Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director, Qumra Master Sir Christopher Hampton, told emerging scriptwriters and directors to visualise their film frame-by-frame as they write and focus on the power of storytelling.
Addressing the participants of his masterclass at Qumra 2023, the annual industry talent incubator event by the Doha Film Institute (DFI), Sir Christopher reiterated the need for paying attention to all the cinematic necessities right from the scripting stage, and underlined the need to have the best professionals, including actors and crew, to create an engaging film.
“Hire the best people, then let them do their best and intervene as little as possible,” he said. “Many first-time directors make the mistake of trying to do everything, thinking that they know everything and try to impose their personality into their projects.”
Sir Christopher won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for *Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears, and a second win in the same category for his screenplay and adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2007), directed by Joe Wright.
He debuted as director with Carrington (1995) about the life of painter Dora Carrington, which he also wrote, as well as *Imagining Argentina (2003) that explored the “forced disappearances” of more than 30,000 people.
With a distinguished ouvre spanning theatre and film, and a series, *The Singapore Grip, he told the emerging talent “to do a film, write a script, only when you really want to do it”.
It is important to have training across the spectrum.
Born in Portugal, Sir Christopher lived a good part of his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, where he used to watch at least three movies a week with his father, who was a great film enthusiast.
“Going to the movies, probably, made me want to be a writer,” he remarked.
This initial interest was deepened at the boarding school in England, where there were weekly film screenings, “and these films were extremely influential on everybody’s thinking at that time”.
Sir Christopher started his career at the Royal Court Theatre.
His breakthrough in films was with *Dangerous Liaisons, based on his own play *Les liaisons dangereuses, which again was adapted from the 1782 French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
When Sir Christopher won a commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company, he decided to take the chance and make the play.
Although planned to be staged at a swanky new theatre, it was demoted to a standard 150-seater theatre.
Sir Christopher calls that serendipitous, like the many strokes of luck, he says, that had defined his career.
“The play worked so well in the smaller space and attracted enormously positive reviews,” he says.
Sir Christopher held on to the play’s film rights, and soon would enter a race against time to make into a film with Milos Forman, the director of *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, also expressing his desire to make the novel a film.
Shot and screened in less than seven months, the film was a breakout moment for Sir Christopher in international cinema.
Making Carrington, Sir Christopher said, was not an easy journey either.
From script to screen, it took 18 long years.
Highlighting the value that talented professionals bring to a project, he observes that working with French cinematographer Denis Lenoir gave the film a distinctive look and feel.
“Lenoir used a technique called flashing, which gave the film a milky sheen and the characters progressively growing older organically without using make-up,” he explained.
Sir Christopher says that there is also a large section of films in his life that were never made.
One such was *Nostromo that was all set to go on floors, but did not materialise with the passing of Sir David Lean, who invested many years in the project.
However, he acquired many invaluable lessons.