The Script
‘Bad City Blues’ was the Devil’s own job to adapt; or to use a colloquialism, ‘a right bastard’. The process wasn’t made any easier - even if the script was made much better - by the ceaseless scourge of the director’s lash. The novel is a hellish maelstrom of crazed, mentally unbalanced, demon-driven characters, most of them with personal histories of considerable complexity and great importance - exactly the kind of characters worst suited to contemporary film. The events of the story range over five different narrative time-space zones - some stretching back to childhood, some representing the fevered nightmares of the protagonist, and set in numerous locations - Central and South America, New Orleans, guerilla strongholds and bayou swamps. Flashbacks and hallucinations abound. A multitude of interwoven sub-plots fight each other like wild dogs for prominence. And the entire central portion of the novel, a good 50% or more, is taken up by a ‘conversation’ - an unhinged journey into madness and revelation - between two men in a single room. Whilst the novel as a form is able to take such gymnastics in its stride, film - certainly modern film - runs screaming in terror. Which in a way sums up my own instinctive impulse on first contemplating the task I had set myself.

The problem is this: a novel may effortlessly weave in and out of a character’s head, dip into both memories of the past and visions of the future, and convey fascinating information by the ton without breaking the mood, the grip, the flow - because it’s all there in the words on the page which come to life in the dance with the reader’s imagination. On film all these things are either invisible - or the subject of dialogue of intolerable tedium and turgidity. As in life, a person in a novel may transport himself or herself into any corner of the universe, known or unknown, whilst sitting on the back of a bus. We do it all the time. It’s called daydreaming. Or remembering. Or worrying. Or fantasizing. Without this gift we would go insane; or turn into plants. But in a film, all you have is a guy, or gal, sitting on the back of a bus - or standing against a wall with a black bag on his head as his mind splits apart like rotting fruit. How do you convey such inner experience on film? How do you communicate the teeming psychic turmoil of a silent man? How does one make visual a world in which the coin of survival is secrecy - the guarded-with-one’s-very-life secrecy of love and hatred and shame? How does one portray a twenty-four hour conversation - for all that it’s an epic duel with neither rules nor limits between two men of mythic stature - in the middle of an amphetamine-fuelled film without sending the viewer into a coma?

These were only some of the challenges that faced us.
The great writer and director Paul Schrader once described the conventional Hollywood Movie thus: ‘You tell the audience what’s going to happen; then you show it happening; then you tell them what they’ve just seen.’ Clearly this wasn’t going to work for us, if only because so much does indeed happen in the underbelly of Bad City that the film would be nine hours long or more. In the cauldron of collaboration, we realised that only an approach as bold, as driven and as unconventional as the characters themselves would stand any chance of success. So the structure of screenplay - and the film itself - became a kind of narrative Rubik’s Cube: with each twist of the story one knew - or at least hoped - that one was somehow getting closer to that distant resolution that would only arrive at the very last moment - the moment of truth. We had to place our trust in the veracity and conviction of the characters, of the many superb artists of every stripe that we hoped would join us, and most of all in the willingness of the audience to throw caution to the winds, engage heart and mind, and dance to the Bad City Blues like pagans beneath a blood red sky. We cut, we re-defined, we re-invented. We condemned important characters into oblivion and introduced new ones. We changed motivations and histories. We simplified. We complexified. We spoke in tongues. We sat staring into space waiting for our foreheads to bleed. We prayed to the muses and we cursed God. We abandoned all fidelity to the novel itself in order to remain faithful to the mysterious and elusive truth that lies at the heart of any story. Or as Shakespeare might have put it, ‘a dark tornado of betrayal, vengeance, sex and redemption by any other name would smell as sweet’. After many months, and over two hundred and fifty e-mails no less driven and intense than the story itself, we decanted the molten residue from the cauldron’s bottom, scraped away the dross afloat on top, and gambled all we had, bollocks included, on what was left. We believed it to be gold. A sufficient number of actors, investors, cinematographers, production and costume and make-up designers, stunt men, musicians, Panavision and Technicolor executives - a motley collection from the four corners of the world and mad gamblers each and every one - believed it along with us in order to get the film made.

Against all logic and odds the film came to be.

When Giuseppe Verdi was adapting Macbeth into an opera he wrote to his librettist, Francesco Piave:

‘If we cannot do something great, let us at least do something out of the ordinary.’ Giuseppe Verdi

Bad City Blues is out of the ordinary.
Come and see.

Tim Willocks