Mike Figgis

CONVERSATION WITH PAUL AUSTER (for ‘On Writing’ magazine)

Paul Auster and Mike Figgis

May 26, 2007   New York City

 

ON WRITING:  One of the things I think is interesting about both of your work is your use of imagery.

FIGGIS: I think that changes as you go through your life. I came from, first of all, a musical background and then a performance art background which was very anti-theatre, and very anti-British theater.  So there was a time when I would have said that an image was far more valuable than text.  I’ve radically come around from that point of view.

AUSTER: I always had the feeling that, as a novelist, I’m the least cinematic of fiction writers.  My books are not constructed the way films are, they don’t break down into scenes, there’s usually not a lot of dialogue and not a lot of imagery–just suggestions, hints. I’ve always been interested in suggesting things so that the reader can fill in the blanks for himself.  But then working in film, I’ve seen a bit of an evolution.  I haven’t done that much, I’ve worked on four films, total. The first two were collaborations with Wayne Wang, and the script for Smoke–which was our first film–is a film almost without images. But in the two films I’ve made on my own–

ON WRITING: –Lulu on the Bridge and The Inner Life of Martin Frost–

AUSTER: –I’ve found myself more and more drawn to trying to convey feelings and ideas through images.  And particularly in this last film, Martin Frost, even though it’s a very simple film with only four actors and limited locations, I was thinking of painters as I was setting up shots.  There’s a little shot of a tabletop when Clair is sick, for example, and you see that glass of water.  I really wanted to make it look like a Chardin glass of water. I find these everyday objects, if rendered in paints or on film, can be very moving.

ON WRITING: As you were talking, I realized I want to make a distinction between visual versus imagery.  It’s interesting what you said, Mike, because I think your digital movies, Time Code and Hotel, are still incredibly visual but they’re not as image-driven.

FIGGIS: True.

ON WRITING: Whereas your earlier movies, for instance, Leaving Las Vegas or Liebestraum, the visuals are much more front and center.

FIGGIS:  You don’t a abandon a sensibility. I know how film works and how video works; I know how the color blue will read and things like that. So that’s an ingrained technique. What I’ve always been aware of is, what’s unique about film–and what makes it so interesting for so many different people–is that you have upped the ante by having multi-options.  In other words, how you combine text, music, camera movements, acting style and color of costume is all going to mean something really big, because somebody is going to watch it big. And the visual is the crudest of all senses, it will overwhelm the literary part of the brain if you allow it.

ON WRITING:  The literary part of the brain?

FIGGIS:  The part of the brain that deals with words is very different from the part of the brain that deals with visual images.

AUSTER: He’s right.

FIGGIS:  One is like crude sex.  The other one is more like an intellectual interplay that has many more subtle levels.  So your choice of how to bring one down and the other up is going to be the [challenge?].  As I become less and less happy with the cruder use of visual imagery, to me, it’s almost become an obsolete form. It’s almost a redundancy because the visual saturation is inescapable.

AUSTER: You’re talking about the culture.

FIGGIS:  Within our culture.

ON WRITING:  But you’re using it.

FIGGIS:  I’m using it but I’m trying to temper that with all the other levels; I haven’t lost my love for it, I’m just saying the redundancy that has been created has made it really, really hard to work in that medium.

AUSTER:  Mike and I were talking around a year or two ago about collaborating on a film in which there would be no visual information at all except people’s faces talking and the entire story would be told rather than shown.  I’m still very attracted to this idea.

FIGGIS: I was more and more reminded of scenes in certain films that contained an interesting actor speaking and describing something graphic. And if you bring in literature by using either text on the screen or the spoken word, it still transports the viewer in an amplified way to a domain that has enough abstraction or enough choice of imagery within your own head space. And yet it’s still cinema

ON WRITING:  Would it be a story?

AUSTER:  Yes, definitely a story.

ON WRITING: Paul, you sort of do that in The Book of Illusions. The novel is about a man who writes a book about a forgotten silent movie comic named Hector Mann.  And you describe Hector’s films in detail.

AUSTER: Yes, I made up Hector’s films and [finish the sentence]. The challenge in writing those imaginary films was to convey enough visual information so that the reader could see what was going on, but then at the same time not put in too much. If it’s too verbose everything slows down and it doesn’t have the feeling of a film. So I had to walk this line between the too little and the too much.

ON WRITING:  And then The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the film you wrote and directed, is described in The Book of Illusions as one of Hector’s later films.

AUSTER: Yes, [but I wrote the film before I wrote the book?]

ON WRITING: Oh, really?

AUSTER: I wrote a short version of The Inner Life of Martin Frost [for a series being put together by a German producer that never happened?]. So the script was sitting around and when I was writing The Book of Illusions–I started it later that year–I thought Martin Frost would resonate with the rest of the novel. But in the meantime I thought that it shouldn’t be a short film, it should be feature length. I was actually planning to do the whole film in the novel but it would have been way too many pages and it would have thrown the novel out of balance. So I just stuck to the short version with the idea in the back of my mind that one day I’d try to make the full-length version, which I have finally done now.

ON WRITING: So you’d already written this movie in the book in a way that’s much fuller and richer than a screenplay would be. What was it like making the transition to three dimensions?

AUSTER: Well, I had made films before, I knew what I was getting myself into.  And I know that things change, it’s inevitable–sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. You need a good crew, you need people who are thinking with you.  And that applies to the actors, the director of photography, the production designer, the wardrobe person, the composer–everybody has to be in harmony.

ON WRITING: And you do something you also do in your books, which is a story within a story.

AUSTER: The way I describe this film to myself and now to others is, it’s a story about a man who writes a story about a man who writes a story.  But it’s ambiguous because Martin, who’s the author of the story, makes himself the hero of the story as well.  So you think it’s all really happening.

FIGGIS:  But the thing that’s actually refreshing about that–and it’s apropos of what you said earlier about use of images and text and all of that–they’re forms of language. I quite like the idea of theatrical staging, whether it’s a literary device or a visual device.  You see the set, you know it’s not real.  The fact is, if you do it halfway decently you still transport the people that you’re asking to come and be an audience or reader or whatever.  And I think for a period, for me, it will be satisfying to go back to that basic idea.

AUSTER: I’ve never had any problem, as a novelist in particular, or as filmmaker, with the idea of using the medium itself as part of the thing you’re trying to express.  I mean, who’s kidding whom?  You’re holding a novel in your hand and you know it’s a book.  You know it’s not real.

FIGGIS:  You open it and it says page one.

AUSTER:  Yeah, so you can turn the stuff inside out and make it very compelling by exposing the pipes and the plumbing and the wiring, and that can be just as big an adventure as a traditional narrative, I think.

FIGGIS: In Hotel, the use of, let’s say The Duchess of Malfi–

ON WRITING:  –Hotel is a digital film that you did in 2000.

AUSTER: I think this is the one film of yours I have not seen.

FIGGIS:  It’s largely improvised.  But its core is that a film company is doing a punk version of The Duchess of Malfi in contemporary Venice with no control of the traffic or the people or the noise or anything. And then the film company starts to fall apart because the producer tries to kill the director so he can seduce his girlfriend who’s the main actress and so on. Interestingly enough, the one thing I think is useful in our culture is that people have gotten fascinated with the process of filmmaking. They know how a special effect is done, they know how every trick works.  And now people are doing it themselves in cheap cameras and computers. So their interest in device and process is a useful thing because now it’s part of the language.

ON WRITING:  Time Code also deals with the film.

FIGGIS:  In a different way. That was much more, I think, Auster-ish–

ON WRITING:  Paul Auster-ish?

FIGGIS:  Yeah. It’s the idea of real parallel narrative, and getting away from montage, because montage is one of the things that’s also strangling film.

ON WRITING: What do you mean by montage?

AUSTER: It’s the Eisenstein word. He was the one who wrote at great length about all this. It’s the juxtaposition of images.

ON WRITING:  I see.

AUSTER:  It’s cutting, it’s editing.

FIGGIS:  When it first happened it was a vanguard movement.  Now it’s been taken by the mainstream and used as a stifling device.  And also the visual image is so addictive that the faster you cut, the more addicted to fast cutting you become.

AUSTER: Yeah.

FIGGIS:  So you now try to make a film, like a ‘60s film, with very long takes and the audience will keel over and fall asleep, because you can’t go back to something once you’ve created an addiction for something else. Time Code was an attempt to deal with the audience’s hunger for multi-imagery but in a parallel narrative way rather than a linear montage way–which is what draws me to Paul’s books because he, over the last 20-whatever, 30 years, has created his own genre of parallel narrative.

AUSTER: Or stories within stories within stories.

FIGGIS: But also in a way that’s effortless to read in the sense that when you read a Russian novel and suddenly it’ll go from Moscow to somewhere else and you say, “Oh, I was really into that, I want to know what happened to the Count.” And then you get into the next one and say, “Okay, this is interesting.”  And then, almost with a sense of a familiarity and joy, you go back to the first one.

AUSTER:  The problem is, as you say, people have been trained to look at things in a certain way.  Our mutual friend, John Boorman, once said to me, “People are so in the habit now of watching these big budget Hollywood films that when they’re confronted with something different that uses a different language, so to speak, they almost can’t comprehend what they’re seeing.” And I think that’s why [independent?] filmmakers have such a hard time finding an audience, because we’re going against the grain.

ON WRITING:  But linear storytelling is something people have always been used to.  And nonlinear, more experimental stories have tended to be outside the mainstream.

AUSTER: But I have to say, I think what determines good storytelling from bad storytelling, whether it’s linear or not, is almost secondary.  It’s clarity.  Clarity is what’s important.  There’s no writer more disturbing than Kafka.  He still upsets us when we read him. And yet every sentence is clear as a bell. There’s nothing murky about it at all.  And I think that’s why he’s so [note: I wasn’t sure if you wanted to finish this sentence or merge it into the next sentence: And that’s why he’s part of who we are... Or just go right to: He’s part of who we are...] He’s part of who we are, because he’s such a great writer.  Then there are other, what you might call, experimental writers who deliberately try to be obscure. And it’s very difficult to connect to that. There are poems by Ezra Pound which are so saturated with allusions to other literature, they’re so oblique that you really don’t have what I would call a sensuous or visceral experience with the work.  And I’m looking for the visceral experience, no matter what.

FIGGIS:  Even when you have no clue what something is on first experience, sometimes you just know something interesting is going on. And if it’s really the avant-garde, you won’t understand it at first but you will also get the buzz that something’s happening.  And as Paul says, that is a visceral response to it.  To me it’s such an important test of something you’re experiencing, it really is.  And oftentimes you do find yourself nodding and gritting your jaw and kind of saying–

AUSTER:  –This is good for you.

FIGGIS:  Yes.

AUSTER:  It’s really good for you.  Open your mouth and swallow.

ON WRITING:  Transition needed.

FIGGIS: I recently had a film conversation with David Lynch, who I think is a very interesting filmmaker.

AUSTER: I do, too.

FIGGIS:  His latest film is very long and very personal. And one of the things that’s quite clear when you talk to him–and I think the same thing would apply to us–is that when you’ve lived with an idea for a long time, the logic is absolutely clear to you and it seems obvious. And we forget it’s not so obvious to other people. Never.

AUSTER:  Perhaps not.

FIGGIS:  What’s left is, let’s say, our choice of the bones we will lay out.  But a lot of the other flesh, which was maybe much more explanatory, has gone.

AUSTER: I think with Lulu on the Bridge I made some mistakes as a screenwriter. I used my novelist’s brain on small, small things, but I thought about them at great length. For example, I’d seen someone walking down the street with a t-shirt that said, “Beware of God.”  And I thought this was very funny.  We have the phrase, “Beware of Dog,” right?  So “Beware of God….”  So you see Harvey Keitel’s character walking down the street and someone has written on the window “Beware of God.”  The very next thing that happens is he gets tangled up in the leash of a dog. I thought, all right, we have God and dog here, we’re establishing something. So that later on when he discovers the dead body in the alley–I don’t know if you remember this moment. He’s walking down this dark, dark alley and suddenly you hear a dog barking behind him. And he turns around to look, and for me this was actually God, or the gods, beginning to intervene in the story.  But nobody–nobody, not a single human being on the earth understood what I was doing.  It doesn’t matter, it was there for me, but I don’t think it translated.

FIGGIS: When I did Liebestraum, the whole point of that film is you think you’re inside the head of the son who’s come to visit his dying mother.  And then the truth is you’re in the head of the mother.  The proof of that is, she’s in the hospital dying of cancer and she’s on morphine. And the nurses are like Catholic nurses, they’re all sort of nuns.  There’s a scene later on where the son, Nick, goes to a whorehouse with a very drunk sheriff and the whores in the whorehouse are played by the same actresses who were playing the nuns in the hospital.

AUSTER: People didn’t see [they were the same?]?

FIGGIS:  No, what happened was that after the preview, which was such a disaster in New York, the studio insisted that I take the whorehouse scene out. And I tried to explain to them, if you don’t have the piece of information that the whores and the nun-nurses are the same characters, you would never be able to work out that it was all taking place in the mother’s mind. And despite that, they took it out because they could care less about it. To me it was a tragedy.  I’d worked so hard on the complexity of this script. I was very influenced by Alain Resnais’ film with John Geilgud–

AUSTER: –Providence.

FIGGIS:  Yeah, the whole thing is in his head and he’s dying.  And it was such a profound film, amazing.  So sometimes you have no choice, the Powers That Be step in and say, “I don’t give a fuck about your script, mate, that’s a filthy scene and it’s coming out of the film.”

AUSTER:  Or you over think it the way I did.

ON WRITING:  But you said you don’t care if the audience makes those connections.

AUSTER: Well, it’s not crucial to the film.

FIGGIS:  But the thing is, the information is there if you choose to find it.  Like in any good piece of work.  You have a choice, you can either hit them over the head with a mallet or you can lay the things out and say, “It’s there.”

AUSTER: Which means that good films, or difficult films, or challenging films–however you want to define it–need to be seen more than once.  And most people just see a film one time. But a film that’s dense needs to be seen two or three times, I think, before you [note: finish the sentence].

FIGGIS:  The joy being that it’s the kind of film that you can. The first time is to try and understand the plot, the second time is to then start understanding the subtext and the third one is to enjoy it, maybe, where you’re kind of like, “Okay, I’ve absorbed quite a lot of information and now I can really watch the acting.”

ON WRITING: In a previous issue of On Writing, Tom Stoppard talked about–I can’t articulate it the way he did but–

FIGGIS:  –Nobody can, it’s an impossibility.

ON WRITING: He said there’s a line where the audience comes to meet you. And if you don’t bring it to them enough then they’re baffled. If you bring it to them too much–

AUSTER: –It’s boring.  It’s funny that writing novels and making films are very different activities. When I write a novel, I don’t show it to anybody except Siri, my wife, she’s my only reader.  And that’s all I need, one intelligent person who’s sympathetic to what I do but is very rigorous and will tell me if something’s not working.  Whereas with a film, when you’re editing, it’s very helpful to have people come in and say, “Ah, you know, it’s really dragging there.  It’s not interesting.  I don’t understand it.”

FIGGIS:  Or when somebody is bored.

AUSTER: Film is like music.  It is all about time and pace and rhythm.  And that’s why editing is so crucial.

FIGGIS:  It’s so different, you can enjoy a really slow book because you can put it down and say, “I’ll come back to this tomorrow.”  Whereas film is brutal because we’re used [note: finish the sentence]. That’s why I like episodic filmmaking; I quite like the idea of half-hour episodes and having a bit of a break. Because you’re not forced into this awful three-act, mini-structure where you have to end with some kind of literary orgasm each time.  Episodic storytelling is terrific.

ON WRITING:  Television.

FIGGIS:  Well, yeah, it is the domain of telly.  And there is also a lot better writing in the mainstream going on in certain aspects of television right now, without a doubt, than in mainstream filmmaking.

AUSTER: True, true. I made one episodic film with Wayne [Wang], but we co-directed that one, Blue in the Face.  I don’t know if you’ve seen that.

FIGGIS: No, I haven’t, I would love to.

AUSTER: That’s the craziest film project I’ve ever done because it was improvised. I gave all the actors notes and suggestions but they were free to use or not to use them.  We just tried to establish aims for each scene.  It’s a series of little episodes. But when we tried to edit it, our original plan was just to have about nine 10-minute episodes.  And then we realized it just didn’t work and we started cutting them up and intermingling them, so you see a little bit of one and then we’d cut to another, we’d go back to number one and then we’re in number four.  And it took six days to shoot and 10 months to edit.

ON WRITING:  Do you think some of the conventions of storytelling in filmmaking are the same in episodic? Even in an episodic, you still have a beginning, a middle and an end.

FIGGIS:  Yeah, but you don’t need to [have the same kind of?] payoff at the end. One of the problems in film is this awful thing of a payoff. Cinema, as I said earlier, because it is the most popular form of communal storytelling, has this franchise problem. And films are so expensive now. Mainstream film budgets have gone through the roof.  Low budget still is exactly the same.  There’s been no inflation in the consideration at all.  But still a million dollars of somebody else’s money–

AUSTER:  –It’s a lot of money.

FIGGIS:  It’s not going to be Paul’s and it’s not going to be mine, that’s for sure. But I love the fact that economics are a factor and I don’t in any way dismiss them, I think they’re interesting. You’re constantly looking for ways to do digital this, digital that, just shoot it in your own place, actors working for scale, cut it on your laptop and all this kind of stuff. I just brought out a book called Digital Filmmaking and it is a guide to how you can do that.  And that’s exciting.

AUSTER: But there are certain costs you have to absorb.  Just the technical things of post-production, making the film, doing the sound mix.  This is time-consuming and expensive, even for a cheap film it’s the same as for a big budget film.

ON WRITING:  What Mike is saying is now you can just do the digital–

FIGGIS:  –I’m cutting in my hotel room. I just started a feature-length film in Istanbul two weeks ago based around a real event, a Gumball Rally, that then went horribly wrong.

ON WRITING: A Gumball Rally?

FIGGIS: It’s where dot.com millionaires drive their Ferraris across Europe and break speed limits and things like that. I’m making the film with my son and I threw in two actors, one of them pretending to be a driver and one pretending to be a very depressed woman in Istanbul. We waited for the rally to come and shot all these scenes. Then the rally had a disaster that killed two people in Romania so it got cancelled. So I had to completely restructure the improvised scene that we thought we were about to do.  And I’ll cut the film on the computer because there isn’t really any money.

ON WRITING:  Are you going to distribute it?

FIGGIS:  I can’t even think about that any more.  At the end of the day you want to make films just because you want to keep moving. You want to keep developing; the ideas are interesting. If you stop and think about distribution all the time you might just stop because it might seem too hopeless or something.  And economically you, of course, are forced to find other ways of making a living by doing commercials–

AUSTER: –So many directors do that, don’t they?

FIGGIS:  They have no choice.

ON WRITING:  I want to go back to a question about something Paul said earlier. When we were talking about how you described Hector’s movies in Book of Illusions, you were saying it’s a balancing act of not describing too much but just enough.  Isn’t that also the challenge in a novel as well, that you don’t want to slow it down?

AUSTER:  Yeah, I agree. In fact, I have a little motto for myself when I’m writing novels because I have a tendency sometimes to go on too much. And I say to myself, “Swift and lean.  Swift and lean.”

ON WRITING:  For your novels?

AUSTER:  Yeah, and it helps.  I want to write books in which every word is essential, that if one were removed the book would be different.  And I think, too, with film you want every scene to count, every moment in every scene to count as well.

ON WRITING: I always thought that in a book you can take digressions more than in a film.

AUSTER:  You can do that, sure.  For example, long, exhaustive descriptions of places or rooms, some novelists revel in this. And sometimes the writing can be extraordinarily beautiful.  But if it’s not really serving the story in any essential way, I tend to get bored by it, and I want works in which everything is pertinent.

ON WRITING:  So, I guess, it’s the same use of craft in a novel as in a screenplay?

AUSTER:  I suppose, although writing a novel is very different from writing a screenplay. Because, oddly enough, it’s more real than a screenplay.  I write novels in three dimensions. It’s an ongoing, pulsing narrative. I smell things, I taste thing, I touch things.  Whereas writing a screenplay is an artificial act of composing a story for a rectangle. A two-dimensional rectangle.  And it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle than an organic ongoing process.

FIGGIS:  It’s different rules.

AUSTER:  Yeah, different rules.

ON WRITING:  Was it a difficult transition?  Are you still figuring it out?

AUSTER:  I’m still figuring it out. The two screenplays I wrote before this were Smoke and Blue in the Face, but there was no screenplay per se for Blue in the Face. And then Lulu on the Bridge. Both of them were too long and, in the editing room, large amounts of material had to be cut.

FIGGIS:  It’s damaging.

AUSTER:  Yeah, and it’s very hard.  The first cut of Smoke was three hours.  So we had to cut out things that I really liked very much, but I understood the necessity.

FIGGIS:  David Lynch’s recent film is three hours and something long, and it’s often out of focus and very dark. They screened the film at the Polish film festival after another film and after two concerts. It started at 10 o’clock and it went on till after one in the morning.  And by midnight, I’d been sitting on that same seat for about seven hours and listening to speeches from the president and blah, blah, blah, in Polish with translations.  And I was actually bored [during the film?]. However, the next morning I woke up so cheerfully and my head was so full of the images and I said to David, “I love this idea of latent cinema.”  Which is, the kind of cinema that doesn’t work till the next day. But on a commercial level that’s a gamble.

AUSTER:  It sneaks up and hits you from behind. There’s no question, there are certain long, drawn-out movies–I’m thinking about a film like Kings of the Road, which, while you’re watching it, seems dragged out and then you remember the images for the rest of your life. So there is that aftereffect.

FIGGIS:  Godard does it all the time. He did it in [‘Êloge de] L’amour. I watched that film and I fell asleep a couple of times, woke up.  And I watched it again.  And the film is an incredible film.  But it’s working on a different level, it’s important to absorb things slowly sometimes in order to understand them.  You can’t always go to the crash language of our contemporary cinema. But that is the prevailing climate in cinema.  So that’s the rub.

ON WRITING:  One more question. At the beginning, Paul, you said that your books weren’t good for film, they didn’t have a lot of dialogue.

AUSTER:  I don’t think I’ve written a novel longer than 350 pages, but they’re very dense. I think they function like 700-page novels.  And it would be impossible to do a two-hour adaptation of any of these novels that would make any sense. You’d have to start cutting things from the original story and I think you’d lose the structure and they wouldn’t be very interesting.

ON WRITING:  Do you agree, Mike?

FIGGIS:  Well, I once made the point, which I still believe, that if you wanted to do The Idiot, the only really interesting way to do it would be to put a blindfold on, open the book, count off 100 pages, tear it out and say, don’t worry about it, it’ll work. It’ll be confusing for about the first 10 pages and then people will absorb the characters through the writing anyway.  Rather than trying to condense and re-digest [note: finish the sentence.]

AUSTER:  Movies are short stories or novellas.

FIGGIS:  They’re just expanded short stories.  Or not even particularly expanded.

AUSTER:  Unless you do a mini-series.  That can work, the 12-hour version of a book.

FIGGIS: People read a book and they just assume it’s going to be a good film because they had a good experience with it.  It’s not the case.

AUSTER:  No, no.

ON WRITING:  Mike, you’ve done a number of adaptations, is there a lot of stuff that you need in a book that you don’t need in a movie?

FIGGIS:  It’s a time issue. Stories take time to absorb and tell and if you try to force the pace on them–it’s like what Paul was saying about having to edit Lulu and lose stuff because of time and the pacing of the film.  And ultimately, okay, you win the one battle, which is you get it down to 95 minutes, whatever it is.  But you lose the second battle which is all the detail that you put your love into and your talent and your skill, you cut out like a bad surgeon because it’s too long.

AUSTER:  One novel of mine was turned into a film in the early ‘90s, The Music of Chance. I thought of all the books I had written up to that point, that was the one that lent itself most easily to film because it was a linear story with more dialogue than I usually do.  And still I had to cut out huge chunks of the book. The film isn’t bad, but it’s not the book. It’s something else.

ON WRITING: Mike, what about Leaving Las Vegas?

FIGGIS:  Let’s say Leaving Las Vegas as a novel is a series of internal thoughts, his-hers.  In the process of converting that, I xeroxed the entire novel into single sheets and went through and did cut ups.  I had three piles: this would work in a film, there’s no way this could be filmed, and I don’t know about this. I cut the first pile together into a very short scenario, which I then converted into a form of a script, very short, and then started to write some connective tissue because I’d cut out the other connective tissue which I thought wouldn’t work. Then I went through the third pile which was “maybe” and I found stuff.  And I thought, oh, that actually would work really well as a connective tissue right there.  By now I was no longer in sequence. I didn’t go back to the novel’s sequence till much later on.  And that process of cutting and pasting until it organically seemed to make sense got me to the first draft.

AUSTER:  That’s really very interesting to hear.  I think that’s probably the best way to approach a novel if you’re going to turn it into a film.

ON WRITING:  Would it be hard for somebody to do that to one of your novels, Paul?  Because a film might be a good film but just different.

AUSTER:  To tell you the truth, I’m just not interested in having my novels adapted. There’s one project that might happen and I’ve let this happen. There’s a young Argentinean director who wants to do In the Country of Last Things, the book that came after The New York Trilogy. But it’s so visual and I think it could work. I guess. I helped him write the screenplay.  He’s trying to get the money together.  We’ll see if it happens or not.  But that’s the only one.

FIGGIS:  Obviously, I’m a huge fan so I would like to work with Paul and that’s why I think the only way for us to work together would be to start from scratch on something.

AUSTER:  Yeah. I have an idea by the way.

FIGGIS:  Good.

AUSTER:  I’ll talk to you about it later.