Now the novelist has taken on a new role: filmmaker. Having written screenplays for films from “Chaplin” to “Mr. Johnson,” Boyd has took his seat in the director’s chair to make “The Trench,” a somber ensemble piece set in the 24 hours before the Battle of the Somme. He spoke to Andrea C. Basora about his interest in filmmaking and his ongoing fascination with the First World War.
NEWSWEEK: What makes someone turn from a prolific novel-writing career to directing films? WIilliam Boyd: I’ve always had a film job alongside my novel writing. I’ve co-produced a film. I’ve gotten involved in casting films. So it became almost inevitable. The ambition was always there lurking, and I suddenly realized it was possible at a certain stage. But I wanted to do something that, a) I was passionate about, and b) was feasible. So I wrote “The Trench.” It was really a very personal project, an attempt to get World War I right on celluloid in a way I had thought I’d got it right in print. I had total artistic control. I feel about “The Trench” as I do about one of my novels. No compromises were made and the film has ended up as I hoped it would.
You have been a screenwriter, and screenwriters traditionally do not have much control over the final product. Was that part of the motivation to make this film? Partly, although I’ve always had quite a good working relationship with my fellow directors and producers. I tend to only work with friends, which helps. I think it was more to try to make the First World War real. [The war] is very present in British imaginations, but often distorted, mythologized and romanticized. I wanted to get that experience right on film. Funny enough, there’s a character in my book “New Confessions” who’s a filmmaker who tries to make a film during World War I which is going to be called “Aftermath of Battle.” It’s never shown because it’s too shocking. In a way, “The Trench” is my “Aftermath of Battle.”
Did you feel at all intimidated by the classic films on the subject, such as “Paths of Glory” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”? They are great movies, but I think my aims were different. And my film is in color, which is a very funny thing to point out, but World War I is a monochrome experience to us. All the photographs are in sepia, the films are all in black and white. So to see a World War I movie in the living color in which it was is already a jump forward. Also, there were elements of realism, such as the language–soldiers swear like troopers–that I could bring in, which weren’t available to those filmmakers. It’s a different animal, although still part of that genre.
What about the First World War fascinates you? Well, my grandfather survived it, and my great uncle. My great uncle was actually wounded at the battle of the Somme. It was part of the family lore. And the more I looked at it, trying to get your head around what it was like is a challenge to the imagination. So when you write a novel about it, it’s like time-traveling in your imagination. You ask yourself, how would I have coped? I think the answers are still very vague. It seems so extraordinary that it happened. Of course, the argument goes that it did shape the 20th century. It shaped the modern world–the rise of Hitler, the Russian Revolution, America’s power–all that sort of thing happened as a result of the First World War. It’s the defining event of the modern age. But more particularly, it’s about how did someone like my grandfather, who was 23, how did he survive two years in the trenches?
Why is it, do you think, that World War I seems so much more present in Europe than in the United States? It’s interesting because 114,000 American soldiers died during the First World War in 19 months. That’s as many as in Vietnam. But, perhaps because it was such a concentrated involvement, it remains distant, and it hasn’t occupied the national psyche the way World War II or Vietnam have. It’s the same somewhere like Spain, where the Civil War is their great scar and the World Wars don’t have any particular resonance. I think it’s as simple as that–that it tore apart Europe. Nine million people were killed in World War I–particularly the youth of Britain, France and Germany, so imagine the ripple effect of that through the next generation or two.
Do you ever feel any of that old “anxiety of influence” being part of such a revered literary tradition? Well, I’m always reluctant to stick myself in a tradition. My writing has really been shaped more by my experience as a teenager in Africa, when I was living in Nigeria during the Biafran war, which was their Civil War, from 1968 to 1970. I was on the fringes of it, but it completely shook me up and changed the way I thought. It was such horrible, ghastly, messy business. All my writing about war–and it’s true of “The Trench” as well–is shaped by this urge to de-mythologize, to de-glorify, to make it real. So in a sense, I would place my writing in that tradition of “war is crazy and absurd and meaningless.” So it’s more “Catch 22” than “The Naked and the Dead.” As a result of what I saw and heard about in Nigeria in the ’60s, it made me realize that books, TV and movies were telling me something at a great remove from the reality of the experience.
Yet “The Trench” seems to lack the absurdist angle of many of your novels. It’s a very direct take on the subject of war. It’s a film about people rather than about fighting. The soldiers do banter and joke, but there’s a mounting somberness about what’s going to happen to them that, I think, filters back through the film. As we, the audience, know the clock is ticking, and we know the outcome, I think it does tend to shadow the film. So, no, there’s not a lot of laughs. It’s hard to be lighthearted about 60,000 dead.
