THE GHOST WRITER is a contemporary thriller by the best-selling British novelist and journalist Robert Harris. In early 2007 while working with Roman Polanski on an adaptation of his novel Pompeii, Harris, a former political editor, started to write the novel. Harris was working on both projects in parallel and believes the novel was imbued with Polanski’s influence as a result. When, for various reasons, the planned film of Pompeii didn’t go ahead, Harris sent Polanski a copy of his finished novel, prior to its publication. Polanski responded by saying “Let’s do this instead, it’s like Chandler.” Harris explains. “He’d been looking to make a thriller and had been originally interested in my first novel “Fatherland,” but he discovered it had already been filmed. So in a curious working out of fate, which he strongly believes in, we ended up making something completely different. We then spent another very pleasant few months working on this screenplay instead.”
Harris found Polanski the perfect collaborator. “He is respectful of the original source material and he always said ‘the novel is the screenplay’. So from a writer’s point of view he’s the ideal director. Our method was to do a draft, which I would write based on the scenes and the structure of the book and then we would go over it remorselessly – discarding, sharpening, improving. One of the curious effects of working with him is to feel one is writing the novel again, but getting it right this time around. There are things in THE GHOST WRITER screenplay which are better than are in the novel. We worked at it and made it sharper. For example, I think that the movie’s infinitely strengthened by the fact it stays in this environment of trees and coastline and derelict rundown ports and beaches. That works much better.”
Harris found that he and Polanski had a similar approach to storytelling that made their collaboration all the more enjoyable. “Just as I’m less interested in writing shimmering prose for the sake of shimmering prose, so I don’t think that he’s interested in a particular shot or a particular dramatic piece of cinema happening for the sake of just showing off. It’s always story, character and logic. It was such a joy working on the screenplay.”
The page-turning novel that became the script was influenced by the master of the art of suspense. “I hugely admire the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock,” says Harris. “The way an ordinary guy gets plunged into a completely strange world, yet every step of what happens is completely logical. Yet it becomes more and more crazy. I like that genre and Hitchcock was the master of it. And certainly I tried to put an element of that in THE GHOST WRITER. This is an ordinary, nameless guy, who happens to do a job that takes him into a completely extraordinary world. And we go into that world with him. What appeals to me, and I think to Roman as well, about the thriller genre is that it has fantastic narrative energy and drive.”
At the time of the book’s publication, many commentators interpreted the novel as a thinly-veiled commentary on his former friend and former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Harris explains the genesis of the idea. “THE GHOST WRITER is an idea I had many years ago. Probably 15 years ago, long before Tony Blair was Prime Minster. I was just very interested in the set up of a former world leader and someone who has to write his memoirs for him. I envisioned from the start a kind of love interest between THE GHOST WRITER and this ex-leader’s wife. I saw them living in some isolated spot, but I could never quite get it right. I could never quite see who this world leader was or where he lived. And year after year I’d look at this idea, then put it away. In the end more than a decade went by. And finally in 2006 I heard an interview on the radio with someone who wanted to have Tony Blair prosecuted for war crimes, who said that the only way he would be able to avoid this would be to go and live in America in exile because he couldn’t be extradited from there. And I almost froze in my seat because I suddenly thought how that could be the central character. Someone based on someone in that situation. And immediately then I also saw the location — in exile, in the United States, like Solzhenitsyn in the 70′s. That’s really when it crystallized for me.”
Although there are obvious similarities between Tony and Cherie Blair and the characters of the Lang’s in the film, Harris stresses the universality of the themes. “Writing about power is the thing that I’m most interested in and all my novels, in a way, are examinations of power. I’m particularly interested in the phenomenon of the leader who loses power, be it Richard Nixon or Margaret Thatcher. How do they readjust? What takes a person to the top and then what’s it like to lose that power. When I started writing the image of Tony Blair went out of the window, and I created – I hope – this universal political figure.”
As a political journalist who for a time was close to Tony Blair just before and after he became Prime Minister, Harris was in the rare position of having a ring-side seat at the centre of British politics. “I acquired a lot of information on the inside track. I got access which no journalist got at that time, let alone a novelist. I was able to acquire information about the way people react under pressure, the way one lives in the security bubble, the relationship with power, the excitement and the adrenaline of it. And it gave me the confidence to imagine is how someone would behave in that situation.”
As producer Robert Benmussa, who has worked with the director since 1992’s Bitter Moon, says, “In all of Polanski’s films, there are many layers, and one of the leitmotifs of all of his films is the struggle to bring the truth that lies beneath to light, to show the reality behind appearances. Justice is something he holds dear. But never without irony.”
THE GHOST WRITER is mostly set in America, in an out-of-season seaside town on an island off the eastern seaboard of the United States. The setting and climate were chosen for very specific reasons. “I always like to put weather in my books,” says Harris. “I suppose that’s because I’m an Englishman and we’re famously obsessed with the weather. And it was very important to me to get that whole feel of an exile in a shuttered up seaside town in winter. A place that everyone else has abandoned.”
Indeed, one of the film’s key themes is isolation. “The Prime Minister is living in an isolated environment,” explains Harris. “He’s on an island, he is cut off from the world. He is separated from the world by security. And that is something which I don’t think has really received the amount of attention it should have done. At the height of the Second World War Winston Churchill used to walk from 10 Downing St. to the Houses of Parliament with one police inspector walking behind him. And Churchill would raise his hat to passersby. And this is during the greatest war in history, in which 40,000 British civilians were killed by bombing! As a former Prime Minister, Blair has, I think, 24 full time armed body guards. He never will be allowed to drive a car, he never goes on a commercial flight, or very rarely. He certainly doesn’t go through a public lounge. He doesn’t have to do all those security shake downs at airports and so on. I’m absolutely fascinated by the way in which our leaders have become a totally separate class from the rest of us. This never happened in the past. Even in medieval times, a king used to lead his men into battle. Now our leaders live behind bulletproof glass. This conditions the way that they behave and distorts relationships. And inevitably they live in an unreal world in which they become very dependent upon their security people and their aides, who become their only link to the real world.”
Of course, the truth at the centre of THE GHOST WRITER comes to light in way that recalls one of Polanski’s most chilling films, which like this and several of his other films – Tess, Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, The Pianist, Oliver Twist - was based on a novel. In Rosemary’s Baby, the identity of the evil neighbour is revealed in an anagram in a book. Here, the big reveal involves a riddle planted in the manuscript. While it appears fanciful, the concept has its origins in reality. “Two of my friends have both ghost written books. One suggested that I describe the process of ghost writing. They also said that it often occurred to them to encrypt something into the text in the way someone working on a great cathedral in the Middle Ages couldn’t resist carving their initial letters or a leaving message, hidden high up among the gargoyles.”
“The idea of disguising a secret as a code within the text of a book intrigued me,” continues Harris. “The manuscript is absolutely essential throughout the book and the movie. Its importance grows and grows until it almost becomes a character in its own right. It’s brought out, everybody sits and looks at it. And then it has to be worked on and crossed out; it can’t be taken out of the building. But then the writer smuggles it out and finally it proves to be the answer to the whole mystery. And then it’s the last thing we see as the credits roll.”
The narrator of THE GHOST WRITER, played by Ewan McGregor, provided another great challenge for the writer and director – an unnamed writer who is at the center of the story and yet remains an elusive bystander to the main events, but one who nevertheless solves the riddle at the centre of the story. Harris and Polanski began by seeking inspiration from Billy Wilder’s seminal film Sunset Boulevard in their quest to find a voice for the lead character who is dead before the action of the movie begins. (Sunset Boulevard is famously told from the point of view of a dead man.)
“Roman’s suggestion was that we should tell a lot of the story, as Wilder does, by using voiceover,” explains Harris. “But the problem with that, we discovered, was that the story unfolded perfectly well simply using action and dialogue and the voiceover added nothing. It slowed us down, in fact. So in the second draft of the screenplay we dropped that device. We did not, however, want to lose the dark undertone to the story that comes from the audience realising at the very end that THE GHOST WRITER is just that – a ghost. It was a problem that we still hadn’t solved when the movie started shooting – I guess we must have spent more time puzzling over that than anything else. And then Roman came up with this extraordinary ending which I suspect may well become one of the most memorable things about the film, but it was almost ad libbed. Just as Chinatown needed a dark ending, this film also cried out for a hard ending.”
Ewan McGregor explains how he heard about the ending. “Roman essentially kills off my character at the very end of the movie, off screen, so it’s quite a brave moment. It wasn’t in the script and in fact Roman told me about it at one of the first days of rehearsal. He came up with it really causally to me and said he had an idea. It’s one shot and it finishes the film. It’s brilliant, brilliant!”
With the screenplay now fine-tuned, the film-makers turned their attention to choosing their cast. The biggest challenge was the character of the narrator, who remains nameless.
“I was influenced by the famous novel Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, in which we never know the name of the narrator, and the idea of a ghost writer fits perfectly with that,” explains Harris about the inspiration behind the novel’s central conceit. “He takes the viewer into a world and describes it for us. He’s just a very ordinary guy, who just happens to do a job that means meeting extraordinary people. “
The sense of narrative perspective is central to much of Polanski’s work. As producer Robert Benmussa clarifies,“There are always many layers in Polanski’s work, but there are constants. All his films are seen from the point of view of a character. Here, we are with THE GHOST WRITER from the first frame to the last – it is all seen from his point of view and the viewer goes forward with him. This is characteristic of Polanski’s films.”
Ewan McGregor was cast in the role of THE GHOST WRITER. With no description of the character or back story detail in the script, it was up to the actor – with the help of his director and screenwriter – to find a way into his character, to find a way to discover his traits and ticks, to develop his manner and characteristics.
“It was quite brave of Ewan to take on such a part,” says Harris. “He really did have to completely flesh it out himself. Very early on Ewan was the name that came to mind, as someone who was both an everyman, but also glamorous in a believable way. And he had to be sympathetic. “
Producer Timothy Burrill adds, “Ewan brings a likeability to the role and you have sympathy for the character, largely due to the way Ewan plays him. He has the charm and the sense of humour that brings a lightness to the movie that was so important.”
Ewan McGregror was thrilled by the prospect of working with Polanski. “I expected that I would be challenged by Roman and I really wanted to be. He’s always giving actors really interesting notes on their performance, really, left of field comments that brings things to life, it’s wonderful. He puts in massive amounts of details in the performance and what you see and how you move and what the set looks like and what’s lying around. It’s the detail that makes it strikingly real I think. I’ve watched most of his films now in preparations for this and that’s what I was struck by and I was excited by.”
The political element of the script also attracted McGregor and the necessity to examine our leaders. “Politicians make monumental life or death decisions on our behalf and then retire and wander off into a world of speech-making and money-making and are not held accountable for the decisions they made or the lies they told and they get off scot free. It drives me mad and this film is very timely.”
When it came to casting Adam Lang, Polanski was keen to avoid any comparisons to any former British prime ministers. “Roman wanted the physical aspects of the characters to be different to those we might imagine,” says producer Robert Benmussa. “That was very important. The idea was to have characters with their own charisma so when you see the film you have a sort of subliminal association with events which have taken place. “
This was going to be a challenge – when the novel was published, British and foreign commentators immediately interpreted it as a thinly-veiled swipe at Tony Blair. Polanski knew who he wanted for the role – Pierce Brosnan. The director had no other names in mind.
Robert Harris was thrilled with Polanski’s choice. “Lang is a composite of all the politicians I’ve ever read about and been interested in,” says the writer. “He has charm, you understand how you’d vote for him. And Pierce has great charm and self-confidence. Lang is not Blair but he does have some of the actorish mannerisms that Blair has. I wanted to also hint at the way that political careers are tragedies because you have a few years and then your life is never the same.”
Pierce Brosnan had read the novel and found it a page-turner and was attracted by the complexities of the story and characters. “This is a political thriller, but not really. It has a Shakepearean flavour to it, it’s a Jacobean tragedy. A man is caught in the circumstances of his own life and his own ego with a woman that he doesn’t really know and is manipulated and maligned by her. I vacillated between liking Adam Lang and thinking he was a complete and utter jerk to believing he had sincerity and did want the best for his country. There is a lot of concealment within all these characters. It really is a nest of vipers in this rather bleak austere house. The writing is very good. ”
Brosnan had never imagined himself in the role of ex-Prime Minister. “I never saw myself as a British Prime Minister, ex or otherwise, but I’m having a great time playing it and it’s a treat to watch Roman. He’s very charming and he’s very specific and to see a director with his viewfinder picking the shot, it’s superb. The viewfinder he uses looks like it dates from Knife in the Water. I’ve been a fan of his work for many years, he is a brilliant cinematic storyteller.”
The role of Amelia Bly was the second character to be cast. Again, Polanski only had one name in his head for this protective assistant to Adam Lang, whose loyalty to her boss goes beyond the call of duty – Kim Cattrall.
“In a political office there is usually a very powerful figure,” says Harris. “And quite often with Presidents and with Prime Ministers it’s a woman. She’s a kind of super secretary or personal assistant who becomes, as it were, a professional wife. This interested me very much because it sets off all kinds of tensions and possibilities. Inevitably there’s a curious relationship between the boss and this professional who tells him he’s marvellous or makes sure his tie is straight. There’s also a tension between someone who plays the professional wife and the actual wife, which is interesting. And then by making her attractive and formidable means that THE GHOST WRITER, who is quite full blooded, is also drawn to her. And so you immediately have a wonderful four-way scenario of tensions and possibilities between these four people. It’s quite understated at first but gradually develops. It was only while I was writing the book that I began to imagine Lang and Amelia having an affair. It seemed to me inevitable: as Lang loses power, he turns to another kind of consolation. Amelia to me is a very interesting character. There’s also often something very sad about those professional wives. They either have no private life or they have a marriage which is duller than the professional relationship with their boss. It’s another manifestation of the way in which power distorts human relations and lives. And that figure is one of the beneficiaries and also casualties of the magnetism of power.”
“I would say that there are two wives in Adam Lang’s life. There’s Ruth and there’s Amelia,” says Cattrall. “This is a woman who’s made a career out of helping politicians and she is always one step ahead anticipating his needs. She’s smart, she’s capable and she’s really indispensable. Her support of Adam Lang is unconditional and I think she feels that he has done the right thing.”
Cattrall found Polanski an inspiring director. “I’ve seen all his films and Polanski is a fascinating filmmaker. He’s a wonderful director, because he leads the suspense. You follow him, you can’t stop looking. You need to know more. I’ve heard him say sometimes, even in a camera move “No don’t be so literal. We need the suspense. Leave a little something out.” And that’s what I love about Roman’s work, it’s so exciting to watch, because I don’t know where I’m going to end up. He leads you slowly but deliberately into a trap, and then you have like the characters in the film the same kind of climatic effect. It’s really thrilling to watch.”
Cattrall continues. “Roman knows his job better than anyone else and he knows your job better than anyone else. He knows behind and in front of the camera, he knows specifically what he needs and how he needs it. That’s a real challenge for an actor. He can pitch in and fix a microphone or saw a table or tell you something about your accent or your make-up. Whatever it is, his eye is complete. For me it’s exciting just to keep up with him.”
With three of the principal roles cast the role of Ruth Lang, the ex-Prime Minister’s wife, proved a tougher challenge. After considering several actors who were the right age for the part, Polanski settled on Olivia Williams.
“I think Ruth is the most interesting character in the movie,” says Harris. “She’s the most intelligent and she’s the person who really makes everything work. She’s also the funniest and the sharpest. I’m interested in a power couple in which someone with charm and the gift of communication becomes the public face of the relationship and the one with the acute political brain but less charisma remains behind the scenes. Ruth is a very complicated and mysterious figure. There have been endless stories about Russians infiltrating British society but if you looked at post-war British history, the Russians failed to exercise any real influence at all on British foreign and defence policy. But there is another country that some people say has taken over and cloned Britain and that’s America. I thought it was quite interesting to have the idea of a Cambridge spy being recruited not by the KGB but by the CIA. I exchanged many emails with Olivia about the character and she certainly shares a piercing intelligence with Ruth. So she is perfect and the perfect foil for Kim Cattrall.”
“Robert Harris sent me a list of characteristics to describe Ruth which began with clever, dominating, vulnerable, jealous, cunning, neurotic and proud of her husband, but contemptuous of him. This contradictory list of adjectives has been ringing around in my head ever since,” says Olivia Williams. “Ruth is the way I’d like to behave in real life! Being so upfront and seemingly transparent no one sees the threat that she is incredibly idealistic and driven. To the point that she will make the ultimate sacrifice for her beliefs.”
Ruth’s double role in the plot is only revealed at the end of the film and brings into question what has gone before. A tricky balancing act for an actor, but one that Williams embraced. “The role is an absolute pleasure, I have to lead an audience confidently down one path and deceive them. I had to do a similar thing in The Sixth Sense. It’s really the pleasure of acting.”
McGregor enjoyed watching the scenes between Williams and Cattrall unfold. “It’s wonderful watching Olivia and Kim because the two characters are in love with the same man. And it’s very fascinating to see how they’re playing that. It’s beautifully done. It’s very nicely detailed, the cattiness between the two women, but it’s quite subtle. They’re often playing these scenes in front of Lang, in front of the man they loved and in front of THE GHOST WRITER who they’re trying to hide it from, but it slips out here and there, they’re playing it very delicately.”
The supporting cast comprises some of the best character actors working today – Golden Globe winner Tom Wilkinson as Paul Emmett, James Belushi as THE GHOST WRITER’s publisher John Maddox, Eli Wallach as the Old Man, Timothy Hutton as Lang’s lawyer Sidney Kroll, Jon Bernthal as the agent Nick Ricardelli and Robert Pugh as ex-Foreign Secretary Richard Rycart.
“As in all of Polanski’s films, there are several characters who have episodic roles but who remain very important,” says Benmussa. “Tom Wilkinson’s character is very important in the film and Roman insisted on casting someone with a great deal of charisma even though the part was only really significant at certain moments. James Belushi isn’t a principal character but he’s a character with a real personality and needed to be played by a very charismatic actor. Roman loves actors, especially English actors. He has a sort of love affair with English actors and that was just right for this film because the majority of the actors are British.”
“One of the great advantages of working with Roman is that he has an extraordinary ability to bring people to work with him,” says Timothy Burrill. “There are very few actors who, if offered a few days work with him, would turn it down because his reputation amongst actors is remarkable. People really enjoy working with him. When I heard Eli Wallach had been cast for such a tiny role I was absolutely enchanted. It is perfect casting and it enhances the film. To get an actor such as Eli, at the age of 93, to come to Europe to play for one scene is an example of Roman’s pulling power.”
“There are great roles at the heart of the movie and we got great actors to play them. I couldn’t be happier,” concludes Polanski.
THE GHOST WRITER boasts a cinematic first. Harris wrote the first novel to include a ‘sat-nav’ device at a key juncture. The directions of a disembodied voice provide his plot with its crucial breakthrough. Harris explains. “I had a very efficient research trip when I was writing the novel. I flew to Boston, picked up a hire car and drove down to Martha’s Vineyard, the location for most of the action, which is named in the novel, but which becomes an anonymous, generic island in the movie. I was only there for about a week and then went back to London. And every single interesting thing that happened to me I put in the story. The house that’s in the movie is an actual house that I found and was able to get into; the hotel, and even the satellite navigation device in the hire car were useful. As I drove along listening to this disembodied voice I thought that this is perfect because someone who’d had the hire car before me had left their destination programmed into the machine. It took me a while to turn it off. And I thought this is fantastic because this can be a kind of voice from beyond the grave. And that device stayed right the way through, through the novel into the movie. And I hope it may be the first time a satellite navigation device has played a prominent role in a thriller!”
Filming took place over three months on locations in Germany and at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin.
Harris says “I think that the notion of exile and of hostility are important elements in the story. And certainly when we first talked about making the movie. The notion of doing something that was generic, that wouldn’t be specific, but it would be an island, a coastline, a former leader. That it would be universal. I think that that’s a great benefit. In that sense, the fact that this world has been recreated in Europe is far from being a handicap and suspect that that adds to the eerie feel that it has.”
Ewan McGregor adds. “The locations have been really important. It’s been really cold making this film. It’s been windy and cold and we filmed so much outside. We’ve been shooting on beaches in whipping winds and rain and we’re always trying to find bad weather. You know, we literally can’t shoot if the sky’s are blue, it has to be grey and rainy and miserable and isolated. It’s quite a claustrophobic feeling that’s been created with these characters stuck together in this modern, sterile house in the middle of an island, set off the east coast of the state.”
As Ewan McGregor noticed, no detail was too much for director Polanski one detail that caught his attention was a brilliant touch that the audience would never know about. Fake covers were created for THE GHOST WRITER-written autobiography of Adam Lang and as McGregor reveals – they were wrapped around copies of a real book. “All the books that appear in the film are all clever designs, they all really look like real books. I was amazed. Someone in the art department is very good at creating book covers. But the truth behind the “Adam Lang, My Life” memoirs is in fact that they are The Blair Years: The Alistair Campbell Diaries inside. Every book in this movie that’s got an Adam Lang cover on it is in fact The Blair Years. It’s an art department joke.”
Dave Griffiths
