Interview

Hampton examines 'Agent'

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

Christopher Hampton is treading on sacred ground with his latest feature film project. It's "The Secret Agent," and it's based on the same Joseph Conrad novel that is not only admired by thousands of readers the world over, but has served as the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 "Sabotage," an acknowledged early classic from the master director. But Hitchcock wasn't all that faithful to Conrad, and all the promotions for Hampton's film make it very clear that this is "Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent," or at least that it's intended to be as such. So that prompts the question of how Hampton's approach differs from Hitchcock's, as well as whether the sophomore filmmaker had any reservations about venturing into the realm of the remake, as we begin our telephone conversation.
"Well, it's about as crazy as you can get to remake a Hitchcock movie," Hampton said from his New York office several days prior to the film's release, "but one of the reasons it's called `Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent' is that its intention is to be kind of an accurate, faithful and loyal version of the book. Hitchcock had a completely different agenda. He updated it; he changed the story. There's very little flavor of Conrad left in it. I mean, it's a very interesting film in its own right, but not really comparable, I think. I actually didn't see the film again before I started working; I had seen it some time ago. I've looked at it again since I've finished the film, but it didn't really figure much in my thinking. Indeed, the whole reason I wrote the screenplay in the first place was simply because Bob Hoskins invited me to, and it's a book I've always loved. I also like Bob very much and I thought (Verloc) was a very good part for him."
And what exactly is that "flavor of Conrad" so conspicuously missing from Hitchcock's film?
"It's a sort of sardonic tone, I think," Hampton said. "Curiously enough, (it's) a tone that's not unlike late Hitchcock, which somehow doesn't make it into `Sabotage.' It's very cool, detached, tough and uncompromising. `The Secret Agent' was a really innovative book because it sort of inaugurated a whole new genre of novel. It's impossible to imagine Graham Greene or John LeCarr having written quite the way they did without `The Secret Agent,' and I wanted to catch that tone that sort of said things are not as they seem, they're going to get worse, and whole lot of new threats are going to come into people's lives in the 20th century, so beware. In that sense, I don't think Conrad is like his famous contemporaries. He's not like Henry James or Thomas Hardy because he's facing forward. He's talking about things--he's talking about ambiguities and complexities and betrayals--that will become peculiarly characteristic of the 20th century."
It is a warning that seems valid for the 21st century as well.
"What seems to me uncanny is that this screenplay was written five years ago, it took all that time that films do take to make, and in the last 18 months or so things have started to happen that are very eerily reminiscent of what's discussed in `The Secret Agent'--the Oklahoma bombing, the Unabomber, the guys in Japan putting stuff in the subway. All those sorts of things are a kind of motiveless terrorism which may be some kind of fin de si�cle madness, such as was operating at the time that Conrad was describing."
Despite its flaws, "The Secret Agent" is consistently visually impressive, especially given the constraints of a low budget when working in a period setting. The London street settings feel authentic, the atmosphere is potent, and Hampton shows it all off quite well during multiple stedicam shots of considerable duration.
"It was a tight budget. It was $7 million, and my main struggle was to persuade the studio to allow me to build that set, which was very expensive. They wanted me to find a location and we tried very hard to find a location, but we never found anything. We went all over and never found anything that looked like what I had in my mind's eye. So in the end, when it came to backs against the wall, I traded five days of shooting for the right to build that set, which made it tough to get the film done on time, but it seemed like a bargain worth making."
Hampton's previous film was "Carrington," a stunning debut and a masterpiece that was one of last year's best films. In addition, it was a film shot primarily on location and outdoors, unlike "The Secret Agent," which is heavily sound stage-based, and I asked Hampton about his preference between the two shooting methods.
"I think location shooting is more fun, and I sort of had more fun shooting `Carrington,'" he said. "It was the hottest summer ever when we did `The Secret Agent' and the studio was full of horse shit and fish rotting, but one of the things I wanted to do was to try to make a completely different sort of film from `Carrington'--a film that called on completely different skills. So I used all the same people--I used the same director of photography and designer and editor--and I said, `Look, we need to make something that looks quite different and with a quite different style.' It was interesting to me to explore a completely different side of making a film."
Robin Williams stars in "The Secret Agent" as a "mad" professor of sorts who roams the streets of London with a ticking time bomb forever strapped to himself, ready to explode whenever he should see fit. It's an effective performance and, while the character has no direct bearing on the action of the story, he comes to serve a symbolic purpose in Conrad's grand design.
"He is the cold voice of the future. At the end of the film he talks about how, in the future, governments will exterminate the weak, obviously like the Nazis did, and he says, `I myself have no future, but I am a force.' I think that force is abroad today. `The Secret Agent' is one of the Unabomber's primary texts, I think. I don't think he used it in the way Conrad was hoping the book would be used, but clearly if there's anybody around who's like the professor, it's him."
When Hampton and I spoke last year at this time, on the occasion of "Carrington"'s Los Angeles premiere, he briefly made reference to the two or three dozen different endings he had written for Stephen Frear's "Mary Reilly," at the bequest of a very nervous studio. Since then, that expensive and oft-delayed retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story has come and gone--a non-event quickly relegated to an eternity on video stores' dusty shelves. However, it's tough to resist asking Hampton about his final feelings about that much-maligned motion picture.
"I think it's an absolute object lesson in the dangers of spending too much money. I think if it had been made for a fifth of the budget it was made for, it would have been a much more interesting film. I think once the spending gets out of control in that way, you lose focus. You start to paddle about in some huge pool instead of swimming purposefully forward. However, I went to see the movie in Tahiti--where I was researching my next project--on a Saturday evening and the audiences loved it. I didn't feel ashamed of it and didn't feel the urge to repudiate it in any way when it came out. I know it was a disaster for the studio, but I'm perfectly happy to have the film against my name."
And what is it that Hampton was working on in Tahiti? A new screenplay? A new directorial effort? Or both?
"It's already written. It's actually an adaptation of `The Moon and Sixpence' by Sommerset Maugham, inspired by the story of Gaugin. The character in the film and the book is not Gaugin. It's an English painter who goes through roughly the same experiences as Gaugin and winds up in Tahiti. I always felt that the book would make a very good movie, and in fact (it) was already made into a movie in the `40s with George Sanders. So that's my next project and I start shooting in April in Hawaii and Paris. I've cast Alan Rickman in the Gaugin role as it were, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's another film about a painter (like "Carrington"), which is for some reason a subject that interests me a great deal, but it's quite different."
And perhaps we'll speak again when that film is released.
"End of next year with any luck."