Bits #70: GUEST EDIT
Novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls on coming-of-age movies, his favourite playlist + the diaries he's gifting to everybody
Ending an epic month of guest letters with the one - the only! - David Nicholls. (ICYMI, I’ve been commissioning out April’s weekly culture round-ups, while I focus on a few projects. See: epic edits from Bobby Palmer, Sophie Heawood and Annie Mac.)
David Nicholls, as you will definitely already know, is the acclaimed author of six novels - One Day (which I have read more times than any other book), Starter for Ten, You Are Here, The Understudy, Us and Sweet Sorrow - and the BAFTA-winning screenwriter of multiple hit TV series, including the Patrick Melrose novels, Far from the Madding Crowd and Cold Feet. He is known as - and this is his official title - The Kindest Man in Publishing.
Under the paywall: the diaries that he is pressing into everyone’s hands; a film without a plot; actors on their favourite films; a debut novella that moved him; postcards from Madrid; and the artists he’s listening to on repeat.
Over to David!
The last novel that I absolutely adored has the feel of a 19th classic, despite being published in 1980. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus is an epic love story, following the fortunes of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they fall in and out of love in post-War England. It’s a big, wild drama, something like an old David Lean film, rich and densely written, sometimes melodramatic, and ultimately heartbreaking. It’s been many years since I’ve been so swept away by a novel.
I’m currently working on an adaptation of Sue Townsend’s comic masterpiece, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ - a dream job for me, though a large part of the process means reading the source material over and over and over again. But an incidental pleasure has been the coming-of-age films that I’ve been watching for inspiration, specifically from an adolescent male point-of-view.
Rushmore is an all-time favourite of mine, my favourite Wes Anderson I think, less mannered and chilly than later films, and I’ve also loved revisiting Richard Ayoade’s excellent Submarine from 2010 (adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s wonderful, Mole-esque novel). It’s a film that draws a lot of inspiration from an all-time top-ten favourite of mine, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows; so beautiful and moving and with one of the all-time great final shots.
As a kid, one of many misguided aspirations was to work in an electronics store, pointing out the features of TVs and cameras and VHS recorders, and I’m going to slip into that mode now and bore-on grimly about my projector, which has transformed the way we watch films at home. I love the ritual – the hassle, others might call it – of setting up the screen and the speaker, focussing the projector (an XGimi Horizon, thank you for asking), closing the shutters and pressing play. It gives a sense of ceremony to watching films and no, you can’t talk or eat, and no, I am not going to pause it once we’ve started.
I’m a little hesitant to recommend this, because it’s a film that’s almost entirely without plot, but I loved Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a meticulously reconstructed, almost real-time enactment of a taped conversation between two friends, Ben Whishaw as the artist Peter Hujar, Rebecca Hall as friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. It’s a brilliant snapshot of NYC in 1974, a touching portrayal of friendship and, incidentally, incredibly stylish.