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David Thewlis as Johnny in Mike Leigh’s
Naked (1993) | |
DAVID THEWLIS AND HIS HOPELESS, HILARIOUS FICTION - PART 3
The Vice Interview
You’ve got experience not only with writing, but with a lot of improvisation as well.
Well for me, the dialogue tends to be some of the easiest stuff to write because it’s like improvising, really—improvisation with myself. I’d take a conversation between Hector and his mother that had to do with A, B, and C and let it ramble on for like 20 pages of longhand in a notebook and then I’d return to it and cut out whole pages of what wasn’t interesting or funny or relevant.
Most of your dialogue in Naked was improvised…
Yeah.
Is that character, in a way, a piece of fiction that you wrote?
I mean, I see this book as a kind of relative of
Naked, much more than anything else I’ve done acting-wise. I certainly don’t think I would ever have written this book if I hadn’t done
Naked. Doing that movie was when I realized that I could write something substantial. Mike Leigh gave me the opportunity and the wherewithal to channel a lot of ideas I may have had in my head for many years and to put them into a form to which he gave a structure and characters to bounce it all off.
The book does have a real kinship with the film.
Mike was the first person who suggested to me that I should write a novel. He thought that was where my future lay rather than making films myself. And I have done that, but I don’t have a passion for it. I always really did want to be a writer of short stories and novels. Even before I wanted to be an actor, that was my ambition. So Mike certainly helped me gain confidence in thinking I was capable of doing such a thing.
There’s a common thread of misanthropy that runs through your book and your character in Naked.
There’s a natural progression there. I think the book is probably funnier than Naked—although Naked is quite funny. A lot of people don’t think so. They’ll say, “What do you mean? It’s not funny at all.” But I’m like, “There are some good gags in Naked!” It was meant to be a black comedy, of course—maybe more black than comedy.
I liked how as I read the novel my feelings for Hector, the main character, shifted. At first I felt empathy for him, but I started to realize that he was transforming into an awful person. Where did the inspiration for this guy come from?
He’s a mixture of some people I know. He’s partly me, obviously. But only partly. In some ways, you could say I’m more like his best friend, Lenny. Their relationship is somewhat based on my experiences with a few friends who resented my success. When I did Naked, for example, I started getting calls from Hollywood and ended up kind of where I am right now, driving around meeting anyone who’s anyone in this town, then coming back to England and telling a few stories of this kind of adventure I’d had out in Los Angeles. A lot of people were like, “Wow, that’s fucking great, how exciting, what a great novelty, that must be interesting.” But then a handful of people were very resentful of it. So in the book, in a way, I’m more like the character Lenny, who’s just come back from America with his namedropping and his success and everybody wanting to photograph him and getting recognized in public. That’s more what happened to me. I had the bitter friend at my side, and that’s the sort of person Hector is based on.
There are real-life precedents for these guys.
Yeah. Again, when you work with Mike Leigh you base your characters on a real, living person who is in your acquaintance. And I really enjoyed creating such a sort of sad guy as Hector. [laughs] At the same time, I struggled to keep him likable, to not turn the reader off too much. I didn’t people to be like, “God, I don’t even want to know what happens to this guy because he’s such a pain in the ass.” I wanted him to have something so pathetic about him that you’re going to follow him because you want to see this loser fall, but also keep him nice enough to maintain that interest. Even though he’s diabolical at times, there’s his love for his mother and father and his love for his girlfriend.
But he’s such a mess. You want to grab him and slap him and go, “Snap the fuck out of it!”
He’s always making the wrong decisions. I thought it would be interesting to create a character that is just constantly making the wrong decision. I wanted to have him do that again and again and again, and see where that landed him.
The pace of his descent, and even the pace of the actual writing, really accelerates as you get toward the end of the book. The climax is quite shocking.
I wanted it to be a sudden rush at the end. I didn’t want people to anticipate it once it started going. As I was writing it, once it got very dark, once the first two deaths occurred, I started to think it was maybe too much. But then I thought, well, maybe I should just kill everyone! I thought, look at Shakespeare. He did that all the time and nobody complained. Look at the end of Hamlet. There are like 15 bodies on the floor!
INTERVIEWED BY JESSE PEARSON
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