Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

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       21

      Even with my new salary of £60 a week, I still felt a bit of an interloper at the screening-rooms. I had never, for instance, been to one of the lunches that were occasionally thrown for visiting directors or stars, until, hurrying out of a screening one day, I overheard someone discussing a lunch that was being held down the road for Oliver Stone to mark the release of Natural Born Killers. Feeling very much that I owed the Journal some news, I went along to try and gatecrash.

      The party was being held in a private room upstairs from the restaurant. There was lots of sail-bright white linen and untouched fruit juice in iced jugs. Completely on his own, looking plaintive and even a bit lost, sat Mr Stone, so I went over and sat next to him.

      ‘What paper are you from?’ he asked, exhaling a plume of blue smoke.

      ‘The Camden New Journal.’

      He nodded. ‘Is that like the Village Voice?’

      ‘Oh, yes. Very much.’

      A tall and extremely beautiful Oriental woman came over and sat next to Stone, with a cigarette which was successfully impersonating her own slenderness.

      ‘Are you with the film?’ I asked her.

      ‘No. I'm with Oliver.’

      Then Stone began to talk in a very low, slow voice. He didn't really pause at any point so I started to take notes.

      ‘Who are the real killers anyway? Is it really Mickey and Mallory? Or is it the media?. And who are the media? It's just another a word for us, right? Are we the real killers?’

      While Stone talked, I wrote down his thoughts in big swirls and hieroglyphics and loops across pages and pages of notebook. A strange thing had happened. I think I must have been pretending, to both Stone and myself, that I knew shorthand. Which I don't. A couple of times he looked down at my notes and then caught my eye and I returned his puzzled look with a calm one, reassuring him that this was indeed an obscure but ingenious system of European notation.

      ‘… If you think about it, a camera is just another kind of gun. They're both machines you shoot things with, yeah? What I was trying to create in NBK was a thinking mans action film. It's like the anthropologist meeting the so-called “primitive” tribe. They think that when he takes a photograph, he's actually…’

      Before I caught the bus back to Camden, I rang the Journal and told them to pass on the message to Eric that I had an exclusive interview with Oliver Stone. They were absolutely bowled over, and literally held the front page for my return. I would be safe at the paper from now on, I felt. But when I read back over my notes on the bus, it was like trying to decipher the markings on the cave walls at Lascaux. All I had was – well, it wasn't English, anyway, just pages and pages of drawings, which in their own way did seem somehow to capture the essence of Oliver Stone's conversation. You could have exhibited them, maybe, but not published them. They were quite undecodable. If I showed this notebook to Jim or Eric, having promised them an exclusive, I would be finished. Inconsolably, I nibbled the top off one of the mini pizzas I had pilfered from lunch, trying not to think of the disappointment and even contempt with which they would greet this fresh foolishness, and decided to leave the notebook on the bus. But what if they rang the bus company and got the notebook back, with me all the while palely cheering from the sidelines, saying things like: ‘Oh, thank God’? I dumped it in a bin and prepared myself for a performance of which I was incapable. But it turned out that none of this mattered in the slightest because when I got to the office I found that Jim and Eric had finally had the fight about Jim's drinking which I should have realised had been brewing for years, and that Jim had either been sacked or had walked out – no one could tell – and had gone back to Liverpool. Had gone to his flat and cleared out. Had gone. Gone.

      Many years later somebody gave me a poem because they knew how touching I found the end of Withnail and I, though they may not have known why.

      In Camden rain falls heavily On elephants and wolves and him in The greatcoat. ‘Man delights not me, Nor woman neither. No, nor women Neither.’ Nor even wolves. Stop now: Make that heartbreaking little bow, Reshoulder your rain-loud umbrella And drink the last of Monty's cellar — One can quite reasonably say That you will never play the Dane, Chin chin. So so long wolves, the rain Was artificial anyway. The city's a machine which tries Us; sorts the Withnails from the I's.

       22

      

nce upon a time there lived a family of ogres called the Noltes. They were enormous, and even the smallest of them still looked as big as a mountain. He was called Nick. Being so small, Nick felt different from the other ogres, but he also felt different from all the other people he came across, because he was still an ogre. So Nick was never quite sure who he was. Was he big, or small? This was something he thought about all day. He realised he knew a secret – big ogres were also small ogres. After all, Nick was both.

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