Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It sounds like the seediest film, but it works, principally because all the characters – with the exception of the husband – are sympathetic. Damaged and strange, but sympathetic. That in itself is an achievement.
I was puzzled by your final choice, sex, lies and videotape.
The story of sex, lies and videotape is the story of a marriage between a lawyer, who is having an affair with his wife’s sister, a savvy, sassy barmaid, and his rather straitlaced, you might say frigid, wife, played by Andy MacDowell. And into their lives comes a character played by James Spader, an old university friend of the husband. It’s at least ten years since they were at college. Spader’s character has changed a great deal in that time and has rejected corporate, bourgeois suburban life. He’s also impotent. He gets his kicks by winning the trust of women – he’s very honest about who he is and what his problem is – and getting them to talk about their sex lives on camera. It sounds like the seediest film, but it works, principally because all the characters – with the exception of the husband – are sympathetic. Damaged and strange, but sympathetic. That in itself is an achievement.
For a reason that I can’t quite isolate, the film had a big creative impact on me when I was very young. The only point in the movie in which anyone is really honest is when the women are on camera, talking about their sex lives. The rest of the time everybody is lying to everybody. And there was something else – something about the way that the characters talked, or the mood of the film...it was just very different to anything I’d seen before. I really believe that the books and movies that a writer is exposed to between the ages of, say, 16 and 23 are vitally important to their later development.
After I was interviewed by MI6, I wrote A Spy By Nature because I was thinking about what would happen to me if I had done that job. What effect would it have had on my relationships with my girlfriend, with my family, my friends? I would have gone into a parallel life, a pretty complicated and difficult to manage parallel life. And something of the tone of that novel is echoed in sex, lies… I watched it again the other day and the parallels were striking.
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In the summer of 1995, Charles Cumming was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6. His first book, A Spy By Nature, was published in the UK in 2001. His novel Typhoon, centred on the Uighur struggle for independence, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Top 100 books of 2009. His latest book is The Trinity Six, a thriller about the Cambridge spies.
