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DAVID THEWLIS AND HIS HOPELESS, HILARIOUS FICTION - PART 2
The Vice Interview
The book is also set amid the Young British Artists scene. People like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are mentioned.
It was an alternative to setting it in the film world. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be an actor writing about acting and films, but there were still some things I wanted to talk about in terms of celebrity and rivalry—some of the things I’ve experienced in my own career. I also thought it would be much more visual and entertaining to set it in the art world, of which I am a fan. I’m usually to be found at the openings of most things back in Britain, or wherever I am. I’m in Los Angeles now and I always try to see all the exhibitions and go to the galleries.
So I figured it would be sort of expected of me to write a book that had to do with acting, but I found it more interesting to investigate the art world. I’d like to get away from being perceived as an actor who’s written a novel and get the book judged more on its own merit.
It would also get scrutinized even more than it’s already bound to in terms of “Which parts of this are autobiographical?” if you set it in the acting world.
If it was written in the first person and the narrator was an actor, people would assume that it was entirely based on my own life even if I didn’t use anything that was even remotely autobiographical. As it is now, the autobiographical elements of this book sort of disappear within the first two chapters. There’s nothing that happens in there that really happened to me. I’ve never been that crazy.
You’ve written a lot of poetry, but fiction writing is a real bitch. Was it difficult to get this done?
The hardest thing, which is what I’m going through now as I try to write my second book, is structure. Having a solid plot and knowing where you’re going with it, rather than writing in a void and painting yourself into a corner. To know what you’re saying from the beginning helps, and I always pretty much knew how this book would end. I knew it was going to end in violence because that was something that interested me.
What sort of violence interested you?
People who find their lives at such a dead end that they commit a crime like a random shooting—that’s always fascinated me. Whenever that pops up in the news, it’s very intriguing. How can someone have lost it so much to not only kill themselves or one other person but actually kill strangers at random?
When you set out to write the novel did you have a philosophy or a theme in mind, or was it more about having a narrative and letting the morality take care of itself?
It was more about the narrative. I didn’t necessarily want to say anything thematic apart from exploring the nature of envy, jealousy, rivalry, and the theft of creative work. Morally…
It isn’t a hugely moral book!
Yeah, I don’t think there’s a strong moral at the end of the book. It’s about an amoral character—a selfish, self-involved character. A monster in the end.
But the book is so funny too.
I always wanted it to be comedic, but a very black comedy. I would have bored myself if I wrote such a thing in a serious tone. I also didn’t want it to be just a farcical series of escapades. I wanted to use comedy to investigate something very dark and psychologically disturbing.
It is very funny.
I’ve always tended to write comedy, but I’d hate to just write some kind of sitcom or a lighthearted series of jokes and slapstick. I wanted to talk about some deeper things within the comedy.
I think the most effective part of the book for me is the dialogue, especially Hector’s inner monologues. Is it your acting experience that taught you to write such great speeches?
Yeah, I think so. Obviously, I’m used to not only speaking dialogue all the time but also reading scripts—often with very, very bad dialogue. It happens so often that you’ll get a script with a good story but the dialogue is found wanting. So I’m forever on the set trying to change the dialogue. A lot of writers of film scripts, I think, don’t actually read their work back to themselves. They don’t see how it can’t be spoken very well and it doesn’t sound like the way real people speak.
TO BE CONTINUED:
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