어제 책을 다 읽어버리고 나니 영화가 매우 보고싶군요. 듀나 리뷰에 따르면 하울이 좀 재미없어진 것 같아서 섭섭하지만 말입니다. 저는 책의 플롯이나 캐릭터도 좋았지만 유머가 제일 좋았어요. 맨 나중에 너무 급하게 몰고가서 서둘러 매듭지은 느낌이 드는게 흠이라면 흠이지만 전체적으로 독창적이고 흥미로운 책이었습니다.
지독하게 자기중심적이고 허영심 많은 하울이 머리 염색이 잘못되었다고 부리는 히스테리 소동은 진짜 웃겼고, '평범한 얼굴에 진흙색 머리카락을 한 남자치곤 허영이 많다'고 비꼬는 불의 디몬 칼시퍼의 독설도, 늙은 소피가 칼시퍼를 협박하다시피 밀어붙이는 것도 재밌는 부분이었죠. 웨일즈에 대한 농담, '난 음악적 재능이 없는 웰쉬맨으로 태어났다'고 한탄하는 장면에도 꽤 낄낄거렸어요.
그러고 보니 농담 하나가 생각나는군요. 빌리 코널리가 코미디 무대에서 한 농담인데, 난파선에 탔던 각각 2명의 잉글리쉬, 스코티쉬, 웰쉬맨이 무인도에 가게 되었답니다. 몇 달이 지나 스콧들은 가능한 재료를 갖고 위스키 증류를 시작했고, 웰쉬맨들은 합창단을 조직해서 노래를 부르고 있었대요. 잉글리시맨? 그때까지도 해변 어색하게 서서 소개해주길 기다리고 있었답니다.....
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어제 밤에 제랄딘 매큐언의 새 미스 마플이 나오는 '서재의 시체'를 봤습니다. 저는 좀 실망했어요. 미스 마플이 재밌는 건 늙고 자애로와 보이는 얌전한 할머니가 실은 무서운 탐정이라는데 있는데, 아무리 옷을 칙칙하게 구식으로 입고 얌전하게 앉아 있어도 제랄딘 매큐언은 그냥 매서운 권위가 뚝뚝 흘러서요...게다 레즈비언 키스도 등장했으니 아가사 크리스티가 봤으면 꽤 놀랐을 것 같군요.
타라 피츠제랄드와 잭 데븐포트가 작은 역으로 나와서 약간 낭비되었더군요. 그리고, 맨 마지막 결말과 범인도 바꾸었습니다! 현대화 하려고 참 애쓴단 생각은 들었지만, 별로 그렇게까지 효과적이진 않았어요.
촬영 장소가 제가 알아볼 수 있는 곳이더군요. 이스트본이었거든요. 거기 한 두번 놀러가 본 적이 있는데, 거긴 정말 노인 인구가 많죠. 노인네들이 은퇴하는 휴양 도시라더니, 세심한 곳까지 노인네들에 대한 배려가 많이 되어있었고, 노인들이 권력이 센 곳이란 걸 실감했죠. 이스트본 해변의 티룸에서 스콘과 차를 마시던 생각이 납니다. 영국 티룸에 큰 기대는 없었지만 부석부석한 스콘과 밍밍한 밀크티가 참 맛 없었어요...
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미야자키 하야오의 스튜디오 지브리 팀에서 다이아나 윈 존스의 집으로 방문을 했던 모양이에요. 그 얘기가 작가의 작년 가디언 인터뷰에 나왔었죠.
Just don't go to Cardiff
Andrew Osmond
Wednesday September 17, 2003 The Guardian
Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the acclaimed Japanese animation film Spirited Away, has been busy since completing the Oscar-winning film over two years ago. An avid reader of children's literature, he has settled on Howl's Moving Castle as the basis for his next film.
The book, by British author Diana Wynne Jones, is a light-hearted fantasy that gently deconstructs fairy-tale conventions. It is, says its author, "a very visual book. I think it appealed to Miyazaki because it was about magic in four or five places at once."
She also thinks her characters will have grabbed his imagination. "I imagine that Miyazaki might, almost at once, have set about thinking how to draw and animate a fire demon." The fire demon in question is called Calcifer, and he lives in the hearth of the moving castle. "I can't wait to see how he's done. I have heard he's not being done as simple animated fire, but that's all I know."
According to Miyazaki's studio, the director liked the book's idea of a young girl being magically turned into an elderly lady. Few cartoons have a protagonist of pensionable age, and Miyazaki reportedly pondered how to make his heroine attractive. Jones had her own reasons. "I discovered, writing the book, that old women are much funnier than young girls," she says. "I hope Miyazaki has noticed this too. Turning the heroine into an old woman may not have been done before, but I always wondered why not. People are more than a little hidebound."
Jones describes her contact with Miyazaki's studio as minimal. "My one real contact was when a group of studio people visited me, with interpreters. The group was trying to establish a proper visual background for the film." Backgrounds are the foundations for Miyazaki's fantasies, and the director has a reputation for drawing meticulously constructed worlds, often modelled on European settings. His 1986 film, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, was shaped by a visit to Wales's Rhondda valley during the miners' strikes.
Howl's Moving Castle is partly set in Wales, but Jones couldn't help feeling the studio was on the wrong track. "I tried hard to dissuade them from going to Cardiff, and suggested that a smaller Welsh town would be better. They seemed not to understand the nature of the moorland where Howl's castle is (most of the time), or what a fishing village looked like. I suggested examples, which was difficult as I had largely made these places up, but they seemed doubtful about going there."
More recently, it has been revealed that the Howl film's setting will be modelled on the French region of Alsace. Yet Jones is unconcerned by the changes being made to her book by the director. "I have been an admirer of Miyazaki for many years. He has an ability to make beautiful, meticulous images, without ever losing the rhythm and impetus of his story. It isn't really my place to have fears and reservations."
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Wednesday April 23, 2003
The Guardian
Author of the month Diana Wynne Jones
The Merlin Conspiracy (Collins, £12.99 hb, £8.99 pb)
Just as in all the best fairy tales the heroine's triumph over tragedy culminates in a huge ball, so a few months ago Diana Wynne Jones was invited to a do at 10 Downing Street. Jones had a Cinderella childhood: wicked parents. She and her two younger sisters were made to sleep in an unheated lean-to while her mother and father - who ran, of all things, a recreation centre for teenagers - stayed warm in the main home about 100 yards away. Often the sisters went hungry. "It wasn't pleasant," she says, "but I thought it was normal."
As an adult she suffered searing back pain, from which she escaped by writing fantasy stories. She gained a cult readership, and prestigious awards, but popular success eluded her until 1999, when HarperCollins reissued her backlist. The new covers, and Harry Potter-inspired desire for all things wizard, turned Wynne Jones's stories into bestsellers. Last Christmas came the invitation to the Blairs'. "I always wanted to see inside that house," she tells me, sitting at her own square, dark wooden kitchen table, heavy wind chimes outside. "I'd got this idea that it was like the Dr Who's thingummy - you know, small on the outside but absolutely huge inside." And how was No 10? "Really very ugly carpets, and tastelessly decorated," she says.
"Blair doesn't go anywhere without being videoed," she continues. "These two cameras followed him through every encounter, but only filmed him to the exclusion of everyone else. All the people he was meeting must appear" - and here she extends an arm to demonstrate - "as if they're just handshakes reaching in from the edge of the screen." The image she conjures up - graphic, spooky, and all about those who are excluded in the presence of power, but whose hands reach in anyhow - could easily turn up in one of her books.
Though her 40 novels are all different, her characters tend to be outcasts, or those with difficult family circumstances. Some stumble into magical worlds, others already live there; all learn to negotiate magic's finicky rules and power structures. If you crossed Jacqueline Wilson with JK Rowling, you'd come up with Wynne Jones: the foreground of her novels is magic and fantasy, but played out against a background of rivalries, depression, dark stuff.
The backgrounds are lightly sketched, though. As with Wynne Jones's own childhood, the problems are facts of life, rather than the point of the story. So, in her latest novel, The Merlin Conspiracy - her first for 10 years - the wizard world is one of detached families; nobody stays together. This is described, but not rammed home: Wynne Jones's fiction pulls off that difficult trick of dealing with the problems today's kids are grappling with much as they are experiencing it - as the fabric of their lives, rather than the dramatic interest. She does it like a magician: her novelist's sleight of hand makes so much else happen, you almost don't notice. And, as The Merlin Conspiracy shows, she understands computers, too: older witches' memories are accessed as downloads.
Her best-known character is Chrestomanci, a dapper wizard somewhat in the Mary Poppins mould. The first Chrestomanci novel, Charmed Life, won the 1977 Guardian award for children's fiction. Despite critical acclaim, Wynne Jones's novels were languishing with a publisher, until they were discovered by HarperCollins, looking for magical tales in the wake of Harry Potter. At the time, Wynne Jones hadn't even heard of Rowling.
But children reading the reissued Chrestomanci books soon commented on the likeness to Harry Potter: school background to the magic, referring to a character as one who must not be named. "I think," says Jones, "that she [Rowling] read my books as a young person and remembered lots of stuff; there are so many striking similarities."
Does she feel certain things got "downloaded", perhaps? "I feel slightly aggrieved," she says, "but it happens so easily - one retains something in one's mind. I would like to ask her about it, but she's hard to meet: she was very frightened by all the publishing furore." With typical generosity of spirit she acknowledges Rowling's role in bringing children's writing out of its ghetto.
She is not always so kind - mothers figure ill in Wynne Jones's fiction, as either shiftless or wicked. Does she blame her mother more than her father for her childhood? "I suppose there always is a bad mother or two in there somewhere," she says. Her father died when she was 19; her mother is still alive, in an old people's home. "My father was extraordinarily mean - he counted farthings. But I think my mother not only acquiesced in it - she rather used it: it saved her having to go out and buy us things."
She and her husband, the Chaucer expert John Burrows, have lived in the same house for 26 years. Now, with their three sons grown up, she is learning to enjoy her late-won financial success. "Just at the point where we are getting elderly, I've finally got money." It sounds almost like a happy ending.
Dina Rabinovitch
