"An extension of my work as a novelist" (Paul Auster)

This is an excerpt from a 2006 interview, re. Auster's new film The Inner Life of Martin Frost:

Céline Curiol: You wore two hats on this movie: writer and director. What are the advantages of doing both? What are the disadvantages?

Paul Auster: To tell the truth, I can't think of a single disadvantage. I'm not a full-time filmmaker, after all, and I tend to to think of my occasional forays into the world of movies as an extension of my work as a novelist, as a storyteller. Not all stories should be novels. Some should be plays. Some should be films. Some should be narrative poems. In the case of Martin Frost, it was conceived as a film from the start – just as Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge were. By directing my own screenplay, I profit from the fact that I know the text better than anyone else. I know the rhythm of the words, the rhythm of the images, and I can communicate these things directly to the actors and the crew.

– Taken from The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster, published by Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 10. The excerpt is from an interview conducted on August 22, 2006, which precedes the screenplay in this edition.

LINK
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

The oscillation between humour and drama (Paul Auster)

"Life is both tragic and funny, both absurd and profoundly meaningful. More or less unconsciously, I've tried to embrace this double aspect of experience in the stories I've written – both novels and screenplays. I feel it's the most honest, most truthful way of looking at the world, and when I think of some of the writers I like best – Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett – they all turn out to be masters of combining the light with the dark, the strange with the familiar. The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a very curious story. A story about a man who writes a story about a man who writes a story – and the story inside the story, the film we watch from the moment Martin wakes up to find Claire sleeping beside him to the moment Martin stops typing and looks out the window, is so wild and implausible, so crazy and unpredictable, that without some doses of humour, it would have been unbearably heavy. At the same time, I think the funny bits underscore the pathos of Martin's situation. The tire scene, for example. The viewer knows that Claire has just left the car and run off into the woods, and here comes Martin pushing a tire down the road, unaware that the woman he loves has just disappeared – and suddenly the tire gets away from him. It's classic silent comedy: man versus object. He runs after the tire – only to have it bounce off a stone and knock him to the ground. Funny, but also pathetic. The same goes for Fortunato, with all his weird comments, bad jokes, and ridiculous short stories. He shows up when Martin is at his most abject, suffering over the loss of Claire, and amusing as I find this character to be, his presence underscores the powerful loneliness that has enveloped Martin."

– Paul Auster, in an interview which Céline Curiol conducted with him on August 22, 2006, to be found in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 16).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

Writing can certainly be dangerous (Paul Auster)

Céline Curiol: (...) Do you think writing is a dangerous weapon. Can it kill?

Paul Auster: Writing can certainly be dangerous. Dangerous for the reader – if something is powerful enough to change his view of the world – and dangerous for the writer. Think of how many writers were murdered by Stalin: Osip Mandelstam, Isac Babel, untold others. Think of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Think of all the imprisoned writers in the world today. But can writing kill? No, not literally. A book isn't a machine gun or an electric chair. And yet, strange things sometimes happen that make you stop and wonder. The case of the French writer Louis-René des Fôrets, for instance. I first heard about it when I was living in Paris in the early seventies, and it haunted me so much that I wound up incorporating it into one of my novels years later, Oracle Night. Des Fôrets was a promising young writer in the fifties who had published one novel and one collection of stories. Then he wrote a narrative poem in which a child drowns in the sea. Not long after the book was published, his own child drowned. There might not have been any rational link between the imaginary death and the real death, but des Fôrets was so shattered by the experience that he stopped writing for decades. A terrible story. It's not hard to understand how he felt.

– Paul Auster, interviewed by Céline Curiol in 2006, excerpt taken from the interview that precedes the screenplay in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 18).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia