David Hare

(Interviewer/writer unknown)

It's Friday the 13th and Paramount has lent the Writers Guild of America East its
screening room to host The Hours, followed by a Q&A with the writer who adapted
Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. After the film ends--after
Virginia Woolf has committed suicide and the two remaining key women
protagonists have not--the projector shuts down and Sir David Hare takes a seat
on stage.

Looking jet-lagged by his flight from London and still wearing a scarf around his
neck that never comes off, it's immediately obvious that Hare dreads the process
of publicizing a film.

However, as he dialogues with professional writers and deftly fields questions

about the craft of writing from WGAE members, Hare gradually comes to enjoy
talking with an audience of people who "do what I do."

"It took me two weeks to write the opening sequence," he says, "but once I had it,
it really didn't change."

"Do you always know the beginning?" he's asked.

"Well, that's everything, isn't it?"

Thirty-six hours later I am greeted by Hare's wife in their suite at the Lowell Hotel,
which feels like a little bit of London in the East '60s. Hare has been doing press
interviews back-to-back, and when he hangs up the phone, his energy is manic.

The 55-year-old British dramatist carries a self-possession that fits a stage actor--
as indeed he was last year in his solo play on the Arab-Israeli crisis, Via Dolorosa
(directed initially by The Hours' Stephen Daldry).

His plays, any number of which often find themselves running in tandem in both
New York and London, confront head-on the institutions that form societies
(though mostly British), while recognizing the inseparability of the personal and
political realms: The Secret Rapture, Skylight, The Judas Kiss, and The Absence
of War are among these.

Often, his plays demonstrate a rare psychological insight into women, qualities
that proved invaluable while adapting The Hours and a powerful incentive for
attracting top-level actresses. (Hare's The Breath of Life recently brought Judi
Dench and Maggie Smith together on stage for the first time.)

The Hours came to Hare via Scott Rudin, in the form of Michael Cunningham's
novel, a complex handling of themes from Virginia Woolf's own novel Mrs.
Dalloway. The book weaves three stories of three women in three time periods,
while maintaining the ambiguity of their connection without losing the reader.

"Everyone said to me, 'Omygod, you're adapting The Hours?'" Hare told
Entertainment Weekly.

"But I had no idea what was worrying them. It seemed to me that the three stories
[set in 1923, 1951, and the present day] link in a way that's fantastically satisfying
and very cinematic indeed.

" With carte blanche from Cunningham to make it his own, as the author had made
Mrs. Dalloway his, Hare tackled the complex structure, developing some 30 drafts
with Rudin, then bringing in a previous Hare collaborator, director Daldry.

Though film is neither Hare's first nor favored theatrical medium, and though he
would never describe it as such, his film career has been, in its own way,
somewhat charmed. Writing and directing his first feature film, Wetherby, earned
Hare the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Festival in 1985. But until
adapting The Hours, great commercial success eluded the highly successful
playwright's cinematic work.

However, his artistic achievements with such films as the adaptation of the novel
Damage and directing Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner afforded him
fulfilling collaborations with theater colleagues like Shawn, Mike Nichols, and Louis
Malle.

His work has been interpreted on screen and stage, often repeatedly, by such
notables as John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson, Ian McKellen, and Vanessa
Redgrave, and produced in both mediums by Scott Rudin. Adapting his play
Plenty to the screen for actress Meryl Streep ultimately led to their reunion for The
Hours.

In 1998, his Blue Room became Nicole Kidman's stage debut and a sensation in
London and Broadway, thanks in part to the star's nude scene, but more
significantly it led to Kidman portraying Virginia Woolf in The Hours. (Indeed, the
actress has said that the only reason she initially read the script of such an
"unfilmable book" was because of her friendship with Hare.) Clearly there's a
reason Hare enjoys an involved, hands-on position in the development and
making of his films. Not bad for a process that Hare refers to as "frequently
heartbreaking."

Rob Feld: In The Hours you worked with three intercutting storylines, which you've
said was so much more interesting than working with two.

David Hare: Three's the good number. And two's the disastrous number. I mean,
The French Lieutenant's Woman [adapted by Harold Pinter from the John Fowles
novel] famously took a very long time to get made because everybody knew they
would have to address that problem of: How do you do 19th century, 20th century,
19th century, 20th century? All those films were in flashback to childhood, which is
a very conventional structure: present day, childhood, present day, childhood,
back and forth. It's like watching the Williams sisters playing tennis; it's boring.
They just play from the base line: bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk. But as soon as you put
somebody else on the court, and you don't know where the ball's going to go next,
then it becomes exciting. Actually, the Williams sisters playing doubles are quite
exciting.

It's a really delicate balance. Did you have to struggle with simply making sure
everyone had enough screen time to engage the audience in their stories?

Yes. Well, that was it. But the contrast was between two hyper articulate people.
Julianne Moore is the person with the difficult job, I think, because Meryl Streep
and Nicole Kidman are both playing hyper articulate people: One is a publisher in
present day Manhattan; one is Virginia Woolf. But Laura Brown [Julianne Moore]
in Los Angeles is an inarticulate person compared with the other two. And I
deliberately didn't want to give her a speech. I wanted it to be very, very unspoken
and done in silence, in contrast to the other two. So, all she talks about is cake
making. That should be all she talks about. What's great about Julianne is that
she'd originally responded to the book, and she came with the character from
reading the book and injected that into my script. With a less good actress, that
part would seem underwritten. Julianne did ask me for a speech. She did say,
"Can't I say something?" And I said, "No, you can't." Ultimately, it's the right
decision, but it's only the right decision because she's so brilliant.

One weak link and the whole chain would have collapsed.

That's right, and we were very, very aware that this was genuine ensemble
casting. Most films are driven by a barnstorming performance by a great actor, and
everyone then contributes. But with this, there is a real sense of ensemble, so
even Linda Bassett playing the cook or Eileen Atkins in the flower shop are
bringing something into the film.

Did you ask yourself questions while you wrote and juggled the storylines, to keep
the audience engaged, or don't you operate like that? Is it just more instinctual?

It's more instinctual, and the challenge of this, which became quickly apparent,
was that I wanted to do very long dialogue scenes. The scene where Meryl Streep
first goes to visit Ed Harris in his apartment, where you understand their
relationship in the past, is about 20 minutes long. I was absolutely determined that
there should be two long scenes that would hold their length in the cinema at
something that's nearer a theatrical length. There's also the station scene, the
climax of the picture, where Virginia Woolf is going to run away to London. It's
unusual in the cinema for individual scenes to last 20 minutes. If you go to all
those appalling screenwriting courses in California, you're told this is against the
rules, and move on, move on, move on, you can't have a 20-minute dialogue
scene. I did really want to stick two fingers up to screenwriting gurus throughout
the world and say, You can have great cinema with just two people in a room
together. About two minutes came out of first the Ed Harris, Meryl Streep scene,
and out of the railway scene, but, by and large, I hope I've made my point.
Have you seen Adaptation yet? It has Robert McKee as a character.

Well, I haven't seen the film, but I think that so much of screenwriting teaching is
just such rubbish. It's doing infinite harm to the cinema. Teaching by rote how to
write screenplays, when the craft of screenplay writing is so much more
complicated. Reducing it in this absurd way to bullet points is insulting, actually.
What great screenplays actually conform to these bloody rules? The stupidest of
all is this thing that all the gurus say, "Don't tell. Show."

Well, nobody was ever better than Shakespeare at showing, but the interesting
thing is he deliberately chooses to mix telling and showing. That's why he's a great
writer, and all great writers mix the two. We could have shown Wellfleet, but we
made a very deliberate decision that the crucial event in Clarissa Vaughan's [Meryl
Streep's] life--the summer she spent in the late 1960s and was in love with Richard
[played by Ed Harris]--I just thought, if you show images of this, they will be
completely banal. What's it going to show? Naked people running along a beach,
you know? There's no way of producing images of how young love once was that
doesn't just make you puke. But you can speak about it in a way that's profoundly
moving. Ed Harris saying, "Do you remember the summer?," moves me in a way
that no image could possibly because you're seeing both the present day and the
past mixed in a man's voice. And that's a fantastic thing. The way people who
want to become screenwriters are being told that everything has to be reduced to
action--it's nonsense.

You changed the end from the book, excluding the dinner scene.

In the book a party is being prepared all day. The person for whom the party is
prepared kills himself, yet the people who would have attended the party with him
decided to nevertheless go ahead and eat the meal. Together they achieve a sort
of redemption by bringing in the person who's committed the unforgiveable crime,
Mrs. Brown. By bringing her into this communal meal, Michael [Cunningham]
achieves this incredibly moving effect of forgiveness. But, somehow in my version,
it just seemed incredibly sentimental and conventional. There was nothing I
wanted to say in the scene because everything had been said in the scene
between Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. So, given that there was nothing to
say, there was nothing more to add to the story. The scene simply existed as
redemptive, and it seemed cloying and sentimental. That was something we got
out of being able to reshoot.

So much of what resonates in The Hours are the themes of love; how love works,
its ambiguities, and the way in which it comes on its own terms. These are themes
you've explored in your theatrical work, plays like Skylight and Amy's View. Why
were homosexual, or bisexual characters (or however they are characterized),
particularly apt for the exploration of the way love operates in this story?

I imagine that is why Scott [Rudin] said that when he read the book, he thought I
was the right person to write the screenplay--simply because these are not
unfamiliar things for me to be writing about. What I haven't written about is the
ambiguity of sexuality, which is what Michael is really militant about. He feels very
confined by people being called gay, not gay, straight, whatever. The most
significant relationships in his life have been with people of either gender, of
different ages, and expressing themselves in the most unexpected way. That idea,
that we swim around between genders rather than are defined by a single gender,
is absolutely fundamental to the book and the film. I've noticed that if you can
stereotype someone who dislikes this film, it tends to be the late middle-age white
man. If you're not too intimate with the feminine side of your nature, as a man, you
really aren't going to like The Hours. That we've noticed in the reaction. But that,
for me, was the extra element that made it so interesting, rather than, as you say,
what I've written about in Amy's View or Skylight.

The basic injustice of love...it's very powerful for me, that scene where Meryl
Streep has to say to her daughter, "I don't feel alive except when I'm with Richard."
And, yet, she's talking about a relationship that happened 30 years ago with a man
who is now primarily gay and who hasn't, as it were, shown her any passion for 30
years! Nevertheless, she feels alive, and he manages to control her emotions in
that infuriating way--people do become victims of the memory of a relationship that
dominates their lives. And, I think, that's very powerful and true in the movie.

Because life is far more nuanced than the screenwriting formula allows?

Yes. I mean, I loved that Japanese film Afterlife, where they had to name the
moment they were happiest. It's so unfair that Clarissa Vaughan would choose
Wellfleet, "When he put his hand on my..." It's so unfair! It's unfair to [Clarissa's
lover portrayed by] Allison Janney that that should be so, and it's so unfair to
Claire Danes that that should be so, but for her it's true.

And there are mothers who don't love their children.

Precisely. Exactly.

Something that's also interesting is the way that Michael Cunningham replaces
World War I in Mrs. Dalloway with the AIDS epidemic in The Hours. In Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, for example, the war is an ever present but
unmentioned force behind everything. Cunningham witnesses the same loss of life
and accomplishment through AIDS.

To me the image that I've always found so incredibly powerful is that, on a clear,
very still night in Sussex, you could actually hear the fighting in continental Europe;
Virginia Woolf would sit in the garden in Sussex and actually hear, in extreme
distance across the English Channel, the sound of the First World War. And that's
what she does in the book, makes it a sort of presence that has changed
everything. It's always there. And that is what Michael does with the AIDS
epidemic. It's a most beautiful transposition. It's something that's been similarly
catastrophic, similarly affected everybody's lives and changed them subtly, but
which is not actually much referred to now. It's sort of less talked about, for
obvious reasons. But it's nevertheless changed so many people's lives.

I have yet to see a similar work that reflects the 11th.

Well, I went to the Neil LaBute play last night, and he's obviously trying to bed
September 11th down into literature in the same way as Michael, but I think that
time has helped Michael; the fact that Michael himself was so intimately involved
with so many of the strategies of self-help. He was there in the Village throughout
the epidemic, and that gives him a fantastic perspective about which to write about
a man who--we're all prone to saying that Richard is dying of AIDS. He isn't dying
of AIDS; he's actually stable, and Stephen was very keen to establish that he's on
a cocktail that will hold him where he now is for many years to come. But he,
again, is making the same choice that Virginia Woolf is making: that the quality of
life isn't enough to sustain him; and the film, essentially, is speaking of his choice
to kill himself. He kills himself partly because of AIDS, but partly because he also
feels failed as an artist; that he, as a genuine artist, hasn't done what he wants to
do.

Philip Glass did the score for The Hours, and I wanted to talk about the way a
score functions in a film. It can have an enormous effect on a film and impact the
script as much or more than any other element.

For me, this is the big crisis in modern cinema. I just think people are confused
about how to score films now, unless you're making a genre picture. Then it's fairly
simple--what you slap on, so to speak. If you look at the films of the 1950s, the
boldness of the scores is quite astonishing. La Strada is two minutes in when the
orchestra is demanding an emotional response from you that is way above
anything that you've yet seen. Similarly, in Jules and Jim, Georges Delerue comes
in with music that makes you go, "What? I'm missing something. What the fuck is
happening here? This is the mood, is it?" Yet, they're both great, great scores, and
in some ways they're above the film.

Whereas, at the moment, all music is doing is supporting the film from underneath.
The Philip Glass score, whether you like it or don't like it, is an attempt to do that
thing again, which Nino Rota and Georges Delerue used to do, where the music is
an extra element, not just there to back up and support. A friend of mine who's a
composer says it's basically butlering: "I'll open the door, come in, the actors have
arrived, they're sitting down, Oh! They're ready to speak. I'll back out now. Would
anybody like a gin and tonic? Here I come with the gin and tonic." Now that's how
most film scores work, and Philip Glass' attempt is to do something completely
different. Whether it's a success or not, I'm the last person to judge.

I always feel that you write from absolute empathy with each character, that no
matter what side they are on you let each character make his argument as best he
or she possibly can.

That's the nature of this book, isn't it? One of the things that's most moving to me
in this book is carers. In other words, for me, Stephen Dillane's character [Leonard
Woolf], who is a carer, and Meryl Streep's character, who is a carer, and John
Reilly, who is trying to love Julianne when she doesn't really want his love, these
characters are as moving as the protagonists, particularly Stephen Dillane's
character, who is doing nothing wrong. He's really doing his best for her, and I
think these figures are, essentially, janitors. They are prison guards, but they don't
realize they're prison guards. When Ed Harris says to Meryl Streep, "I'm only
staying alive for you, and you've got to let me go," it's a terrible thing to say to
somebody, but, on the other hand, he's right. She's only doing her best, but she's
not helping him. That is a familiar syndrome for anyone who's dealt with Alcoholics
Anonymous or narcotics support groups, and that's the conundrum of caring. By
caring for somebody you may not be helping them. So, obviously, in this film, you
have to swing it around to their point of view.

What do people mean when they say you write women well?

I don't think I write women well. I just think I write women. So, unfortunately, it's not
a comment on my work; it's a comment on the industry and the absence of women
in a lot of people's work. I don't know how to talk about any of this, really, any
more than you do. I took a lot of stick from feminists in the 1970s and early '80s. I
felt that, basically, I was only taking stick because I was the most conspicuous
person. In other words, it was at a time when the women's movement needed
there to be great women writers and, as it happened, in England, we only had
Carol Churchill, and Carol was a fantastic playwright who was also a woman and
so became very much the heroine of the period. But it was inconvenient for the
women's movement in England that the person who was writing most
conspicuously for women was a man--and I can see that that was very
inconvenient at that historical moment.

And so, like Tennessee [Williams], I took a certain amount of abuse from feminists;
just as that terrible slander against Tennessee, that his were homosexual dramas,
but the homosexual is dressed in a skirt, which, is a terrible, unforgivable libel of a
great playwright. Just as [Edward] Albee gets furious about the charge that
originally Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was about gay men--it doesn't make any
sense at all! It's about someone who's pretending to have a child. How can it be
about gay men? This is stupid! And it's a sort of resentment about the right of men
to write about women. And Tennessee Williams' women are absolutely fantastic.
He's written some of the greatest women's parts of the 20th century.

So, I took that stick, but I think I was guilty of ascribing to women a moral virtue.
What irritated the feminist movement was that my women tended to be "better"
than men. This was a subject about which feminists were very confused: They
were better than men, but they didn't want their betterness to be a function of their
impotence. In other words, they didn't want to be regarded as better simply
because they were the conscience of people who acted; the men acted, the
women criticized the action. It's true that in my early work that often tended to be
the formula. The men were doing things, and the women were telling them they
were wrong to be doing them. The feminist movement didn't like the reduction of
my women. I don't think it's fair, but it was said of Susan Traherne [Streep's
character in Plenty] that she was, as it were, a negative critique; that she wasn't
acting in her own right. That's what they objected to.

I have now filled my women out much more. So I claim the right to write bad
women, lousy women, shitty women. When I wrote Paris by Night, where the
woman is actually a murderess, then, of course, the feminist movement flipped
and said that I was a misogynist. So, in that game of sexual theory, a male writer
writing women can't win. Whatever you do, you'll be attacked by feminists of an
academic stripe. But what I've noticed is that no actress in 30 years has ever said
to me, "A woman wouldn't do or say this." And that's what I'm taking comfort in.

What is "writing for women"?

I hate those films that are called women's pictures, which say they ought to
Celebrate Women's Lives. They're always about joining hands and doing dippy
things, and usually the women all get drunk together. For me it's just poison. It's
like pouring lemon all over my face. I just cringe at it. That is patronizing. That is
condescending. That is really saying women aren't people; they're just these
cuddly toys that you should put in a circle together. Those films I do find offensive.

In much of your work, you seem to appall sentimentality as untrue.

I don't really hate sentimentality. I'm as sentimental as the next person. I watched
Casablanca the other day and was in floods of tears. What I dislike is formula.
What I dislike is knowing what's coming before it comes, work that is trying to
demand emotion before it's earned it. The Hollywood Ending, so to speak, is
something we also want to avoid--not because it's sentimental but because we
know it before we've seen it. As I've said, formula, whereby Reel 10 hero confronts
impossible obstacle, Reel 11 hero overcomes impossible obstacle. It's so fucking
boring I just want to leave at Reel 9 because I know what's going to happen.

Do you think differently when you write for the screen as opposed to the stage?

No. I don't like working in the cinema. I don't like the industrial. I just find this bit
torture, where you give the film to the public. I find you don't know what you've
made. There's something mysterious about what you've made. We know so many
great films have been disregarded--La Règle du Jeu is the most famous example.
One of the greatest films of all time, which didn't even open to bad reviews, was
just totally not considered. It was not thought to be a film of any importance
whatsoever, and now we regard it as one of the greatest masterpieces of the
cinema. So how do you know what you've made? That is less true in the theater
because you sort of do know what you've made. Because it's made on the spot,
and you're there when the audience receives it. There's an interaction between it
and the audience.

There's something really happening.

There's something really happening, whereas the cinema is something you're

going to put on a shelf and, in my experience, when you take it down it's going to
look completely different. I don't dare look at my films because I don't dare see
what's happened to them, whether they've grown or what. I just edited a book of
screenplays that I'd written. A couple of the ones that I thought were good turned
out to be terrible, and a couple of the ones I thought were terrible turned out to be
quite good.

You've said how heartbreaking film has been for you.

Horrible! Horrible! But that may be temperament. You know, [director] Stephen
Daldry loves it. He loves the life and is perfectly happy. He will go to a screening.
He loves listening and talking to the audience afterward. Me, no. I've done the film.
I don't want to hear who likes it and who doesn't like it. I know a lot of people claim
to have gotten the lowest score in the history of the scoring system, but withParis
by Night in Seattle I was sort of laughed off the screen. When you've been
laughed off the screen, it steels you in a way that leaves you for the rest of your
life completely uninterested in reactions. I don't mean that disrespectfully; I want
the audience to like the picture, but you have to armor yourself.

What do you find is worth writing about?

In my own work, plainly, it's all an argument for the historical view. I find that work
that's exclusively psychological, without political or social dimension, is a complete
denial of who we are. Who we are is not the same as people were in the 19th
century. History is blowing through the room, and what we think and what we feel
is determined not just by what's going on inside our heads but by everything out
there. So, if I have any purpose as a writer at all, it is to remind people of the
existence of out there. So to the psychological writing of the American theater in
the '70s and '80s, where the world is treated as a sort of bell jar that is
permanently the way things are, you want to say: "No, actually, you are the richest
and most powerful nation on Earth, you have certain foreign policies which have
certain effects on other people, and because of that, that's the reason you think
the way you now think. It isn't all going on inside your heads. It's the movement of
history." Now, dramatizing the movement of history in the way that Michael is
bringing the AIDS epidemic into the psychological material, that's what I'm here
for.