Patrick Marber - Interviews

GETTING CLOSER TO PATRICK MARBER

Congratulations on the Golden Globe nomination...
A. Thank you very much!

You must be very chuffed?
A. Very chuffed, very surprised and trying very hard not to take awards and nominations very seriously, which is a really boring response.

You can build your hopes too high sometimes...
A. Oh I know I can't possibly win! I'm just going there for the fun, but I'm not writing a speech.

But now you have Golden Globe nominee under your belt, to go with Olivier Award winner...
A. I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

But it is a brilliant screenplay. It pulls viewers in a lot of different directions and it is very challenging?
A. Yes, well I hope so. But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make. And whether you like it or not, it's authentic; it's the real deal, and it doesn't pull its punches. It's a film-makers film and I love it for that. He hasn't sold it out, it's just what he wanted to make. And very few films these days, that you see, do you feel that there's a sort of artist's hand at work, and is doing what you wanted it to do. I felt like that when I saw Paul Pavlikovsky's My Summer of Love. I just thought here's a guy in full command of the medium - you just feel confident from the first shot. And I felt like that with Mike, you know, as soon as you see Natalie Portman walking towards you in slow motion, you just think 'oh, right, I can relax, he knows what he's doing'. And it's a really nice feeling.
It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

But probably one of the most important. I mean, if it weren't for you there would be no story?
A. Sure. But he's the teller of the story, somehow, more than I am. When it was a play, I'm the teller of the story, but the director of the film is really the teller of the story.

You and Mike Nichols first started talking about adapting Closer into a film in 1999, when it first went to Broadway?
A. That's right, yeah, I had breakfast with him in the spring of '99. He'd seen the play and he'd read the play and he just said he wanted to do a film of it. And I said 'let me think about that' and took a couple of years...