Written Interview: David Hare

English screenwriter, TV writer, playwright and director David Hare (Strapless, The Hours, The Reader) with a presentation he made in association with BAFTA. An excerpt:

On The Hours, when Meryl Streep walked into the room in which she, the principal character lived, we had to stop filming for six hours to completely re-dress the apartment. Stephen Daldry is the most assiduously collegiate of directors. He’d had endless meetings with her about what it was going to look like but at that moment when the abstract becomes concrete everybody realises that they are making a subtly different film in their heads. And the job of the director is to align everyone’s views and to make everybody understand the degree to which they are making the same thing.

The screenwriter’s job is to begin that process. To be the first person who does that. I am the first person who imagines what it will be like at the Everyman Hampstead in 18 months time or two years time when the idea becomes concrete. So when people ask what I do for a living, mostly I think. I spend most of the day thinking — a posh word for thinking is imagining — but I do whatever you call that. Dreaming what the film is going to be. That’s what I do most of the day. Most of the day I balance out the implications of one thing being one thing, another thing being another thing, and how that will work.

When I recently delivered the film I’m hoping to make next year, the person who paid for it said to me ‘Oh my goodness me, this is dialogue to die for.’ I didn’t like to say to her I usually write the dialogue at about 4.30 in the afternoon and it usually takes me about 20 minutes. Actually, writing the dialogue is kind of the easiest thing that a screenwriter does because if you’ve thought it all out right then the actual job of writing the words is just incredibly easy, because most of what you’re doing is imagining.

For the rest of the interview transcript and the video of the presentation, go here.

Thanks to Shaula Evans for sourcing this link.

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