
a couple of these that are quoted below. Ellipses appear in place of
material that was covered completely in Stringer-Hye's interview.
Happy speculating.
Brian Walter
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu
P. S. Reading the first exchange below, users of STRONG OPINIONS may well
be reminded of Nabokov's comment that he sometimes found it sufficient
cause to discard a book if a cursory survey of its pages revealed too
much dialogue. BW
------------------------------------
Interviewer: I should think that adapting LOLITA would be really
difficult. Nabokov was such a brilliant and rich writer, and so much of
the book is in the sentences, in the writing itself. How much of your
dialogue comes directly from Nabokov? I'm not really sure that most of it
would work in people's mouths as opposed to just on the page.
Schiff: You're so completely right about that, and I wish you had told
that to some of the actors. This apparently always happens when there's a
book source, that the actors, if they're having a hard time with one of
your lines, they start going back to the book and sort of curling their
mighty mouths around what's there. You're right that in the mouths of
actors, a lot of this very curlicued, beautiful, ornate writing that
Nabokov did sounds pretentious, and over the top, and extremely mannered
-- not like the way people talk at all. . . . What you have to do in
recreating LOLITA, to the degree that anyone can, is to indeed invent a
lot of dialogue. You have to really create the character of Lolita, who
is not there on the page (in a way) in the book. . . . She has to have
dialogue, true-to-life dialogue. It can't be this kind of semi-satirical,
very ornate version of a child's possible dialogue that Nabokov invented.
Finally, you have to create a relationship between them which doesn't
really exist at all in the book; it's just hinted at in fragments of
sentences. So it was hard, but it was also a labor of love.
[This second exchange continues a line of questioning regarding the
difficulties Schiff has experienced working with people whom he had
previously panned in his film reviews. This response perhaps brings to
mind one of the most popular casting rumors floating around last spring
regarding the role of Humbert Humbert -- that it could easily have gone to
a very hot British actor whose notorious dalliances with a publicity-
hungry prostitute temporarily jeopardized his reputation while
simultaneously inventing her now-burgeoning media career.]
Interviewer: Have you already met with people whom you were hoping did not
remember the reviews you gave them?
Schiff: Yes. Yes. There are some who are more grown-up and some who are
less grown-up about this. [Slight pause for apparent moral struggle.]
There was an occasion -- and I won't go into very much detail,
unfortunately, as I once would have done -- when an actor turned down a
part that I had written. [Another pause for a bit of hemming and hawing.]
Well, actually, the actor turned down Humbert Humbert, which is a
dangerous part for an actor to take on, it must be said. If you're trying
to maintain a certain kind of reputation as a gleaming, virtuous star,
you're not going to want to be seen in this situation with this young
girl. That actor probably didn't want the part for that reason, but one
of the reasons he gave for turning it down was that I had given him a bad
review, had said something bad about him once.
END
of our long-running VNCollations, for initiating and conducting the
following interview with Stephen Schiff, scriptwriter for Adrian Lyne's
new film of LOLITA. We also thank Jeff Edmunds, the editor of the Nabokov
web site ZEMBLA <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/nabokov/nsintro.htm>,
for permission to reproduce the ZEMBLA Schiff/Stringer-Hye interview. The
ZEMBLA version includes some visual material not found below. Most of all,
we thank Stephen Schiff for participating in the project.
As a bonus, NABOKV-L contributor Brian Walter appends some
additional information gleans from AN NPR interview of Schiff.
D. Barton Johnson
-----------------------------------------------
INTERVIEW with STEPHEN SCHIFF
by
Suellen Stringer-Hye
SS-H: In the preface to _Visiting Mrs Nabokov_, Martin Amis says the
literary interview is nearly dead, but at least it gets you out of the
house. In this case, the interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, staff
writer at the New Yorker and screenwriter for Adrian Lyne's cinematic
interpretation of Nabokov's _Lolita_, did not even do that. I was in front
of a computer, volleying questions, roughly one a week, from my world to
his. I never met him. I do not know what he looks like, where he lives, or
what he has for breakfast. For better or worse, all of the "human
interest" Nabokov deplored is absent from our interview. Like a radio
personality who one is surprised to see converted incorrectly to video,
I'm sure I have pictured a Stephen Schiff who it would take a few seconds
to surrender to the real should we happen to meet. From a Nabokovian point
of view, it was, however, the ideal interview. Unhampered by the required
illusion of spontaneous conversation, we were free to regard both query
and response in unhurried reflection. Schiff's answers to my questions
are lengthier than is common in oral interviews but taken together they
form both a profile of the screenwriter as well as a preview of the film.
The email interview has not yet been perfected but at its best it will
combine the intimacy of a private correspondence with the immediacy of
computerized communications. I hope we have captured some element of the
two.
Before Stephen Schiff began his career as a screenwriter, he was
better known as a journalist, writing and speaking about film and culture
in a number of different venues. As the Critic-at-Large for "Vanity Fair"
from 1983-1992 and as a staff writer at the "New Yorker," where he has
been since 1992, Schiff wrote in-depth profiles of such notables as Vaclav
Havel, Philip Roth, Mick Jagger, E.L Doctorow, Steven Spielberg, Jack
Nicholson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Redgrave, among many other
cultural figures. Additionally, he has written articles on topics ranging
from the New York City Ballet to Daytime TV Talk Shows. Before branching
out into cultural criticism, Schiff established his reputation as a film
critic, first at "The Boston Phoenix" where he was Film Editor from
1978-1983 and later as the film critic of National Public Radio's "Fresh
Air" from 1987 until February, 1996, when his screenwriting commitments
made continuing in film criticism unfeasible. He has appeared on
television on both network and public TV-- for two seasons as a
correspondent on CBS-TV's prime-time news magazine "West 57th " and as a
frequent guest on the critically acclaimed PBS interview program "Charlie
Rose". His articles have been frequently anthologized and reprinted, often
in textbooks for writing and journalism courses. Since penning the
screenplay for Lolita he has written an adaptation for film of Carl
Hiaasen's most recent best-seller, Stormy Weather, which has already been
purchased by Twentieth Century Fox.
I asked Schiff how he got started on this illustrious path.
________________________________________________
SS: I went to Wesleyan University during the early seventies, a time when
very weird courses of study could pass for serious, albeit immature,
inquiry. By which I mean: I was allowed to put together my own major
under the rubric "University Major," so long as I could justify my
course selections in a way that would convince certain stern deans. I
took courses in history, English, linguistics, symbolic logic,
philosophy, anthropology, American Studies, and God knows what else
and called my major "Myth." Needless to say, it prepared me for very
little in the real world except cultural criticism, which in fact is
what I've been practicing since I began writing for a living in
Boston, in the late seventies.
Before that, I was a musician for several years, but the more
musical work I got, the worse my life seemed to be. I always knew I could
write, and I was known in my tiny circle for conducting obsessive rap
sessions after virtually every movie I saw. Eventually I decided I would
try my hand at getting something published, and film criticism seemed an
attractive option, first because I loved movies (and had ever since I was
a kid growing up in a small, one-theater town in Colorado), second,
because the early to mid seventies were a golden age for movies, and
third, because it seemed to me that practicing movie criticism would allow
you to write about an unusual variety of things: sociology, history,
visual aesthetics, performance, narrative, politics, and so forth.
It so happened that I was living in Boston at the time, and that
Boston was a hotbed of film criticism. A town full of colleges, it was
also, therefore, a town full of impassioned moviegoers. The interesting
writing about film--and music and TV and theater--was at two so-called
alternative newspapers, "The Real Paper," now defunct, and "The Boston
Phoenix," which continues to thrive, though most of its cachet has
vanished. A fan of one of my bands had recently become the film critic of
"The Real Paper"; his name was David Ansen, and he is now the lead critic
of "Newsweek." I went to him and said, "You know, I'd be a really good
film critic." He replied, "Can I see what you've written in the past?" I
said, "Oh, you don't want to read any of that stuff." Oddly enough, he
accepted that and sent me off to review a film called "Cleopatra Jones and
the Casino of Gold," no doubt realizing that if I failed to produce a
coherent, readable piece, it would be no great loss to "The Real Paper" or
its readers. But I did OK, he published it, and a small career was
launched.
Very small, at first. When I wrote for David I was making fifteen
dollars a week. By then, I had broken up all my various bands and had
written a musical, which was running in Boston at the time. My chief
source of income was from being a session musician and general dogsbody at
a local recording studio, but I wanted to do more writing. I gathered up
my clippings and took them to "The Boston Phoenix," where the film critic
at the time was Janet Maslin--that's right, the woman who is now the lead
film critic of The New York Times. I began working as a second-string film
critic for her, but she was almost immediately hired to become the film
critic of "Newsweek" (she would hold that job for a few months and then go
to the New York Times, whereupon David Ansen would replace her at
"Newsweek"). She, in turn, was replaced at "The Boston Phoenix" by David
Denby, for whom I worked very happily for a year until he was scooped up
by "New York" magazine, where he remains the film critic to this day. And
when he went, I replaced him as film editor and lead film critic.
Gradually, I had to turn down so much studio work that I stopped being
asked, and that was just as well: my musical career ended, and I've never
had any regrets about that.
I remained at the Boston Phoenix for years; at the same time I was
film critic of "Glamour" magazine and then of the "Atlantic Monthly," but
those were not jobs one could make a living from. I kept waiting to be
called to New York as my predecessors had been, but it wasn't until 1983,
when Conde Nast revived the celebrated but long-dormant "Vanity Fair" that
my chance came. The new "Vanity Fair" had hired a film critic, but he was
a man named Gore Vidal and, as it happened, he lived in a foreign country
called Italy--not a good place for an American film critic to reside. A
big national search was conducted, and I was picked to be the film critic
of "Vanity Fair." I did that job for several years, spanning the
editorships of Richard Locke, who presided over exactly one issue, the
late Leo Lerman, who succeeded him, and Tina Brown, who transformed it
from the failure it was into the great success story of the eighties.
Tina, to whom I have become deeply grateful and devoted, thought that film
criticism was a waste of time; I, somewhat blindly, thought it was a very
high journalistic calling, and whenever she told me I was being wasted on
it, her words fell on deaf ears. But when Eddie Murphy refused to be on
the cover because of something I said in one of my reviews, Tina decided
that a film critic was an extravagance she didn't need, and I became a
writer of features, essays, profiles, and so forth. I continued to ply my
film criticism on National Public Radio, but now I branched out
culturally, writing about books, authors, playwrights, ballet,
photography, music, and so forth. Then when Tina became the editor of "The
New Yorker," I was the first writer she asked to join her, and I happily
consented. She then asked me whether I wanted to be the magazine's film
critic. At one time, it had been my dream job, but now that it was
actually being offered to me, I tried to imagine doing it week in and week
out, with the quality of movies being what it is today, and I felt the
walls closing in. So I said, No, I guess not--which was what Tina had been
hoping I would say: her opinion of film criticism had not altered in the
least. Anyway, "The New Yorker" has been an even more congenial experience
than "Vanity Fair" had been.
_____________________________________________
SS-H: It was rumored that Harold Pinter, David Mamet and Tom Stoppard all
tried their hand at the screenplay for the remake of _Lolita_. Is this
true, why did their efforts fail, and how did you come to be the final
writer for the film?
________________________________________________
SS: Anyone who writes about movies as long as I have inevitably gets
asked whether he would like to write a screenplay. My answer has always
been "No," because 1) I've never quite viewed writing without prose as
real writing (wrong, dummy), and 2) just because you can write and you
often write about movies doesn't mean you can write movies. Be that as it
may, around 1987 or '88, the Nabokov estate was optioning various
properties to Hollywood (the agent involved was Irving "Swifty" Lazar),
and friends in the movie business called and said, "You ought to try your
hand at writing the screenplay of 'Lolita.'" Since I regarded "Lolita" as
just about the best book I had ever read, the suggestion gave me pause,
and I set about composing a screenplay in the most naive fashion
imaginable: it was all dialogue, and wherever there was supposed to be
action, I wrote "stage directions to come." After I'd gotten about forty
pages into it (which, to my surprise, took no time at all), my Hollywood
friends called again and said, "Hey, forget about it. In the current
reactionary political environment, nobody's going to dare make 'Lolita.'
Sorry we led you astray; have a swell life." So I did: I continued writing
for "Vanity air" and then "The New Yorker," and I didn't think much about
screenwriting at all. But I did experience a twinge when I read that the
director Adrian Lyne was indeed planning to make "Lolita," and that he had
hired James Dearden (who wrote Lyne's hit "Fatal Attraction") to do the
screenplay. Then I read that Lyne had decided not to film the Dearden
screenplay and had hired Harold Pinter. Then, in the fall of 1994, I got a
call from an old friend, the producer Richard Zanuck, who, as it happened,
had become the producer of "Lolita." He had gotten wind of my hapless
forty pages and asked to see them; apparently the Pinter script had not
worked out. I dug the poor things out and sent them along, and a few days
later, I got another call: "Here's what you do. Take the cheapest car you
can find to the airport. Get the cheapest plane ticket available to Los
Angeles. Book the worst room in town. And come for a meeting with Zanuck
and Adrian Lyne. And guess what? You might not even be reimbursed." "All
righty," I said. I went. I spent the day meeting with Messrs. Lyne and
Zanuck, and, truth to tell, had a pretty good time. A few weeks later, we
met again in New York, but, by that time, they had determined that they
were going to hire David Mamet to write yet another version. However, they
seemed to like what I had done so far, and I was brutishly stupid enough
to think that I ought to just keep at it--actually, it was the most fun
I'd had at a keyboard in years. The Mamet script arrived, and it, too, was
rejected. By that time, I'd finished mine, so I sent it in. And then the
stretch limo came; the first-class plane ticket arrived; the room at the
Four Seasons Hotel was waiting, complete with fruit basket. Suddenly I was
living a satire of Hollywood. Did I love it? You'd better ask my agent.
I've made this story sound rather blithe (not to mention long), and maybe
that's not quite appropriate. My screenplay of "Lolita" was and is a labor
of love, and I worked very hard to make it as worthy of its source as I
possibly could, even though that often meant inventing things that had
nothing to do with said source at all. There were also, of course,
rewrites and new drafts and cuts and emendations, but that's par for the
course with any piece of writing. There are only a few more things to add.
First, there was never any Tom Stoppard script. Second, I think probably
any one of the other screenplays would have made a fine (though very
different) film. Mine was chosen, it seems to me, because it most
resonated with Adrian Lyne's own vision. In any case, I feel lucky and
very grateful that it was.
__________________________________________
SS-H: How does Lyne's and/or your vision/ version differ from say,
Kubrick's or Nabokov's? Without giving away too many telling details, can
you say which elements of a complex novel you and Lyne chose to express?
----------------------------------------------
SS: Right from the beginning, it was clear to all of us that this movie
was not a "remake" of Kubrick's film. Rather, we were out to make a
new adaptation of a very great novel. Some of the filmmakers involved
actually looked upon the Kubrick version as a kind of "what not to
do." I had somewhat fonder memories of it than that, but I had not
seen it for maybe fifteen years, and I didn't allow myself to go back
to it again. My only source material, in fact, was the novel itself.
But as much as I had always loved that novel, I also knew I would
have to throw away a lot of it--even some of what I loved best.
Part of Humbert's tragedy--and a large part of his comedy--is that
his enormous intelligence is always defeated by his obsession. He can't
get outside that obsession to see who Lolita is, to see that she is
actually a fairly ordinary little girl, more charming than some and
probably more sexually precocious, but still a child. Humbert's world is
completely internal, a world of language and fantasy, but in the movie I
have had to externalize it. The ornate curlicues of Nabokov's prose, which
are so much fun to dip and slide with on the page, simply don't work in a
movie; in the mouth of a flesh-and-blood actor they often sound
pretentious or precious or absurd. The best you can do is hint at them,
and, even then, you have to be very careful.
In the pages of "Lolita" the novel, Lolita the child is so much a
figment of Humbert's imagination that she barely exists. On the
screen, you have to make her into a person, and you also have to
create a relationship between her and Humbert, a relationship that
the book's completely unreliable narrator, Humbert himself, allows us
only glimpses of. "Lolita" the novel has surprisingly little
dialogue: Nabokov is likely to hint at what is being said only in a
line or two, such as, "I launched upon a hilarious account of my
Arctic adventures." Well, the screenwriter has to make up that
"hilarious account" out of thin air--noting, of course, that it may
not be as hilarious as Humbert pretends. An enormous amount of the
dialogue in this screenplay appears nowhere in the book, and where
Nabokov does provide dialogue, his ear for the rhythms of American
adolescent speech circa 1947 is not always perfect.
Almost from the beginning, it seemed to me that Adrian Lyne's
conception for the movie was absolutely right: first, that Humbert
had to be sympathetic to an audience even as the audience was
realizing that what Humbert was doing was heinous. After all, that is
very much what Nabokov accomplished--you can (and should) adore
Humbert even as you condemn his deeds. Second, there is a moment
during Humbert and Lolita's cross-country travels in which they are,
in effect, a couple--a very odd couple, to be sure, but a couple
nevertheless. Nabokov leaves that mostly to the reader's imagination,
but I felt I could not, and some of the most vivid scenes in the
movie are scenes in which these two are on the road together, testing
each other, confounding each other, and, yes, loving each other.
Perhaps it doesn't quite go without saying that our version is
sexually much franker than the Kubrick version, in which nothing more
erotic passes between Humbert and Lolita than a peck on the cheek. It
is my feeling that sexuality plays approximately the same role in our
screen version as in the book, and is no more nor less emphasized.
Finally, "Lolita" is not just a book, it is a puzzle. No one who
reads it once can get it all; it was meant to be read at least twice, and,
when it is, its various tricks and motives--especially the ones involving
Quilty--make themselves clear. But I had to write a movie that an audience
could take in entirely the first time; I hope that what we have achieved
is something like the effect Nabokov intends after several readings,
though our means are entirely different. (Kubrick, on the other hand,
made a film that might better have been titled "Quilty." Very much in the
thrall of Peter Sellers, he allowed Quilty to take over the movie, with
Sellers improvising vast swatches of dialogue. If you look at the Kubrick
movie today, the Sellers stuff still seems amazingly energetic and funny
and alive; the rest of the story plods by comparison. The other strange
choice in the Kubrick film, of course, is Sue Lyon, who, even though she
was only fifteen when she played Lolita--the same age as our Dominique
Swain--could easily have passed for a twenty-year-old porno star.
Dominique can easily pass for a twelve-year-old, which we all think is a
very good thing.)
I just want to add one note: I would never claim that we are filming
Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita." I would say only that we are attempting to
translate into a kind of exciting sign language--the language of
film--what one of the century's greatest masters of prose rendered so
incomparably on the page.
--------------------------------------------------
SS-H: You said that the only source material used in writing the
screenplay for "Lolita" was the novel itself. Did you also look at the
Nabokov screenplay written but not used for the Kubrick film? If so, do
you think it would have made an interesting movie; if not, why not?
-----------------------------------------------
SS: I'm afraid my answer to this question is rather boring: no, I didn't
look at the screenplay Nabokov wrote, since I wanted to be influenced
no more by his take on himself than by Kubrick's take on him.
Unfortunately, I still haven't allowed myself to read the Nabokov
screenplay, though maybe I should hurry up and get to it, the better
to respond to your questions. One more notes: I have been given to
understand that the published version of the Nabokov screenplay is
already several generations removed from the screenplay Nabokov
originally wrote and submitted.
----------------------------------------
SS-H: In Camille Paglia's essay, "Lolita Unclothed", the author
Anne Rice is quoted , "...Lolita has become today ...the image of
the seductive young girl who is every man's dream of sensuality..." .
Lolita the myth, the mirage created by Humbert from his childhood and
his reading list has not popularly been differentiated from Dolores
the girl, perhaps because, as you say it takes several readings to
understand that there is a difference. The Kubrick film captured the
invented (in part by Humbert, in part by Dolores Haze herself )
Lolita's charm and ravishing enchantment but very little of the real
girl Dolores Haze. From your description, the new film will portray
much more of the everyday but will it still attempt to convey the
magic?
-------------------------------------------
SS: I don't know in what context Anne Rice made her comment, but if
Lolita is viewed simply as an enchanting young seductress, then I
think Nabokov's point is lost. It is true that when the seduction
finally takes place, she instigates it, but "Lolita" isn't "Blame It
on Rio"--this isn't the story of a naughty young thing and the
walking midlife crisis she seduces. Nabokov's Humbert identifies
Lolita as one of a small and distinct class--the class of
nymphets--and I don't think the properties of that class are quite so
coarse and obvious. Lolita is bewitching, but not always by
intention; sometimes what bewitches Humbert about her is her very
childishness, for it is that quality rather than any sexual
precocity, that identifies her as something other than mere woman. Of
course, our Lolita has magic, but it is not the rather porny allure
that Sue Lyon had in the Kubrick film. Dominique Swain, the
remarkable young girl who plays Lolita, lives very much along the
line between childhood and womanhood that Lolita lives along, and she
slips back onto the childish side at least as often as she surprises
us by her womanliness. The magic I tried to give her in the
screenplay is the magic of a very vital, very alive young girl, and I
do think the audience will have no trouble perceiving it.
-----------------------------------------
SS-H: It was reported in the media that "Swifty" Lazar sold the rights to
Lolita_ to Caroloco productions for 1 million dollars. Did Mr. Lazar
actually possess the rights to the film or did he simply broker the
sale? What role did the Nabokov estate play in this transaction?
----------------------------------------
SS: I'm afraid I don't know too much about the details surrounding the
rights to "Lolita." I can say with some certainty that Swifty Lazar was
the agent of the agreement between the estate and Carolco; I'm fairly
certain that he never had any ownership of the property or any option on
it. And I imagine, though I'm not a hundred percent sure, that the man
whom he was optioning the book from was Nabokov's son (and translator)
Dmitri, who would have been acting as executor of the estate.
------------------------------------------------
SS-H: Has Dimitri Nabokov seen the sceenplay and if so, what was his
opinion of it?
-----------------------------------
SS: I had long thought that there might be opposition to the film from the
right, particularly the so-called Christian right, because of its subject
matter alone. And my general feeling about that was that, as experience
has shown, many of those people are so unthinking in their approach to the
arts that they are liable to protest the film without even seeing it,
without knowing that its source is one of the great literary works of the
20th century, and without in any way questioning the peculiar but common
assumption that when a work explores certain themes or actions, that is
the same as endorsing them. In any case, nothing I could do was going to
have any effect on opposition from that quarter. What I cared about more
was another sort of knee-jerk response--the one that was likely to come
from the intellectuals, for whom the very idea of turning so beloved a
novel into anything so tawdry as a movie (let alone a movie directed by
the man who made "Flashdance") was bound to be viewed as sacrilege. Since
I believed (and believe) that we were making a very good and faithful
film, I hoped at least to open some minds to it, and to that end, I sought
Dmitri out. I knew he was coming to New York to promote his remarkable new
translation of his father's short stories; in fact, I had been invited to
a party celebrating his arrival. So I weighed the risk: if I showed him my
screenplay and he liked it, the film would have gained the most valuable
and respectable of allies; if I showed it to him and he hated it, his
animosity could be very damaging.
I telephoned him. When he answered and heard who was calling, he
immediately said, "Oh, Stephen, hello, I love the screenplay you
wrote of 'Lolita.'" At which point he no doubt heard a long and
relieved exhalation. As it turned out, he had been sent the
screenplay as part of the movie company's contractual agreement with
him. I then asked him whether he would be willing to support the film
in some public way, but he, quite rightly, pointed out that there was
no way he could know whether the final film would reflect what was in
the screenplay he had read. So I invited him to come onto the set,
watch some filming, and meet Adrian Lyne, Jeremy Irons, Dominique
Swain, and Frank Langella (By that time, Melanie Griffith's role had
already been completed and she was no longer on the set.)
He accepted, and a few weeks later we were in Hammond, Louisiana,
where the Enchanted Hunters sequence was being filmed. Dmitri proved to be
ebullient, charming, and very, very tall. He has been, in his eventful
life, an opera singer (basso) and a race-car driver as well as his
father's translator, and he did seem to like what he saw on the set. His
only objection seemed to be to the car we were using to represent the
"Melmoth"--the car in which Humbert and Lolita tour America. We had
selected a beautiful old wood-paneled station wagon--a "woody"--which,
truth to tell, was never what Vladimir Nabokov had in mind. Dmitri, who
knows and loves cars, had a little trouble with that, and for
understandable reasons. After all, it was not at all like the car he
remembered traveling around America with his father in, and those travels
were the basis for the ones in "Lolita."
----------------------------------------------
SS-H: Have you read any of Nabokov's other writings? If so which ones and
what is your opinion of those works?
________________________________________________
SS: Yes, I have read several. I have always been a great admirer of style
in writing and a supporter of the notion that a style of sufficient
beauty, grace, and profundity IS substance; those who decry high
literary style and hanker for simple prose expounding simple truths
are, I think, missing much of what is greatest in the heritage of
literature. Among American prose stylists of the postwar era, Nabokov
has no peers, and so, given that and the tenet above, almost
everything he has written is worth reading. Still, there are better
books and worse books. There are, from my reading, three
masterpieces: "Lolita," "Pale Fire," and "Speak, Memory," which I
regard as one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. I am also
an admirer of "Laughter in the Dark," "Invitation to a Beheading,"
"Pnin," "Bend Sinister," and especially "Ada, or Ardor," which is at
least as rich as "Lolita" or "Pale Fire," but whose convolutions,
delightful as they often are, interfere too much (I think) with the
narrative momentum. If "Lolita" and "Pale Fire" are books full of
tricks, "Ada" seems to me a book full of booby traps, so I cannot
love it as well. I have also read "Despair" and "King, Queen, Knave"
and found both a bit disappointing--they seem rehearsals for a
Nabokov book, or pale imitations. Still, if these are failures, they
are failures on a very high level.
Many of Nabokov's other books have been filmed, though not often
very successfully. Would it be kosher to ask whoever is reading these
words whether they have favorite Nabokov books (or even stories) that
they think worth filming? By the way, I refuse even to contemplate
movie versions of "Pale Fire" or "Ada."
__________________________________________
SS-H: What other novelists do you admire?
__________________________________________
SS: I hardly know where to begin. I assume you're not asking for my list
of the greatest novelists of all time--that familiar compilation of
Proust, Joyce, Austen, Eliot, Flaubert, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Rabelais,
Sterne, Richardson, Dickens, Musil, Gogol, Kafka, James, Wharton,
Twain, Melville, Waugh, blah, blah, blah. Shall we do more
contemporary authors? I think the greatest living American novelist
is John Updike, and in so saying, I am betraying my Nabokovian
predilection--after all, who more than Updike is the heir to
Nabokov's musicality? I love Roth as well, and Bellow and--well, off
the top of my head: Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, early Norman Mailer
(up through "The Executioner's Song," which, whether it's a novel or
not, is his masterpiece), Stanley Elkin (rest in peace), Richard
Yates (likewise), both Amises (Martin and the late Kingsley), Anne
Tyler, Robert Stone, Elmore Leonard, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie,
Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Helprin, John le Carre, Milan
Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ivan Klima. I'm sure I'm forgetting
several that I absolutely love, but that's a pretty good start.
______________________________________
SS-H: Who will do the soundtrack for the new film and what sort of
musical atmosphere is the director hoping to capture?
_______________________________________
SS: No composer has yet been chosen for the film's soundtrack, though a
great many are hoping for the job. I think what Adrian Lyne is after
is something at once poignant and very spare, but we'll see what we
wind up with.
_________________________________________
SS-H: Will Lyne try to achieve through music, the effect of a 1940s
America?
___________________________________________________
SS: Although Adrian Lyne's fealty to the demands of the period will
result in his using a certain amount of music from the late forties--pop
songs that would have been on the radio, for instance--I don't think he
intends to make the movie's score particularly redolent of the forties. If
you think about it, such an approach could be the kiss of death, because,
even though the movie's look will evoke the period quite accurately, a
movie's score has to evoke contemporary emotions. A movie's score is its
emotional touchstone; it has to be very immediate, and it has to speak to
an audience in a language that requires no transposition (to use a musical
term). What you see will be 1947, but what you feel must be right now.
---------------------------------------------------------
SS-H: Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's _Lolita_ but it
was significantly altered by the time the filming was finished. Do you
think Lyne's vision will be consistent with yours in the end, and that he
is capable of translating onto film an artful version of Nabokov's
masterpiece?
___________________________________________
SS:: From what I have seen of the dailies (what has ready been filmed
and printed) and from what I've seen on the set, I do feel that Adrian
Lyne and the actors are being as true to my screenplay as they can be.
Inevitably, things change during the actual shooting process--actors
stumble into an inspired improvisation, the set doesn't quite work the way
I envisioned it, and so forth--but I seem to have become that rarity, a
happy screenwriter, one who feels that not only is justice being done to
his work but that where the director and actors depart from it, they
depart for an even sunnier clime. Do keep in mind that Adrian and I worked
together on the script for months before filming began, so that, by the
time the cameras rolled, we were both happy with what was on the page.
What I had not anticipated was how sensitive and indeed how inspired
Adrian's approach to the material would prove to be. I come from a
relatively literary world; even so, I know of no one who has read "Lolita"
so many times, so attentively, and with such devotion. Adrian is not by
nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any
lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting
this most splendid novels to the man who made "Flashdance," and I did,
too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped
trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. From working with
him, and from all that I've seen of the filming, I dare to hope that he is
making a masterpiece, and that with this movie he will surprise the world.
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Special Collections
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM
From: "Brian D. Walter" <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu>
To: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: Schiff Interview Addenda
About a week before Suellen Stringer-Hye's interview with him appeared on
the Nabokov Web-Page, Stephen Schiff was interviewed for NPR's Fresh Air
series. The vast majority of what he said in this interview about the
forthcoming film of LOLITA was covered -- often verbatim -- in Stringer-
Hye's interview. But embedded within the considerable overlap, there was
the stray gossipy tidbit that Nabokovians might be interested in, and it's
a couple of these that are quoted below. Ellipses appear in place of
material that was covered completely in Stringer-Hye's interview.
Happy speculating.
Brian Walter
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu
P. S. Reading the first exchange below, users of STRONG OPINIONS may well
be reminded of Nabokov's comment that he sometimes found it sufficient
cause to discard a book if a cursory survey of its pages revealed too
much dialogue. BW
------------------------------------
Interviewer: I should think that adapting LOLITA would be really
difficult. Nabokov was such a brilliant and rich writer, and so much of
the book is in the sentences, in the writing itself. How much of your
dialogue comes directly from Nabokov? I'm not really sure that most of it
would work in people's mouths as opposed to just on the page.
Schiff: You're so completely right about that, and I wish you had told
that to some of the actors. This apparently always happens when there's a
book source, that the actors, if they're having a hard time with one of
your lines, they start going back to the book and sort of curling their
mighty mouths around what's there. You're right that in the mouths of
actors, a lot of this very curlicued, beautiful, ornate writing that
Nabokov did sounds pretentious, and over the top, and extremely mannered
-- not like the way people talk at all. . . . What you have to do in
recreating LOLITA, to the degree that anyone can, is to indeed invent a
lot of dialogue. You have to really create the character of Lolita, who
is not there on the page (in a way) in the book. . . . She has to have
dialogue, true-to-life dialogue. It can't be this kind of semi-satirical,
very ornate version of a child's possible dialogue that Nabokov invented.
Finally, you have to create a relationship between them which doesn't
really exist at all in the book; it's just hinted at in fragments of
sentences. So it was hard, but it was also a labor of love.
[This second exchange continues a line of questioning regarding the
difficulties Schiff has experienced working with people whom he had
previously panned in his film reviews. This response perhaps brings to
mind one of the most popular casting rumors floating around last spring
regarding the role of Humbert Humbert -- that it could easily have gone to
a very hot British actor whose notorious dalliances with a publicity-
hungry prostitute temporarily jeopardized his reputation while
simultaneously inventing her now-burgeoning media career.]
Interviewer: Have you already met with people whom you were hoping did not
remember the reviews you gave them?
Schiff: Yes. Yes. There are some who are more grown-up and some who are
less grown-up about this. [Slight pause for apparent moral struggle.]
There was an occasion -- and I won't go into very much detail,
unfortunately, as I once would have done -- when an actor turned down a
part that I had written. [Another pause for a bit of hemming and hawing.]
Well, actually, the actor turned down Humbert Humbert, which is a
dangerous part for an actor to take on, it must be said. If you're trying
to maintain a certain kind of reputation as a gleaming, virtuous star,
you're not going to want to be seen in this situation with this young
girl. That actor probably didn't want the part for that reason, but one
of the reasons he gave for turning it down was that I had given him a bad
review, had said something bad about him once.
END