Word: gilliatt
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With two novels and a brood of short stories already behind her, Penelope Gilliatt has most recently written the movie, Sunday Bloody Sunday, which has won her extravagant praise. As she sipped a drink in the lounge of New York City's Hotel Algonguin, a watering-hole for literary notables in the city, from Harold Ross, Dorothy Parker and James Thurber on down, Gilliatt revealed her surprise at the movie's reception. "I am very touched that people respond to it as they do. I thought it wouldn't travel--that it was a movie made for about...
...making of Sunday Bloody Sunday demanded 3 and one half years of preparation. "After mooching around for months, lost really for a place to work," Gilliatt completed the screenplay in about ten days in 1967. She recalls the pressure of writing it as enough to make her feel "about ready to flip." She describes her writing, whether of stories or scripts, as being drawn underwater on a steel hawzer, directed not by particular words, but by the force of the whole narrative line. In the black notebooks she constantly carries, which are filled with pages of reworked text, and dialogue...
John Schlesinger, the film's director, worked closely with Miss Gilliatt on choosing the shooting locations, casting, directing and in adapting the rough draft of the script to the actors. She marvels at his attentiveness to her script: "He served it beautifully. He submerged himself to its character and contributed a lot of himself." As with any writer, however, the befleshing of her characters prompted some changes. From the page to the screen, she found "the inflection of the way one character bears on another alters," and she changed odd lines which were either not idiomatic enough or which modulated...
...Alex), and despite the too-callow Murray Head's Bob; with Mozart arias on the soundtrack which give musical dimension to the trio's cultural separateness; and with graceful camera plotting which tie the characters to the shape of their environment, be it park or townhouse. Schlesinger serves Miss Gilliatt inspiredly well...
...final question some audiences will undoubtedly ask: Why make the trio a bisexual one? But that artistic decision simply deepens Hirsh's aloofness, and the doubtfulness that he will ever achieve the sort of earthly happiness that Alex works for. By portraying a man so socially limited, Schlesinger and Gilliatt heighten their point's effectiveness...