I had been drawn into the world of Tintin in a rather strange way. I’d originally been invited to work on the computer game that would go out with the first film, The Secret of the Unicorn, working with the French company who had just had a huge hit with Assassin’s Creed. This isn’t something I would normally consider. I don’t play computer games. I don’t particularly like them. And writing random dialogue for nameless pirates wandering around the deck of the Unicorn didn’t particularly appeal to me even if – in an early draft – I had them all earnestly discussing my books. But the truth is that Spielberg is Spielberg and I wondered where the job might take me.
It took me to Wellington and the home of Peter Jackson. Somehow I found myself drawn into the sequel, just as the first film was nearing completion. Even more bizarrely, it turned out that The Secret of the Unicorn had problems and almost by accident I was asked to help with the shape and the narrative flow – even to add a few extra scenes. Some of these actually made the final cut. There’s a tiny moment in the film when a man runs into a lamp-post. He falls to the floor and, in the style of a Hergé illustration, a little circle of tweety-birds flutter around his head. But there’s a twist. The camera pulls back to reveal that the incident has taken place outside a pet shop and the birds are reaclass="underline" the owner is there with a net, trying to recapture them.
I mention this only because it was filmed by Steven Spielberg and in all the writing I have ever done over forty years, it’s probably the scene of which I’m most proud. When he showed it to me in a Los Angeles screening room, I almost leapt off the sofa in excitement. This was the man who had shot Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List. And now his filmography included forty seconds by me. In fact, when I look back at the entire Tintin experience, that’s the moment I like to remember. Nothing else was ever quite as good again.
That said, I loved working with Peter Jackson. In fact I had liked him the moment I met him at the Weta studios in Wellington. He showed me a long corridor with a stationery cupboard about halfway down. This was actually the secret entrance to his office. He pressed a button and the back wall swung open on hidden hydraulics, revealing a huge space behind. A secret door! The Tintin books are full of them. I even have one (although it’s much less elaborate) in my home in London. Jackson was such a pleasant, even-tempered, amicable man that it was easy to forget that, with The Lord of the Rings, he had written, produced and directed three of the most successful blockbusters in cinema history, making himself hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Nothing about the way he dressed or the way he lived fitted the stereotype of the movie mogul. After that first meeting we usually worked at his house, which I remember as being messy, cosy, lived-in. When it was time for lunch, his assistant would phone one of the Wellington takeaways. The food was awful.
Together we had decided to adapt one of Hergé’s double albums: The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. The story begins with a group of professors who stumble, Tutankhamun-style, on the tomb of the high priest Rascar Capac. They are searching for an ancient bracelet which has magical properties and which will in turn lead to the Inca’s lost city of gold. Or something like that. By the time I finished the screenplay, about half the story was Hergé’s and quite a bit of it was mine. I’d added one or two huge action sequences, including a chase on two steam trains that turned into a rollercoaster ride around the Andes, and a new climax that involved an entire golden mountain being melted by a primitive laser. We couldn’t use the actual ending of the book – an eclipse – because it had appeared in another very successful film (Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto) five years before.
So that was how things stood as I went into the meeting at the Soho Hotel. Peter Jackson had already told me he had notes but that was hardly surprising. A screenplay for a film of this size might pass through twenty or thirty drafts before it was ready for production, and I would almost certainly be fired somewhere along the way. I was quite prepared for that. I just hoped I wouldn’t be dropped immediately. It would be nice if they let me have two or three attempts to get the script right. At this stage, incidentally, The Secret of the Unicorn hadn’t been released. I had seen it and I thought it was extraordinary. Spielberg had used a technique called motion capture, which had magically transformed the actors Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis into Tintin and Haddock. Both of them were lined up for the sequel.
I arrived at the Soho Hotel at ten o’clock, as I had been instructed, and I was shown into a room on the first floor with a large conference table, three glasses and a bottle of Fiji mineral water. Peter Jackson arrived a few minutes later. He was as genial as ever, with the crumpled look of someone who had just flown across the world. He had lost a lot of weight and his clothes were hanging off him. We talked about London, the weather, recent movies … anything except the script. Then the door opened and Spielberg came in. He tended to wear more or less the same clothes: a leather jacket, jeans, trainers, a baseball cap. His glasses and beard made him instantly recognisable. As always, I had to remind myself that this was really happening, that I was sitting in the same room as him. He was someone I had wanted to meet pretty much all my life.
Spielberg got straight to the point. I have never come across anyone so focused on film-making and storytelling. In the short time that I had known him he’d never asked me a personal question and it often struck me that he had no interest in me outside what I had put on the page. I had been wondering where he would begin. Did he like my way into the narrative? Did the characters work? Were the action sequences in the right place? Were my jokes funny? I always dread the moment when a director opens a script of mine. The first words that come out of his – or her – mouth may change the next year of my life.
‘You’ve chosen the wrong book,’ he said.
It was impossible. Peter and I had discussed which books we were going to adapt when we were in Wellington. I had spent three months on this draft. It was the last thing I had expected him to say.
‘I’m sorry?’ I’m not sure those were the exact words I used.
‘The Seven Crystal Balls. Prisoners of the Sun. Those are the wrong books …’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to do them.’
I turned to Peter. He nodded. ‘OK.’
And that, actually, was it. It didn’t matter that Peter Jackson was directing and Spielberg was producing. They both had copies of my script but we weren’t going to discuss it at alclass="underline" not the plot, the characters, the action, the jokes. There was nothing to talk about.
‘We can do Prisoners of the Sun as the third film,’ Peter said, brushing it aside with a casual wave of his hand. ‘Which book do you think Anthony should start working on for number two?’
Anthony! That was me. I wasn’t going to be fired.
But before Spielberg could answer, the door opened again and, to my shock and utter dismay, Hawthorne walked in. As always he was in his suit and white shirt but this time he’d also put on a black tie.