Ian McEwan on collaborating with Richard Eyre for The Ploughman’s Lunch

Ian McEwan first became well known as an author of short stories with the publication of First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) and of novels with The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers. His writing has been described as ‘shocking’ and ‘morbid’; his fiction has a pronounced interest in perversity arid depravity and specialises in the portrayal of private worlds such as those created by lovers and children. But he also writes drama for television and the cinema and his recent collaboration with the director Richard Eyre on The Imitation Game (BBC, 1980) and The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) has revealed a concern with history and politics and public events that is not apparent in his fiction.

The Ploughman’s Lunch is a film which sets out to discuss contemporary reality, with the Falklands campaign and the 1982 Tory Party conference as the backcloth to a love affair that never quite comes off. The film’s London opening almost coincided with the announcement of a General Election in which events such as these played a major part and, as Ian McEwan explains in this interview, this was only one of a series of coincidences that conspired to increase the immediacy of its impact. McEwan has the knack of placing his finger on the pulse, and The Ploughman’s Lunch stands as a telling portrayal of the state of the nation in 1983.

Jill Forbes: Could you tell me something about how you came to write The Ploughman’s Lunch and to work with Richard Eyre?

Ian McEwan: We made a film for television [The Imitation Game], and that was a very successful collaboration from our point of view. I think one of the problems for writers in films is that it’s a director’s medium and writers tend to get used. Working with Richard meant working with someone whose habits are those of a theatre director, who respects writers, and who really is far more intent on coming to terms with a script than trying to get writers to produce scripts which feed into directorial fantasies. I wrote a first draft, and of course Richard and I talked, and second draft changes were largely to do with incorporating the Falklands into the film. But any changes Richard suggests are always towards ways of saying better what you are already saying, rather than barging in with ‘Why don’t we make the man a rat and the woman a cockroach … ?’ So I felt confidence in him and, perhaps more importantly, I felt a shared ‘world view’. 

Having made a film set in 1940, we both wanted to make a film set in the present, and we shared the feeling that whereas the American cinema, or for that matter Hungarian, or Italian or French cinema, managed to reflect some contemporary reality, we had very little in British cinema that showed us ourselves. That was, very loosely, where we began. 

Did you receive development money? 

No. I started writing in April 1981, but the film wasn’t, in a sense, set up. There was talk of Channel 4 funding, but at that time Channel 4 hadn’t got on the air, and there was – no doubt very creative – chaos. So I made a virtue of necessity and decided that the best way to maintain control (I can’t think of a better word) was simply to take a year of my own time. I proceeded in a very leisurely way, telling Richard I was writing him a film. But we didn’t talk for a long time after that, though I had a working title – The Ploughman’s Lunch.

I had told Richard that little anecdote [‘The ploughman’s lunch is a completely successful fabrication of the past’ on the part of advertising men] and we both agreed it was a good starting point. It proceeded outwards from that, and what I did was to mooch around: I went to the Greenham Common peace camp, I went to Poland, I went to the Conservative and Labour Party conferences. I asked to spend a day watching the television news being made and, by a series of Chinese whispers on the phone, the message got relayed wrongly and I ended up going to Radio News. But as soon as I stepped in there I thought this is where the film must be. It was perfect! It had… a paradoxical quality: something of the dowdiness of a staff common room in a rather cheesy boys’ grammar school, but clearly also the voice of the State was emanating from this place. You expected to see dust, chalk dust… 

Why did you go to the newsroom?

One idea was that contemporary ‘reality’ is something that people make up. We have to have the world interpreted to us, and just as we were proceeding from the idea of the ploughman’s lunch and the fake past, I also wanted to have some fake present. That’s not to talk cynically because novelists themselves create fake realities. News is a form of fiction and I wanted to see how it’s made. As soon as I walked into the newsroom I knew I wanted a character who worked there. It was the year of the Royal Wedding, and for a long time I thought the film was going to be about the press corps in relation to the Royal Family. 

When I went to the Party conferences I became quite determined that the film should end at the Conservative Party conference, and towards the end of that year I had become fairly certain that what I wanted to write was a love story whose ins and outs would, in some way, reflect some of the ins and outs and deceits and alliances of the Suez crisis… I wanted to find a metaphor that would work in two directions, both for private deceit and national deceit or, more crucially, forms of private self-delusion. I think the most potent lies are the ones we tell ourselves, and this is even more so on a national level. 

So when the lecturer asks, ‘Can we talk about nations behaving as people?’ he is asking a question central to the film? 

The lecture is key to the first draft of the film, where it’s actually all there in one great block on the page. I didn’t really think Richard would want to shoot it like that. It would be filmically disastrous. Together we worked out a more dramatically acceptable way, which was to have James record the lecture and then spread it over three places. The lecturer does talk about Suez and the nation being ‘an affair of the heart’ and he’s saying that over the tape just before we watch James stick up the Vogue picture of Ann and Susan Barrington on top of the Suez map. So dearly we are talking about the two things being parallel. Similarly, at one point Richard chose to go from the brown of the map of Egypt to the brown of the Norfolk landscape.

Why is James writing a book particularly about Suez? 

What he sees is Britain sending off an invasion fleet, just as it did from Malta in 1956, with some chance of success. And if this is to succeed, and the general climate of opinion is wholly behind it, then this would be a very opportune time to present to Goldbooks the publishers the possibility of writing something which fits. The news that fits. The news on Suez is no longer to be that of national humiliation. James wants us to believe it unfortunate that it failed. A mistake but an honourable attempt, and we should get over all this stuff about deceit. 

Paradoxically, that would bring James close to the peace camps, wouldn’t it? With the whole anti-American thrust of Suez…?

He has got to write a pro-American book. He has to be very careful and that’s why he says that a good ally is one who tells you when you’re making mistakes, and in that respect the Americans were good allies. Of course, it’s nonsense. The Americans were atrocious allies. It was when they saw the odds were stacked that they pulled the plug. In fact, Dulles is reported to have said to Selwyn Lloyd, from his hospital bed, ‘Why on earth didn’t you go on? You didn’t have to pay any attention to us. We had to say what we were saying in order to maintain our peace with the Arab world.’ So I think there was a great deal of duplicity in the American position, almost as much as in the British one. James is well aware that he has to steer carefully through this: he’s writing history to order. 

Is there a sense in which this generation is now rewriting its history? 

I don’t see it as a film about a generation at all. They are my age, but they are singularly untouched by what I would regard as the formative time, which would be the late 1960s. So in this respect I would regard them as slightly anomalous. I think it was possible for lots of ambitious people to come pouring out of Oxford and Cambridge and hardly be touched by the move towards political radicalism in this country, but just hunt down the jobs in town in their third year, and wonder if they’ll get that place with Vogue or on the BBC’s trainee director course, or whatever people were pushing into. These people in the film are contemporaries, but the film wasn’t meant to suggest that this is what happened to the generation of ‘48 or the class of ‘69. 

I went to see the film during the election campaign, and the audience was obviously responding to its immediacy. At the same time, it seems to me that the film refuses to expose a certain position, or has, in the post-modernist version, a kind of self-reflectiveness which impedes the presentation of a single point of view. 

The film certainly doesn’t tell people to go out and vote Labour. I wanted to draw attention to a set of relations between things, rather than saying aren’t these people horrid? They are, but in ways that nearly everyone is. I don’t think their horridness is so spectacular: it’s not the horridness of Jacobean drama. It’s the sort of half lie, the sliding truth, the change of register when you talk to one person and then to another. So although they are moral monsters, they’re quite a common breed. It wasn’t my intention to do anything other than point towards certain kinds of relationships between private and public behaviour, the way people can act in bad faith when there’s nothing around them to which they can attach any good faith. Now, this is to some extent the fault of the Left, but that seems to me another problem, and one that I couldn’t possibly propose solutions to in terms of a film, or in terms of anything else. 

What about what one might call the positives? Aren’t they slightly naive – James’ father, the peace camp women…? 

I wanted to propose people who were actually in good faith and watch James react to them – by that time we can watch over his shoulder – with a kind of distanced contempt, politeness, horrified that anyone should be so earnest about anything as to do something so futile as to camp in a bog outside an airfield. I think one of the main strands of the bad faith of James’ milieu is that as soon as anyone appears too earnest they expose their flank and appear foolish. I hoped to make the audience laugh at the people at the poetry reading. I wanted them to share and to feel horribly on the side of James, because I didn’t want James to be an improbably nasty fellow. I wanted some kind of recognition that we all love to watch earnest people put down. It’s a national characteristic.

Against James’ urbanity, his worldly pragmatism, the Greenham Common women just look silly for being so friendly. A few people said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong, the women aren’t like that; and they get a lot of media attention.’ But the fact is that during the Falklands crisis they didn’t, and they were desperate. When we went down there, they were at work, and they felt that part of their work was to communicate with the press. If the press didn’t come they were not exactly wasting their time, since they had a commitment to being there which was beyond propaganda. But they did feel a great need to communicate. 

And they weren’t intellectuals, they weren’t Marxist feminist intellectuals. A lot of them were just ordinary, pleasant housewives. Later on, when the thing got going and the weather got better, there were probably lots of other people around, but at that point when they were weathering it out, they were just local women who had marched from Wales. It was a shame that Greenham Common became so famous later that people thought we were being opportunist. 

Is there an element of pastoralism here? I notice that Norfolk figures from time to time in your writing…

Pastoral is important because you can no longer go anywhere in the English countryside without your peace being shattered by low flying jets. It’s true of Norfolk but also of the Yorkshire Dales, of the Lake District. Young men are learning to fly combat aircraft as if we were gearing up for a war. If James was having his conversation with Ann Barrington, the historian, interrupted by aircraft, what should be his relationship to that? 

And Norfolk? 

I was a year at the University of East Anglia and I sometimes go to write there. At Cley you find the largest salt marsh in Europe and yet it’s the English countryside. Again, we have an image of the countryside put out by margarine ads which is, I’d say, Home Counties, rolling, with mature deciduous trees, smallholdings and hedgerows. The reality is not only that the hedgerows are disappearing and there’s Dutch elm disease, but that there are other forms of countryside that are actually quite beautiful, powerful and English. We were both keen to have an image that was not the traditional one, and we enjoyed having Rosemary Harris and Jonathan Pryce walking across a great expanse of sand talking about the collapse of the postwar Labour government. 

So when the Falklands happened, did you decide to incorporate it? 

It was a great gift. It started almost as soon as I finished the script. I couldn’t quite believe it: an Armada leaving Portsmouth! There were a number of points at which events seemed to play into the script. For example, the scene with the poet and James and Jeremy when they remark, ‘Blasé and epicene, it perfectly describes the new Foreign Secretary.’ A couple of weeks after I wrote that, the Foreign Secretary resigned and there was a new Foreign Secretary, who could be conceived of as ‘blasé and epicene’. 

The scene between Ann Barrington and James where she’s saying ‘My first husband worked for the BBC and was involved in preserving their independence during the Suez crisis…’ All that needed was a shift in stress to, ‘My husband .. .’ and then I just added ‘He’d be useful to them now’ because at that time the BBC were involved in arguments about their impartiality over Falklands reporting. There are all kinds of little points which suggest political events or national events that the film had somehow grown out of. It was partly because I took such a long time researching it that the momentum of events somehow managed to feed back into it. 

Whose footage of the Conservative Party conference was it?

 Ours. That was the first week’s shooting. 

It seemed to me that apart from one shot with Michael Heseltine it could have been a montage. 

No, it couldn’t possibly. There’s a slow pan off Margaret Thatcher to Jonathan Pryce biting his nails, and she is in shot with him framing the whole of the rest of the screen. It was all shot there in the last two days of the conference, and it wasn’t clear what would happen because we had to shoot all that first, before the main shoot. We were having problems with our permissions up to the last moment, but we got in quite successfully because we had Channel 4’s blessing and, through them, a connection with ITN. And we had official permission from the Tory Party. We went in as ourselves, shooting a feature film, a romantic comedy! They had seen the script and they had no objection to it. 

But you do cut the speeches. For example, the Thatcher speech about ‘telling the people the truth’ becomes a very poignant commentary on the film. 

The conference is the kind of reality you behave selectively towards, just as you behave selectively towards all your material. I sort of wrote their speeches in advance and they seemed to give them more or less word for word. I went the year before and I knew the kind of things that happened. The script simply gave the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister lines about national identity, destiny and the younger generation. Resounding phrases about the nation. And they repeated them. Of course, they were talking about the Falklands as well, and it couldn’t have been better unless they had actually been making speeches about Suez. But credit for all that should also go to Clive Tickner and a tiny crew wielding a 35mm camera in such a limited space, and to Richard Eyre for devising some kind of logic for the sequence. 

Are James’ class and background important? He seems very precisely placed. 

They have to do with one of the central preoccupations of the film. James denies his past. He’s a lower middle class boy who wants to succeed in a certain world which ends up rejecting him.

Is his the same milieu as that of the family in The Imitation Game? 

James’ is slightly lower down. Cathy’s father [in The Imitation Game] is a small town accountant with definite pretensions. Fascinating this talk of where people stand – the consolations of the British, the class system! But it seems quite clear to me that James’ parents’ gloomy terraced house underneath the M4 is a couple of points down from Cathy’s father’s nice house in Frinton. The fact that Cathy can play the piano and speak a little German has to do with her father’s ambitions; the fact that James is in the newsroom has to do with his own. I should also say that his family didn’t exist in the first draft, but was a response to suggestions by Richard that we had a character but didn’t know where he came from. In fact, it gave the film much more of the sense of journeying to have those phone calls back to his mother and also to end in the graveyard. Before, it ended with the clink of glasses to History. As soon as Richard said, ‘He has to come from somewhere,’ I knew immediately where he came from.

Could you say something about the way your screenplays relate to the rest of your work. There seems to be a great difference between your stories and your dramatic work. 

I think that’s so. In a discussion after a screening of The Ploughman’s Lunch we were talking about how certain young English writers have written about a sense of betrayal from the Left and written plays about the War or have used the War as a starting point. We were talking about David Hare in that respect. And I said this was more true of dramatists than novelists and I couldn’t really isolate novelists’ interests in the same way. 

Someone else said, ‘You yourself represent this kind of split: as a novelist you don’t talk about these things, and yet as a screenplay writer or a television writer, you do.’ It certainly is the case that when I write fiction I find myself more interested in psychological states, which I think is something that film doesn’t do very well, or not with any great finesse, or with a great deal of pretension, and that when I undertake to write dialogue I seem instantly to be in another frame of mind. I get into another gear, I seem to want to take on themes that are more broadly political.

I certainly don’t want to locate the explanation in the nature of film or fiction. Clearly it was possible once, and some writers would argue it still is possible – American writers think it still is possible – to write the novel of Society. I’m sure there are also film-makers who think film is very suitable for the investigation of individual frames of mind…

Perhaps for me it has to do with what it means to know that you don’t have to collaborate with anybody, the freedom that gives you to make an inner journey… David Hare has an interesting line about how drama, by its very nature, tends to lead to some kind of social critique. 

David Hare seems to have a particularly authoritative status among his contemporaries. 

I find myself interested in all the things he does. And when I was reading through all the vast number of books on Suez, one of the most thrilling bits of rereading I did was the Suez scene from Plenty. If there were a Desert Island Discs of scenes from plays, then I’d be taking that scene, which I think is magic, quite brilliant. What we have in common, I think, is a desire to write about the way we are now by reference to the past. And I would say that in terms of drama (TV and films) the things David does have been the richest, the most resonant. I think he has a very strong voice, and his ambivalence is very much to my taste. 

What you say might suggest that the novel and short story are marginal genres. They reach a much smaller audience than television. 

I think argument from numbers is irrelevant. Otherwise we’d all end up writing for TV. I’m not at all convinced that having five million people watch Play for Today means more than having a few hundred people a week go to the Gate. I don’t think writing about social issues is the only thing you can be doing: I don’t think it’s the most important thing, though it’s an important thing. But the relation between people’s behaviour and their unconscious or their own private past, for example, is also crucial, and I think fiction is a very fine tool for examining states of mind. Novels at their best are complex things with lives of their own. They tend to make political points that are so broad you’d have to call them moral points, if they make those at all. 

For some people the numbers are important, they are excited by large audiences. 

I quite like the compromise by which one can make a film, show it to a cinema audience and then have it on television. I think that’s probably an ideal relationship to have with TV. You know that your film will go on existing after it has been shown, it can occasionally reappear on some late night show, and it will also join the list of all the good and bad films that were ever made. Television films, if you’re lucky, get repeated, and then they don’t exist. I have a novelist’s instinct which tells me that if anything is going to have any worth it must persist in the culture. It must become part of the conversation. Television, however brilliant, defeats itself by its own abundance. 

Ann Barrington’s remark about us being the Channel to observe the shooting in danger of sinking into a perpetual present would apply to television? 

Television ‘is’ a perpetual present. The most successful things are TV reflecting its present: sport, news, panel games, sitcoms, where whatever is stated is replaced by something else that is stated. Maybe videotapes are going to change this. But a feature movie seems to me closer to a book. It can exist, it can go on to a shelf and people can choose to see it again. I really enjoyed making The Imitation Game with Richard. We were treated very well by television and given freedom. But one particular pleasure was managing to get it published. I thought it was the nearest we could get to it persisting. We explored quite vigorously the possibility of some arrangement whereby it could have a limited release, but it was impossible. Films and novels have an edge on TV that it’s hard to get around. 

I’m working with Bertolucci at the moment, and one of the extraordinary things is to be talking to a true cinéaste who seems to have seen every film ever made and to remember every shot in it… in other words, he has the memory of a good literary critic. I doubt if you could meet a teléaste. I doubt if there are – people who could remember that wonderful wide-angled studio shot in that early Panorama! TV’s much more functional. 

What about the duty to be a historian, the question of the popular memory that Ann Barrington raises? 

The irony is that the woman who says this deludes herself into falling in love with a young shit whom she takes to be an idealist, and has also heavily compromised her own past, so you have to take it within its context. What she says is drawn from Kundera, and it’s something that I feel is right. However, Ann retreats into the private life, which seems to me a course that many people take, one with which I sympathise. You can’t spend your life being in opposition all the time. It does something corrosive to the spirit, and many fine intelligences, having attended meetings and jumble sales and marches, at some point in their lives are probably going to say, ‘It’s not changing. Let someone else do the work. I’m going to cultivate my garden.’ For that reason, although the historian is undone by wish fulfilment, she has authority when she says that everyone needs to have some historical sense: the nation that dozes off into a perpetual present is easily tyrannised. 

And after The Ploughman’s Lunch? You mentioned Bertolucci. I’m writing a script for him based on a Moravia novel, 1934, set in Capri in 1934. We’re getting towards the final stages and I hope we’ll shoot next spring. After that I have to get on with some fiction. Too much collaboration is not good for one. It’s nice as a break but I have to return to base, which must always be fiction.