Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #5

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What Maria is going through in that book,

she is coming to terms

with the meaninglessness of experience.

That's what everybody

who lives in Los Angeles

essentially has to come to terms with

because none of it seems to mean anything.

Once we moved to the beach,

I felt particularly good.

Joan Didion lives hard by the sea

about an hour's drive north

of Los Angeles.

She shares life along

the coast of her native California

with husband John Gregory Dunne,

who is also a writer.

The day would start with

John getting up and building a fire

and making breakfast for Quintana

and taking her to school.

Then I would get up, have a Coca-Cola

and start work.

Everybody had their own thing.

How important is it

to live here?

I like to look at the horizon.

I mean, that is nice.

It is always there, flat.

I like the way it feels here.

I got back to New York

from the interview and wrote to her.

I sent it to "Joan Didion,

somewhere in Malibu Beach."

That was the address I had.

'Cause I didn't have anything with me.

And she got it.

I was a carpenter

to do a renovation

and expansion of their home in Malibu

overlooking the ocean.

And I spent a couple of months there...

in their house,

first thing in the morning, last thing.

The end of every day...

explaining why we hadn't

made more progress...

and how it was gonna cost even more money.

There was a room that was developed.

And there were bookshelves.

There were decks

and a wall of doors and windows.

I had a young family.

I think I became their carpenter

for the same reason I became

their friend, is that I was, uh...

out of my depth...

kind of...

Didn't know where I was going,

how I got there.

Joan always had an Easter party.

My family and I were always invited.

I always felt

everyone there was smarter than I was

and more cultured than I was.

But I was always made to

feel welcome and comfortable.

It was not the way

you think of Malibu.

It was very out there.

It was far away.

And it was shacks.

And it was small houses.

And it was people living very separately.

And it was very...

Joan.

Everybody and their brother

showed up at this house.

Brian De Palma,

Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese,

Warren Beatty.

Warren Beatty had

a tremendous crush on Joan.

She was well aware of it, as was John.

And John used to...

John used to be very amused by it.

And if I had a dinner party,

Warren would say to me,

"Please, please, will you put me

next to Joan? Please."

It was a very hot atmosphere.

I don't mean "hot" like "sex hot."

I mean "hot" like... "creative hot."

Everybody was talking movies.

Everybody was arguing about movies.

John, being the great raconteur

that he was,

he was gathering material,

and Joan was gathering material.

And they actually were

interested in what we thought.

And they were interested

in, uh, the ideas that we had.

Fade in. Interior subway, day.

The camera holds very tight on her face

as she hangs from a strap

in the crowded subway.

She looks ill, drawn,

scarcely able to cling to the strap.

I had read this book

by James Mills.

It was developed from some pieces

he'd done in LIFE.

It just immediately said "movie" to me.

I had John read it and Nick.

Each of the three of us put in $1000.

You had to go to the producer and...

And describe the movie in one sentence.

And their sentence for

Panic in Needle Park was

"It's Romeo and Juliet,

but they're junkies."

When writing Play It As It Lays,

did you see it as a movie?

You surprised it was made into a movie?

No, I wasn't surprised that

it would be made into a movie.

Um...

I wish it was made

into a better movie.

It was just different. It was different.

The characters were different.

Uh...

The point was different.

Everything was different

even though I wrote the screenplay.

We work in films in an odd way.

One of us writes the first draft,

and the other functions as really

kind of a super-editor

and writes the second draft.

In the end, you can't really

tell who has done what.

Writing scripts allows us to do

other things. Writing scripts is also fun.

I suppose if they had...

a religious belief,

it was in the

Writers Guild medical insurance.

They spoke about

the Writers Guild medical insurance

almost in reverential tones.

When they discussed it,

it was like in almost hushed tones.

The Writers Guild, "Medical insurance.

Oh."

You've written fiction,

and you have written truth.

Why do you write films?

I like it. It's fun.

It's not like writing.

- Pays good money.

- It's like making notes for a, uh...

Making notes for a director.

It's a...

It's an entirely other form of, uh...

Of, uh, something to do.

- It is.

- It also helps finance

- what you really like to do.

- Yeah.

- To write books.

- No doubt about that.

This book, Book of Common Prayer,

is very complicated

with a lot of layers,

and yet it all flows to a common point.

When you write a book like that,

do you keep notes over a period of time

and then begin to see

the story unfold in your mind?

It unfolds as you write it.

I mean, that's something I never believed

before I wrote a book...

Um, but it does.

Well, as you know,

Joan's a complete perfectionist.

If she's thinking about something

and feels she's stuck,

she'll put it in the freezer.

- Do you know that?

- That's not a metaphor?

- That's...

- No, in the freezer.

- She would put the book...?

- The manuscript in the freezer,

in a bag, and, um, then go back to it.

The morning the FBI men

came to the house on California Street,

Charlotte did not understand why.

She had read newspaper accounts

of the events they recited,

she listened attentively

to everything they said,

but she could make no connection

between the pitiless revolutionist

they described and her daughter Marin.

Who, at 7, had stood on a chair

to make her own breakfast...

and wept helplessly

when asked to clean her closet.

Sweet Marin.

Or so the two FBI men

tried to tell Charlotte.

I realized... some years after

A Book of Common Prayer was finished...

Mm-hm.

I realized that it was a...

That is was about my...

anticipating Quintana was growing up.

- I was anticipating separation.

- Her leaving.

Yeah, and so I was actually

working through...

- that separation ahead of time.

- Mm-hm.

So, novels are also about things

you're afraid you can't deal with.

I realized Play It As It Lays

had been about mothers and daughters,

on a certain level, as Common Prayer

is about a mother and a daughter...

and the separation between them.

In that sense that a novel

is a cautionary tale...

if you tell the story

and work it out all right,

then it won't happen to you.

After The White Album,

were you interested in moving away

- from the personal into the larger world?

- I was bored with it, yeah.

I wanted to move into...

stuff that was beginning to

interest me more.

It was a hard transition to make

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