much more than the triumphant ‘Smoke’

He had some objections to the seventh art, mainly its bidimensionality (“they are flat images projected on a wall, a simulacrum of reality”) and the fact that films tend to be watched “passively” while in a book “you have to get actively involved” and “use your imagination.” But beyond these considerations, Paul Auster He was first a great film buff – in his autobiographical book Inside report talks about the films that had the most impact on him as a child, starting with War of the Worldsand, as an adult, his most admired filmmakers were Yasujiro Ozu (he had a devotion to Tales from Tokyo), Satyajit Ray (he was fascinated by The world according to Apu), Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson—, then a wonderful screenwriter and, finally, an irregular director.

‘Smoke’ and ‘Blue in the Face’

On Christmas Day 1990, The New York Times public Auggie Wren’s Christmas Carol, the work of Brooklyn’s most illustrious resident, Paul Auster. At the end of that day, in a very austere moment, the American filmmaker of Chinese origin Wayne Wang He bought the last remaining copy of that newspaper at a newsstand in San Francisco. She read the story, going from crying to laughing, and vice versa. At the end, he asked himself a question: “Who is Paul Auster?” He thought that that little piece—his author’s first story, but he didn’t know that at the time—was a great starting point for a film. He had the opportunity to tell her in person five months later. The writer knew the work of Wayne Wang (he admired his film Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart) but at that time he was writing his novel Leviathan and coming up with a script, as the director suggested, made him lazy.

Circumstances changed a few months later, after Wang successfully moved to find financing. So when he finished Leviathan At the end of 1991, Auster began to write Smoke. He finished a first draft, but problems arose with financing, so the author immersed himself in writing his next novel, which he would later title Mr. Vertigo. But later he returned to the script, of which he made new versions. The fourth is the one the teacher read Robert Altman, which detected that the plot lost interest after halfway through the text. The writer heeded the advice of the director of the very choir—as Smoke— Lifes crossed (1993) and rewrote it again.

The filming of Smoke ended in December 1994, “after many twists and turns and many economic, emotional and creative ups and downs,” says Wayne Wang in the prologue of the book published by Anagrama that brings together the script of this film and that of Blue in the Face.

Auster participated in much of the creative process. She was at the casting. She created complete biographies of the characters—including their musical and food tastes—that she gave to the actors. She went into the editing room, where she verified that the script that she had written and that had been shot was very long. During the filming he was less lavish, because he understood that this was Wang’s territory.

The film revolves around a New York tobacco shop run by Auggie Wren, played magnificently by Harvey Keitel. It is a “comedy drama” (Auster dixit) with a magnificent cast (William Hurt, Ashley Judd, Giancarlo Esposito, Stockard Channing, Forest Whitaker…) that won the Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Festival.

The most remembered scene is the one in which the protagonist tobacconist shows the writer Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) a curious photographic album: every day he takes a picture at the same time—seven o’clock in the morning—from the same angle. However, Auster’s favorite was the last one, in which Auggie Wren narrates the Christmas story that gave rise to the film.

During the first trials of Smoke, Wang and Auster laughed a lot at the actors’ improvisations. That’s where the idea arose to make a cheap movie without having rehearsed before and without a script. It is title Blue in the Face (1995) and was filmed in six days at the tobacconist’s Smoke. The actors (Keytel, Esposito, Mira Sorvino, Lou Reed, Madonna, Roseanne, Jim Jarmusch and Michael J. Fox are some of them) participated for minimum wage. Auster defines this feature film, which he co-directed with Wang, as “a hymn to the People’s Republic of Brooklyn.”

Smoke and his little sister Blue in the Face They are “two Christmas gifts that Paul Auster and Wayne Wang give to film fans,” writes the second of them in the Anagrama book that collects the scripts of both feature films.

Two solo films

This book of scripts published by Anagrama includes an interview by Annette Insdorf with Paul Auster dated November 22, 1994. She asks him if he will make more films after Smoke and Blue in the Face. “No. It’s time for me to go back to my hole and start writing again.

He changed his mind. He directed two more films, already alone: Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007).

Lulu on the Bridge is a magical realism film in which a saxophonist (Harvey Keitel) has to leave music after being the victim of a shooting, so he falls into a depression until a mysterious stone gives him back his will to live, which allows him to meet an aspiring actress (Mira Sorvino) with whom he falls in love. It’s a good movie, but unlike most of her novels, you don’t feel the need to watch it again. The prestige of the writer in Europe allowed this feature film to be screened in the section a certain look from the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

His latest film is The Inner Life of Martin Frostwhich he presented in 2007 at the San Sebastian Festival, where he also served as president of the jury of the official section (the shell went to Wayne Wang). His plot, which includes supernatural elements such as that of Lulu on the bridgehas its origins in a script for a half-hour film that a German producer asked Auster for a twelve-episode series titled erotic stories. This project came to nothing, but as I was writing then The book of illusions decided to incorporate the story into the plot of this novel. The protagonist of the film is an American writer who decides to stay alone in a country house, where one morning a woman appears in his bed who turns out to be his muse. It was filmed in Portugal. His daughter Sophiealso a singer, she is one of the actresses. It is a failed film that failed at the box office.

A novel made into a film

Auster maintained that there is a lot of inner journey in his novels that is difficult to capture in images, and hence it has hardly been adapted to film. Furthermore, his works are usually extensive, so he knew that they would be mutilated in their transfer to the big screen. However, one reads Leviathan, Moon, S Palace, Brooklyn Follies, Mr. Vertigo either The book of illusions and he feels that potential films pulse in those books. However, only one of his novels made it to the big screen: The music of chance, in 1993. Filmmaker Philip Haas and his wife wrote the script and the former directed it. James Spader and Mandy Patinkin are the protagonists.

Includes Auster’s only work as an actor, if that can be considered a cameo. It’s thirty seconds in the last scene: «Never again! If nothing else, I came away from that experience with a new respect for what actors do. I mean the professional actors. There is nothing like trying it to receive a lesson in humility.

The film, correct but without the magic of Auster’s novel, barely had an impact.

A Spanish project

In the country of last Things It is one of Auster’s great works. It is a novel with an apocalyptic tone starring a woman, which is unusual for the writer. The Argentinian Alexander Chomsky He was going to be the director and author, along with Auster, of the script. Anton Reixa, singer of Os Resentidos then focused on cinema as a director and producer, offered to seek financing in Spain. He even traveled to New York and met Auster, whom he also met in Europe.

The commercial failure of The Inner Life of Martin Frost It did not help attract investors and the project came to nothing. The film was never made, but there was a theatrical adaptation which premiered in Sarajevo in the middle of the war and later toured other European cities.

Silent film scripts

Maybe one day some will appear unpublished scripts by Paul Auster, now lost. «When I was very young, when I was 19 or 20 years old, I wrote a couple of scripts for silent films. They were very long and very detailed, seventy or eighty pages of words. Strange comedies of impassive faces and blows. Buster Keaton I revive. Those scripts were lost, I wish I knew where they are,” the writer details to Annette Insdorf in the aforementioned interview.

A curious frustrated feature film

In A life in words (Seix Barra), Auster says that in 1989 the British director Michael Radford (The postman and Pablo Neruda) proposed to collaborate on a film project. It was based on an episode starring the french artist Sophie Calle: He found an address book on a street in Paris, decided to telephone all his contacts and published interviews with these people in a newspaper. The owner of the diary, who was traveling abroad, found out about the matter upon her return, a month later, and announced that he would sue Sophie Calle unless she agreed to publish the diary in question naked. That’s how it went.

Radford and Auster made an “outline” of the film, but there was no way to get it to any producer. Maria Turner, the character inspired by Sophie Calle that he had created for that film non natus, was recovered by the writer in his novel Leviathan.

Cinema in his novels

Cinema often appears in Paul Auster’s novel plots. Sometimes, collaterally, as occurs in Ghosts (the second novel of The New York Trilogy), which details the 1947 police films that the character Azul is going to see and gives a broad description of Return to the past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), or in Sunset Parkin which one of the characters is writing a thesis on The best years of our lives (William Wyler, 1946).

But above all there are two novels in which he plays a central role in the plot, which are The book of illusions and A man in the dark.

“Everyone thought he was dead.” It begins so The book of illusions, which sold very well in Spain (it came to be recommended by Aznar as summer reading). Hector Mann, silent film actor, is the man who everyone believed in the afterlife and the axis of the plot.

In the main story of A man in the darka guy spends a sleepless night analyzing movie scenes.

Employed by a producer

Furthermore, among the various jobs that Auster held (English teacher, black literary, translator, telephone receptionist in the office of the The New York Times in Paris…) also includes “working for a film producer”, as we read in A life in words. It does not detail for which one or at what time.