The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life

by William Brandt

  The script was Flagrant Consequence. I read it. Then I sat up with her until three in the morning. I told her that it was a good script, a brilliant part, and it suited her perfectly. And indeed, it was quite a good script, the part was at least average, and it didn’t suit her too badly at all. I told her she could get this part. I told her this could be the moment she remembered for the rest of her life as the moment it all turned around. She did the audition. She got the part. The rest is history. Sophie has joined the pantheon. It actually happened, just the way I said it would. I saw it all, I was there. I shaped the course of events, even. If Sophie was Hillary, then I’d be Tenzing. Only in this case, Hillary arrives at the summit, turns around and gives his faithful Sherpa a good hard shove right off the North Face. I served my purpose. My work is done.

  I look myself in the mirror. The window of truth. “Well, Frederick,” I say, “what’s it going to be?”

  “How did that go?” Tamintha is about two thirds asleep.

  “Better than I expected, thanks.” I sit on the edge of the bed. She puts a hand on my arm. “Tamintha, I’m not ready for this.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “I’m sorry. I feel really bad.”

  “No, God, you don’t have to feel bad. I feel bad. I shouldn’t have pressured you.”

  “Don’t you feel bad.”

  “But I do. I do feel very, very bad.”

  “But you’re good. Don’t feel bad. I’m bad.”

  “You’re not bad, Frederick. You’re not bad.” She squeezes my arm. “You’re good.”

  “Maybe another time then.”

  “Sure, another time. Listen, I’m sorry about the news. I know it must have rocked you.”

  “What the hell. It could have been worse. At least she waited a little while.”

  There’s something close to panic in the look on Tamintha’s face, which pulls me up.

  “How long has she been pregnant? Tamintha? How long?”

  “I don’t know exactly how long.”

  “Roughly how long?”

  “A while. Months. Maybe six.”

  Chapter 4

  PICCADILLY CIRCUS. Selfridges is closed, so I’ve come here to think. It’s about ten-thirty and the place is packed, swarming, teeming with life. We have new information. We have a twist, a development. I have to see Sophie. I have to see her in person, and in private. Soon.

  We had a day’s shooting here, at Piccadilly Circus, for Bonza, Mate. We stood in front of the neon signs over there and kissed for the camera. That was how we met; kissing for the camera. In the original script of Bonza, Mate I had about twenty-five scenes. In all of the scenes my character exchanged two words of dialogue with Sophie’s character, then they kissed passionately. That was pretty much it. The first time I met Sophie was in rehearsal the week before shooting began. It was a Tuesday. I was a little nervous. The first day of rehearsal is generally a pretty tense experience for everyone, but I was mainly worried about the kissing. In rehearsal, would we just do the lines, or would we actually do the actual kissing as well? If it was just the lines, it was going to be a short rehearsal. If it was the kissing as well, how far should we take it? Tongues or no tongues? It was a long time since I’d had to worry about that one.

  The Tuesday morning I found the right warehouse and went upstairs. There was Janine waiting for me. Janine was the director. She didn’t look at all tense even though this was her second film, which is generally a very tense-making experience. Her first film was really good. It was all about this guy who hitchhikes around New Zealand in bare feet. I was expecting to sit down with Janine and talk about the backstory and character arc and deep motivation but Janine only had one question: “What do you think about glasses for this guy? I think he’d look cute in glasses.”

  The only other person in the room was a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor over in the corner. She had very long slightly stringy hair hanging down so you couldn’t see her face. In front of her was a script, a big fat notebook, a big plate of jelly donuts, and next to the donuts a packet of Marlboros and an overflowing ashtray. She was going for it. She was shoveling down the donuts two at a time. Naturally I assumed she was the first assistant.

  “All righty,” said Janine, “come and meet Sophie.”

  We went over to the corner, to the face-stuffing girl. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Frederick this is Sophie. Sophie this is Frederick.”

  The girl looked up. Her mouth was full of jelly donut. She didn’t particularly look like anything much. Sort of hippyish, maybe. No makeup and a wide mouth. Spiky black hair. Her voice was drawled out and her eyes were light brown and narrowed against the light from the window. She swallowed, licked her fingers and lit a cigarette. She looked straight at me. A very direct gaze.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She held up a donut. “Want one?”

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  “All righty,” said Janine. “Now you kids know each other, let’s do it.”

  This was it. I was almost in trouble.

  “Oh, just one other thing,” said Janine. “For these scenes, don’t worry about the dialogue, I’m cutting it all. Just go for it.”

  “All righty,” said Sophie. She stood up. She was almost as tall as me. There was a small dollop of ersatz cream on her cheek. Now, I was in trouble. I was in trouble because I realized I liked her and my nerve was failing. Once your nerve fails you’ve had it. I needed to do something bold and active. I needed to take the initiative. I reached out and I brushed away the spot of cream. I said nothing. I looked Sophie right in the eye, and I kissed her. Quite hard. She tasted of sugar, Marlboros, and future happiness.

  “Wow,” said Sophie.

  “Can you guys try that up against the wall?” said Janine.

  “All righty,” I said.

  I don’t remember a lot after that, mainly just Janine’s voice going, “Try cupping her breasts,” or, “Can you get that from the other side?” or, “How about more leg?”

  It was a special sort of freedom. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t her. But at the same time it was us. Of course actors do that kind of stuff all the time. They get used to it. It’s just a job. Finally, Janine had had enough. We rolled apart, gasping. Then Janine took me down to wardrobe and we tried on some glasses. We settled on a nice thick pair of horn-rims.

  So that was my part.

  The kisses had to take place all over the world, in the world’s most romantic places. So we had Sophie kissing me in front of the Eiffel Tower, in front of Nelson’s Column, the eighty-foot statue of Christ in Montevideo, St. Basil’s in Moscow, the leaning tower of Pisa, etc. So that meant that although ninety percent of the film was actually shot in a warehouse in Auckland, lovingly re-creating the interiors of the backpackers, pensiones and B&Bs of low-rent Europe, they flew me and Sophie and Janine and the cameraman to Paris, Rome, Pisa, London, Amsterdam, Moscow, Berlin and Prague. At each city we would get off the plane, drive to the local romantic monument, kiss passionately, get a night’s sleep, jump on the plane and do it all over again. It took us six weeks. Now if that’s not a romantic way to meet someone, I don’t know what is.

  Naturally, Sophie and I spent a lot of time together and we got to know each other quite well. In Paris we went to the Pompidou Centre. In London we went to the National Gallery. Sometimes Sophie dragged me to a nightclub. As it happens I’m a gifted dancer, so that went off fine too. Anyway, we hit it off. We shared points of view. We walked and talked. And talked. And talked. Sometimes we held hands. We put pencils up our noses. We kidded around quite a lot, which was healthy and fun and doesn’t cost anything.

  For quite a while things stayed on that kidding-around level. For some reason I was reluctant to make the first move. Sophie was definitely a live wire and maybe I was even worried that she might be a little too much to handle, but in actual fact I discovered I could handle her no trouble at all. I had her right around my little
finger. She adored me—and with good reason. I was extremely good-looking, fun, outgoing, even a little zany, yet at the same time steady and mature, a moderating influence. I didn’t have moods. I didn’t get hung up on things. I wasn’t flighty or extreme. I did dishes. I washed. Plus, being older, I had perspective. I knew that this too shall pass. She looked up to me. In fact she believed every word I said, right down to the “I believe I was born to change the world for the better” part. Extraordinary, really. I mean, hell, Christ and goddamnit it all I believed it too.

  Sophie, on the other hand, while being extremely focused and ambitious, not to mention talented, was young and not particularly stable. She was only twenty-four. She was likely to do foolish things, to drink way way too much, to get viciously depressed for twenty-four hours at a time, to succumb to sudden waves of fear and doubt, to throw rubbish bags off apartment buildings or even claim insurance on a stereo she hadn’t lost. This stuff can be embarrassing. It can come back. I was exactly what she needed, and she knew it too.

  When we got back to New Zealand things took a more serious turn. She took me to meet her folks, and they liked me. They loved me. They adored me. What wasn’t to like? I was rich, handsome, comparatively young, yet respectful, considerate and helpful. Mature. On my very first visit I did the dishes, helped clear the leaves out of the guttering and deplored violence in the Middle East. I liked them too. The handshakes were firm and the coffee was hot. They were solid people, you could tell that right away. Her dad is from South Africa and her mum is from Upper Hutt. I think they met on safari.

  I took her around to meet my folks too. They adored her. They absolutely adored her. She was young, sexy, almost famous, dry-witted, ambitious—and she could cook. She even called my dad Kev. He loved it. Loved it. She had them eating out of her hand in about thirty seconds. She adored them too. She thought my dad was a scream. She was right, my dad is a scream. He’s a self-made scream. He made his fortune manufacturing light fittings for the Japanese, which is not so easy. He retired years ago, and he still uses the words “quality control” about three times in every sentence. My mum, well everyone adores my mum. She’s just one of those people.

  So, yes, we were riding high, we were on a roll. In Auckland we were like royalty. Everybody thought we were just amazing. We’d just been in this really cool film, we were almost famous, people hung on our words. We were solid. Rock solid.

  Bonza, Mate did extremely well. It played a number of festivals, it won a couple of prizes and Sophie really took off, almost instantly. The New Zealand press went absolutely nuts, as soon as she’d won a couple of overseas awards. (This is pre-Peter Jackson. Nowadays you have to get an Oscar at the very least if you want to impress anyone back home.) Speaking of the press, I even got a couple of mentions myself: “Haunted by erotically charged visions of a bespectacled fantasy lover . . .” “. . . pursued by a mysterious incubus in glasses.” That was me. The fantasy lover. Erotically charged. I like that. Erotically charged. Has a ring to it, huh?

  There was a phone call from Janine. She was delirious. She was in London. “You’ve got to get over here,” she kept saying over and over. She’d been talking to some people. There was a guy at ICM. He’d seen Sophie, and if Sophie was considering relocating he’d love to represent her in London. There was no real question. We were going, of course. We’d been working up to that from the very beginning. We got married in Las Vegas on the way over. I’ve got dual citizenship but Sophie hasn’t, so this way it would be easier with work. But that wasn’t the only reason. We were in love. I’d like to stress that. It was real. We were really in love then, and whatever has happened since doesn’t make it any the less real. We were in love. That’s why we got married.

  Sophie called Simon at ICM the first day we were in London. She went around to meet him. A strange guy. Spends his entire working day pacing up and down his office wearing a headset, waving his arms and talking to people who aren’t even there. He seems to have an eye problem too. On the rare occasions when I would be in his office, whenever I said something he would look vaguely troubled and glance around the room like he could swear he just heard somebody say something but he couldn’t tell for the life of him where it was coming from. Simon took Sophie on. There was never any question of him taking me on. Christ, I knew that. I had erotically charged, but that was about it. I was optimistic, though, I was buoyed up by success. Only problem was, the success I was buoyed up by was Sophie’s.

  We found a flat in West Hampstead, bought a bed, settled right in. Sophie almost instantly got a small part in The Bill in which she played a cheerful overweight Australian hitchhiker who gets incinerated in a backpacker’s fire. Then nothing for a few months, then a run of small TV parts playing large Australians: a walking tour of the Lake District, living in a houseboat in Regent’s Canal selling drugs, a budding journalist. I got no jobs at all. I met a couple of agents, mainly friends of friends of Sophie who explained that their books were very full and if they thought they could realistically do anything for me they would take me on like a shot, but . . . So after bumming out with ICM and PFD and all the others I ended up with ACA: Actors Cooperative Agency. A sad setup indeed. We all took turns at representing one another. I’d spend a couple of days a month manning the phones. Which were running hot. Not. I did once score a job as Ernest Rutherford’s father in a BBC radio docudrama and another time I got to do a voice-over for a TV ad for New Ziland lemb. For a while I thought I’d found a niche in the market but in the end I was undercut by an Australian. They told me they thought he sounded more authentic.

  Meanwhile, Sophie was getting worried. She was still getting work, but she felt she was being typecast as an overweight antipodean. We talked it over. If she was ever going to bust through, she decided she would have to take drastic action. She turned down an offer to play the lead in a film about a young overweight Australian trying to make it in Hollywood and went on a diet. She was re-branding. She lost six kilos. Then another two. She lost her Kiwi accent. She changed her lipstick. Instantly, the work stopped. There was nothing. Nada. And thus began the year of pain. The year which ended in Flagrant Consequence.

  There’s a light drizzle falling. I’ve been carried along, a microbe caught in a mass of foreign bodies, stirring slowly like cake mix, borne along by the madding crowd, crushed shoulder to shoulder back to front with Pommies. Pommies, Pommies everywhere, and not a drop to drink. What a time to give up alcohol. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I have no vices. Help, help, I need a vice. We seem to be moving in the general direction of Soho. Pommies are nothing like New Zealanders. They’re polite but unfriendly. They let their dogs crap just anywhere. They don’t even smell the same. Actually, we’re a lot more at home in California. It’s not that we’re any more like Californians than we are like Pommies, it’s just that in California it doesn’t matter what you’re like. They’re all so soothing. We feel right at home. Anyone feels right at home. Home. Home! A great wave of homesickness picks me up and dumps me on the shores of despondency. I want to go home.

  “Looking for a girl?”

  She can’t be more than twenty-five. She’s standing with her hands in the pockets of a green coat, belted tight. She’s got masses of thick curly hair and babyish skin and she looks a bit like the lady doctor off ER. She has a bright professional smile. Good teeth. She’s a New Zealander. I recognized the accent instantly. Oh, that accent. It’s a real New Zealand accent. One hundred percent pure. I have to hear it again. I just have to, one more time. It’s making me go all trembly and teary-eyed, like when the Maori cultural group does a haka. They practice in New Zealand House just down the hall from me on Thursday nights. Chokes me up every time. The girl smiles again, seductively, and touches my arm, lightly. “Come on, it’s not far. See that doorway over there?” She smiles. She waits. She’s very polite. “I take Visa,” she adds. I guess that’s supposed to be the clincher.

  “You’re a New Zealander.”

  She blinks. �
��Well, yeah.”

  “So am I.”

  “Oh, yeah, right! Where are you from?”

  “Auckland.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, figures. But I won’t hold it against you. You coming?”

  “How do you like it here?”

  “London?” She shakes her head. “It’s a hole.”

  “Really?”

  “Unbelievable.” She holds a hand out, palm upward. “It’s been weeks now. Weeks. And it’s not even proper rain. It’s just this pissy gutless drizzle all the time. No wonder they invaded the Pacific. I would too, if I lived here. And as for the traffic. Oh, the traffic. You know it took me an hour and a half just to get to work this evening? I could have walked it in twenty. And the tube, it’s so dirty. And everything’s so expensive. And you can’t even get decent food. And everyone walks around looking like they’ve got a poker stuck up their arse. Which half of them have. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. And the TV is so boring. Really, it’s just a hole. The whole place, it’s just a great big dirty, dark, wet hole. As a matter of fact, if you really wanna know, it sucks, real bad. The whole place. Sucks. And as for the beer . . . actually, I have to admit I quite like the beer.” She pauses for breath.

  “What about the art galleries? The museums? The libraries? The wonderful parks, the architecture, the sense of history, of access to the rich fascinating tapestry of European culture, thought, art and philosophy?”

  “Nah, I’m not really into that, eh. I do like the movies though.”

  “The shopping?”

  “Yeah, the shopping’s not bad. But the shop assistants, God, they’re all so up themselves. And electronics are cheaper in Auckland. Nah, the whole place sucks. Badly.”