SÁNDOR LAU sits down with screenwriter/novelist/actor William Brandt to talk about Proust, letting go of your baby, and the truth about Shoes.


WILLIAM BRANDT is a screenwriter, fiction writer, and actor. He has appeared in An Angel At My Table, Shortland Street and you can catch him in the final episode of The Insider's Guide to Happiness. His collection of short stories, Alpha Male (1999) won the Montana Book Award for best first book, and his novel, The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life (2002) has been published in Aotearoa, the United States, and Britain. As a screenwriter, William has penned episodes of Shortland Street, an episode of Duggan. More recently he wrote the short film, My Father's Shoes, which screened in the New Zealand International Film Festival's Homegrown programme of NZ shorts and the Melbourne International Film Festival. A black comedy, the film tells the story of a prodigal son's attempts to beg, borrow and steal his father's old gardening shoes. My Father's Shoes also plays shortly in the Montreal World Film Festival, and has been purchased by Polish television.

How and why did you start writing?

I did start writing when I was about six or seven I guess. I really take it from my time in Russia in the 1980s when I'd just finished drama school and then I worked for a year as an actor in Australia. Then I accompanied my wife to Russia. She was being posted there as a diplomat.

I had already tried to write a novel, which had not worked out at all, while I was at drama school. But when I got to Moscow, I thought, "I'm not going to do a lot of acting here because my Russian isn't really up to scratch," and so I made a conscious decision to devote myself to writing while I was there. I wrote a collection of short stories, all of which were absolutely appalling, but it got me started.

I had a real Proustian experience, you know in À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust relates this experience, his first writing experience. He wrote a bunch of short stories and showed them to a friend of his father. But the friend gave him a response which absolutely crushed him and just left him a total mess and made him feel like he was a complete and utter failure because his stories were so terrible, and that's basically what happened to me. I wrote these stories and I showed them to someone who was friends with some hotshot Australian writer, and she just didn't say anything at all.

But my mother-in-law sent some of them to Phoebe Meikle, she was quite a well-known NZ writer who read them and said you should keep writing. So that was at least a start.

And I did keep writing a bit. The most useful thing I did was teach myself to type over those two years in Moscow. That was my big creative achievement. When I got back to NZ in 1990, I produced a documentary in 1991. Then I wrote a play (Verbatim) for Miranda Harcourt in 1992. That was my successful venture, and was a really positive creative experience for me. From that I met Fergus Barrowman (of Victoria University Press), who just asked me if I had any short stories, and I sent him something, and he published it and things sort of took off from there. That was 1992 that things started happening.

So you published some stuff in Sport (literary magazine)?

Yeah, my first story, in fact this story, which has been filmed. That was the first short story I ever had published and it was the first good short story I ever wrote.

Tell me about the process of turning this story into a film on screen.

I've known Sam Scott the director for a very long time. We've been friends from back in university days. She read the book (Alpha Male, in which) when it came out. When did we first start talking about it? The book came out in 1999, and around then we touched base and started talking, and she said she'd be interested in making a film based on one of the stories in that book and I said well, fine, just pick a story. That's the one she picked, which I think was a very interesting choice.

I very quickly wrote a draft of the screenplay and sent it off. We had a little bit of discussion about it. I had to shorten it a little bit but it pretty much stayed as it was. Sam got it funded relatively quickly, but the way scheduling worked out, she was doing other work and couldn't find a slot to shoot it, so she had to pass on that funding.

A lot of people would kill for that funding.

Well, I'm sure somebody benefited. I'm sure it didn't go to waste. Then it sat around for a couple of years after that. Eventually she managed to get back to that and get it done. I thought, "it probably isn't going to happen." Things have a kind of momentum, and it was gone, but it came back again. Things can come back.

How many drafts did you go through?

I would describe it as one draft with three or four polishes. There was a length issue, I had to get the length down. I was a bit worried about that for awhile. For a while I thought I had cut too much out and gutted it. Apart from that, there was some stuff, which was much more involved, like a scary thriller. That changed quite a bit. There were a couple of scenes that got dropped, just short scenes that got dropped in the editing room, but really it's very close to what I wrote. The main thing is the dialogue. There's quite a lot less of it.

I like that sparseness of dialogue. It's well communicated through the pictures on screen. A lot of prose writers are very precious about having their work adapted to screen. In this case, you were very fortunate to be writing your own script and you changed quite a number of things. What was your motivation?

I wanted it to have a dramatic storyline. I looked and in the story, the main character narrates something that happened to him. For the film I just took that story that he narrates and turned it into dramatic action.


Why did you change the title (from His Father's Shoes to My Father's Shoes)?

I didn't they did. I personally prefer His Father's Shoes. It's more literal.

It has unfortunate timing this year, easily confused with something else.

Not that it does me any harm. If everyone thinks I wrote In My Father's Den then I'm strokes ahead.

You should have called it Lord of the Things.

Yeah, that's a really good idea. Lord of the Shoes.

What involvement did you have in actual production?

I went to a rehearsal. Early rehearsal. That was very exciting. I basically didn't have much to do with it. I had quite a lot of discussions with Sam leading up to that, about how I saw it and what I was after. She wanted to get a picture of where I was coming from with it. It was quite a challenge. It seemed really straightforward at the time. But when you actually get to it it's a lot harder to capture the tone of the piece. It's kind of comic and black at the same time and balancing the comedy and the black was a real challenge. There was quite a lot of discussion about that at the rehearsal. But I went back down to Wellington and let Sam get on with it from there. It was really important that she took it over and did the directing. It's her piece, it was good to just let her take control at that point. It was time for me to step out.

What's that feel like handing over your baby?

I'm fine with that. I think you've got to be careful with who you get involved with and trust who you're working with. If you don't feel OK about letting them do their thing, then you're working with the wrong person. I was more than happy for Sam to take the piece and do what she wanted with it. As a writer of prose, you are God.

Yeah it's great, isn't it!

In filmmaking, people are constantly questioning, especially writers, "How important am I. Am I valued. Do people know I exist." It's true that you cannot make a good film without a good script, but at the same time a good script does not equal a good film. Other things have to happen.

For good things to happen creatively there must be freedom. A writer has to accept that and give the director freedom. Directors have to accept that and give the writers freedom. Everyone has to feel free or they won't be creative with it.

What are your plans for the future? Is this the Book of the Film of the Story of My Life becoming the Film of the Book of the Story of My Life?

That's correct. The film of the Book of the Film of the Story of My Life, I'm working on at the moment. I've got another screenplay that I'm also working on. I'm very much in the screenwriting mode at the moment. It's been good to have done this short film. A good stepping stone and starting experience. I'm also continuing to grapple with the challenges of adapting your own material. You've got to step back from it and see it from another point of view, then get back inside it again. I'm getting quite close to finishing the first draft of the (screenplay based on the) novel.

What's the second screenplay you're working on?

That's just an original screenplay. I can't remember the working title. Oh yeah, the working title is Made in Heaven. It's an original screenplay about men and domestic labour and marriage and the middle class.

Wide ranging.

Fairly close to my heart.