Conversations with Paul Auster

The Making of The Inner Life of Martin Frost

179 The Making of The Inner Life of Martin Frost Céline Curiol/2006 Reproduced from Paul Auster, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, pp. 1–19, with permission of Paul Auster. Céline Curiol: You already wrote part of Martin Frost’s story in The Book of Illusions. Why go back to it, expand it, and turn it into a screenplay? Paul Auster: The Inner Life of Martin Frost has had a rather complicated history. In 1999, I was approached by a German producer to make a thirtyminute film for a series she was putting together of twelve short films by twelve different directors on the subject of men and women, so-called Erotic Tales. I was intrigued by the proposal and decided to take the plunge. It was early in the year, I remember, February or March, and I sat down and wrote my little script, which came to about thirty pages. Since the budget was going to be low, I confined myself to just two actors and one location— an isolated house in the country. The story of Martin Frost, a writer, and a mysterious woman who turns out to be his muse. A fantastical story, really, more or less in the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Claire isn’t a traditional muse. She’s an embodiment of the story Martin is writing, and the more he writes, the weaker she becomes—until, when he comes to the last word of the text, she dies. He finally figures out what has been happening and burns the manuscript in order to bring her back to life. That’s where the short version ended—with Martin bringing Claire back to life. CC: What was the response from the German producer? PA: Very positive. Everyone liked the script, and I went ahead and began making preparations to shoot the film. Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk—the great actress from the Wooster Group—were going to be my cast. Peter Newman, the producer of all the previous films I’d worked on, was again 180 CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL AUSTER going to produce. We made an itemized budget and were starting to look for a house to film in when negotiations with the German company broke down. They wanted to release the money to us in three stages. One-third on signing the contract, one third when we started shooting, and one-third when we were finished—and they approved the film. This last point worried me. What if they didn’t like what I did and rejected the results? One-third of the budget would be lacking, and suddenly Peter would be in the position of having to pay off tens of thousands of dollars from his own pocket. I didn’t want to put him at risk like that, so I backed out of the project. The thing that clinched it for me was a conversation I had with Hal Hartley. He had just finished shooting one of the twelve films for the series, and lo and behold, the German producer was insisting that he make changes, putting Hal in exactly the same mess I was afraid of getting us into. His advice to me was to pull out, and that’s what I did. In the end, it was probably all for the best. For the fact was that not long after I finished writing the short version of Martin Frost, I began thinking I should extend it into a full-length feature film. Martin brings Claire back to life—and then what? That’s where the story would start to get even more interesting, I felt. So I sketched out a plan for the rest of the film—nothing definite yet, but a stack of notes to mull over for the future. Then I put it all away and started writing The Book of Illusions , which had been brewing inside me for a long time, close to ten years. That was the summer of 1999, and I finished the manuscript two years later, exactly one month before the attack on the World Trade Center. Toward the end of the book, David Zimmer, the narrator, gets to see one of Hector Mann’s late films shot in the New Mexico desert. For numerous reasons, The Inner Life of Martin Frost seemed to be the perfect story to use at this point in the novel, so I adapted the short version of the script and put it...