Writer Anthony McCarten. Photo / Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times/Contour by Getty Images
Anthony McCarten always used to have a saying when we first became friends, and he brought it up when we spoke on the phone on a recent Wednesday morning in New Zealand, Tuesday night at his home in London: “These must be the good times.”
He thought we were co-authors of this line, issued in deep contentment as we sat for many happy hours with our feet up in a series of shabby, cheerful bars in downtown Wellington in 1986 through to 1987, the best of friends until it all got a bit much for one of us by about 1990. It was nice for him to share the credit but that line was all his own work. I can hear him say it, hear the way he avowed it, really meant it - he has a special talent for saying sweet and sentimental things with absolute sincerity. It’s very persuasive.
Shooting begins this year on the film he has written about the love story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He had to get Ono’s permission, and he said over the phone, “I met her at the white room in the Dakota. There was John’s white piano and the room, I can report, was indeed white. I gave Yoko an outline of the story. I printed it out as a big book, and put a peace symbol on the front. It was quite expensive to make, actually. It told the full and frank story, warts and all. She said, ‘It’s fair. And very few people have been fair to me in my life. And can I have 86 copies for my Christmas presents?’”
Our friendship was immediate. We were 25 and shared things in common, such as being unemployed. He had high hair and a big face. He wore denim jackets over jerseys, and liked to play guitar along to Van Morrison records. He retained a kind of provincial modesty that came with growing up in New Plymouth; everyone in Wellington was from somewhere else, and no one ever wanted to return. We loved Wellington, its narrow streets, its terrible weather, its cheap rent. No one had any money. No one seemed to be going anywhere. I was spectacularly wrong about that.
He has written more Oscar-nominated roles than any living writer, including three best male actor awards for his first three films, Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, and Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
He said, “Gary revelled in being Churchill. Absolutely revelled. He would finish a shooting day at 9pm and by the time he was out of makeup and home it was 11. He was back in a car to get makeup by 3am and sit in a chair like a stone god for three hours, and he’d sit there and smoke. He smoked $50,000 worth of cigars. When we broke for Christmas, he checked into a hospital to have his stomach pumped. And one day on the set when he was dressed as Winston Churchill, he proposed to his wife and used Winston’s voice.”
He left school and had a brief career in journalism. His editor at the Taranaki Herald found him sleeping in the company bathroom and said, “I don’t know what’s to become of you.” He was a student in Bill Manhire’s writing programme at Victoria University of Wellington and his first claim to fame was as a poet. Everyone we knew in Wellington was making art – the painter who slept in a coffin, the short story writer who read palms. There was a lot of exciting music played in damp pubs.
Theatre was vibrant, too, and Anthony wrote two stage plays, one of them hilarious. I was cast as an angel in his first short film. One day we went to visit a friend of his who lived in a massive warehouse loft in Courtenay Place; there was a little shelf of Beatles memorabilia that Peter Jackson was collecting. Around that time Anthony announced he was writing a new play with his friend Stephen Sinclair, and that the idea of it was so good that they knew they were working on a smash hit. I remember his excitement. I remember thinking he was deluded.
“Mick,” he said, “is more charming than he needs to be. Just oozes charm and wit. A tremendous mimic.” He spent time with Jagger when they were wanting to co-produce a film about Sun Records; they drove to Memphis together and came across Jerry Lee Lewis pulling up in the Sun carpark in his Cadillac. He told another story about a film project. “The impulse to kiss the wounded is not always there,” he said, “but Bill and Warren are clearly trying to do good with this grotesque amount of money that they have.” He meant billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet; he’s struck a film deal that will tell the story of their philanthropy.
I wondered about the sort of person who can tell an uplifting story about two billionaires, and said to Anthony, “You know, it strikes me that a lot of your work seems to be a document of intelligent optimism. Winston Churchill, Freddie Mercury, Whitney Houston [he wrote the biopic I Want to Dance With Somebody] - you seem to revel in celebration as compared to someone who might prefer to dwell on the filth of human nature.”
He ignored that I was talking about myself, and said, “I’m interested in inspirational characters and I think the public are too. Maybe there’s something evangelical about what I’m doing. I don’t know. And also Bill and Warren’s journey fed into this interest I have in dispute and resolution … In a polarised world, it seems like a facility we need to either have or resurrect, where you can bring two different people into conflict with each other and have them sort of fight their way out the best they can and find common ground.”
I said, “Our own friendship is a narrative of dispute and resolution.”
“Mmm,” he said.
I went to his wedding. The marriage didn’t last long and he showed up at my door with his suitcase. We took acid on a train ride to Auckland; it was a great trip. A friend who came with us slept with the wife of an Auckland mayor, and the mayor gave him a black eye. Anthony gave me a driving lesson in Ponsonby; 30 seconds later, I crashed a borrowed VW into the front doors of the Limbs dance studio.
Back in Wellington, he finished the play he wrote with Stephen Sinclair. Ladies Night was first produced at Mercury Theatre in Auckland at the end of 1987 and quickly became the biggest commercial success in the history of New Zealand theatre. I quickly found it intolerable. I was black with envy, a terrible figure of resentment, bitter and soured - we started hanging out less, then not at all. He wrote and directed films that I didn’t watch, wrote novels that I didn’t read. We didn’t see each other for about 20 years.
I missed him. I heard he and Sinclair filed suit against the producers of The Full Monty, claiming the film’s premise was based on Ladies Night. There was an out-of-court settlement. I heard he went to England and got married again. I didn’t hear a lot else; word about his career had gone quiet.
“The fallow years,” he said in our phone interview. “I remember working on my third novel. I was living in an old stone cottage in Gloucestershire. My publisher at Picador rang she said, ‘We think this might be your finest work, but we’re letting you go, I’m afraid. We’re not going to be publishing this.’
“I’d spent three years on this thing. And I remember my cold dead hand putting the phone back in the cradle and thinking, ‘That’s it. I’m over. I’m completely washed out. There cannot be a way back from this.’ The cottage was lit by a single coal fire furnace. I remember going over to it on my knees trying to coax a flame out of this wet coal and I felt like my soul was weeping, ‘That’s it. This is the end.’ But I got the coal fire going, and - I don’t know. There was some sort of sense that I was going to go down with the ship whatever happened.”
I was at a Christmas party held by Great Southern TV in 2008 when an august gentleman in a silver beard came over to shyly say hello. I nearly jumped out of my skin when he said, “It’s Anthony.” He talked a little slower and had a chastened air. His second marriage was ending and he was in town because Great Southern hired him to write a film about bungee guy A.J. Hackett. No one should have to write a film about bungee guy A.J. Hackett. But it was so great to see him and there was an immediate reconnection of a close and enduring friendship; it came at a crucial point in his writing career.
He said over the phone, “In my back pocket while I was doing these little gigs, and usually my heart was not involved in them so the work suffers, because you’ve got to be passionate, you need to be stirred by whatever you are doing, I had this Hawking thing.”
We tell myths about ourselves, take credit where it may or may not be due. Anthony had written a script for a film about Stephen Hawking, but needed the permission of Hawking’s ex-wife Jane; my self-aggrandising version of history is that I instructed him he had to go to her Cambridge home and show up at her door. I suspect this is nonsense and I’m just trying to make up for years of neglect and jealousy. In any case, Jane Hawking gave her consent and The Theory of Everything was a smash hit.
“And then something very significant happened,” he said. “As I suspected, there’s a little walled garden in which the successful are all passing jobs to each other. Once you’re in, the phone rings in quite an extraordinary way, and the quality of work that you suddenly have access to is suddenly very high. My life and my job got a lot easier from that moment on.”
Last year he staged a Broadway musical he wrote about Neil Diamond; this month, his latest novel, a thriller called Going Zero, is being translated into 24 languages. These must be the good times …. I ought to have saved my envy and rancour for now, for his wealth and his Oscar nominations and his Yoko stories, his Mick stories, his Bill Gates stories (they met at a Netflix event: “I told him I was hugely impressed by some of the work he and Warren were doing, and his face softened.”) But I’m proud of him, and not a little awed. We exchange long emails. He’s happy. He lives in London with Eva Maiwald, a clinical psychologist who he met on a book tour in Munich (his novels are bestsellers in Germany). He’s generous; a few years ago in London we met at a bistro bar where a large tribe of New Zealand and Australian writers were drinking, and on his way out he paid the tab.
He always heads for the light. I knew the subject of his dad was difficult for him so I asked about it to see how he would adapt to the dark. “My dad was a mystery to me,” he said. “Schoolmates of mine, their fathers would say, ‘Oh are you Fred McCarten’s boy? Funniest guy I ever met.’ And I would think, ‘Where was that guy when I was growing up?’ He was a big drinker and that became an issue. I was always on my mum’s side in those domestic battles. He died of cancer at 63 so as an adult I never got to know him.
“But,” he said, expelling the gloom in his voice, “one thing I inherited from him I’m sure is a work ethic. He had a grocery store in a state housing area and was a milkman at the same time, then a used car salesman - he did most of his business in the pub - and then a baggage handler at New Plymouth airport. Incredibly hard worker. I have that industriousness from him. Inevitably.”
I had one more attempt to lower him to the filth of human nature, and asked him how his John and Yoko film would deal with Lennon’s executioner. “Chapman is not even a character in this thing,” he said. “He’ll be glimpsed, but it’s not about Chapman. It’s essentially a love story. It’s two complex, interesting artists trying to make peace with themselves and the world.” He said it with genuine sincerity; the thing about Anthony is that he always sees the best in people. It’s a joy to be his friend.
Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (Pan Macmillan, $37.99) is out on April 11.
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