Give the man a cigar

Novelist Paul Auster has had his first taste of film production with Smoke. This `least cinematic of writers' spoke to Chris Peachment about what it takes to `visualise' a story

It is a great pleasure to find Paul Auster smoking small cigars in public. Not just because there is probably a death penalty for such egregious behaviour where he comes from, New York, but because they look to be the same brand that William Hurt smokes in the forthcoming film Smoke, for which Auster shares a prominent co-credit with the director Wayne Wang.

Hurt just happens to play a writer, suffering from writer's block, who also just happens to live in Park Slope, the same part of Brooklyn where Auster lives with his family. Each day Hurt goes down to the corner cigar store and chats with its manager, Auggie Wren (played by Harvey Keitel). Much else happens in the movie, but by the end of the film, Auggie is telling the writer all about the most unusual Christmas he ever spent.

In fact, the film's genesis was a short story which the New York Times asked Auster to write for their Christmas edition. He came up with Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, which I won't spoil for you, except to say that Keitel delivers it to Hurt in a bravura, one-take sequence in a cafe. Wayne Wang saw the story in the paper, called up Auster, and asked for the rights.

"I said, `Sure, use the story. Good luck'," says Auster, "and hung up and went back to my novel I was working on."

Wang later turned up in Brooklyn and he and Auster discussed how the story might be expanded. Wang then went back to San Francisco where he lives and worked it up into a script with another writer. He sent a treatment and outline to Auster. "I read it and I thought it was OK, but not extraordinary. I showed it to my wife, and she said it was, well, OK. We spent the evening trying another approach. I rang Wang the next day and he really liked my ideas and he said, `Just do me a favour...' This is where he is so tricky! `Just do me a favour and type it up.' So I did, and he went to Japan, and got the money, and then the next two years of my life were the movie."

The film has the highly unusual byline: "A Film by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster." One would have to look back to the collaborative partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger for a similarly shared credit. "That was Wayne's idea," says Auster. "After I delivered the script he insisted I stick around. We cast it together, rehearsed together, went through designs together, scouted locations together. And then spent seven months editing together. Believe me it was the last thing I expected. I looked up and there were two years gone out of my life. Still, it got me out of the house."

While Auster has had one previous book filmed, The Music of Chance directed by Philip Haas, he had no hand in the production of it. He does, however, have a solid grounding in cinema from his student days in the Sixties when he would skip classes and go to the famous Thalia rep cinema on 95th Street and Broadway, where he saw a steady stream of European art films. "Henning Carlsen's film of Knut Hamsen's Hunger was a favourite of mine, because he contrived a style that enabled the story to be told from inside the head of the narrator. That's very hard to do on film. You can resort to point-of-view shots, but that becomes a little mechanical. I'm also very fond of Rosselini's bio-pic of Pascal. He somehow managed to show on screen a solitary man coming up with an idea about the existence of God, and it was so beautiful. I guess they both appealed to me because they show on film that impossible thing of what it is like to live inside a writer's imagination."

Although Auster has had plenty of interest shown in his books over the years, including an on-off collaboration with Wim Wenders that came to nothing ("I call him WW Two. Wayne Wang is WW One"), the grammar of cinema has played no part in his own writing. "I hate modern novels that read like they are just movies for the page. I would say that my novels are the least cinematic of contemporary writers'. Which is why Smoke was so exciting. I had to become a dramatist, but also a visualiser, and work out all the different narratives for each character in terms of pictures."

He and Wang decided early on that the film should predominantly be the stories of different lives around the neighbourhood. "I like where I live. There are all kinds of different races and they all manage to get along with each other. We wanted to make an Ozu film, but with Americans," says Auster, with reference to the Japanese humanist film-maker whose quiet way of observing people amounted to an almost religious illumination of the human heart. "Hence the little bracketing shots of the Brooklyn subway train, which echo Ozu. We were shooting mostly indoors with just faces and bodies, and their story to tell. I firmly believe that every life is interesting. If you could write up everybody's life honestly, then you would have a map of the entire universe."

Like William Hurt in the movie, Auster has had some bad stretches in his time. "Although nothing like having my wife gunned down outside the cigar store (Hurt's reason for writer's block). If I am stuck, which is not quite the same as being blocked, it is usually because I didn't truly understand what I was trying to do. Or I am not being honest enough with myself. You have to live at a very profound level with your imagination in order to get the work out. And if you lose your energy, and you can't get down to that place, then it won't come out any good."

What helps spring Hurt from the trap is his involvement with Auggie Wren, seeing a picture that Wren had taken of his dead wife and hearing his little Christmas story. "I have no formula for the problem," replies Auster, to a question I haven't exactly asked. "As I get older I get more patient. I wait a while and if there's still no solution, then I know I am going seriously wrong."

He was originally going to be a sports writer, but an interview with the New York Times made him realise that he just couldn't get three stories a day out of one baseball match for the deadlines, and so he took to doing odd jobs before spending four years in France, translating, tutoring, and house-sitting. Montaigne and Pascal are still his chief pleasure and main influence upon his writing. "There is no more honest writer than Montaigne. He set out to discover himself. And he discovered the human race. He was pretty much a heathen though. Pascal wrote what he believed about God in In Memoriam, and then sewed it in his jacket next to his heart. What a joy!"

After two years on the rock face of film-making, has he acquired a taste for collaborative work? "No, I was getting rusty with the writing, but I am back on it now." There is suddenly a knock on the door of the office in Soho Square where we are talking, and a messenger comes in and gives him a bulging wallet. "I left it in my hotel room," says Auster, "which is weird, because right now I am writing a long essay on money." About how he leaves the house without his wallet, for example, something I don't think I have ever known any man do in his life. "No, more like, why I didn't have any money at various stages of my life. And why this culture has such a passionate obsession with it. It defines everything, and everything is judged in terms of money. A rather disheartening way of life."

He stubs out his cigarillo and looks at my tape recorder. "I hope that this won't turn out too hard to write for you," he says. I explain that with a deadline approaching and an editor standing over you with an axe, there is nothing that can't be written. "Good idea," he says, "novelists should have one of those."

n `Smoke' is on general release from 19 April