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[Site manager's note: this page contains excerpts from Dead Babies--the Interview (Guardian reporter Andrew Pulver interviews Amis (23 January 2001) about the Dead Babies film (to be released 26 January 2001), and a response by Stephen P. of the Amis Discussion Board]: This week marks a rare event in the career of Martin Amis: the release of a film based on one of his books. This is only the second time in almost 30 years of publishing that such an incident has come to pass. Back in 1975, Dead Babies was Amis's second novel, and now it has become the second Amis adaptation. "Never second-guess the movies," he says, almost wearily. "The only time you can be sure they're going to make a movie of your book is when the film has been out for a couple of weeks. Then it's definitely going to happen." At 51, Amis appears inured to the unenthusiastic reception that film-makers have given to his oeuvre. "No," he says, "I don't mind. I've noticed some of my writer friends have been taken up - but it's not a frontline concern. You're just making trouble for yourself if you get too involved in all these things. Years ago, I wrote a script for The Rachel Papers. I wrote a script for Dead Babies, too. But now I wouldn't dream of writing a script from my own stuff." The script used in the new film was actually by William Marsh, who also directed. Amis is terrifyingly spry, sitting bolt upright in an armchair, and hardly moving except to take drags from the ever-smouldering cigarette. He doesn't seem to like having his picture taken, initially refusing to look directly into the camera lens. But after a little cajoling, he complies, sucking in his cheeks as he does so. Then he talks with self-conscious sonority - very slowly, in fully formed sentences. You can hear the punctuation: the semi-colons, the italics, the ellipses. . . . "So often when you're watching a movie it's like being present at some desperate script conference. Someone's saying 'We could try this' - and by God they have tried it. Films are terribly underwritten. But if I had the chance to do it now, I don't know that I would, because I want to get on with the stuff I control." Of course, Amis has written directly for the screen, without ever achieving the chemistry that someone with his talent for dialogue might expect. His sci-fi thriller Saturn 3, which still surfaces occasionally on late-night TV, might have been an unholy embarrassment upon its release in 1980, but provided Amis with raw material for his epic movie-industry novel Money. He says now: "It just seemed to me that when I was working on that film I was head-doctoring and kissing ass, and writing these characters as they saw themselves, as they idealised themselves." Performers Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel re-emerged memorably as characters in Money: Lorne Guyland, Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis. Amis was later hired to work on an early incarnation of Mars Attacks! "I wrote a good script too - the producer said it was 'too hip for the house'." That experience went into the short story "Career Move," a brilliant satire of inversion in which poets command seven-figure fees and screenwriters labour over threadbare creations such as Offensive From Quasar 13. But cinema, and appreciation of it, is a skein that runs through all of Amis's work. Even at the start of his novel-writing, Amis has his Rachel Papers protagonist Charles Highway discourse elegantly on European cinema ("Of course, there are plenty of sound, even urgent reasons for hating French films ... yet I preferred the more rickety and personal conventions ... the more radical attitude to experience, the scrutiny of the single detail and the small moment.") Film pieces make up a good proportion of Amis's journalism: a hilarious account of Brian De Palma making Body Double in 1984; a nervous audience with Roman Polanski just after the director absconded from the US; a wander around the Houston set of Robocop 2 in 1990; venturing with his chum Salman Rushdie to a suburban multiplex to note the "class betrayal" of "400 berks from Hendon" in their reaction to Four Weddings and a Funeral; a brilliant exegesis of the habits and influence of screen violence for the New Yorker in the wake of the James Bulger murder. Through his film journalism you get the sense of a mind fully at ease with cinema, able to understand both the skittering hysteria of its transnational glamour, as well as its function as the repository of a global unconscious. Amis, alone among British writers, really gets the movies. Part of this assuredly stems from an early immersion: as a 13-year-old, Amis was offered a role in the Alexander Mackendrick film A High Wind in Jamaica, a four-month outing that got him expelled from school and ended up as an entertaining few paragraphs in yet another article, an account of a trip to the 1977 Cannes film festival. "Even at that age," he recalls, "I realised that I had no talent for what I was doing, that I had an anti-talent. A friend of mine said I looked as though I was being heavily bribed to do everything. Anthony Quinn had great force of life, but he was ridiculous. James Coburn was very cool. Alexander Mackendrick, the director, it was impressive to watch him work. But it made me realise how laborious film-making was. I stand by my definition in the Robocop piece: a series of repetitions punctuated by delays. That's movies." But Amis, whose radical critical intelligence operates brilliantly whether he is genuflecting before Saul Bellow or accompanying Watford FC on a Chinese tour, remains an insightful, liberal critic. "There's a line in my father's novel Take a Girl Like You, when he and his girlfriend are trying to decide what film to see, and the narrator says, 'If it were left to me, I would have gone for the most violent or horrific film available.' This was always my taste. There's no doubt that film has no rivals in creating a strong affect. It can really seize you. So action is a very natural thing for film to deal with - and violence. "A funny thing happened in film in the late 1960s, when the self-policing Hollywood code was tacitly dispensed with, and suddenly auteurism was it - and violence. Auteurism did more to damage movie audiences than the advent of television. It halved profits. Violence is not what the public wants, and the industry has since realised that, and is much more market-driven - again - with the results that we see. "Time and again, I've gone to see films that everyone says are great, like The Full Monty, Four Weddings, Billy Elliot ... Everyone says, 'Oh, they're so sweet, they've got a lot of charm', and all that, and I find myself ..." He sighs, irritated. "Well, it's so up your arse. It's so cute, pawky, simpery. I mean, nauseating. And I like the fact that this film bucks that trend." Oh yes, this film. Amis professes to really admire the movie of Dead Babies, saying that it's "incredibly faithful" to its source, and there's a "wonderful energy" about it. And yet unpardonable liberties have been taken with the time setting: the original story, a laborious, multi-character satire on the drug-addled decadence of the early 1970s, has been roughly yanked into the present day. It's a pity, because Amis is at his most engaging when thinking back three decades, to what informed his writing in his early 20s. "The currents at work, that you felt threading through you then, were so different. It was pre-feminist, pre-inflation ... The ideas and the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the culture and ideas you get when there is prosperity. You could live for 10 shillings a week in London; then suddenly there was inflation and a cup of tea cost 10 shillings, a bus fare cost 10 shillings. That had an incredibly sobering effect on everyone, which we see to this day: yuppiedom was born then. "And the wild ideas - political and pharmaceutical - that were going around then had to be dispensed with as leisure-class fripperies. It's also strange to think how left it was: how left-wing, how politicised the culture was. I'm pleased Bill Marsh [who also plays Marvell] looked so much like Charles Manson because he was the dark underside of hippiedom. That was really what the novel was about." Amis pauses. "You lying hippie," he says with relish. "That's what Charles Grodin calls Jeff Bridges in the remake of King Kong." He's suitably tickled. "Hippiedom had its great benefits," he continues, "especially for me. Because of free love, which was terrific for about three or four years until women suddenly realised that it wasn't in their interests at all. But it was great for a bit - any man my age will tell you the same thing. You'd get off with girls that didn't fancy you - a rather eerie feeling. It wasn't that they liked you, but that there was so much pressure on them to be liberated. But there was always this edge to hippiedom: the 'Pigs out!' edge, the blood of Sharon Tate on the bedroom wall." Dead Babies remains Amis's most ambitious treatment of his hippie prince past - but the movie adaptation, with its limited release, is unlikely to set the box office on fire. It's a Hollywood truism that bad books make good movies; maybe Amis's work is simply too delicately brilliant to survive the film industry meat-grinder.
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