John Fowles on The Collector

There’s an excerpt from The Journals of John Fowles in The Guardian about the making of the movie The Collector, based on Fowles’s novel. It sounds like nothing much ever changes in Hollywood, no matter how much everyone always thinks it does:

The awful American-English language problem. Anything that wouldn’t be comprehensible to the average American moron Willie objects to. We had the line: “I did it to exorcise you from my life.” “Exorcise, exorcise,” said Willie. “Who’s ever going to be able to say that – we need another line.” “I did it to get you out of my system,” I suggested. Yes, that was fine. But Willie kept on saying it over and over again. “Out of my system, out of my system, OUT of my SYSTEM. That sounds kind of peculiar.” About 20 minutes later, we ended up with “I did it to get you out of my mind.” Everything has to be mish-mashed to a smooth banality.

(During one of my first classes at USC, we would read out one another’s scripts in class, so we could hear what we’d written. I used “schadenfreude” at one point; the classmate reading it had never heard the word before, let alone had a clue how to pronounce it.)

What’s amazing, of course, is that the filmmakers even had Fowles on the set to begin with. Whatever were they thinking?

(Apropos of nothing: it cracks me up that you can use the Seven Dirty Words (whatever they are) in British papers and American papers still insist on using dashes, as though the people reading don’t immediately have to stop and mentally fill in the blanks, thereby paying more attention to the word than they otherwise would. The funniest one is when the dashes don’t seem to correlate to any bannable word that I know of, and I have to stop and think what they possibly could have meant.)