Clothes of authenticity

I'm in two minds about Henning Mankell. He doesn't do plot -- surprisingly, for such a mainstream writer -- but, like some other Swedish authors, he really does coffee and sandwiches. Such details bring the Wallander novels alive. Here is the reluctant crime writer on crime and location:

Q: Your 'Wallander' novels too seem to chronicle important changes in society.

HENNING MANKELL: It is twenty years since I wrote the first book, and in that time some interesting things have happened. When I started I realized that crime itself was going through changes, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe. Earlier you'd only see criminality in a big city like Stockholm but now you can buy drugs even in small towns. Look at where Ystad is situated, down south in Sweden in a border area close to the European continent – you could say that the Baltic Sea is our Rio Grande.

Q: Your choice of setting the books in Ystad appears to have created a trend.

HM: Yes, but today, I'm sorry to say, there's a lot of very bad crime fiction being written in Sweden where writers use small town settings without any real point. If you set a crime novel in Gotland just because you spend your holidays in a cottage there, I'd call it ridiculous. With a few exceptions, much of the crime fiction published in Swedish is trash.

Martin Cruz Smith is a journalist who wrote pulps before sweating 11 years on Gorky Park, the novel that would become the first of several starring Arkady Renko. The subsequent Renko novels have tapered off in length -- Smith returning to his pulp habits, maybe -- but maintain the tone, and are thick with detail. Smith spoke to Anna Mundow about researching place and time:

Q. "Stalin's Ghost" revisits the Chechen war. Are historical events starting points for you?

A. Well, I had to begin somewhere, and the Chechen war is practically a coloring book of disasters. I was interested to read about Chechens in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." Then I read a little Lermontov, a little Tolstoy where there is a theme of this wild, hono r-bound, somewhat privileged society. That's one of the great things about what I do; I'm allowed to follow any trail.

Q. Is Arkady's environment increasingly bleak?

A. With "Gorky Park" I thought I had done my Russian book. Then Russia changed. I couldn't get back in, so I got on the factory ship, the Polar Star. I could sense that things were changing. Then at the end of "Red Square" there was great hope that things were coming together, a triumphant feeling. That has disappeared. Arkady is more and more thrown back on his own resources, which makes what he does all the more singular and dangerous.

Q. You literally couldn't get back into the Soviet Union?

A. Literally. I was barred from the country.

My friend Paul Reynolds loved John Le Carré. One birthday when I made the error of gifting him yet another copy of Single And Single he accepted it with enthusiasm -- 'One can never have too many,' he said. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is built almost entirely on details of time and place: the narrative plays out in the characters' memories. (The action centerpiece is Peter Guillam stealing a folder from a library.) Here is Le Carré on location in an interview by George Plimpton in 1996:

There's some kind of constant interaction between the fantasy that I brought with me to the location — the place as character — and what happens to me after that, the way the fantasy takes on some semblance of truth. What we want is not authenticity; it is credibility. In order to be credible, you have to dress the thing in clothes of authenticity.

I'll ring and see if your friends are home

Author and screenwriter Jonathan Ames talks to Jennifer Vineyard about being a writer on Twitter:

AMES: I don't have any certainty about anything. The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

VINEYARD: Is that why, after joining a Twitter conversation involving New York's Matt Zoller Seitz regarding the criticism that Girls faces — noting that you had faced it as well, but perhaps not as loudly — you jumped out saying, "Very complicated topic for Twitter"?

AMES: I find it very hard to parse things out. I admire people who are able to do it, actually — it's sort of like reading runes. I quit Twitter at one point, and I lost all my followers. Twitter and Facebook, they were bothering me. I felt like I was only using them to self-promote, and that annoyed me, you know? But it is hard to get the word out on anything if you don't do it, so I thought, Well, I've got this novella about it, I want to tell people about it. I came back on Twitter in October, and but I don't know if my announcing it on there actually does anything. It's weird because it's silly and it feels like a time suck. I find it very constraining, and it's hard to talk about anything sensitive like that.

Read the full interview here at NYMag.com.

I am of the pre-Twitter generation that uses a phone to communicate with one person at a time. Pictured: Ray Milland in Alfred Hitchock's version of Dial M For Murder (1954), based on the play by Frederick Knott. In Knott's thriller the personal nature of the telephone call is crucial to the plot. The technology and the premise would later be updated in the too-often-overlooked remake A Perfect Murder (1998).

Frederic Knott worked as a script editor at Hammer Studios before spending 18 months writing the play about a perfect crime gone awry:

"I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right. You can plan a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action, and invariably something goes wrong and then you have to improvise. And in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake."

The Hitchcock version is the most famous but Knott was still receiving royalties from the play up until his death in 2003. Hold on to those rights.

I'm just looking / Just looking for a way around

'L'Amour fou was just a phrase and became thirty pages.'

-- Jacques Rivette

(Pics: Miami Vice, Heat, Out of Sight)

WIP

It was always very important to me to be able to get involved in diverse situations. The biggest challenge for an arranger is to be able to deal with different styles and personalities. But it is even more important to make sure that the artist achieves its goals either musically or even commercially. It´s also essential to work with the record company to make sure that they are happy enough to spend good money in promotion for that particular project. It would be a very serious mistake to go against the record company or trying to impose your musical "views" into a project that needs your help and specific work done.

-- Eumir Deodato

Q: Breathless put you at the center of the French New Wave. Were you surprised?

A: I was out of work and needed the money. The producer asked Columbia, which then owned my old Preminger contract, if I was available. He gave Columbia a choice of $12,000 or 50% of the world profits. With great foresight, Columbia took the $12,000. It was shot for $76,000 in five weeks. Most of the time we worked half days. We'd break and sit around in cafes. One day the producer saw us, it was his last card, and he got into a fistfight with Godard because we weren't working.

-- Jean Seberg

Q: When will your next solo release come out and what can we expect from it?

A: I don't know and I don't know.

-- Roisin Murphy

Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?

Ungraded set pic: Nathan Meister in the passenger seat c/- director Jonathan King.

St Valentine's Day massacres

The victim who has been hacked to death and left in the Bayou is an analogue for the movie itself of In the Electric Mist, based on the James Lee Burke novel. Directed by Betrand Tavernier, Tommy Lee Jones's Dave Robicheaux remains too faithful to the character, which has panicked the studio to cut the narrative in an effort to get things moving -- a mistake, because detective novels are all about sitting around. But the movie still works. It has Burke's voice, and his atmosphere and his landscape, with its sudden, emotional bursts of colour. In The Electric Mist could have been Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or No Country For Old Men but in its bones it's Chinatown, i.e. a movie that wants to be a crime novel: complicated and puzzling for most of its length until the resolution appears right where it started. Also: Kelly Macdonald. All movies with Kelly Macdonald in them are good movies.

It's taken me this long to see Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and if I had to draw up a list of the ten best noir movies I've seen it would come in at around number four. Sidney Lumet directed it and it's a fucking gem: modern, shabby, direct and as black as night. Shot in digital, interestingly, a long time before people were talking about that. If you like Black Widow, Against All Odds (one of the best remakes of Out Of The Past) or The Morning After you should really tuck into this. Lumet calls it a melodrama but it's realistic and dirty and moving. The DVD includes a good making of documentary featuring interviews with the cast, producers and director, but not author Kelly Masterson.

Shadows and fog

Some more thumbnails from the set of Realiti, the micro-budget SF movie that director Jonathan King is shooting around Wellington and parts of Auckland. Top to bottom: Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister lurking in the shadows; Graham McTavish giving the news; Nathan Meister hearing it; and Michelle Langstone on her way to something that may or may not happen. Jonathan has been shooting in digital in real locations with found light and a crew so small I'm not sure whether to call it a guerilla or a skeleton.

Realiti is pared-back science fiction: my idea, when I wrote it, was that the characters would come into a room and just talk. I keep referring to it as a science fiction film with no special effects, although when Jonathan is through with it there will be some opticals: removal of objects, fiddling with backgrounds, that kinda thing. Much of our discussion about the movie is what it won't be, and what won't be in it. In many ways it's a noir... but more colourful than that: stranger.

I wrote the script for Jonathan a long time ago. We revived the project after putting our toes back in the water by making on a comic strip, City Lights, which I wrote and he drew. One of the many things I love about these images as they trickle through is the way they evoke the director's drawing style. It's a good sign, I think: evidence that the movie's visual style is evolving naturally.

These preview pics are very small and have not been graded. And the shoot is just coming up to halfway: there's a long way to go yet. But the actors are looking way cool and the footage is looking great. Build it simple, fly it slow...