It was fascinating for me to take part in the Sunningdale scenes, and strange to be involved in a painstakingly accurate recreation of my childhood home. The white telephones and original copies of Time magazine, the art deco lamps and rugs, carried me straight back to the Shanghai of the 1930s. The large Sunningdale houses were uncannily similar in their fittings, their door handles and window frames. In fact, the English architects in Shanghai had modelled their Tudor-style houses on the Sunningdale mansions rather than the reverse.
When the fancy-dress party ended, the ‘guests’ were filmed leaving the house, and I stepped out into the drive to find a line of 1930s American Packards and Buicks, each with a uniformed Chinese chauffeur. The scene was so like the real Shanghai of my childhood that for a moment I fainted.
Other curious reversals occurred during the making of the film. Several of my neighbours in Shepperton worked as extras, drawn by the nearby film studios, and took part in the scenes shot in England. I vividly remember the mother of a girl at the same school as my daughters calling out to me: ‘We’re going back to Shanghai, Mr Ballard. We’re in the film…’ I had the uncanny sense that I had chosen to live in Shepperton in 1960 because I knew unconsciously that I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that extras among my neighbours would one day appear in a film based on the novel.
Another eerie moment occurred when I was on the set at Sunningdale, and a 12-year-old boy in fancy dress came up to me and said: ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you.’ This was Christian Bale, who played Jim so brilliantly, virtually carrying the whole film on his shoulders. Behind him were two actors in their late thirties, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, also in fancy dress, who smiled and said: ‘And we’re your mother and father.’ They were twenty years younger than me at the time, and I had the strange feeling that the intervening years had vanished and I was back in wartime Shanghai.
The Los Angeles premiere of the film in December 1987 was a Hollywood epic in its own right. Claire and I stayed at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, just within sight of the Hollywood sign, where we met Tom Stoppard, the writer of the script, a pleasant but intensely nervous man. Dozens of stars attended the charity screening, some in mink coats, like Dolly Parton, and others in T-shirts, like Sean Connery. Later the nearby streets were closed to traffic and we walked in procession along red carpets laid in the centre of the road to a vast marquee where a themed banquet was held with Chinese food and Chinese dancers bopping to jive numbers.
In early 1988 my American publisher Farrar Straus arranged a six-city, two-week-long book tour to promote my latest novel. The schedule was exhausting, a non-stop round of interviews, book signings, radio and television appearances. At its best, radio is a thoughtful medium in America, while television is regarded as nothing but a continuous stream of advertising, the programmes included. Publicity and promotion are the air that Americans breathe, and they take it for granted that in every minute of the day someone is trying to sell them something.
Many of my bookshop readings and signings were packed, but others were completely empty, for reasons no one could explain. Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful, though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow Spielberg to make a film of your novel?’ When I replied that he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.’ This was the only time that I’ve heard success downplayed in America. Usually it marks the end of any argument about the merits or otherwise of a film or book. Perhaps American journalists, who see themselves as the consciences of their nation, resent Spielberg for revealing the sentimental and childlike strains that lie just below the surface of American life. There is certainly a missing dimension that European visitors become aware of within a few days of arrival, a trust in the idea of America that no Frenchman or Briton ever feels about his own country. Or it may be that we in Europe are by nature more depressed.
In London in the spring of 1988 there was a royal command performance of Empire of the Sun, attended by Spielberg and Steve Ross, the head of Time Warner and a hugely influential man. I am a lifelong republican and would like to see the monarchy and all hereditary titles abolished, but I was impressed by how hard the Queen worked, making friendly comments to each of us. She was poorly briefed by her English guide, and had to ask Ross what he did, an example of British parochialism (though no fault of the Queen’s) at its worst. Cher, among the Hollywood stars in the line-up, suggested to the Queen that she might like to see her own film, Moonstruck, then playing on the other side of Leicester Square. Her tone implied that now would be a good time for the Queen to cut and run, if she wanted to see a real movie. It was another extraordinary evening, and one of the strangest sights was the band of the Coldstream Guards marching into the auditorium and the Queen standing to listen to her own anthem. I felt that she was the one person entitled to sit down.
* * *
In 1991 I was invited to serve on the jury at MystFest, an Italian film festival of crime and mystery films, which was then held at Viareggio, near the beach where the drowned Shelley was cremated by his friends. The chairman of the jury was Jules Dassin, one of the Hollywood exiles and husband of Melina Mercouri, and the director of Rififi, The Naked City and other classic noir thrillers. Another of the jurors was Suzanne Cloutier, a former wife of Peter Ustinov who had played Desdemona in Orson Welles’s Othello. Nick Roeg and Theresa Russell were the guests of honour, and we had a great time in the hotel bar. Claire got on especially well with a young American film-maker of whom none of us had heard; he was screening his first film in a small off-the-beach cinema out of competition. Dassin, a kindly but ailing old man still recovering from open-heart surgery, found him particularly tiring. ‘Who is this young man?’ he asked me. ‘He makes so much noise…’ I put out a few feelers and reported back that the young man was called Quentin Tarantino and the film was Reservoir Dogs. A year later he was one of the most famous directors in the world.
MystFest was interesting to me because it demonstrated the peculiar psychology of the jury system. The six jurors, with Claire as supernumerary, enjoyed our meals together in Viareggio’s best restaurants, including Puccini’s favourite. It seemed to me that we were in agreement about everything, sharing the same taste in films, whether European, Japanese or American. I was sure we would come to a speedy conclusion when we sat down to decide on the winner.
Halfway through the festival, when we had seen five films, Jules Dassin called a meeting. ‘The films are rubbish,’ he told us. ‘We’ll give the prize to Roeg.’ We had not yet seen Roeg’s film, Cold Heaven, and I pointed out that there were six films waiting to be screened for us. ‘They’ll be rubbish too,’ Dassin said. I suspect that he was under pressure from the festival management to steer the best film award to Roeg. Bob Swaim, the American director of Half Moon Street and La Balance (‘I always sleep with my leading ladies.’ This left me agog. ‘You’ve had sex with Sigourney Weaver? Tell me more.’ ‘No, not Sigourney.’) and I insisted that we see all the films, though the other jurors were ready to follow Dassin.
In the event, sadly, Roeg’s film was not one of his better efforts, and at our final meeting Dassin gave up his attempt to award the prix d’or to him. But our problems had only just begun. As we discussed the eleven films it soon became clear that we would never agree. Each member of the jury had his or her favourite, which the other jurors dismissed with contempt. We stared at each speaker as if he had announced that he was Napoleon Bonaparte and was about to be taken away by the men in the white coats. Every choice other than my own seemed preposterous. I assume that sitting collectively in judgement runs counter to some deep and innate belief that justice should be dispensed by a single, all-powerful magistrate. How jurors at murder trials ever come to a unanimous verdict is beyond me.