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Young Adam (2003)
Starring:
Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Emily Mortimer, Jack McElhone, Therese Bradley
Writer/Director:
David McKenzie
Story Source:
Alexander Trocchi
Studio:
Sony Pictures Classics
Official Website:
www.sonyclassics.com/youngadam
Source: www.movies.com
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NC-17: No One 17 And Under Admitted
"This rating declares that the Rating Board believes that this is a film that most parents will consider patently too adult for their youngsters under 17. No children will be admitted. NC-17 does not necessarily mean "obscene or pornographic" in the oft-accepted or legal meaning of those words.
The reasons for the application of an NC-17 rating can be violence or sex or aberrational behavior or drug abuse or any other elements which, when present, most parents would consider too strong and therefore off-limits for viewing by their children."
Source: MPAA
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(Continued from Page One)
DM: We’ve certainly had a lot of support amongst the people that we're speaking to. We've talked a lot about the sort of weird double standard between sex and violence, about the sort of weird dumbing down of the whole grown-up culture in general. Maybe it's because we're talking to a bunch of educated media types or whatever, but there's some sort of groundswell going on there and let’s hope it goes on to something big.
Some have called the Trocchi novel on which the film was based pornography. How to you respond to that?
DM: I certainly don’t think the novel is pornography. What is interesting is that in order to get this sort of dark, existential tale published as a young writer, aged 25 in Paris, he couldn't find a publisher and he had to write a version of the book.
So he came across a guy named Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press, which was kind of a pawn press and he said I'll publish your book if you stick in some sort of...
TS: Spice...
DM: Yes. Spice. And then people recognized the book for what it was and he was able to publish it in its original form, which is of course what we used.
It's interesting, someone sent me the original version of Young Adam, which they picked up at an airport or something, and I read it thinking that it might help me with the script, but as I read it I was saying to myself, "I liked this book and I've spent the better part of a decade trying to get a film made of it and I don't want to get tainted by this shit." I put it down and I haven't read it.
Young Adam is obviously a novel you were very passionate about. How did you go about adapting the book for the screen?
DM: From the start I thought that it was a very cinematic book. I guess especially for me because I had the experience of working on barges and all that kind of stuff and I read it and thought this is a film that was waiting to be made and pounced on it.
Trocchi was dead, and when you're talking about dead authors, you're ending up in the hands of lawyers and the state and it gets complicated. It became this long process of trying to unravel the various pieces. Trochhi died without leaving a proper will.
He had a kind of confusing thing in the will where, when his son was to reach the age of majority, at 21, which actually at the time the age of majority was 18. His son committed suicide when he was 19. So did his son own the rights when he died or didn't he? That took a year and a half of legal wrangling to get it all settled.
Tilda, how did you get involved in the film?
TS: I was sent a script and fairly soon after meeting David, I decided to do it. I was sort of already interested in Trocchi. I hadn't read Young Adam, but I had read Cain's Book and I read some of The Pawn.
It's interesting that when he wrote Young Adam, it was a work of imagination and then he went and lived on a scow in the Hudson River. And that's the sort of experience he writes about and describes very loosely in Cain's Book. There are times where he even describes sex scenes that are obviously riffs on things he'd talked about in Young Adam. He has a sort of Ella character as well.
That seems to be a trait of Beat writers. I once read a Kerouac reference guide that included a bibliography tracing the different names that characters had assumed throughout his novels... Burroughs, Ginsberg, Snyder, they all had around 8 or 9 names...
TS: Well, yes, recycling one's own life endlessly is a sort of honorable tradition. Kerouac once said of Trocchi that none of the Beats could keep up with him. He just outdid them all. He was truly, truly wild.
It's interesting to feel his determination to push it all. Beyond the conversation he was having with Burroughs about the Stateless Novel. His theory of literature became about not writing. He was obviously phenomenally charismatic and an activist of sorts, and always at the center of some happening.
[1] [2] [3]
005: Swinton, Mackenzie
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