YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Hampton

lines on the record: 56
first: 1996-01-07
most recent: 1996-01-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, no, that's why I asked for a restaurant. I suppose actually boringly it would probably have to be an inexhaustible supply of black notebooks and parker pens.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Oxford, my special subject was Proust, Ala Rashit Tempu, so I've never yet come across a novel that's as compendious and as astute about the human spirit and its difficulties, and it's sort of inexhaustible, I think, so I think that's the book I would take.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it would have to be the Bach, the Janet Baker, actually, because it's for some reason my favourite piece of music.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the last record is from Mozart's Requiem. In fact, it's, I think, the last piece that Mozart ever wrote. It's the Lacromosa.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably that wouldn't be so bad, and since one has plenty of time to do everything, eventually one might get the knack of weaving the roof of the hut or whatever one's supposed to do.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think not very good at all. I don't think I'm not very practical. I'm useless with my hands. I can't see straight. It's rather a gloomy prospect, I'm afraid.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really there are plays of mine that I'm very pleased with and films as well, so it's hard to say, I mean, I suppose Carrington gave me most sense of achievement because it was germinated over such a long, long period. But liaison and the film of that were also things that I'm very proud of. So it's difficult to say you plunge into these different things and you never quite know which ones are going to work and which ones aren't.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've chosen at the closing Arya from an opera by Philip Glass about Gandhi called Sachra Graha, which I saw in San Francisco, and it's a very, very peaceful piece of music which I think would calm the troubled brow when things got hard on the island, you know, after the typhoon or whatever.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it was sort of moving along parallel tracks, but I had been asked by the English National Opera if I would like to write an opera for them, Libretta. And I proposed them Sunset Boulevard, and they were interested in this idea, and I wrote to Paramount. First of all, I wrote to Billy Wilder, who wrote back saying you were a writer, how can you possibly suppose that I retain any rights to me? And he did I wrote Paramount and they said no they weren't interested in selling me the rights or negotiating an option or whatever. And a while later I was having lunch with Andrew Lloyd Weber and told him about this and he said that the person who was in fact negotiating with Paramount for the rights was himself. So I said, well, when you get around to doing it, let me know, and he did.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you just have to take, as it were, the rough with the smooth. I don't know why it took me so long to realise that writing the kinds of films I'm interested in writing is the most difficult way in that you could possibly choose.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you have to, I suppose, learn to do in the end is to protect yourself, and the honorary consul was a project that I was very committed to, and in the end it was renamed, it was re-edited, new music was put on it, and it was thumpingly denounced by Graham Green in a lengthy article which revealed in the last paragraph that he hadn't seen it”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I don't stay there. I mean, one of the good things about working there now is that you just go and you come back. So you don't have to live there to work there. But you do have to work there if you work in films. And ever since I began the first Hollywood film, which was an adaptation of Graham Green's. the honorary consul, which in America was called Beyond the Limit because the man from Paramount said that out of the three word title the honorary consul the American public would only understand one word I ever since then I've”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well now this is to do with Los Angeles. I spent such a little time in Los Angeles that I was eventually obliged to learn to drive something I never got any good at at all. But as I was scraping the wheels along the pavement in Los Angeles, I often used to have the radio on one of the records of that particular year was something called Angel of the Morning by Juice Newton. It sort of summons up the Los Angeles for me, which isn't entirely pleasurable, but it's played such a big part in my life that I feel I ought to be reminded of it.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting thing, though, that people never say that about, let's say, film directors, which is also a secondary role, interpreting other people's work I sort of don't spend a lot of time worrying about these categories, and I do have a list of original projects which are slowly thickening in notebooks here and there, so I don't feel any particular pressure in this respect, although we'd certainly be nice if, for example, I can manage to establish myself as a film director to direct some original scripts. Why I haven't done that in the past is that The one time I did spend a year writing an original screenplay, it didn't get made, and that really is heartbreaking.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's again a skill that people, I suppose tend to underrate. In the end, the business of putting in front of people for a couple of hours something that will engage them and interest them is so complicated that it doesn't really matter whose name is on the piece of work. It's getting a piece of work that will do that to an audience by whatever means you can.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean I can understand why, but in fact I think translators are shamefully under acknowledged and underpaid and look down on really in a way that's not justifiable. They have a tremendously important job to do.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I suppose in the way some people do crossword puzzles or whatever it's a great exercise for focusing the mind actually on the specific linguistic problems.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'd always done that. I'd started that in 1970, I think I did my first. Actually, no, I did my first translation in. While I was still at Oxford in 67 it was a play by Isak Barbel, a Russian play called Maria. I find translation a sort of therapy I always have one on the go, I have one doing one at the moment.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“could be, but I think I was just ready to move on. I mean, I felt that I'd been at the rock hall for ten years. The Royal Court was a theatre for new writers and new plays, and I felt I wasn't a new writer anymore, and probably shouldn't just go on having my plays done there. And in fact, the thing that I did immediately then was to write Carrington”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't, actually, I had no idea that I could do it. I was in Los Angeles and went into a bookshop and bought a book called First Steps in Directing. Give me a great deal of information. But I had very good people around me, and I was careful enough to hire people who were very experienced, and I was old enough not to be afraid to say, well, I don't know, what do you think? At various key moments and not try and bluff it through. Well, this is a favourite of mine Janet Baker has a very beautiful voice, and I have an enormous number of her records, and I've chosen an Aria from St. Matthew Passion. Have mercy Erbamadi.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Desperation, I think it was. No, when Mike Newell decided he didn't want to do it, it was at quite a late stage, that's to say that Emma Thompson and Jonathan Price were already attached to the film, and we had specific dates.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, I suppose an ultimate kind of acknowledgement that life is more complicated than it's cracked up to be. I always think oversimplification is one of the things that gets us into the trouble we get into.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just interested in that relationship and the way two people could make a contract like that and live together very successfully for 17 years, I think it was, and pursue their own sex lives, actually, outside of the marriage in inverted commas, and still remain entirely devoted to one another.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's what they said to me. That was the phrase that was used to me in turning it down. I would say, but it's not about that at all. It's about these people who had a sort of experiment in living. It's a very unusual love story.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the subject matter really, the sort of unconventional nature of their lives, and the tragic conclusion, which is always a thing that disturbs people who finance films. They don't like films with unhappy endings.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't jump at anything. This was a strange illusion that I had after I won the Oscar of her liaison that somehow it would get easier.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't really learn about music at all until I went to school and got a regle player and began to listen to what other people were listening to. I'm one of my favourite records was The Amadeus playing Schubert String Quintet. And I discovered when I was researching Carrington that it was also a favourite of Lytton Strachey's and Dora Carrington, so I included it in the film, used it, and used that recording.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, yes, and was rather sort of Jacobian plot, one of them has an affair with the other one's mother, who then commits suicide, it was very, very lurid, and I don't think I've ever had such good reviews from that day to this.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was Peggy Ramsey, actually. I took advice at Oxford from a woman called Elizabeth Sweeting, who was at the Oxford Playhouse and about getting an agent because when I'd done the play in Oxford, I'd got lots of letters from agents. And she said, Oh, the only agent worth thinking about is Peggy Ramsay, so I sent her the play. Two or three weeks later the porter, New College, arrived and knocked at my door, and said there's someone on the phone. Now this was unprecedented because, you know, you got messages if you were lucky, but for somebody to actually come and knock on your door prove that there was someone formidable on the other end, and it was Peggy Ramsay, and she said, Come to London, dear. And she got the royal court to agree to put the play on within about six weeks, I think”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She didn't actually say it to me. I was standing in the doorway of her office I'd come to visit her, and I heard her on the phone to a young writer, saying You don't want to be like Hampton, he wrote one play which was a great success and then sat around for years. Get on with it, dear. And I said, Peggy, I'm here, and she turned round and looked at me and said, Well, it's true, isn't it?”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't seen it for a while, and in fact there was a fire at Peggy Ramsay's office a few years ago, and she rang me up and said There's bad news and there's good news, she said. The bad news is that a lot of my archive has been destroyed by this fire, but the good news is I think your novel went up as well.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was startled, let's say, but in fact looking back on it, it was a very good thing to happen because that year, which was quite difficult because my father had this knag of being in places where difficulty. In a rather kind of Obvious way, I suppose. I went to Paris and finished my novel and began to write this play when did you ask my mother?”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was quite an extreme way of putting it. What had happened was that I passed my exam into Oxford and was looking forward to my father was by this time in Zanzibar, was looking forward to having two terms at Lancing, just messing about putting on plays and enjoying myself. And my housemaster, who had somehow rumbled this, summoned me and said We think it would be better for you and indeed for the school if you left So out I went into the world and”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my father was very fond of Buddy Holly strangely enough, and he used to play his records a lot, and one of his songs that I'm particularly fond of, both because I like the tune and secondly because I think the sentiment in the title is unarguable. And that's a song called Love Is Strange.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, actually my parents were very encouraging about it, although it was not a what you would call a literary household there weren't many books in the house, although my father was very fond of the cinema. He might have been expected to say well you will never make a living at that answer but he instead he said well yes you should start right away he'd say things like Conan Doyle started writing when he was fourteen I have no idea whether this is true or not but it sounded convincing to me so I felt although this was a strange ambition I didn't feel that it was one that was frowned upon”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made adaptations from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, my favourite writer at the time, concentrating on the blood and guts and leaving out all the philosophical boring bits.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really think so because I'd already started to write at the age of eight or nine in Egypt. The school I was in which was called the British Boys School, had a drama department. And one of the things we did, we were asked to write plays, you know, even at the age of eight or nine for our class to perform. And I started, that's how I started.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not exactly no, but the headmaster was a very kindly man at the prep school that I had sent to brought me in to his office and said You mustn't go round saying these sorts of things, you know, people are out there fighting and dying for their country and you mustn't go Repeating these things that you may have heard somewhere or other. So all this was a very sort of what you might call a political education.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underneath all this, of course, there were political ruptions of one sort or another leading towards the Suez Crisis. And the first crisis that happened was when King Farouk was expelled in fifty two and we were sent back to England, evacuated, so that when the real crisis came in 56, we were rather blas ⁇ about it and in fact stayed right up to the last minute my mother and I were evacuated on the last bowed out. But naturally, being a British child in Egypt, you got into trouble because the British were sabre rattling and so on. And then when you came back to a school in England and repeated what my father had said to me, i. e. that the Suez invasion was completely unjustifiable and there was no reason for it at all. You got into trouble in England.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was very cosmopolitan. Boys I was at school with could mostly speak five or six languages. My parents were very fond of sport, so one was always swimming or yachting or going to the sporting club doing, you know, one thing or another, and it was just a very nice way to grow up.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The happiest time of my childhood was this five years that I spent in Egypt. My father was a radio engineer, worked for cable and wireless. A bit like being in the army you were posted around the world wherever they wanted you to go. But his favourite posting was Alexandria Wade first gone in the thirties. So we wound up there again in the early fifties. It was a sort of idyllic place too.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you could say it was entirely autobiographical. Having never before written autobiographically, I went the whole hog, you might say.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's from Mozart's clarinet concerto, which he wrote for an instrument much deeper in range, I discovered a few years ago than the conventional clarinet. So this is a recording which uses an instrument called the Basset Clarinet.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and for example the ending of the film is much closer to the ending of the novel The Disgrace of the Marquise is very difficult to organise on the stage and in the stage I sort of imply that she got away with it, that it was, you know, her life was ruined, but that she'd got away with it. Whereas in the book, mostly to conform to moral ideas of the time, unleashed a series of terrible punishments on her.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the screenplay is closer to the novel, because I think the form of a film is somehow closer to a novel. Stage play is a very artificial thing. It has its iron laws which you have to conform to somehow. A film is more fluid like a novel. Actually, winds up like a novel too.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, of Yes. It was one of those extraordinary events in my life, really, because everything about it was a surprise. Although in the summer of'y5 when we rehearsed it in Stratford, with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan and Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw and a wonderful cast, we began to realise, rehearsing in our tin hut by the other place theatre in Stratford, that something really exceptional was emerging. And the fact that it had the success that it had, I think, changed a lot of our lives.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means I can write what I like, yes. And so I wrote this, and they were appalled, actually, when I told them what I'd done. Well, it turned out that they had already done a dramatization of liaison autores in the mid sixties, which had not been one of their great successes. and therefore the prospect of doing another one was not something that they”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was, and in fact the two central characters, the Marquise de Mate and the Marquis. Vicomte de Valmont never meet, because they just write to each other. And so when I proposed it as a play, which I think I did to the National Theatre in the mid seventies, there was a lot of head scratching and people said, well, you know, I don't know whether this is dramatizable. Eventually I was offered an open commission by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the mid 80s, and I chose to do this”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd come across the book Laison at Oxford. It was one of my set books for the period that I was studying, which was from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century. And it was one of those books that seemed to me to reveal various bleak truths and was beautifully constructed. It was a book that I came back to again and again.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first piece I've chosen is a concerto by Vivaldi for four violins. George Fenton, who wrote and arranged the music for dangerous liaison, chose Bach's reworking of this to sprinkle through the film. And it's a piece I've always loved.”
1996-01-07 · Desert Island Discs · Christopher Hampton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source