By Gill Pringle
“I’ve been smoking weed for 44 years, five nights a week,” author, Lee Child, famously told The Daily Mail. “I’m the poster boy to prove it doesn’t do you much harm. I have a guy on speed dial in New York who comes over with a huge range of marijuana. I smoke it in a pipe because I’ve never been any good at rolling my own joints.”
Despite enjoying getting lit, Child has stated that he doesn’t write his popular Jack Reacher novels while under the influence. But according to director, Edward Zwick, the author does hit an altered state of consciousness when banging away on his keyboard and conjuring up his crunching tales of action and adventure. “He talks about [his writing process] like it’s Coleridge,” Zwick says. “He talks about it like…like Kublai Khan. It’s like automatic writing, and he wakes up. But he claims not to have an outline. He claims to sort of just go into the zone, and start, and then write for six months, and then be done!”
A truly singular writing talent, Child even makes a cameo appearance in Zwick’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. “He’s a lovely man,” the director offers. “I sent him the script, and we had a really nice conversation about it, and he had a couple of ideas. But he’s a very sophisticated man, and he absolutely understands the difference between a book and a movie, and he was very supportive. He came out to be with us when we did the table read, and he came to set a couple of times, and I think he’s just very modest. He loves this thing that he’s created for himself, where he can sit down and write, and invent these worlds, and then go out and sell a billion copies, or whatever it is that happens.”
Lee Child has always been supportive of the Jack Reacher films. When the internet went into overdrive over the vertically challenged Tom Cruise being cast to play the on-the-page towering, physically huge Jack Reacher, Child was quick to jump to the actor’s defence. “With another actor you might get 100% of the height but only 90% of Reacher,” the author stated. “With Tom, you’ll get 100% of Reacher with 90% of the height.” When FilmInk reminds Zwick of the kerfuffle, the director smiles. “I remember that controversy when the first movie came out,” he says. “When we released a trailer for this movie, it had 75 million hits! That says to me that those Reacher fans, of the books or him, after a certain point, now just sort of accepted the fact that that’s what it is. A lot of times, where you see an actor play a part, your initial reserve, is that you’re either won over, or you’re not. Either you end up by saying ‘You know what? He wasn’t there. It didn’t work for me’, or you say ‘It works for me’, and you say, ‘Okay, Shakespeare with multi ethnic casts.’ You either accept it, or you don’t.”
Does Zwick think that this pre-emptive trial-by-social-media – where a film is attacked, dissected, and discussed with a rare kind of fervour before it’s even released – is dangerous for the arts and artists? “It’s a very important question, having to do with the death of real criticism, the succession of criticism, to the blogosphere, to ungoverned, unedited, un-thought through response,” the director replies. “It’s gone along with the need to homogenise a piece of entertainment, so as to be able to appeal to the greatest number of people at a single moment, so as to legitimise the advertising spend, and the investment, and the sum of it all. That is really to the detriment of the quality of the work. People can be defensive in their choices. They’re trying to protect their down side. They’re trying to be the least defensive, and the most pleasing, perhaps in fear of this kind of thing. On the other hand, movies were always made or broken by word of mouth, and this is just turbo charged word of mouth, right?”
It’s certainly not slowing down the prolific Edward Zwick, the director of Glory, Courage Under Fire, Defiance, The Last Samurai, and the era-defining TV series, thirtysomething. “I’m working on something,” he says. “It’s always about trying to detect the slot machines. You’ve got to come up with three cherries with the script, and then you’ve got to get the right actor, and then the studio comes in, and somebody’s got to want to finance it. I was literally in the middle of something else when Tom called about this…”
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is released in cinemas on October 20.
