BRIT WRITER'S CHINESE TALE

Jeffrey Caine is on the road again. After succinctly capturing Le Carre's Constant Gardener novel in Africa, he is now in China, with a script detailing the notorious 1937 massacre of civilians in Nanjing by marauding Japanese invaders.

It’s a long way to go for a London boy who started off teaching English before working in television on mainstream fare - Dempsey and Makepeace, The Chief, that sort of thing - until he did a little film called Goldeneye in 1995.

Even with a Bond behind him, it would have been hard to predict that he would now be author of a £25 million story being directed by Con Air’s Simon West.

Indeed, in 2004 he penned something altogether different, Inside I’m Dancing, an admirable tale about a rebel in a home for the disabled, which did great things for the careers of Romola Garai and James McAvoy, but was small, small, small in writing terms.

Still it was witty and original enough to win him the gig on Constant Gardener and, in a real sense, the rest is history, a film called Purple Mountain.

This is likely to be, like Gardener, a mixture of the venal and the heroic, as the brutality of the Japanese was astonishingly offset by a variety of foreign expats who rose to the occasion and risked their own lives to shelter as many of the Chinese as they could.

Shooting has started on location in Nanjing, at the local Pukou train station, the scene for the enemy’s arrival and one thin route of escape for the victims.

The film is scheduled to wrap by the end of the year for a planned summer 2008 release. Oddly, the cast is not yet complete. West is hoping to announce an A-list star soon.

See below for a few of Jeffrey Caine’s thoughts on scriptwriting.

Filed August 7, 2007

Excerpted from an interview last year with Anne Hogben, Assistant General Secretary of The Writer’s Guild,

Caine says : “It is a constant source of dismay to me how low the screenwriter is regarded both here and in America.

He tells me that he was once summoned by a major Hollywood studio to a meeting in Los Angeles. Under the terms of the WGA Agreement there is a provision requiring that a writer should travel first class. The junior executive in charge of making the travel arrangements phoned him up to ask if he would fly Virgin Upper Class which was virtually the same standard but considerably less expensive than first class. Caine refused, not that he disagreed about the standards, but because of perceived status. If he accepted Virgin Upper Class, then the next time he could be asked to fly Business Class and, after that, what? Bus travel instead of car? The YMCA instead of a four-star hotel? It was a slippery slope. (As it happens, on that trip he met a senior executive from another studio which might have led to another deal. If he had not been in the first class compartment they would never have met).

“The industry has always had a low opinion of writers, ever since the early days of the movies,” Caine insists. “In the silent movies, dialogue was added on in frames, for those who could read. In those early days the movies were seen as a novelty, not as a branch of drama. In theory the screenwriters credit is ‘above the line’ – in reality the industry would prefer to see writers ‘below the line’. Even at the recent BAFTA Awards the writers were seated in the below the line tables. What does that say about how writers are treated in Britain? I feel it is imperative to take a stand. The Writer’s Guild should take a strong line on this – a group voice speaks for everyone.” He stressed that he was not complaining on his own behalf, but on behalf of all writers.

Caine says he would prefer the term “screen playwright” to have become standard in the industry, but it is too late to make that change now. “Most people don’t realise what a screenwriter does. I write a play. To be filmed. But producers and studios are often at pains to keep a writer down the line.

An actor, however great, however talented, only has to learn how to get inside his/her character. I have to get inside the head of every character. But we get the least amount of respect for our work. Yet no actor will accept a role until he has seen the script. Actors don’t sign up to play a role on the basis of the book alone. Some actors don’t even acknowledge that they worked from a script. To listen to their Oscar acceptance speeches you’d think they took the book onto the set every day, turned to a particular page and improvised the dialogue.”

He liked the recent WGA campaign called ‘Somebody Wrote that’, with large posters on Sunset Boulevard reminding the public that dialogue is created by writers, not actors. “It is a problem of perception. We need to educate people about this. The director’s vanity credit is still being fought by the WGA. In my experience producers rarely defer to the writer’s skill, yet feel qualified to make a judgement or to suggest changes without considering the consequences. Nobody ever tells costume designers or make-up artists how to do their job. Why are writers the only group singled out for this kind of treatment?”