Rewriting ‘Les Liaisons’ : Some notes on breaking the book/stage/screen triangle

The author is the playwright of the award-winning “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” which ended its run recently at the Ahmanson Theatre, and he is the screenwriter of the film version, “Dangerous Liaisons,” which opened Wednesday .

The theater and the cinema speak two quite different languages; or, to put it more bluntly, as Milos Forman did in an interview last year: In the cinema, theatricality is the kiss of death.

The devices of the theater--rhetoric, a certain artifice, the slow unfurling of a tightly knit argument, the pleasures of language--are not merely different from those of the cinema--sensuality, speed, unexpected juxtapositions, the eloquence of images--but to a large extent antithetical. Brecht wanted to connect with his audience’s brains; Hitchcock with its gut. How else to account for the disappointment that so often steals over one during the film version of a well-loved play?

It’s always seemed to me that film has far more in common with the novel than with the specialized codes of the theater; so in accordance with that theory, the first step in adapting for the cinema a play, which had itself been adapted from a novel, was to close the circle and go back to the original.

Not that there was very much time for the leisurely application of theory. Because, for a variety of reasons too complex to disentangle here, but not unconnected to Milos Forman’s announcement that he, too, intended to make a film based on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” the script for my version of “Dangerous Liaisons” had to be written in three weeks.

Lorimar Telepictures, to whom I had sold the rights of the play (later acquired by Warner Bros.), had the courage not to be intimidated by the competition, but they were not rash; if there were to be two films derived from the same original source, they preferred theirs to be the first. Their only other stipulation was that nobody connected with the play should be cast in the film; they wanted a fresh start.

The most obvious difference between the screenplay and the play script was one of weight. The play runs for 2 3/4 hours and I felt quite strongly (though not perhaps as strongly as the distributors) that the film should not exceed two hours. At the same time, there was a good deal of new material I wanted to include. The early plotting, involving Valmont (John Malkovich) hypocritically assisting an impoverished family to win the good graces of Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer) and blackmailing Madame de Tourvel’s maid, were clearly much better seen than described.

In fact, the whole of the early part of Valmont’s and Tourvel’s relationship, compressed into two scenes of agile sweet-talking in the play, needed to be developed much more gradually. Mme. de Tourvel and the Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) share the stage for only a few seconds; in the film and more or less at its center, I wanted a scene where the three principal characters, at a concert where a castrato sings an unearthly Handel aria, assess and contemplate each other, arriving, without a word spoken, at some surprising conclusions. And I wanted, to take a final example, to show Madame de Tourvel’s fate, not learn of it by hearsay. I also hoped to include a series of individual images, some from the book, others from my imagination; the two protagonists dressed and accoutred by their servants like two Samurai; the opera and the private chapel; the secret passage and the formal garden; a corridor of mirrors. Clearly the only answer was to hold the play still and, exorcising as best I could its insistent rhythms, take a machete to it.

Before long, there was an enthusiastic co-wielder of the machete: director Stephen Frears.

Stephen’s contribution to the shape and texture of the script was considerable and one example of this will have to stand for many. Laclos’ novel is composed of letters, and one of the difficulties of adapting it for the theater is that, in the course of it, Valmont and Merteuil meet only once. In tackling this problem, I had lost almost all trace of the novel’s letter-technique (its epistolarity, to use the $10 word), and Stephen pointed out (by now he had read the novel and even endured the play) how useful letters might be to the film, as physical objects, as ironic counterpoint, as secret messages or palpable lies. Now, at the end, the plot turned on a bundle of bloodstained letters.

There are artists who impose their style, whatever the material; others, rarer, who allow the material to suggest an appropriate style. As far as I can tell, Stephen Frears belongs to the latter category and it was fascinating for me to watch the style--neither predetermined nor superimposed--that was allowed to emerge in post-production: a clean, almost austere style, close-ups predominating and the opulence of the settings and costumes emerging in a series of asides, all the more effective because so sparingly employed.

Here too, in the editing room, radical adjustments can be made; thus, when it became clear that some of the changes described above had damaged the delicate balance of Valmont’s two victims, Madame de Tourvel and Cecile (Uma Thurman), it was the editor, Mick Andsley, who found a way to reorganize the order of some central scenes and restore the equilibrium of the narrative.

And it’s in the editing room where the final, fundamental difference between theater and cinema becomes clear: For whereas a play is a kind of metaphysical idea, a random collision between a text, a group of actors, a set and a director and thus endlessly potential and open to change, a film is an object, a submarine, say, where one by one the hatches are battened down until you break the bottle of champagne over it and let it dive and roam the world, unalterably itself.

I want to end by talking about the ending of the film. Faced with the necessity of bringing the work to some sort of moral conclusion, here’s what Laclos does in 1782: He shows us the Marquise publicly disgraced; she also loses a long-running lawsuit and goes bankrupt; she contracts smallpox and loses an eye; and finally, he tells us in a footnote, even worse things happen to her, which he can’t put into words. This has the air of protesting too much and in the play I replaced it all with a hint of the coming revolution. When the play was performed in France this was thought to be somehow sacrilegious, so the disgrace and the smallpox were restored.

For the film we had no idea. At least half-a-dozen alternatives were proposed, and a good many were shot, whereupon the answer imposed itself. The last but one scene of the script had remained constant in all the drafts: it was shot and the rushes came in. What they revealed was a minute and a quarter of such consummate acting by Glenn Close that any other ending would have been an anti-climax. At least, that’s what we all thought. And now the submarine has submerged.