Cinema: When Acting Becomes Alchemy

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Fowles knew better than anyone else that filming his book would be a daunting process. He had been less than ecstatic about William Wyler's interpretation of his first published novel, The Collector; and though Fowles wrote a script for the movie version of his second, The Magus, he—and many critics—thought the film a disaster. The third time, he would play it safe: he would retain veto power over the director. In fact, Fowles had just the man for the job; Karel Reisz, whose films (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Morgan) dealt with intelligent outsiders like Sarah Woodruff, and who was then completing a period film on the life of Isadora Duncan. But Reisz, after reconstructing the early 20th century for Isadora, was reluctant to plunge into Victoriana.

And so the options multiplied, the screenplays accumulated, the frustrations mounted. Fred Zinnemann, the Oscar-winning director of From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons, had a script by British Television Playwright Dennis Potter; but Zinnemann could not find the right actress. (Fowles' own choice at the time was Vanessa Redgrave.) Mike Nichols tried, and so did Franklin Schaffner. Recalls Fowles: "A Hollywood scriptwriter came over to do that one. I'm told he had a nervous breakdown after six weeks." Finally, in 1979 Reisz reconsidered and invited Harold Pinter, Britain's master playwright, to collaborate with him on the project.

Harold Pinter carves theatrical art from minimalist melodrama: his plays' silences have the whipcrack of menace. He is also a screenwriter whose adaptation of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between examined the tensions between the entrenched upper class and the emerging educated proletariat, between the fond, painful past and the remorseless present. Karel Reisz is the technician as artist: he makes films with taste, scope and, always, discretion. He is an ideal "reader" for the script or novel to be filmed; he makes writers' visions his own, to help the viewer see more clearly. Together they could perhaps make something faithful and original out of the book.

For three weeks Pinter and Reisz haggled over a table in the study of Reisz's home in Hampstead, London. Finally they hit upon the notion of a parallel secondary plot: "Suppose we had a modern relationship that started in bed and went from there?" Fowles' narrative would be stripped and varnished to Pinter's specifications; and a modern story would be interpolated, describing the affair of the actors playing Charles and Sarah in a film adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Says Reisz: "The novel is a science fiction—a Victorian story and a modern speculation about fiction. Take away that acknowledgment of the 20th century, and the story doesn't add up. Our sense of Sarah's sexual awareness is a modern thing; inside her head, during the story, she jumps from the 19th to the 20th century." By the end of 1979, Pinter had completed his weaving of two centuries, two stories—and Reisz had found his heroine. The following May, Meryl Streep walked onto the Lyme Regis set, and the filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman began at last.