“I understand the logic. The unwritten contract between the novelist and the reader is somewhat different from the unwritten contract between the filmmaker and the viewer. Novels are baggy, capricious things and you can ask a reader to start a novel six times –you can’t always do the same with a viewer. But actually the mosaic structure [of the film] gives it an extra propulsive drive, I think, you get a little throb of pleasure at the ingenuity at which one scene ends and the next starts. It could be a question asked in 1850 that gets answered several hundred years later in a different part of the world. Or it’s the same face, but this time she’s Hispanic and male instead of east Asian and female. Or it’s an object, or an image, or they walk into a room and it’s the same shape room as the one they just left a hundred years in the future. Just the little connections. You have the narrative arc, you have the character development.”
It seems with even as impressive a lexicon as his, David is lost for words. Official ones, anyway.
“I am contractually obliged to not criticise the film in public, but I am not contractually obliged to say nice things about it. Which is why I am here. I think very highly of the film and I want to help it.”
Obviously, the characters in David’s novel don’t have a cast, so the ingenious trick of having the same actors play their own reincarnations is simplified by the use of a comet shaped birthmark marking each body the everlasting soul returns in.
“The funny thing is I can no longer remember what the characters look like in my imagination before I saw the film.,”he muses. “Timothy Cavendish didn’t look like Jim Broadbent, I know that, but damn me if I can remember what he did look like now. It’s a bit like if there’s a city you’ve never been to –I’ve never been to Anchorage, Alaska –but when I think of Anchorage, there isn’t a vacuum, there isn’t a void. You think of something, you think of bits of Vancouver, or bits of something Twin Peaks-y, there’s some kind of composite imaginary Anchorage. Then you go there, within five minutes of leaving the airport it’s been replaced by the real Anchorage and you can no longer remember the imaginary one, it’s evaporated. It’s the same with the [book characters]; they’ve been replaced by the film versions.”
David reveals he was not consulted on the casting decisions –nor did he expect to be.
“I’m not a film-maker, I’m not a screenwriter; I’m a temporary visitor, a tourist with a short term visa to the remarkable world of film. So they didn’t need my advice and I don’t think I could have given very useful advice if they did.”
So you didn’t have any problems letting go?
“Two parts to my answer really. One: If the Wachowskis want to adapt your book I was just too pathetically grateful and excited to be that critical about the decision and I did not agonise about it for very long. Secondly: If you really are going to stress out about it then, no-one forces you to sell the film rights at gun point. You can always say no. And some writers do say no, they would just rather it never happened and I respect that decision. But I kind of like the idea that I write a story and then it leaps –not only over the language barrier – that’s cool when you write and you get a copy of your story back in Chinese or Hebrew…God speaks Hebrew! That’s great! –but then it goes over the media barrier and it becomes a film. Quite apart from considerations about ‘this is my baby’ I’m intellectually excited by that and I want to see what will happen. So curiosity trumped reserve.”
There is no mistaking that David is an Englishman from his soft spoken and perfectly enunciated accent, but he is as international as the media gathered around him, living for many years in Japan –where his wife is from –and currently living in County Cork of all places.
So what brought him to the southwest coast of Ireland?
“That is an Irish accent I hear then? Yes? Dublin? Oh, you’re a Jackeen then,” he laughs. “We know about you…” He’s obviously familiar with the ongoing rivalry between the Rebel county and the capital.
“It’s great. We had an eight month old baby, we didn’t own much, I’ve got a mobile job; where shall we live? I’ve been to west Cork and had a holiday on Cape Clear in the southwest corner of Ireland in the mid 90s and remembered how beautiful it was, and took my wife over for a little holiday to see if she liked it as well and she did. It’s like, if you could live in West Cork, why on Earth wouldn’t you want to live there, is how I feel. You’re a local boy and it’s natural to want to go as far away as you possibly can from where you grew up and I understand that too, but it is beautiful. Do you not think West Cork is sort of the California of Ireland?”
I answer with a skeptical look out the window at the very sunny real California.
According to online reports, David’s next novel will be part set in Ireland..
“Pieces of it are,” he confirms, although he sounds uncertain.. “It was going to have more Irish influences than it actually has now…. just because I’ve been reading Claire Keegan and John McGahern recently, these people can do Ireland. I can do London Irish though, so I’m sort of diluting both the Irishness and my exposure to ridicule. But we’ll see how it goes…”
His deadline is the end of June, but he admits he does’t know what it’s called yet.
“Sometimes it comes at the beginning, sometimes you find it, other times –like the last book –you wrack your brains because you don’t know what the hell to call it…I only gave the last title to my agent between Frankfurt Airport and Frankfurt Book Fair –that is as last minute as it gets! Cloud Atlas was there from before the beginning. It’s a piece of music, just a beautiful juxtaposition of words, it’s also helpfully vague and open to interpretation. Clouds were not immune to the enlightenment project and people began to map them, and categorize them at the end of the 18th century. In the context of the film, or the book, ‘atlas’ is existence and ‘clouds’ are souls. The Atlas is fixed and there and immutable; Clouds are mutable and changing and they move, like souls moving through time.”
While his upcoming novel will have plenty of Irish, the Asian influence in his current work is very apparent.
“I became interested in Buddhism when I was living in Japan, and still am, and as it happens reincarnation is such a beautiful literary device as well. [Yukio] Mishima uses it just gorgeously in the Sea of Fertility, the last thing he wrote before he died, which as got one of the best endings of any book ever, ever, ever. I read a lot of Japanese literature, Tanizaki Junichiro, Endo Shusaku, great historical novelist. My wife’s a Yamaguchi girl…and uh…we eat a lot of Japanese food. Japanese culture is a part of my life and I’m happy to have it there.”
Maybe in your previous life you were Japanese?
David laughs a little uncomfortably, considering it: “I don’t know if I had that honour,”he labours. “I cannot think of a subject that is more difficult to talk about on a press junket than spirituality and reincarnation. If you’ll let me off lightly on this one until such a point that we can have a bottle of wine in a restaurant, then we can talk about it.”
Time to offer a tangent so: “Did you spend much time on the set and what did you observe?
“Thank you! Yeah that’s a safe one…Yep, I spent a week and I observed the tribes. The Tribes of Filmmaking –The Directors, The Actors…actors are amazing. They’re shape shifters, they become other people; literally, in front of you, convincingly, scarily. That’s amazing. The other people I love talking to are dialogue coaches. I thought the worst word nerds in the world were writers, but no: dialogue coaches would out-nerd us. I met the main dialogue coach who had been hospitalized in Belfast, and she had had a fantastic time because when the lights went out the women would talk, and she would be lying in the darkness working out where they were from. And learning that this flatter ‘a’means Donegal, and this sort of contraction, glottal stop you get down in Wexford.”
Talk of Irish accents provides a perfect segue into one of the film’s biggest mysteries: Where on Earth is Dermot Hoggins supposed to be from? This journalist was quite excited when Hanks’ character appeared on screen spouting a rather convincing ‘modern’ Irish accent –and not the ‘top ‘o the marnin, faith and begorrah, too-ra-loo-ra-li Oirish accent Hollywood has been inflicting on the nation of Eire since the 1920s.
However, according to the press material, Hoggins has a ‘rugged Scottish brogue’ (typically, an ‘easy’accent – see every Michael Myers character, ever). And further, if you Google Dermot Hoggins (X), where ‘X’ is any country at all, you will find a hit.
Finishing on subject of Ireland, will he divulge any more information about his upcoming work? “It’s tough because it’s changing… It’s changed in the last week actually,’he muses. “There were going to be Irish parents of a pub in Gravesend where the book starts, so the kids would be English and Irish. I’m actually making it one step easier on myself, it’s now only an Irish mother, so there’ll be Irish in the diet. “However the last novella of the six novellas that make up the book will be set on Sheepshead Peninsula (in Cork) in the year 2038 when oil is $1,000 a barrel.”
Cloud Atlas screens at 7.30pm on 16th February in The Savoy as part of the wider Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2013.
