I'd lived with the characters, and I cared about them

Tony Scott discovered Quentin Tarantino in 1991:

Tony Scott: When I was directing The Last Boy Scout, my assistant was hanging out with this quirky guy named Quentin Tarantino, and he'd be around the set. She said, "You gotta read his script."

Quentin Tarantino: When you're a nobody, it's murder to get anyone to read your scripts. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, "Read the first three pages. If you don't like it, throw it away."

Scott made True Romance, but changed the ending:

I took True Romance and I took Reservoir Dogs. I'm a very slow reader but I read them straight through. I said, 'I'll do both.' He said, 'No. I'd like you to do True Romance.' He's a brilliant writer, he fully conceives every character, no matter how small they are. Actors came to the set not wanting to change a word, which is unusual. The only thing that I did change was the ending. The original was very different. It ended with Alabama. She puts a gun in her mouth. She doesn't shoot herself, and then she just says, 'Oh fuck it, he isn't worth it.' She throws the gun out of the car window and drives off. Quentin thought it was truer to the character. I was trying to make a commercial film, I wanted a happier ending. I'd lived with the characters really, and I cared about them.

Who knows what people will say about Tony Scott now. But I remember reading (would it have been Premiere magazine?) that when the director hired Tarantino to do a script polish for Crimson Tide (1995) for a lot of money and very little work, it was as a thank you for True Romance.

Oxygen

There's a way in which a writer can do too much, over-whelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary? Is the novelist's job simply to reproduce physical sensations for their own sake? When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it.

-- Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

-- David Mamet, Memo to writers of The Unit, 19 October 2005

Bedside reading

Seriously

The Assange standoff is a fitting coda to Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony: emotional, crowd-pleasing and illogical. Prosecutors have an ulterior motive. UK diplomats have scored an own goal. Ecuador probably can't get Assange out of the embassy. Ecuador loves freedom of speech. And if there's one thing Britain won't tolerate, it's people sharing other people's private information...

In Russia a punk trio have been jailed for two years for flash-mobbing. How is that different from the two young men who have been jailed for four years in the UK for posting on Facebook?

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself: new on Kindle

A new edition of my original 1995 short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself is out now on Amazon Kindle.

The collection features twelve short stories: 'Running Hot and Cold' (deeply offended the publisher. "Breaking her hip? Perhaps if you made it all a dream"), 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' ("A casually menacing story that has something to do with health problems and lesbians" – Steve Braunias),  'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica' (S&M on the west coast, and the most popular story, to judge by the many emails I've received over the years), 'No Sun No Rain' (the first appearance of detective Ellerslie Penrose, who went on to helm Shirker), 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (SF), 'Oilskin' (upset people no end, but some of the students at the Auckland University writing course liked it, and a Waikato student went on to make it as a student film. Kids!), 'John', 'Me and Misspelt' (currently under option as a film),  'From Soup to Nuts' ("Unnecessarily violent" – Graeme Lay, Metro) and 'Another White Gown'.

All here, now, just for you, in the new digital™ format, with brand spanking new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. A snip at US$2.99.

A leaf on the wind

A moving and clear-eyed piece by Peter Carey on the late Robert Hughes:

Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to underestimate the anguish he suffered in private.

Choire Sicha remembers David Rakoff:

The work he leaves behind — both recorded and in the collections Fraud, from 2001, Don't Get Too Comfortable, from 2005, Half Empty, from 2010 — are all ahead-of-their-time documentations of the way we actually do live now. There was no better correspondent from New York City of his time.

At the Shanghai Literary Festival a fellow author leaned across the table and asked me the sort of low voice normally reserved for selling drugs: 'Chad, Do you like... science fiction?' Why yes, I said. And so over the clatter of plates at M on the Bund we yammered on to each other about Firefly. Here is the very emotional Firefly reunion at Comic Con 2012.

Buffalo, girl

I never got the Jesus and Mary Chain. When they played Auckland in dada-dada-whatever someone at the Powerstation told me their static "feedback" came from a tape loop on the sound desk. No biggie; I'm all for synthetic augmentation: The Jesus and Mary Chain's problem is that they were boring. That week at Entertaining The Stars In New Zild Yeah No It's Rilly Strong Here Aye drinks at the record company offices on K Road the shambly ensemble appeared and shuffled through the room with armfuls of CDs -- they'd pounced on Prince's back-catalogue, which made you wonder why they didn't have Prince in the first place. Later that same day, standing in the kitchen, Neil Young wandered in holding a beer, and being New Zealanders we all stared at him saying nothing, not even 'hello' (including the record company people in the entourage. How shy are we?) and after a long, long minute Neil shrugged and left. I have regrets in life, and that moment is one of them.

But I digress.

The Jesus and Mary Chain have exactly half a song, 'Just Like Honey'. Younger readers will know it from Lost In Translation as the song that ruins the film: the soaring paean that never climaxes; the Velvets steal by someone who could only transcribe two of the three chords in 'Femme Fatale'. After this the British indie scene could only go one way (Pete Doherty sounding like a small child trapped in a car) but no, now The Jesus and Mary Chain have appeared on stage with Jessica Paré AKA Megan Draper, and so it begins... again. Jessica is the tall one, with good teeth: the one who could beat the other ones up.

(Pic: NYMag, obv.)