Chris Petit

Back From The Dead (discussed below) is available as a Pan paperback. The Edge #1 (see our back issue pages) features an extract from the book then known as Malfate, a thriller with 'black fairy tale elements', set against, says Petit, a rock and roll backdrop'. At some point we'll finally get round to adding some pictures to this interview, including many from the hard-to-see Asylum.

Chris Petit has been active for 25 years: you'll have seen his name on review bylines, film credits and book jackets. He's had false starts, frustrations and compromises, yet produced interesting work in every field in which he's worked. From 1973 to 1978 his work as Film Editor at Time Out established him as a critic of clarity, originality and perception.

His first work for cinema, Radio On (1979), was a blend of edgy mystery story and existential road movie, crammed with eerie evocations of English landscape and weather. Then there's the harsh cinematic poetry of his last cinema feature to date, Chinese Boxes (1984), a dark, dreamlike and complex thriller described by Iain Sinclair as 'So good, so self-contained that it disappeared almost immediately.' Unable to secure funding for his films Petit moved into television, making Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery (1989) and a series of idiosyncratic documentaries. Suburbs in the Sky, Petit's take on the history of the air hostess, was well received but subsequent pieces like Surveillance and Weather attracted less attention.

Robinson (1993), Petit's debut novel, is a quirky and genuinely disturbing slice of London noir. Imagine a rewrite of The Third Man by JG Ballard, or The Rake's Progress shot by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Waterstones Guide to London Writing described it as: 'One of the most interesting London novels since the war . . . a flawed piece of magic.' Sadly, the same piece concluded with 'Robinson is currently out of print.'

Petit worked with Iain Sinclair on two films exploring the counterculture through collisions of fact and fiction, The Cardinal and the Corpse and The Falconer. His third novel, Back From The Dead, is a thriller with elements of 'black fairy tale' set against a Rock and Roll backdrop.

Chris Petit: My background is straightforward middle class. My father was an Army Officer and, because of his job, I was brought up abroad as much as in this country. I was sent to boarding school at the age of eight and came out at 18. The only real spin on that was that my secondary education was at the hand of Roman Catholic monks.

Did growing up abroad leave you with a sense of being an outsider?
Inevitably. The other thing we did was to move around, even when we were living in England. I was rather envious of people I knew who'd grown up in one area and had one set of friends. We moved every year or 18 months, so in a way I never belonged. Sometimes (for example when we lived in Norwich and also in Bury St Edmunds) we lived in my father's barracks, and that became another way in which I was removed from things.

Some of the most impressive re-imaginings of London have been produced by outsiders. Why?
I don't know why that should be, except that London is, and always has been, a great clearing house. Its business has always been import and export. I've always thought of Iain Sinclair as someone who works in that mercantile tradition: but instead of bales of cotton it's these big boxes of ideas that he's shifting around. What has always interested me about London is the extent to which it is unknowable. So all of us who write about it tend to cover very specific aspects, so a book like Robinson is only about a very small area of London. I've travelled around the place a lot. Not to the extent that Iain has, but there are whole swathes of the city that I've never been to at all. Once when I had to go somewhere South East; when I got there I thought: 'This could be Los Angeles, this could be anywhere at all.'

London is so large and labyrinthine, in the sense that Borges described it, that you can, in a way, make up your own city. The strange thing about the response to Iain's work is that in books like Downriver and Radon Daughters there's this huge kind of fabrication, the creation of this imaginary city. And then you've got this book of essays, Lights Out for the Territory, that people treat as some sort of literal handbook, as if it's Nairn's Guide to London or something.

Do you think the success of Lights Out expanded the market for London books?
I think it must have. When I was writing Robinson I was reading reviews by all those clever boys in the establishment press and I thought: 'They're really looking for was a novel with a really strong sense of place. The London Novel – its time has come!' But this was in 93 and my book was completely overlooked. I was about three years too early. These days they have a top ten of London books in Books Etc. Any old bit of tat is OK now, as long as it's a London Novel.

Robinson didn't get much coverage.
No, it didn't. And the thing that alerted me to the probability of that happening was the reaction to Jonathan Meades' Pompey. Meades had this big book out just before me. It was much more ambitious than mine, and the literary boys went for him. They don't like it if you have other jobs: Meades was a restaurant critic and there was a sort of sniffiness about the fact that he was a commercial figure. And I thought: 'I've done other things so they're not going to take me seriously either'. There was one review implying I was this enormously wealthy film director who had probably dictated this novel while driving his Shogun around the Twickenham roundabout. Robinson got reviewed but nothing happened to it. I got a few nice reviews and some silly ones. The management at Cape took a walk the week the book was published and I thought: 'This is going to go down the toilet'. You need a certain vanity to get through the process of writing the bloody thing, and I was telling myself people would be saying: 'So this is what he's been doing, it all makes perfect sense now.' But sadly that didn't happen. It did get quite good reviews in paperback.

Did you see Robinson as a recapitulation of your early work?
There was a sense of rupture in the mid 1980s when I ran out of films, partly because I couldn't see anyone else financing me, because the films hadn't been successful enough. And I didn't fit into a comfortable niche of either 'Art' or 'Commercial' movie maker. It did produce a kind of crisis and I thought: 'This isn't going to carry on for much longer. If there was a choice between never seeing another movie and never reading another book which would I choose? I'd have a book over a movie any day!' And I like books as objects, in a way that I never particularly liked cans of film or video tapes. At that time it was clear that things were drying up and I ought to think fairly seriously about what I wanted to do. I knew that if you stay in this country as a film director you do not necessarily get a career. People as successful as Michael Powell and Lindsay Anderson had pretty blippy careers. There are no guarantees. It's an anecdote that I've dusted down rather a lot, but I remember seeing Lindsay Anderson at a party and thinking: 'They don't let you work much do they? I don't want to be standing on that side of the room in thirty years time.'

I read that wonderful, and very sad, book by Anderson's scriptwriter David Sherwin: Going Mad in Hollywood. It seems not even moving to Hollywood on a wave of success gave Anderson or Sherwin a career.
In the mid-1980s there was a flurry where everyone got much more organised: they went to film school, got an agent, did a BBC2 play, then they were in Hollywood, in two moves! And then some of them made it – Caton Jones – and some got sent back with their tails between their legs, like David Leland. So, for me, getting into Hollywood may not have been an answer. And, oddly enough, TV didn't seem to be an option. So I started writing. Originally Robinson started out as a history of Soho.

It was non-fiction?
Yes, I managed to cobble together the money to write this book and then it never got written. Instead of spending time in Soho I was acquiring this library of second hand books on London and Soho. I ended up in Edgware in second hand bookshops reading about Soho and failing to write about it. The whole thing was in danger of falling apart, and a friend of mine said: 'Why don't you write it up as a piece for Granta?' This was a friend who's a kind of literary wide boy, and I thought it was a good idea. The only thing I had written on Soho was an essay on Julian McLaren Ross which subsequently got published in the Time Out Book of Short Stories and I couldn't see where to go with the book.

Robinson himself is interesting. Are there elements of Robinson in some of your films?
Yes, the Gottfried John character in Chinese Boxes, a sort of spidery fixer figure. But it all goes back to the Robinson of Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. I read Celine at that age where you either read him or Joyce, and I think it had a big influence on me. I always liked the idea of this figure who was always just ahead of the narration and I think I must have, in a sense, decided to rip off the idea.

Are there elements of Harry Lime too?
Well, I liked The Third Man. There are elements of Orson Welles playing Harry Lime. There are all these clues in the book, such as the thing about his black shoes. If the vague background notion was the figure of Robinson from Celine, then I think the foreground image I had in my mind was that moment when Lime is in the doorway and his shoes fall in the spotlight. That was my starting image of Robinson. The way he speaks, the 'old boy' stuff, was taken from Welles. Because of this, I was quite pleased with the cover treatment I got in America. For the English edition of the book they went all round the houses to find a cover. For the American edition they never even talked to me about a cover, but when they sent me a copy I thought: 'That looks great!' Then I realised it was a repeated image of Welles in the sewers at the end of The Third Man, the sequence where he's in that long overcoat, I thought: 'Maybe someone has read the book after all!'

Were you consciously playing around with the archetype of a louche, controlling character?
I've never worked out what the attraction of these people is. I'm not drawn to them so I find the question hard to answer. But it's something I've gone back to a lot. Maybe it is to do with a recognition that this figure is to be found in stories I've enjoyed, from John Buchan to Celine, and that it's a good mechanism for something that has elements of a thriller narrative. I was delighted when Giles Foden put Robinson in a section on high adventure books when the Guardian did a 'Seven Ages of Reading' feature last year. Giles said he hoped I didn't mind it being in with all these thrillers and I said: 'No, it really is John Buchan gone wrong – I just wish they'd pushed Robinson as high adventure all along!'

I thought Radio On captured the advent of Thatcherism, and Robinson dealt with what had happened to the British psyche in the intervening 14 years. Where you consciously trying to create a sense of the physical and spiritual degeneration of London?
You may be right, I haven't really thought of any of this in ages. Last year there was a screening of Radio On down in Bristol and I went along. I hadn't seen the film in ages and I was surprised. Even when we were making it I was aware it was being made at a turning point. I did have secret ambitions for the film in terms of it being not just of its moment, but something one could go back to later. That was at the beginning of a career and Robinson was at the end. When I did Radio On at the end of the 1970s, I went to Germany quite a lot and I was always amazed at how England and London lagged behind in terms of looks, affluence, cars and so on. Everything in Germany was new, shiny and colourful. At that time we seemed to drive particularly old cars and England was still looking pretty clapped out. At the Bristol screening I was asked if I'd had to go out of my way to find these locations. And I said: 'No it was like that!' When I came back to England in 1984, after making two films in Germany, I was amazed how much London had changed in a very short time. England was catching up: in London you were getting the start of this restaurant culture. It was all to do with money. Suddenly the £5 note was being waved about. The start of the note culture.

The background influence for Robinson was my abiding interest in the idea of collaboration. In the sense of living in an occupied state. If you lived in France during the war how would you have behaved? Would you have collaborated or resisted? And for a German at the time of Hitler: would you have obeyed orders or not? I've always been fascinated by this. After the event it's always very cut and dried. Fingers pointed: you did this, you did that. But I think people end up in grey zones. I was interested in exploring the notion of collaboration in the moral sense, and in the work sense as well. So the relationship between the narrator and Robinson was to do with this collusion, and the point at which people step back and say: 'No, I can't do this.' I don't believe there are any points as such, it's much more of a sliding scale. The thing that surprised me when I saw Radio On again was that it was like coming across something in the ice. I thought what happened to the 15 years after that? I wasn't allowed to carry on and makes films like that, and maybe Robinson does reflect the fact that I viewed England as if it was controlled by an occupying force. It amazes me, you have people like David Mellor who should have been taken out and shot, and he's a fucking populist broadcaster!

There's a sense of things sliding into psychological freefall in Radio On as the film wears on. People are disengaged in Robinson, but is it a different kind of disengagement?
The ending in Radio On is stalled and vertiginous. Robinson is just vertiginous. It's about a fall, and the delights of that fall. There is an exhilaration in the narrator's moral decline.

Robinson moves along very cinematically. Did you ever intend it to be a film?
No. I had to review a novel by Gilbert Adair and went back and read his first novel. It was set against a backdrop of Paris 1968 and involved a menage a trois, so at first I thought: 'You crafty devil, this is a rewrite of the old Cocteau film, Les Enfants Terribles.' But what he'd really done was to take the idea of doing a rewrite from a movie and made it very cinematic, but in a way that was impossible to film. With Robinson I was interested in writing something which would lead people to think it would make a great movie while, in fact, it was probably unfilmable. It involves a lot of refraction. I never really wanted it to be filmed, which is just as well because no-one has ever shown any real interest!

Were you surprised by that?
I was. Some interest was shown by one film-maker, but when I got the contract they wanted the rights to Robinson in perpetuity. Just imagine: Robinson II, Robinson III. My real ambition was that it should not be made as an English film, but that it should be relocated to Soho in New York, that it should be made by Abel Ferrara and that it should star Christopher Walken as Robinson. If that happened they could do what they wanted with it. But if you did the full Soho bit with Alan Rickman as Robinson – doesn't bear thinking about. I know how they'd do it: they'd make a very literary film out of it. They'd do to Robinson what they did to Crash. Ideally, it should be like a Fassbinder movie like it's been put together with dirty hands. Sadly I can't see it happening.

Do you share Luis Bunuel's view that it's easier for filmmakers to work with mediocre books?
Well I would agree with him, but for the fact that he did Wuthering Heights!

And Robinson Crusoe, I suppose.
That too, but Wuthering Heights is breathtaking. There's a knock on the door, it's Heathcliffe come back, and you think: 'Daring or what?' But on the whole it is easier to tackle short stories or mediocre books. There's a more obvious freedom because they are less well put together.

In terms of your own approach to adaptation, do you make a point of being an unfaithful adaptor?
I think one is bound to. After Radio On I wasn't allowed to do Radio On II, or to do any other film like that. No-one was offering. It was not possible to go back to the BFI. Their view was that I'd had my chance, and there was nowhere else to go. I then had to think more commercially. I remember thinking that I'd like to do an English murder mystery. I was driving through the Cotswolds and I began to think it would be nice to do a film which involved Agatha Christie and really loud music. Imagine Agatha Christie done as if it were a Fassbinder movie: really heartless and with a soundtrack like Radio On. I read all these Christies and couldn't get anywhere with them. I also realised the chances of selling the notion were slim. So, I ended up with PD James. I didn't particularly like James but there were interesting elements to the story of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. What interested me was the idea of the detective becoming obsessed with a dead person, to the point of becoming that person.

So the key scene would be the one where Cordelia re-enacts the hanging and almost kills herself?

That's pretty crucial. The other thing that interested me was set out in an essay I wrote. It appeared on the back of the Monthly Film Bulletin: it's a reverse of the Oedipal thing; the father killing the son instead of the other way around. I thought of the film as a black fairy story.

Was the setting important to you?
I'd spent some time driving out to the fens and I thought it was a great landscape. The book is set in Cambridge, but I didn't go for that - too much perpendicular architecture! So I wanted to hoik it out into the fens, into those landscapes that look like children's drawings and have a sense of something buried. I also liked the fact that you can see everything coming. So I thought: 'Great!' It turned out that the book had already been optioned and there was a script. It was a scissors and paste job of the book, and I wrote a version that went much further: I decided that the heroine had to kill the father to avenge the death of the person she was becoming. I really liked that. But, by then, Billie Whitelaw had become attached to the project and she went apeshit because it meant she didn't get to shoot the father. At that stage it was such a mess, there were no fens locations or anything, that I just thought: 'Oh well, OK'. In a way, in order to be true to the spirit of the thing, you have to be unfaithful to it, if you're going to get across what it is really about. Flight to Berlin is another example of that: it was taken from a novel by my then wife Jennifer Potter. Her published novels include The Taking of Agnes, The Long Lost Journey and After 'Breathless'. This was an adaptation of her unpublished second novel and, originally, it was a story set in Paris.

Did you relocate it because of a particular fascination with Berlin?
No. The year before it was actually made it came close to being shot in Paris, but the production fell apart just before shooting was due to start. I was a bit depressed at everything going on ice for a year. I then met a producer who wanted access to Channel 4 because he wanted to do Paris Texas – he was Wenders' producer – and I was able to effect the introduction. So he went along with both projects and got Flight to Berlin financed on the back of Paris Texas. But his production office was in Berlin and he asked if I'd consider relocating the film there. I said yes because, in a way, I'd already shot it in Paris. I'd been there for two or three months, got all the locations sorted out and cast it. I thought it more fun to start afresh and Berlin suited the story every bit as well as Paris.

Another dark film centring on sex and murder. Are you exorcising a fear of transgressive acts when you made films like this?
I suppose so [laughs]. There's still that sense of catholic morality one is raised with. The lines and boundaries that you must not cross are set down at an early age. I remember sitting in some religious retreat with school and this priest got up and started banging on along the lines of: 'On average nine out of ten of you will go to Hell'. We were 11 or 12 and I wondered how he knew this. We were all shitting ourselves and I remember looking down the row and thinking: 'I'm totally fucked'.

So where was his empirical data coming from?
Exactly, but it took me 30 years to work that one out! So I suppose a lot of my work is to do with having grown up with all this baggage.

So is there a Dennis Potteresque aspect to your work?
Yes, there's quite a lot in that old saying: 'To find the writer, look for the unhappy childhood'. In a way writing becomes a form of trespass, a means of going into areas you wouldn't explore physically.

I was brought up in the 1950s and you lived in this constant state of fear. There were a lot of confusions in my childhood. I didn't know what was going on half the time. My father kept having to go away to fight in wars and all that, so most of my early life was spent feeling kind of confused. Then I got my father back and I remember that as quite a happy time. But not long after that religion became a spectre. We had to be drilled up for first confession: from what I can remember, the idea is that until the age of seven, which is the age of reason, you're in a state of grace, but after that you're deemed old enough to know what's right from wrong. Then, of course, you have to go into the box and tell the priest everything you've done wrong. Owing to a technicality I was still six and I couldn't think of anything to say. The priest was prompting me and I said: 'Well, I haven't actually sinned father.' I think he thought: 'Piss off son!' Before long, I was making stuff up and trotting it out. But one grew up with a sense of the forbidden, and the forbidden was scary and interesting.

In Radio On, was your use of black and white film planned or serendipitous?
Deliberate. I can't remember why but it was always clear that it should be black and white. I think it may have been because I wanted to do something outside the tradition of English Realism. Part of the problem was the way things looked in England, the homeliness, for example. I wanted a sense of space and a mythic dimension, and I thought the only way to get that was black and white. I thought it should be a film to do with framing, there shouldn't be any distraction in terms of colour. The English tradition of realism is so strong that you have to work very hard and very carefully to get away from it.

So this was a direct way of letting the audience know your film didn't belong to that tradition?
I remember Wenders, who was Associate Producer, saying in that rather Moses-like way of his: 'How are you going to shoot this film?' I said black and white, 35 mil. And I got Wim's endorsement.

How did you come to be associated with Wim Wenders?
It was strategic. I'd been reviewing at Time Out for five years or so and had come to the conclusion it was not a job I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At first I thought: 'What a great job, I just bunk off and see movies all day.' But after watching 10:30am screenings with the same people for five years I began to wonder why I was doing it.

Do you think something similar happened to Truffaut and Godard?
I think so. You end up feeling so impotent in a way. So I thought: 'What am I going to do?' There was nothing obvious I could go into. I thought I might be able to get a job at the BFI, but I was getting pretty fed up of working in an office. I ended up writing a script. I'd been really taken by the earliest of Wenders' films, especially The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty. It was like seeing something for the very first time and it wasn't that often that you heard music like that in films. Godard and the New Wave weren't particularly interested in rock music. So when I saw Wenders' films, I thought: 'This is my life, I understand this, it's as plain as paint.' By that stage Wim had done The American Friend and was pretty much on his way to Hollywood. I'm not sure what I had in mind when I started writing my script. Maybe I thought I could write scripts and get people to film them. That would have been fine. But I had this script and couldn't think who to give it to. There was nowhere to go, no obvious sponsors, in this country. Wenders was the only obvious person, in that I felt he would understand it. So I angled to get an interview with him. There wasn't a lot of foreign travel at Time Out in those days, but I managed to set up a trip to Munich to interview Wim with regard to Kings of the Road. I remember he was still filming The American Friend and was pretty knackered, so at the end of the meeting I thought: 'Do I mention it or don't I?' In the end it seemed like on of those pivotal moments and I just came out with it: he was quite interested and asked me to send him the script. I'm not sure of the chronology but I also became aware that the BFI, who were the only obvious bet in this country to approach in terms of money, were looking for co-productions. In a way, I was able to bring them Wenders and this made the package attractive to them. I don't think the board were particularly keen on the idea of doing the film, but I had a couple of supporters and I think they pushed it through.

Weren't they keen on the film because it didn't fit any particular genre?
I think they thought it was frivolous. This was a time when the higher reaches of film culture were totally in thrall to French academic theory, Structuralism and fairly hard-line leftist politics. So because of all the pop music and so on, Radio On was deemed rather lightweight. But it was pushed through and then came the question of who was to direct it. I wasn't harbouring any ambitions. I didn't really see myself in the job. At the same time I realised Wim wasn't going to do it. So we had this classic talk in the back of the taxi when Wim asked me who I thought should direct the film: I said: 'Search me Guv.' And when he suggested I should do it, my reaction was: 'Don't know how'. He then said I should do it because I had the vision, and went on to say that if he got me an experienced crew it would be possible. I tell this story now and people's jaws drop in disbelief. These days there are all these people yelling that they want to direct. They're told they can't and they don't get the chance to prove that they can. But I sort of walked into this thing wondering whether I really wanted to do it. In the end I thought: 'If life is about transgression this is one line I should cross.'

I see Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man and Radio On as the two films that do most to capture the psyche of Britain in the 1970s . . .
I've never seen O Lucky Man all the way through, just fragments of it on television. People at Time Out queued up to slag off that film. It became a bit of a joke. There were three reviews one after the other and they all put the boot in. I don't know why, but it was loathed by Time Out. Isn't it based around a picaresque journey through England?

Yes, it's an update of Candide, with road movie elements. Very long, very dark. I thought Radio On and O Lucky Man were very conscious reflections of a British society in a period of dread, an era when we began to slide into a harsher sociopolitical landscape. You'll probably tell me I'm way off beam with this!
It's true: I felt there was very little sense of choice at that time, punk notwithstanding. At the time I had some hopes for the film but it was curiously uninfluential. I've decided that it was one of those cul-de-sac movies that appear at the end of each decade. Peeping Tom was one: that film is a cause celebre for some and reviled by others, but it's strangely uninfluential. Its main influence was seen on TV in series like The Avengers. It had a similarly kinky quality. Another striking example is Performance, now feted by all and sundry as the greatest British film ever made, but again curiously lacking in influence. I'm not suggesting that Radio On is on a par with these films, but it has always struck me how little influence it had. It's disappointing in a way, because it did do certain things, especially in the way it dealt with the English landscape.

It seems, 20 years later, to be a very popular film. I told a friend I was coming to see you and he said: 'Oh yes, the Radio On man'.
Well that's a progression. For years I thought it would say 'ex-Time Out Film Critic' on my headstone! If I've moved on to having 'the Radio On man' as my epitaph that's good. At the Bristol screening last year, there was a sense of coming across something that had been buried in the ice. It looked remarkably well preserved; not at all dated.

Did it go through a period where it l did look dated? Performance did in my view.
Performance always varied. Sometimes you'd see it and think James Fox is a mess and Jagger is very cool. Then you could see it again and think Jagger looks preposterous and dated. Fashions seems to swing around that film.

I suppose Chas (the gangster character played by James Fox) looked spot on for the eighties, sharp and pushy?
Yes, there's that great sequence where he's arranging the magazines. There are curiously inept narrative elements in Performance. Think about the way Fox turns up at Jagger's house: he overhears a phone call which gets him to the house. Pretty clunky, but I always quite liked its clunkiness.

I feel similarly about Blue Velvet. The discovery of the ear is a bit clunking in terms of plot development, but it's redeemed by its rich symbolic resonance.
I wasn't keen on Blue Velvet, but in terms of what we were talking about in terms of transgression this is the clearest statement we've had from an American filmmaker on that. I liked the very obvious geographical things: the town boundary, the wrong side of the tracks, strange things going on in dark rooms.

You've always worked in or around the thriller form. Do you see it as a way of getting serious ideas over to a popular audience? What do you feel are the possibilities of the form?
Thrillers are a kind of habit. I've read them, together with high adventure novels, since I was a kid. I've always liked stories with narrative drive. By contrast, I've always found most Eng Lit and contemporary novels stupefyingly dull. I've always enjoyed the mechanics of a good plot and because there's always a degree of narrative curiosity in the thriller, it's a good way of driving the story forward. The French recognised this with all those series of noir thrillers, and Godard adapted various pulp writers. If you look at Made in USA, which is from a William Irish novel, he takes the first ten pages verbatim then chucks the book out of the window. It's an obvious and useful device. The starting point for Radio On was the image of the feet in the bath which was inspired by a photograph I'd seen. And I remember thinking: 'Who is the body in the bath?' The American film noir way of doing it would be to explain how the body got to be in the bath in the manner of Sunset Boulevard. But I didn't want to do that, I wanted something much more oblique. In the end I didn't even want to know the answer. I think I'd been reading Alain Robbe-Grillet at the time. I suppose I have been loyal to the thriller as a form, certainly the idea of adapting a literary novel never attracted me. And I don't have that many original ideas!

If you'd taken fewer risks, do you reckon you'd still be making feature films?
When I did Miss Marple – A Caribbean Mystery I was a very good boy. I was financially in not very good shape and this opportunity came out of the blue. I had to sit for five minutes and wonder if it was what I wanted to be doing, but I always quite liked Joan Hickson, and you always got a good cast in those things, and then they told me it was the one set in the Caribbean. And I thought: 'Arduous foreign location!' But I really didn't want to fuck it up and I didn't muck about with it at all. I half expected to get calls asking if I'd like to do an Inspector Morse or two. But it just didn't happen. At the end of the 1980s everyone else had careers and career plans, but because I'd started so early on there was no career on offer. So all these other people who'd started after me, made one film and gone into television were zipping around in 4-wheel drives, buying fitted kitchens and getting married to the wardrobe mistress. I was left thinking: 'Where did I go wrong?'

Do you think you're perceived as an art house director because you haven't a track record of spending enough of other people's money?
Radio On cost £80,000. I looked at it in real estate terms and thought of it as a terrible responsibility. But it was dirt cheap. I never had the knack of making and spending enough money. I always had this anxiety that if I did the film really badly it would be taken away, but I now realise that the worse you do it the more money they sling at you! There are films I've seen where you wonder why the director was ever allowed back. Then you discover they're doing even bigger stuff the next time around. The problem for me was that I was never really perceived as anything. I didn't fit into that art house bracket in the way that Jarman and Greenaway did. There weren't enough ideas, or enough of an attitude, on offer from me. After Radio On I went off and did these semi-thrillers: so I was seen by the art side as commercial, but the commercial side didn't see me in that light because I didn't spend enough money or make films that lots of people wanted to see. I was sort of stuck. Go back and look at the career of someone like Neil Jordan: in a way Company of Wolves was one of those films which (if you take out the special effects) surprised me when he was allowed to come back for another one. Angel had been a success, but I thought it was a rotten film, the way it was shot was wrong for the story. You could argue that I had Wim as a sponsor, but Jordan had Alex Walker and John Boorman who, at that time, was a figure of some influence. The absent father off in Hollywood. It's always interesting to look at those alliances. Derek Jarman was always sufficiently embattled to carry it off. And Derek was always frank about the fact that being gay freed him up enormously, no domestic chores or those other demands of family life.

Do you think you'll return to making feature films?
Until very recently I'd have said no, but now I'm not so sure. At the back of my mind I wonder. I've always liked Bunuel's career.

He was out of things for nearly 30 years wasn't he?
It was a long time, he just sort of stopped. I've actually managed to make a lot of films over the last ten years: but whether they're just a way of keeping my hand in, or preparation for something bigger I don't know. In my work with Iain I've been pushing quite far in certain directions and I don't know whether it's possible to come back from that. The Falconer was the first film where the method of production conformed to what I wanted, and I wonder if I really want to go back to all that stuff of telling actors what to do and arguing about what colour socks someone is supposed to be wearing.

Are there any benefits for you in the recent upturn in the British film industry?
I know there's lottery money available and they're not getting the projects. And I also know that if you stick around long enough you get back on the carousel again. It happened to Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. It's almost a law of nature.

What about the resurgence in the popularity of off-centre documentaries, Nick Broomfield's work; Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space; Kotting's Gallivant?
In a sense all this activity may mean it's time to move on. Back to drama perhaps.

Were your unhappy feelings about the process of filmmaking to do with having to compromise with people like producers and actors?
Yes. But the other problem with the filmmaking process is that you have to know what you want. It's like being in the army: you have to give clear orders as to what you want. The whole thing becomes quite regimented and it's often difficult to change your mind. I remember the difficulty I had with Unsuitable Job. I suppose I was inexperienced as a director, but that particular production gave me nothing that I wanted. I wanted the Fens, I was told I couldn't have them because we couldn't afford to shoot on location. Everything became a process of reduction. Then I'd end up in these rooms I didn't like, not knowing where to put the camera. I didn't know how to shoot various scenes because I'd never envisaged them in these rooms.

So you dislike the reductive nature of the film-making process?
It needn't always be like that. Radio On was a bit trying on the nerves because I'd never done it before, but the production served the film very well. It was a small crew and everyone worked very hard. When I saw the film again I thought: 'I wouldn't have done this any different'. I felt the production served the film for both Radio On and Chinese Boxes. With Flight to Berlin and Unsuitable Job the film was subjected to the production. The other big problem is time: the whole thing comes down to [taps his watch]. The other key thing about big films is you're always told what you can't have. Can I have a helicopter? No you can't. And even working on documentaries where you have to hire crews, there are problems like that. About seven years ago I made a film about the weather. After we'd chopped the budget into how many days shooting we could have, I asked if I could film some weather. In the end we went to Cornwall and Wales for two days. We lugged this stupid beta camera up the hill and the fog came down and it was unfilmable.

Did you feel you had more chance of getting across the vision you wanted in the short documentary format?
In a way, but these things weren't a matter of choice, they were to do with opportunity. I tried quite hard to get work in TV and went through a long period where no-one would look at me. I couldn't get an agent. This was in the late 1980s and there was always the problem of earning money. Around that time I became aware that a year had gone by and I hadn't filmed anything. I was a bit like a recovering alcoholic, asking myself if would it really matter if I didn't do anything else. The documentaries came up in the way they do. Somebody put in a word for me with someone who had a documentary strand to fill, which was 40 Minutes. And I quite liked that strand. I thought I'd better come up with something they were going to be interested in. I just had a title in my head: The History of the Air Stewardess. And that became the first documentary.

That's another thing of yours that everyone remembers.
I was set up. Things were looking good. Then I went off and did Weather and involved Sinclair. And my career went into reversal again. There was no doubt that I was happier with the format, but I found the Stewardess piece a hard film to make. I thought: 'I've never made a documentary. How do you do it?' Until quite late on there was no shape to the thing. There was an endless rather Robinsonian viewing session. I spent ages listening to hours and hours of the muzak you get in planes before take off. So I had James Last and all that stuff. But then I wondered why it is that TV documentaries never have any decent music - especially since the BBC has a blanket agreement and you can have anything you want! And so I decided to put in the music I'd been listening to while making the film and it worked. I was flavour of the month for a bit, but Weather was not liked.

But it's clearly a subject that fascinates you.
Well I came up with it after an article by Iain in The London Review of Books. I thought it was a terrific piece so I ripped that off and thought, in exchange, that I ought to get Iain in the programme. We knew each other by then.

How did you meet?
He was a bookdealer, I was a buyer. I phoned a bookdealer friend when I was researching Soho and asked if there were any Soho specialists. He put me on to Sinclair. I was living in Willesden, he was in Hackney and I bought a lot of books off him: we started talking, and it went from there ... a client relationship!

Did similar areas of interest emerge pretty quickly?
This was a very isolated time while I was doing the Soho book: I had a core of close friends, but felt completely cut off from what was going on. I very much liked Iain's catalogues, perhaps because of my background in listings at Time Out. Iain was an emerging writer: I'd been and bought White Chappell in hardback. But I didn't know he was involved in films. I had a sense of similar work going on, but he was more of an archaeologist than I was, and I remember thinking early on that I'd like to work with someone like Sinclair. I felt fairly keenly that I'd like to work with other people again. All my other collaborations had dried up and I felt that Iain and I understood many of the same things.

How did The Cardinal and the Corpse evolve?
Iain had various dealings with TV and was not a happy man. Things hadn't turned out how he wanted and he's even more impatient than I am in terms of how long things take to do. Both of us like a day out from the desk and Iain had enjoyed the work on Weather and sensed that he and I could work together. I can't remember how the discussions evolved about The Cardinal and the Corpse. I think I'd suggested that if we could come up with something I could probably get money out of Channel 4's Without Walls and it started to evolve from there. In a sense I left the stories to him, but I remember saying to him: 'Look, we've only got £40,000. That means we've got five days shooting. And we've got 25 locations.' I suppose most people would just decide it couldn't be done, but we just thought: 'Let's go for it.' We decided that if we can crunch as much as possible in five days, then he and I could go off and film other stuff by ourselves. And that was how it worked. But we were, at that time, still stuck with a crew: it was a small group of people, but we still felt quite constricted. I remember being down Brick Lane: people came up and said: 'Channel 4 then is it?' Once you've got someone standing around one of those microphones that look like an impaled dog they know there's a TV crew. Whereas now, with the new Sharp equipment, no-one knows we're there and filming becomes a form of theft.

The thing that really intrigued me was the way the various characters bounced off each other: bookdealers, writers, gangsters, urban shamen. I've read that a lot of this was contrived, how did you manage to coax such compelling performances from all these people?
The background is that we had problems with moving people from location to location in vans. Iain was very keen on using Silvertown Airport, and I suggested that if we got most of them there we could kind of knock 'em off one after the other. We were supposed to be there for three hours, but it became clear there was no supervision and we could film there all day. So there was Driffield [a notorious bookdealer and memorable character from Sinclair's novels] charging around in a kilt; and Robin Cook [aka Derek Raymond] was there to meet Martin Stone; a meeting Iain had engineered because Cook and Stone were doubles, both wearing their black berets. The two of them adjourned to the bar and there was a point at around four in the afternoon where the woman who was producing asked if I'd like a drink. I asked for a pint of Guinness: by then the thing had turned into a party and Cook and Stone had drunk the bar dry.

For the viewer, and this is true of both your films with Iain, it's very difficult to separate the documentary elements from the fiction. There are obvious ways in which you engineered plots and sub-plots, but the real conundrum is provided by your characters. For example, in The Falconer when Kathy Acker warns Francoise Lacroix about Peter Whitehead I was thought: does she really believe the guy is this dangerous or is this just a script?
This was Christmas '96 and we hadn't got all the money for the film: we just had research or prep money, on which we'd gone off and shot most it. So we cut together this document to show Channel 4 that we were serious, so that they'd give us the money. Iain was looking for someone to do a commentary, and he wanted a woman. He came up with the idea of Kathy Acker because he'd seen her do this rather weird little girlish thing at the Bridewell at one of those bonanzas he organises. Anyway Acker turned up and she gave it the full throttle. It was awful, and I mean just terrible. And then it turned out that, after this Bridewell showing, she and Whitehead had a couple of meetings. I think Whitehead was quite fascinated by Kathy: she told Iain she'd met Peter and they'd kind of circled each other a couple of times. And Iain kind of cooked the thing up on the spot, saying: 'Will you tell this story about Peter to Francois?' And it was a year later that we looked at it and thought: 'This is spot on. Just what we'd want someone to say.' By the time we got round to thinking that someone should come in and give Francoise a warning it turned out we'd had the material for a year! These things happen with Iain, and I do think it's all part of his genius.

The film got a very mixed reception at an event in Leicester.
I wasn't there, but it was billed as part of a sixties event and that's probably a kiss of death. If The Falconer has a fault it's that it tends to exhume all these stiffs from the sixties, and they all start flapping around. Caroline Coon, a sixties figure who used to be with Release, went apeshit about the film. She stood up and started haranguing Whitehead: later on she wrote a letter to the authorities at Leicester accusing us of making a snuff movie and more or less suggesting we were white supremacists, or at least disgusting apologists for this awful man. And then some old IT editor stood up and complained about this or that. I did get quite depressed when I heard about it. I thought: 'Oh no, this is all that ratty old bullshit from 25 years ago, all over again.' But when I read the letter I thought it was quite funny: in my view Whitehead and Caroline Coon cancel each other out. It's all to do with a kind of humourlessness. I read Michael Moorcock's review and thought it was great, but I wasn't convinced he'd been watching the film we made! Maybe that's the way this film works: what normally happens with film criticism is that the thing gets packaged and reduced, but maybe we let loose this big flapping thing and all sorts of things could be seen in it. But Iain has a genius, not for publicity, for rumour perhaps, because boy, did this one run and run: in terms of press coverage there was stuff all over the place.

The Falconer begins as a detective thriller, with you in the role of private eye in the first place. Then it drifts into being something else entirely: something much more subjective and contemplative.
Iain has said that the way he worked was to position opposites against each other and let them get on with it. He saw me and Whitehead as opposites, Emma Matthews [the film's editor] and Dave McKean as opposites. He described his role on The Cardinal and the Corpse as Freak Wrangler: he likes to put these opposing elements together and see what happens with them.

You recast the role of investigator as the film progressed; the baton gets handed from you to Francoise to Emma. What was going on there?
I always felt quite strongly you couldn't have a whole film about Peter Whitehead. There's a sense in which he is endless and quite difficult to get a handle on. In a way his notion of himself is exemplified in that black and white film shot by Anthony Stern, where he talks to the camera for 40 minutes while he's on mescaline or something. He's quite difficult to pin down and it comes at you like a wall if you get the whole Whitehead treatment. I was always finding ways to resist Peter. And the other thing that was happening was that the process of filmmaking became much more apparent in this film. Normally with TV and cinema everything is a move towards rendering the process invisible, so you don't notice cuts or movements. But because of the way I was asked to film it by Iain, which was really on the wing, I didn't want to get into structured filmmaking and ask people to do things over and over again. If it didn't work we'd just do something else. I didn't want to be saying: 'Could you cross the street again because here was a lorry in the way.' In the sections with people talking I just wanted to go in and see what I can get, so it all became very unstructured.

Is that why you shot some segments, including the bits with Stewart Home, in that very rough 'investigative reportage' style?
The other thing was that if there were bits that didn't work, I refilmed them off the screens in the cutting room. So the cutting room and the editorial process became a very real presence in the film. And that led on to the notion, which I think was Iain's idea, of including the film's editor, Emma, in the last segment. You see the material gone over and reworked and the process of film-making is revealed: so it's entirely fitting that the editor is seen to become the driving force of the story.

Was there a tension between this being a film about the counterculture and a film about Peter Whitehead? Were there two films struggling to get out here?
Originally there was a film called The Perimeter Fence. This was to be a round up of various old lags like David Gascoyne and Francis Stuart, people who'd been forgotten by the culture. Then Whitehead started putting down his marker. We met him and filmed him a couple of times, which was interesting, and he was up for the play of it. Iain asked him to do things and he would do them. By his own admission he's a natural actor: you can put him in any situation and he'll bullshit his way out of it. In the interviews it always felt like he'd rehearsed them 15 times, and he was perfect for that element of play you get in Iain's work. But there was a kind of wariness between he and I: perhaps because of a sense that there were these two bust filmmaking careers – and probably because neither of us had a high opinion of the other's work. There was a bit of tension there.

The David Gascoyne material had already been logged some time before and the Francis Stuart was done for the away day! Stuart had never heard of Peter Whitehead, so he was completely stitched up. Nevertheless, a kind of truth did emerge from the process of meeting him and doing a formal interview. In terms of his background, spending the war in Germany and so on, he was never going to tell us any more than he's told anyone else, which is not very much. The line Iain wrote is spot on: 'The truth is a wet road.' We talked to Stuart for half an hour then went out in a car: it was pissing down and I thought it was the best thing I'd seen all day. That's saying a lot after Stuart's face, which is fantastic. But that image of the rain – it was a drowned world. When I watch The Falconer there is a truth in the sequence with Francis Stuart which you don't get in things like The South Bank Show. Maybe we did convey something: you look at that face and think: 'There's a history here'.

Moorcock said in his review that the women in the film upstaged Whitehead. Was he upstaged or is he such a compelling character that's impossible?
Caroline Coon attacked the film for its deep misogyny and I found that hard to accept. Maybe Peter is an old phallocentric but Moorcock's point is correct. It could be argued that the film is handed over to the women out of laziness, and that my own role is largely one of absentee landlord. I showed it to a friend of mine and she said she wanted to know more about Whitehead. Maybe that's the film's balancing act: perhaps if you did get more about him, he would start to lose his intrigue. Iain and I discussed the fact that the women were mute and he came up with a quote from Ted Hughes about silence being the only possible response to the situation.

Another artist accused of misogyny. Not the best quote to fling back at Caroline Coon!
I have to agree [laughs]. Another thing that strikes me about The Falconer, and I've not thought about this before, is that as the film progresses there's an attempt to reclaim my own career. You could argue that the Francoise section has a Flight to Berlin kind of intrigue. Iain showed the film to some French lad who was very taken with it and saw it in the tradition of Wenders; and there's the journey to Bristol at the end, Radio On revisited.

By the time you'd started The Falconer you'd completed two novels, so perhaps it was the perfect time to reflect on your earlier career as a dedicated filmmaker. And perhaps this is the ideal time to ask you about your two most recent books. I got the impression that you weren't too happy with The Psalm Killer. Is that right?
No, that's not true. It did get mixed reviews and it did become a bit of a ball and chain. It came at a stage, about five years ago, when I was in the process of separating from my wife and I needed money. I had to go and rent an expensive apartment near my wife and son. I looked at various options. I decided television wasn't a reliable provider of income because television was changing and, in any case, I hadn't worked as regularly as it might look. The situation has become even worse now: most of the people I know who've had decent careers in television find they're working for something that's become increasingly tabloid. And they have no rights over their work. The whole commissioning and subcontracting system is quite rotten.

Is this a spin off of the Producer Choice ethos?
Yes, and a spin off of the whole Channel 4 commissioning process were everything is subcontracted and it's like working in the building trade. I was smarting because of Robinson and got around to weighing up my options: I could sulk and not write another book; I could do a more literary Robinson II in the hope that critics of a certain type would like it; or I could get money upfront if I came up with a new idea. I'd been reviewing thrillers for five or six years for The Times, so I thought I ought to have a good idea of what they're looking for. And I knew the publishing companies were looking for a smart thriller. Looking back on it, I rather naively thought I would do for Belfast what Martin Cruz Smith had done for Moscow: here was this great secret history waiting to be presented to an eager world. It wasn't until much later that it realised the setting was a dead duck. You couldn't actually flog Northern Ireland. But then came the ceasefire. I thought The Psalm Killer could sell along the lines of a literary Molly Bloom's bar. You know: 'Come in for the crack'. I don't know if you have these places in Nottingham, but since the ceasefire there's been this burgeoning of Irish bars in London. I thought The Psalm Killer could surf in on the back of the Irish theme pub.

A literary Shamrock and Firkin, so to speak?
Yes, but it wasn't to be. In a way it's that thing of pathetic vanity: you have to have some expectation for the thing or there's no point, and you end up attaching all these terrible fantasies to it. I keep reading the blurbs for the thrillers I review – 'sold to 13 different territories': there is a history of people having great success with thrillers, but really I was looking for dentist money. In a way I've got to the stage were I'd like to have money. There's work I'd like to do, and I'd like to be able to finance it. It would be great to be able to afford equipment so I could cut material at home. So, with Psalm Killer, I was thinking that if I could get enough money out of it I'd have a way of reconciling various strands in my career. It didn't happen: I can't complain because I got a good American deal with it, but it didn't transcend that. When I was down in Bristol last year for the screening of Radio On, this fairly rough looking guy came up to me and asked for a private word. I thought: 'Oh god he was in the film and I've no idea who he is'. And when he said 'Psalm Killer', I thought: 'Oh no, here we go'. He told me he had a mate who was the UDA's transport manager and another mate in the IRA and they both thought it was the best thing ever written. So I suppose I must have done something right.

I read The Psalm Killer as an attempt to delve behind the mere politics of violence in that particular place, and get at the psychology to some extent.
Yes, I think that's fairly accurate. When I compare my modest level of achievement with my expectation, I end up not having to dismiss the book but to forget about it. To put it away, in a way. And again it's difficult, because I still review thrillers and I think I may have written it myself but it's still a hell of a lot better than most of this stuff I have to plough through. Very irksome.

Was it the city's secret history that attracted you to Belfast?
In a way I discovered that later. Originally, I came up with the outline for the story and it was inspired by that phrase that came to me: 'When God has deserted his mansion the Devil must do his work'. But whose work? The Devil's? God's? I was also interested in that point at which the circle meets: when things begin to overlap and good leads into evil. I knew I couldn't do Glasgow, but I thought I could do Northern Ireland: I have enough of an ear and my grandfather was Irish so I felt I could do the voice. And I understand the Catholicism, so I knew I could make a fist of it. There's something that always amazed me about Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s: they'd get that grizzly Radio 1 DJ, Simon Bates, on the radio, just like everyone else. They got exactly what we got, and yet it was this big white space on the map! And that was something that interested me.

And were you interested in the fact that, like Berlin, it's a divided city?
Yes. The only one I missed out was Beirut! I worked out the story but it was only later, when I started the research, that I realised the richness of its secret history. I really enjoyed that. I read Mark Urban's book on the SAS, and then I read Father Raymond Murray's. Then I came across this footnote about Tommy Heron who, at that time, was in charge of the UDA. It said he had declared war on the British Army. It turns out that there was street fighting between the British Army and the UDA. And I thought: 'Wait a minute! Wasn't Heron a kind of British puppet?' Then I came across this information on the Mobile Reconnaissance Force, Kitson's secret army. They were charging around shooting people: they were shooting up Catholics and they were shooting Protestants. Their objective was that the two civilian populations should turn against each other. I wondered if Heron had discovered that the army were charging round killing Protestants on his patch, and I wondered how he would find out. I came to the conclusion that he'd find it out from the IRA, because they were all sitting in rooms meeting at that stage.

The UDA and IRA?
Yes. Neither group had any money so they had to operate rackets. They'd divvy up the territory between them, agreeing lines in the grey areas. There was a tax dodge that the IRA were operating basically, a scam. It turns out that they had even told the UDA about it, but the UDA couldn't get the hang of it. So there was some deal where the IRA operated this scam on building sites in Protestant areas in exchange for a UDA levy in Catholic areas. A fascinating bit of detection from one footnote!

So did you have a very provisional sense of what was going on: setting up, testing and rejecting hypotheses on the basis of what people were telling you?
Yes. And the most contentious thing the book argues, and I'd defy someone to prove it's not true, is that British intelligence had a hand in the founding of the INLA. Another piece of detective work. If you look at the Provisionals, they were in a weakened state at that stage. There had been a change in leadership as a result of a sting operation. The British wanted a leadership more open to negotiating a cease-fire and a very elaborate series of manoeuvres ended up with this truce, a ceasefire that held. While I was doing the book I was thinking: 'OK, that works'. Suddenly (at the same time) the Official IRA, which had been dead in the water and of no consequence at all, suddenly split. Belfast and Dublin started arguing with each other and there was a split and the IRSP – Irish Republican Socialist Party – was formed. But within three months, after some fairly patient stitching together, the INLA had emerged. The most obvious conclusion was that it had been founded with help.

If these low intensity operations were being run by British Intelligence, do you think they were a dry run for activities on the mainland?
Well, it struck me that if there were divisions on the Irish side there were bound to be on the other side. And it's quite well documented that MI5 and MI6 were running spoiling operations against each other. It's also clear that, at a certain point, MI5 moved into Northern Ireland and ousted MI6, and then MI6 took two steps backward and started cosying up with the Americans. The Americans were the only ones with a real long-term plan: they basically wanted a united Ireland, and they wanted it as part of NATO. So the Americans and MI6 were the ones going for a negotiated peace urging the Government to sit down with these people. But MI5's attitude was much more along the lines of 'grind the fuckers down'. For me it was a bit like going down a mine without a lamp, but looking back on it, I really enjoyed doing the detective work.

Your own piece of urban archaeology. What about your new book? You said somewhere that it's set in the world of rock music, and you suggested that your approach to the story is based on the idea that rock music has a long enough history for readers to take it for granted as a setting.
This book has proved immensely difficult. The original idea was based on a story my agent told me. He was the first person to go out in public with Yoko Ono after Lennon was shot. I think he was doing a book deal with her. At the time he had a strange meeting. On the anniversary of Lennon's death there was a reunion dinner out in Long Island, which he attended. There was very heavy security for the evening and the guy in charge was a cop who was moonlighting. The department he worked for dealt with locking up career criminals. The following morning, my agent was given a ride back into the city by the cop, and they talked a lot. The cop's job interested me. I got the impression that there are an enormous number of people that the State of New York wants to keep locked up. When they're let out of prison, he watches them and they're locked up again at the first opportunity. And they may well be set up as well. Anyway, there was a file on the back seat of the car, to do with hostile mail that Yoko was getting. The stuff in there went back a long way: there was one saying: 'I'm leaving LA tonight and I'm packing the ice pick.' The woman who wrote it was picked up within 300 yards of the Dakota Building. In a way that anecdote was the start of the story, and I did feel that rock and roll had acquired enough of a history for me to do a kind of Sunset Boulevard take on it.

There's an interesting problem with rock and roll lives: they are, in a way, anti-narrative. They are actually itineraries. The book is essentially a road movie and the problem with this story is that it has a thriller element: someone is writing letters, and in every version I've had a problem with what happens next. My starting point was: she's in Los Angeles, he's in New York, the letters come and . . . they come . . . and WHAT? I was doing back flips to disguise the fact that nothing was happening and he, the rock and roll star, was a kind of ghost anyway, a recluse who couldn't do anything for himself because he'd been looked after all his life. I then compounded the problem by giving him a ghost, because he was writing his memoirs: the narrator who is the ghost becomes the one who observes the story and the one who becomes obsessed by these letters. But it didn't work. It was like playing tennis across two courts. I decided that what I had to do was to bite the bullet and say: 'Yes, we will do Mick Jagger in the first person.' But then, how interesting is Mick Jagger's life? Perhaps it's no coincidence that he's never written his memoirs. What if it's because he's got nothing to say? So I had to be so clever, in a sense, in covering up the lack of momentum. About half way through the story he did go off to LA to look for someone, but you've already had to read 100 pages before that. So I was in big trouble. But I finished it and sent it off to the American and English publishers. I was met with a less than lukewarm response, but I still felt that I was trying to do something interesting with the form.

One of the few TV programmes I watch and really like is Homicide. They have the sort of cast of characters you used to get in Hill Street Blues, but I think it's much better than that. I think I was really quite close to making the book work. But the trouble is that you don't really get editors in publishing these days. I'd been beating my brains out for over two years without really having anyone to talk to. This was meant to be a commercial book and they didn't like it, but they were not clear about why. So I decided I'd better go away and look at what was wrong. I kind of knew that the second half worked, and it was because there were things going on.

So you were having a terrible time with the first 100 pages?
What I was saying about rock and roll was probably not that interesting. I could have got it across in two pages. So there was a slight sense of laboriousness. So I went away and stripped down the whole thing. I took some obvious decisions: I got rid of the narrator, because that didn't work. I knew that the first person Jagger/Lennon narrative didn't work either. And I knew the obvious person to tell the story is the cop, the guy who does the security on a moonlighting basis. In a way he's never heard of the rock star, he's not a fan. And the other thing that happened was that he was the character I'd had the most fun with in the previous versions. I liked him: he wasn't as dumb as he looked and while I made him a very predictable kind of male, I'd given him lots of interesting responses other than that.

After about 150 pages I reached a point where he has an affair with the psychiatrist who is assessing the letters. This woman is over 60 – he's 35 – and I thought: 'No you're not supposed to do this.' I did it in a way where he's kind of nice to her, but he's quite mixed up too. I felt it worked partly because I liked her as a character too. She came from this background where she got sent out of Germany when she was five. She's Jewish, the only child of her family to survive: she was sent to England while the rest of them were killed in the war. And, in spite of being a rationalist and a psychiatrist, she's got this terrible sense of foreboding, of superstition. The thing with the letters is that they're to do with the notion of bad fate. The arrival of the letters affects the lives of all these people. They all come under the spell of the letters and I suppose I wanted to do something that was a kind of black fairy tale.

This was version six! I went away from it for a while and, for some reason, while I was away I really wanted to read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. It was quite difficult to find, but I eventually got hold of a copy. And I thought: 'Of course! This is what my book should be, I should do this as a rewrite of Rebecca!' At the back of my story there is something that happened 15 years ago when they were all in France and this 16 year old girl died. That, in a sense, is the mystery. I rather loftily refused to centre the thing on this: I dropped it in as something you'd just come across, as you might in real life. I was so intent on deconstructing the thriller that there was no thriller element left whatsoever. Rebecca has a terrific voice which carries you all the way through the narrative, and, in my book, I thought the cop as the second Mrs DeWinter; the rock and roll star is Maxim (they are kind of like a married couple); and the girl who died in France is Rebecca. The hook, and it took me nearly two years to work this out, is that the letters start arriving on page one and they're from this girl who died 15 years ago. Then the rock star is saying: 'This can't be how can I get a letter from her?' It worked better once I stopped trying to be coy about what was going on with these letters.

And this solved your structural problems?
Yes. Letter arrives from dead girl – what's happening? We're up and running and into Agatha Christie territory: nobody knows what went on in France except the following five people – A, B, C, D and E – so it must be one of them. Then the letters start changing: they begin to make reference to conversations no-one else had ever heard. And now the guy is really freaking out. So I had a rattled rock and roll star and this quite tough cop, and I could have a lot of fun writing these letters. By the time you get to the end of part one you're beginning to ask the question: 'Well did she really die?' And then the cop finds out enough to think is something going on because the star didn't actually see the body. At this point I want you to wonder if we're moving into black magic territory. The lesson I learned from Rebecca was: do the voice and make sure you've got enough plot to play around with. And I was a sucker for that thing of a story being haunted by a dead person.

Has the rock and roll element become much more peripheral?
In previous versions there was a fictional rock and roll history that I enjoyed doing, and lots of stuff about being on the road. There was a strong sense of biography about it. But I began to think that, in a way, fame is a given now so I don't need to tell my readers about it.

Something you can sketch in and let your readers fill in the details for themselves?
What interested me about those people is that it's like being a kid: there's always someone to tidy up for you, you can leave your toys around and someone will have tidied them up in the morning. That's what fame is like. That's a banal observation in one way, but in another it's helpful. It's the same with Northern. I thought it was such a labyrinth that I decided to make it all up first and then go over and check. And the thing that gave me a handle on Northern Ireland was the weather. They have 1950s weather over there. The whole place has this sense of arrested development for obvious reasons. I was wandering around Belfast and I thought: 'What is it about this place?' It wasn't the obvious things like the soldiers: it was partly the grey drizzle. And I'd been there a week and no-one tried to sell me a copy of the big issue. Part of the fascination is that the whole place is a city in aspic.

I'll be looking forward to seeing how the book slots together.
I've been thinking about the structure and it's terrible, the elementary mistakes you make. One doesn't take these decisions lightly. I remember standing in a phone box in Kent jabbering on to someone that I finally saw I had to get rid of the narrator. And yet I knew in my heart of hearts that I was still going to have the same problem with the first hundred pages. Now I just wonder why I couldn't see from the beginning that the cop had to lead. •

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