Harold Pinter: interview

Harold Pinter stands as a colossus in our culture, both as a world-class playwright and, latterly, as a deeply moral voice of protest. But he's also the author of 25 screenplays, the latest of which is his adaptation of 'Sleuth'. He tells Time Out how a girl from Hackney film club ignited a life-long love of the silver screen

Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for literature in the autumn of 2005 and appeared on that evening’s ‘Newsnight’ looking like an ageing pirate fresh from a sea scuffle. His capped face was gaunt, his head bandaged (the result of a recent tumble), but he was thrilled to be seizing such a prestigious award from the good men of the Swedish Academy. ‘I haven’t stopped being speechless,’ was his initial reaction, delivered to journalists from the doorstep of his home in Holland Park.

The award arrived in the middle of a tumultuous few years in the writer’s life, during which he had been battling hard on the twin fronts of illness and politics. Just as Dennis Potter, in the early ’90s, chose to call his cancer ‘Rupert’, after Murdoch, so one imagines that Pinter, if pressed, may have opted to name his cancer of the oesophagus – diagnosed in 2001 – ‘George’ or ‘Tony’, after the leaders he has repeatedly suggested should be tried for war crimes.

Speechless is not a sobriquet often applied to Pinter who, at 77, is on strong form when we meet in the tidy mews house that lies behind his main home in the shadows of Notting Hill Gate and serves as his working lair. It’s the evening of Halloween and his young assistant, Joanna, is pinning a notice to the door to warn away trick-or-treaters. Pinter is upstairs in his study, already established in a low armchair with a full glass of white wine by his side. Books are everywhere – I spy an entire row dedicated to Philip Roth – and there’s a shelf lined with photos of his cricket team, each of which show the writer-captain seated proudly in the middle of his 11 men.

Michael Caine and Jude Law in 'Sleuth'

How is he? ‘Fine,’ he says, pausing and responding to my health-check with a fair-to-middling weather report delivered in a voice as deep as it is authoritative. ‘Just fine.’ His treatment for cancer in 2002 was successful but, since then, he has also suffered from a rare skin disease called pemphigus and was in hospital days before our meeting. Still, he looks well: he’s fuller of face than two years ago, his trademark bushy sideburns are in order, and he’s as spirited as ever in conversation, though the walking stick propped up against his chair hints at a physical frailty. Resilience is the theme: despite his illnesses, he’s rarely disappeared from view. He performed Beckett’s one-man-play, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, for ten nights at the Royal Court in October last year and, the day before we meet, his name pops up on the radio as one of three signatories, along with John Pilger and Denis Halliday, of a letter to the Daily Telegraph protesting against the unveiling of a statue in Parliament Square of wartime PM David Lloyd George, a move he and his fellow agitators describe as ‘disgraceful’.

For at least the last 20 years, Pinter has been a voracious campaigner for human rights, a pursuit first made concrete by a visit to Turkey with Arthur Miller in 1985. Much has been written, and much of it illogical and with an agenda, on whether and why Pinter came late to politics. While it’s true that Pinter only fully fitted a loudspeaker to his conscience well into his fifties, it’s unhelpful to consider him an apolitical writer before that date: how could anyone witness the menacing powerplay of ‘The Birthday Party’ or ‘The Homecoming’ – plays written in the playwright’s twenties or thirties – and not detect a distinct interest in how we treat each other and, more specifically, how appallingly we can treat each other when systems and relationships go awry? Moreover, Pinter – the son of Jewish parents who chose to reject Judaism in his teens – has spoken of the lasting effect of witnessing anti-semitism in the East End where he grew up in the late 1940s. He may not have been at the barricades in the 1960s but, equally, his decision to become a conscientious objector when called up for national service in 1949 does not suggest a young man devoid of political engagement.

We’re sitting in Pinter’s office this evening because he has written a screenplay – his twenty-fifth, in fact – which may come as a surprise to those who perceive him first and foremost as playwright and author of such milestones of twentieth century British theatre as ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘Betrayal’. The new film is an adaptation of ‘Sleuth’, the play by Anthony Shaffer that Joseph Mankiewicz first directed for cinema in 1972. ‘I’d never seen the film or the play,’ he says. ‘So I looked at the play and I thought: I think I might have some fun with this.’

In the course of our hour-long conversation, Pinter makes it clear that he regards his work for cinema with as much fondness as his poetry and theatrical writing. ‘I have enjoyed my work in films like nobody’s business.’ His first screenplay was a version of ‘The Caretaker’ in 1963 and he has since adapted several others of his plays, such as the devastating ‘Betrayal’ in 1983. The rest are adaptations of novels, starting with Robin Maugham’s ‘The Servant’ for Joseph Losey in 1963 and continuing with John Fowles’ ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ in 1981 and Ian McEwan’s ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ in 1990. It was with Losey, though, that he enjoyed his most treasured collaboration. ‘We had a kind of understanding, an intuition,’ he recalls warmly of the American director, who died in 1984. ‘We hardly needed to talk about some things.’

A few days later, we meet again at a restaurant off Portobello Road as he poses for a photo, a glass of white wine loyally at his side. ‘How’s it going?’ he inquires. Fine. And you? ‘Me? I’m not going anywhere…’

Time Out: You grew up in Hackney in the 1930s and ’40s. Was film important to you as a child and young man?
‘Oh yeah, it meant everything to me as a boy. Much more than the theatre. I hardly went to the theatre. The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare. We were taken by our English master. But film obsessed me from a very early age. I’m talking about the ’40s, while war was still on, and I saw “The Way Ahead” and “The Way to the Stars”, that kind of thing.

It was a golden age of film-going.
‘They were bloody good films, too. But I also fell in love with the French cinema. This was when I was about 15 or 16. And I joined – how I managed it, I don’t know – a film club. A few friends and me used to go and watch Buñuel, Carné, Cocteau… Cocteau and Buñuel were surrealism. And I was very excited by that. “Un Chien Andalou”, especially.’

You enjoyed the close companionship of schoolfriends. Did you talk cinema?
‘Oh yeah. I mean one of my friends used to say to me, “Oh Christ, we’re not going to see another one of your hideous pieces of surrealist shit, are we?” And I’d say, “Yes, we are. Tomorrow.”’

You were a bit of an instigator?
‘Yes, I was, on that front anyway. We knew we were inhabiting a very rich area of artistic life. I mustn’t omit another very strong element which was American B-films, those black-and-white thrillers. Great stuff. So my imagination was stirred by the cinema from a very early age.’

Was the film club in Hackney?
‘In Hackney, yeah. I remember I fell in love with the girl who ran it. I wrote her a love letter. I was 14 or 15. She wrote back and said, “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” She introduced me to this whole world of cinema.’

When you were an actor in rep, I’m assuming that the cinema was never on your horizon. There’s more fluidity between the worlds of film and theatre now.
‘Oh Christ, yes. Too right. I never had such ambitions. It never occurred to me I’d have anything to do with cinema. It was something happening on the other side of the moon. When I came back to London from Ireland, I did a lot of acting on radio, and then I wrote a couple of plays years later, in 1957, and one of them was an absolute disaster, “The Birthday Party”.’

It was only a disaster initially…
‘No, it hasn’t remained a disaster, I have to say. But I did ask myself what the hell I was doing in this whole world anyway. I could hardly be said to be earning any money.’

You had doubts about your writing?
‘…And the acting. I wasn’t getting any work anyway, as an actor. Not much anyway. Then, in 1953, when I joined the Donald Wolfit Shakespearean company, I started to play a few parts and later I went into rep, proper provincial rep.

Did travelling influence your writing?
‘I was writing poems all the time. I wrote poems from when I was about 12. But the richest part of the life as a travelling actor was in Ireland. That’s where I found another life altogether. My father was a tailor, he worked from seven o’clock in the morning until seven at night. At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day. So we were not well-off in any way – he d was a working man and that was it. Then later, when I went to Ireland, I found a poverty I didn’t know existed. I assure you that going to Connemara and Galway and Mayo in 1950 was to encounter a totally different world.'

‘The Caretaker’ was the first of your plays that you adapted for the cinema.
‘We made “The Caretaker” for £30,000, which was quite something, really.

Then you wrote ‘The Servant’; how did you start working with Joseph Losey?
‘I was writing plays at the time and had started to have plays done at the Royal Shakespeare Company by Peter Hall. Anyway, Joe asked me to come and see him and he said, “I like your screenplay.” I said, “Oh, thanks.” And he said, “But there are some things I don’t like about it.” And I said, “What things?” And he told me. So I said, “All right then, why don’t you just go and make another movie?” I left the house. Two days later, he called me and he said, “Look, why we don’t we try to start again?” And I said, “All right”. We worked together for nearly 30 years, and we never had another cross word.’

There’s no guarantee in cinema that a film will be made. Your adaptation of Proust’s ‘A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’ is still unfilmed to this day.
‘Well, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve only worked with directors that I’ve respected. I have written about 25 scripts over the years, three of them were never made and another three fucked up. I took my name off one and with some reluctance left my name on another. The one I took my name off was “The Remains of the Day”, for which they took my script and rewrote it. But the truth is that the roughly 18 films that I’ve had made have not been touched. They’ve been filmed exactly as I wrote them. I’m not only talking about dialogue but structure as well. I’ve always been very amenable, to put it mildly, to discussions about structure. It’s such a delicate business, the structure of film, isn’t it? What happens if a scene is not there but two minutes later? It’s an eternal, never-ending search actually, which is very exciting. It really is.’

You’ve said that the writing of your plays often begins with a single image. It’s entirely different to adapt a work.
‘Well, there’s a certain kind of correspondence. It’s difficult to define. When I was adapting Proust, I spent three months working with Joe and this woman Barbara Bray, who was a great Proustian authority. We used to meet and talk. And then one day Joe says to me, “Okay, Harold, you’ve got to go away and write the bloody thing.” I said, “What? Jesus Christ…” I went back to my house and I called him the next day or the day after and I said, “Look, I’m sitting in front of a yellow pad and I’ve got all these bloody notes which we’ve been talking about and I can’t write a word. I cannot start.” He said, “Look, why don’t you take a walk round the park and call me later? Get a bit of fresh air.” So I did, and I called him a few hours later and I said, “I can’t start. I cannot start. There’s a blank piece of paper and I don’t know what Scene One is…” ’

There’s no equivalent of Joe Losey behind you when you write for theatre.
‘Oh, you’re absolutely right. It’s a totally different state of affairs. So, anyway, Joe said, “All right, why don’t you go to sleep? Just go to sleep and call me in the morning. So, I said “okay”, had a few drinks, went to sleep, woke up, and about 11 o’clock the next morning I phoned him and said, “Look, Joe, I can’t start.” And he said to me, “In that case, there’s only one thing to do.” I said, “What?” He said, “START!” And I did.

You had a very good relationship.
‘We had a kind of understanding, an intuition. I liked everything he did of mine, but probably “Accident” is the film I really loved more than any that we did together. I remember there’s a shot in “Accident” when Dirk Bogarde leaves the house: the door closes and Joe held the shot… and waited… and then he cut. He didn’t do anything else, it was so simple, but it was so resonant and I knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew I knew. Normally, these days, let’s face it, in most things you see – not everything, there are still some mighty good movies out there – but to a great extent, someone leaves the room, the door closes and bang…! They cut immediately to the top of a skyscraper. They cannot rest.’

I watched ‘Accident’ again last night…
‘Oh, did you?’

The film allows us space for thought.
‘Oh boy, exactly. I saw a film – why I saw it, I’ve no idea, but I found myself seeing it – called “The Bourne Ultimatum”, and I thought: Fucking hell! This guy is clearly the strongest man in the world. He can beat up about 12 people in about 35 seconds and kill half of them and the whole thing is totally unreal! I didn’t believe one word of it. In fact, I was stupefied by it, it was so lacking in intelligence and disassociated from reality.’

Did you see that in the cinema?
‘I went to the cinema, God help me, which is not one of my most beguiling experiences, going to the actual cinema, because of those bloody ads and trailers. I sit there seething, thinking: What am I doing here, being blasted, bombarded by this sound? It just knocks you out.

The director of ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ is seen by some as a master of dramatic realism. He made ‘Bloody Sunday’.
‘You mean Paul Greengrass? Of course, I know exactly who you’re talking about. I saw “Bloody Sunday”, I also saw “United 93”: that fellow is no chump. I’ll tell you something, and this is true: I’ve never been able to write a film which I didn’t respect, I just can’t do it. I’m very happy about all the films I haven’t done.’

Your Nobel lecture in 2005 spoke of the political duty of the artist. Is there anyone in cinema who fulfils that duty?
‘It’s difficult for me to answer that question just like that. All I can say is that I did admire, “The Lives of Others”, which I thought was really about something and beautifully done.’

Most American efforts that attempt a political discourse seem to follow opinion, not stir it.
‘I think you’re dead right. I think there’s a cynical attitude towards what is going to be popular. I do, however, admire George Clooney. I think he’s not a fool. I respect him. But, let’s face it, the fact remains that Hollywood has always been an extraordinary bloody place. Always. Hollywood, mainly, is a kind of shithouse. But out of this shithouse, they’ve produced the most surprising films.

Your outspokenness is more accepted now. I’m thinking of the criticism you received in the ’80s when you set up a discussion group among friends.
‘You’re dead right, that’s very accurate. In those days, in the ’80s, we set up a group of pretty intelligent people who wanted to discuss what was going on in this country. That’s all. And people found it absolutely disgusting! Also they found it laughable that intelligent people could meet and try to talk about the society in which they live. I think that, perhaps, there’s a change because I have to tell you that since I made that Nobel speech, I received thousands of letters, and lots of them from Americans by the way.’

Your activism is certainly less ridiculed.
‘That is true. But I still get the occasional contemptuous reference. I’m used to it. There was a column yesterday in the bloody Evening Standard in which someone quoted a poem that I wrote and missed out the title, which was crucial: “Democracy”. I wrote it just before the war, just before the invasion, and it goes like this:
“There’s no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They’ll fuck everything in sight.
Watch Your Back.”
He quoted it and said, as it were, “This fella calls this a poem?” See what I mean? Well, bollocks! As far as I’m concerned, it’s a poem all right! So I just take all that kind of thing in my stride. But there’s much less of it now, you’re quite right, than there was ten, 20 years ago.’

Are you taking things more quietly now?
‘I’ve two things to say on that. One is that I have been pretty ill over the past five years, quite seriously ill, but I’m still around, as luck will have it. But apart from that, the views and the thoughts don’t change, as long as I’ve got the energy to get up from this chair…’

You must have been very proud to have done ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ last year?
‘Yes, I loved doing that. It was like a real shot in the dark. What the hell? Go out and do it! I have to say, one last thing: that I had a great time writing “Sleuth” recently. Some people tend to forget a little thing about me, that I also enjoy writing, I enjoy having fun. I enjoy language.
I enjoy that kind of… comic conflict.’

Surely that’s what first comes to mind when people think of you – language?
‘I wouldn’t know… I suppose it is. It keeps me going, you know? It keeps me alive, in fact.’

‘Sleuth’ opens on November 23.

Pinter on screen
The Caretaker (1963)
Pinter found success with his third play in 1960 and later adapted it for cinema, with both Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates resuming their stage roles, shot in a house in Hackney where the writer grew up.

The Servant (1963)
Dirk Bogarde is the live-in employee to James Fox’s aristocratic bachelor, but traditional master-servant relations soon take an odd turn.

The Pumpkin Eater (1964)
‘One of the finest films I’ve ever been associated with. I think this has been shamefully neglected and is an absolute knockout.’ That’s Pinter’s verdict.

Accident (1967)
Pinter’s second collaboration with Joseph Losey was an adaptation of Nicholas Mosley’s novel and also featured Bogarde.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
Pinter added a contemporary twist to John Fowles’ novel: Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep play both the nineteenth-century lovers of Fowles’ book and two urbane actors playing them in a film.

Betrayal (1983)
Pinter’s 1978 play was based on his own, seven-year affair with Joan Bakewell.

The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
With this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, Pinter and director Paul Schrader attributed a creepy malevolence to the dark streets of Venice.

Sleuth (2007)
Pinter has bypassed the film and gone back to Shaffer’s play for this new version with Jude Law and Michael Caine. The themes are classic Pinter: where game-playing slips into torture and where fun turns into menace.

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