Movies - Candy - Book is now a hollywood movie

[~lostgurl~]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3689936a4501,00.html

From taking candy like a baby

04 June 2006

Luke Davies' great Australian novel of `love and addiction', Candy, is now a movie starring Heath Ledger. Megan Nicol Reed spoke to the author.

He left out the bit where they lovingly pick crabs from each other's crotches. After much angsting he abandoned the bit where, so aroused by the sight of cats copulating, they take each other on the couch. And he forwent the bit where, having butchered the veins in the rest of their bodies, they try to shoot up their necks.

These are three of the most commanding scenes in the book Candy, but when Luke Davies adapted his novel for the screen, he learnt it's all about compression. It's about taking 90,000 words and boiling them down into 100 minutes of film. And sometimes you have to be ruthless. Sometimes you have to "murder your darlings". Did it kill him?

"I was very responsible for those changes and we feel good about them. We had to make a decision that we were going to try and tell a love story and that we couldn't meander as much as you're allowed to in a novel," Davies says.

Candy is about a menage a trois: the narrator, and the two Candys in his life - his lover and his drug of choice, heroin. Written alone, nine years ago, seven years after he'd stopped using, when it came time to turn his first novel, his thinly veiled personal journey, into a screenplay, Davies was only too happy to take director and co-writer Neil Armfield's advice.

"It was really hard to make certain sacrifices, to lose a whole lot of stuff, because we needed to focus on the vision - I think it's a good word. Neil really had one and the film is sculpted out of that vision... We were able to find a way of adapting the deep kind of sadness, the poetic texture of the novel, to somehow make an equivalent cinema language for that. But it meant losing some stuff with great regret."

It was producer Margaret Fink who first saw a film writer in Davies and took his idea for a comedy musical along with a copy of Candy to Armfield. The director fell for the novel's "life" and proposed they make a film of it. Between 1999 and 2005, between other projects, the two men nutted out a script, "constantly trying to address the question of why the novel should be a film".

The novel, which has been re- issued to coincide with the film, is dominated by the narrator's interior monologue. There isn't room for anyone else. For the film, Armfield felt it was vital to expand the addicts' claustrophobic existence, developing Casper, a two-bit role from the book, into a central figure played by Geoffrey Rush, and giving Candy's parents more of a presence. Dan the narrator, who is unnamed in the novel, is played by Heath Ledger, Candy by young Australian actress Abbie Cornish.

It must be odd to see a character that had previously existed only in your mind and on the page translated into living, breathing flesh.

"Absolutely," says Davies, "but in a weird sense the narrator of a first person novel comes so much from the inside of oneself that you don't really have that clear visual sense of them, they're always a little bit fuzzy. There's a small handful of stuff that happened in my real life, so there's those moments where it's kind of like, `Oh this is so strange'. But on the other hand, Heath's so good that he's now Dan, and I can't imagine any other possible face for what he should look like."

Davies describes Dan and Candy as angels - an interesting choice of words. Generous, even. When they've squandered everything else and their habit demands to be fed, Candy sells her body and Dan lets it happen. From time to time he contributes to the kitty by scamming random, innocent strangers who cross his path.

Davies is protective. "I call them that in a literal sense, that there's this incredibly angelic beauty at a physical level with Heath and Abbie in the way they interact, and also in a metaphorical sense it's very much a story about a fall, about two beautiful people coming together and catching fire and burning up.

"Like Adam and Eve in the garden, they have this beautiful, intense thing and they kind of wreck it by trying to eternalise, which is what addiction's about, trying to eternalise the present moment and eternalise your ecstasy."

Talking to Davies is a bit like meeting someone who's found God. The 44-year-old emanates goodwill. When we run over our allotted interview time, he suggests I ring him back at home. Yet in interviews from the time of Candy's publication, he was decidedly prickly about his past. He says with the film's release there has been even more attention and curiosity, the questions even more probing, but he's easier with it, even welcomes it.

"It gives me this beautiful sense of gratitude just for the simple fact of being alive. It's not just that I can't believe I wrote this book and we finally got it together and it's on the screen and not only that it's a good film, but going beyond that it's that, yeah, I did live in this life in which all hope had been literally squeezed out and never thought I would get to any kind of good place from there, but somehow I did get to a place where it's good to live inside my skin and be me. That feels like a remarkable miracle."

Neither book nor film moralises overtly about drugs. "I think drugs are fine and drugs are great," he says. "I'm anti-drugs for myself. I can't take drugs. I finally worked that out. But it was with some regret that I understand that I can't take them because they were so fantastic. I loved them so much. You know. And that's kind of like losing a lover."

While the character of Candy isn't based on anyone, there was a woman with whom he shared those wasted years of his 20s.

"There is really only one person who could vaguely lay claim to being Candy and yet she is a very private person. She's seen the film and she thinks it's very beautiful and true and at the same time it's been a frustrating experience for her in the sense that it's both her and it's not her.

"It wasn't like I had a sense of being loyal to the events of our life when I was writing the novel and nor was it like during the five years writing the screenplay keeping either her or real events in mind as to what was necessary to make it a good film. But you know when I first started writing the novel, fiction though it was, it was meant to be a kind of secret message to her to say it's going to be OK on the other side of using."

And it has been OK. He's in love with 28-year-old actress Victoria Thaine. They live in Bondi and are talking of children. His collection of poems, Totem was The Age Book of the Year in 2004. As well as his poetry, he's working on a third novel, and is planning to make a low-budget thriller he's written.

"From the age of 16 I've had the dream to write and make films and through those years of addiction that dream sort of disappeared like most other dreams, and strangely enough it's come about full circle through all this experience."

* Candy, the movie, is playing now. Candy, the book, is published by Allen&Unwin, $28

* Sunday Books in association with Dendy Films and Allen & Unwin has five copies of Candy plus five double passes to the movie to give away. Name and address on the back of an envelope to "Candy", Sunday Star- Times, PO Box 1074, Auckland.