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William Boyd is Restless
From: www.writerswrite.com

" William Boyd, whose first novel, A Good Man in Africa won the Whitbread award for best first novel, discusses his latest spy novel, Restless with Toby Clement of The Telegraph. A former Oxford professor, Boyd is also a screenwriter.

"I had always known that I needed to do something else other than write novels, but there is a terrible Catch-22 about film writing," says Boyd. "You want to write films, but have you ever written a film? But then Channel 4 offered non-film writers such as me, Salman Rushdie and various others the chance. And mine got made and it started from there."

He describes it as a "very good other thing to have going on" and usually has six or seven projects on the go. He clearly enjoys the collaborative aspects of film-making and the people he meets through the industry, but he acknowledges that films are something very different from novels. "You don't go out to see Verdi's Falstaff and then come home and read Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and say: 'My God! Look what he's left out.' "

He is in two minds as to whether his latest novel, Restless, published next month, would make a good film. It is the story of a mother revealing in a series of letters to her daughter that she is not all that she seems to be - that she is not Sally Gilmartin, as widely supposed, but Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian ?migr? co-opted by the British secret services in the run-up to the Second World War. It is a tense drama, tightly plotted and tremendously exciting. "After Any Human Heart [his previous novel, a sprawling 500-page imagined Life], I wanted to do something 'well-carpentered' and the idea of having two women at its heart was an intriguing imaginative exercise," he says.

He writes, "Val Kilmer is an imbecile. Asked by the Academy to nominate the three best film moments of the century, Kilmer nominated three of his movies. One of them was Batman Forever. Michael Douglas, in my experience, is not brilliant and may very well, in some cases, be dumb. This is the guy who wanted to change the ending of Basic Instinct because it wasn't 'redemptive.' Douglas didn't like that he was the star of the movie and that (Sharon Stone) 'one-ups me at every turn.'

He adds of Stone: "Sharon's 'prima donna' behaviour so annoyed the crew on one of her movies that they relieved themselves into a bathtub before Sharon got into it for her scene."

And Eszterhas has plenty of venom for actors who try their hands at his own career, declaring, "You don't want Edward Norton to star in your movie. He now rewrites all the scripts he agrees to act in."

Airing Thursday nights on Bravo, beginning tomorrow, Writers' Confessions gives viewers a glimpse of what it's like to make a living writing fiction. Barfoot and Donoghue are seen in one episode, talking about subjects such as rewriting and the relationships with their editors. Barfoot discusses the narrative voice in her novels.

"Finding the voice is at first easy," Barfoot says on the show. "Holding onto that voice for several years and several hundred pages is a challenge, an interesting challenge." Donoghue shares with the viewer her thoughts on rewriting and reveals all of her novel-writing goes through at least three drafts. "I find the editing almost more pleasurable (than the writing)," Donoghue says.

Producer and director Michael Glassbourg of TickleScratch Productions, says Barfoot is in almost every segment, while Donoghue is in about half. But now that he's signed for a third season, Glassbourg says he'd like to work again with Donoghue. Glassbourg says the half-hour show appeals not only to literary types, but channel surfers because of its quick, witty dialogue. "It appeals to people who are watching mainstream television and who are also interested in the creative process," he says. "Of course writers love it because they get exposure."

But Glassbourg says his program doesn't promote books -- it examines the creative process. "I find it totally inspiring," he says. Writers' Confessions features 55 authors from Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, India and the U.S. Writers include Alistair MacLeod, Miriam Toews, David Gilmour, Ian Rankin, Russell Bands and Margaret Drabble.

"An editor from Glamour wanted me to write a short story for them, so I send them 'Dora on the Beach' and they liked it, but the main character was too old for their target audience. So I told them I had this idea for a story about a woman who comes across her ex's online wedding registry, based on my experience of surfing www.theweddingchannel.com for the name of every guy I ever dated. I mean, what did God make the Internet for if you can't check up on your ex?"

*****

Of course, writing short stories is a far cry from working on a novel, Weiner said. "There are good and bad things about it," said Weiner, a fan of the collected works of Lorrie Moore, Amy Bloom, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. "You're done with it, you can write a good short story in a couple of weeks, but with a novel, you're - at least I'm - stuck with that baby for a year. But the hard part is you have to think about the details that you use to get your point across in 20 pages vs. 400."

A former composer-lyricist who turned to writing screenplays and TV plays in the late 1950s, Stefano's earliest credits included "The Black Orchid," a 1958 movie drama directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn; and a "Playhouse 90" production about racial prejudice, "Made in Japan."

After Hitchcock optioned Robert Bloch's 1959 novel "Psycho," Stefano was given a copy of the book the night before meeting with the director to discuss adapting it to the screen. In a 1990 interview for Media Scene Prevue magazine, Stefano said that, with the exception of the ending, he thought that the story was "weak in writing and characterization." The novel, he said, starts with Norman Bates, the mother-dominated motel owner, "and focuses on him too much. I was sure that no audience was going to like Norman enough to stay with him throughout an entire movie."

But as he was driving to Paramount for his meeting with Hitchcock, Stefano came up with a solution: begin the screenplay with the character of Marion Crane, who steals $40,000 from her Phoenix employer to begin a new life with her lover but is murdered after stopping at the Bates Motel. "Audiences would be sucked into a character who did something wrong but was really a good person," Stefano said. "They would feel as if they, not Marion, had stolen the $40,000. When she dies, the audience would be the victim." And that's just how it worked, he said. "With so much early emphasis on Marion, no one dreams she'll get killed," he said. "When it happens, people are blown away?. The idea excited Hitch. And I got the job. Killing the leading lady in the first 20 minutes had never been done before.

"Hitch suggested a name actress to play Marion because the bigger the star the more unbelievable it would be that we would kill her." "Psycho," starring Janet Leigh as Marion Crane and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, was a sensation, shocking audiences when Leigh's character was stabbed to death in the famous shower scene. "I think 'Psycho' bothered people on a level that the horror films that came before and after never even attempted," Stefano told The Times in 1990.

The report predicts that the traditional TV set will be replaced by a number of "flexible viewing devices".

The development of ultra-thin displays will result in the introduction of video "wallpaper" and tiles that can turn an entire wall into a screen.

Other innovations expected in the next 20 years are video displays on breakfast cereal packets, and screens that can show two different programmes at the same time depending on the angle from which they are viewed.

Internet access will be available through connected displays embedded in magazine pages.