Acting on the Page
I always agreed with Laurence Olivier, I mean, that method acting’s what you do when you don’t have talent. Writing fiction, for me all it is really is acting, just on the page, not the stage. It’s creating this made-up place and stepping into it, believing it, and that’s how the characters become real – they’re all you. At least the main ones. I’m not saying that ‘sincerity’ and ‘literary’ are exclusive, either, some either/or situation. A poorly written novel about talking jaguars isn’t necessarily sincere, and, at the same time, a beautifully-crafted story about a family falling apart doesn’t have to be sincere either.
Gregory Frye interviews Stephen Graham Jones.
What a Performance
When the film was originally sold to Warner Bros there was no script. The company had somehow assumed that a film about a meeting between a rock star and a gangster – the basis of the slim outline they had been given – would be a caper movie, a screen synthesis of spoof criminals with the pop-playfulness of the Beatles‘ film A Hard Day’s Night. That was not what they got. Instead, they were landed with a film which included copious amounts of violence, sex, drugs and rock and roll all served-up with an almost aristocratic insouciance.
Nicky Charlish on Donald Cammell & Nicholas Roeg‘s seminal Sixties film Performance.