Cinema and book / Writing with director’s pen

On the occasion of Pedro Almodovar’s book “The Last Dream”, Sunday DAWN looks back on books written by famous directors, from Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton to John Waters and Hal Hartley.

The famous Spanish director Pedro Almodovar collects twelve unpublished stories from his personal archive, some of them written decades ago. All the personal obsessions found in Almodovar’s work find space in the pages of his book “The Last Dream” (Dioptra Editions) and are lined up with tenderness and subtle nobility. Stories of biblical fantasy, social psychodramas, narratives of loss, loneliness, creative impasse and of course the catalytic influence of maternal care form a mosaic of delightful short stories.

In the introduction to the book, Almodovar writes: “I was asked several times to write my autobiography and I refused. They also suggested that someone else write my biography, but I’m still allergic to the idea that a book could be about me alone. However, this book is a contradiction because it looks like a fragmentary, incomplete and enigmatic autobiography.’ All twelve stories included in “The last dream” are dedicated to the mother of the director Frantiska Cavaghero. The director’s narrative imprint is noticeable in these stories, but of course none of them come close to the aesthetic level of the best moments of his film work. Perhaps the standout is the story entitled “The Rite of the Mirror”, which has an extremely charming gothic atmosphere inherited from the great masters of horror and mystery literature. So the friends of the director who are waiting for his next film “The room next door”, which he is preparing with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as protagonists, it is worth reading the stories signed by this honest and brave storyteller.

The stylus camera

Filmmaking is a time-consuming and expensive process, so many filmmakers who are born storytellers can’t let the stories they have to tell go unfulfilled, so they turn to writers to bring to life designs that don’t easily thrive on the big screen. In contrast to some writers who occasionally dabble in cinema for artistic experimentation (Clive Barker), directors take refuge out of necessity in the shelter of writing. Among the most famous examples of directors who wrote stories is Guillermo del Toro, who has signed the vampire trilogy “The Fall”, “The Eternal Night” and “The Trail”, a commendable contribution to the literature of the fantastic.

More personal was Tim Burton’s book The Melancholy Death of Streidakis and Other Stories, a collection of seductively macabre and gothic poems featuring outlandish heroes and unusual children looking for love in an inhumane world. Of great interest are the books of the Irish director Neil Jordan, especially “The Past” (1980), “Dream of a Monster” (1997) and “Sunrise with the Sea Monster” (1998). The case for two gurus of independent cinema is also special. John Waters and Hal Hartley, two directors with an independent voice and a language of their own, have signed from a novel. On the one hand “Liarmouth” by Waters, a bitter anti-romance with extreme neuroses and repressed sexuality, with dysfunctional heroines running amok, and on the other “Our lady of the highway” by Hartley, a paradoxically tender story with Catholic decor around a group of elderly nuns whose holy work leads them to smuggle weapons and brew beer. Waters has said he will try to make his story into a movie soon, something David Cronenberg is also keen on for his own novel. The baron of body horror has written a disturbing book, Consumed, a bloody and scandalous conspiracy tale about the bonds of spirit and flesh that possesses a power to unsettle, equal to the most of provocative films such as ‘Videodrome’.

Rare but excellent is “Union dues” by also independent filmmaker John Sayles, set in 1969, when radical groups together with a miners’ union plan a labor revolution. Those looking for a lighter narrative should look to “Heat 2” written by Michael Mann, which is not a sequel but a prequel to the story seen in the famous film of the 90s with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Finally, one of the most enjoyable reads to come from a director’s pen is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. For Quentin Tarantino, the 2019 film wasn’t enough to contain the grandeur of his story, and he felt the need to turn it into a novel, a more expansive version of his cheeky and thoroughly enjoyable revisionism to Hollywood’s darkest page. The incredible thing is that he did it brilliantly, as the dialogues are much more enjoyable than they were in the script.