When I was writing it, I thought that maybe I was insane and no one would know what I was talking about 
Patrick Marber has enjoyed a varied career since emerging in classic news satire The Day Today in the early 90s. He co-wrote and co-starred in Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge, but has subsequently concentrated on writing. Two plays - Dealer's Choice and Closer - were hits at the National Theatre in 1995 and 97, respectively, and now he's adapted the latter for the big screen. His acidic yet witty drama - directed by Hollywood veteran Mike Nichols - chronicles the testerone-fuelled wars between two men (Jude Law, Clive Owen) over the two women (Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman) in their love lives. Marber received a Golden Globe nomination for the script and has gone on to adapt two novels: Patrick McGrath's Asylum and Zoe Heller's Notes On A Scandal.
You've said that you could only see the play appealing to a small group of people, yet here it is as a high profile Hollywood production...
Yeah. To me it seemed like this strange little play that a mass audience wouldn't really be interested in because it just seemed too idiosyncratic. But what I found during the life of the play it that it did have some kind of mainstream appeal - it's a love story of sorts and people like love stories, I guess. But when I was writing it, I thought that maybe I was insane and no one would know what I was talking about. But they did.
You seemed reluctant to sell the film rights. Why the reluctance, and what finally convinced you to sell?
It wasn't so much that I was reluctant, I just wanted to sell it to the right person. I was really waiting for a filmmaker to approach me. Producers and various actors had tried to buy the rights over the years, but I really wanted to wait until someone who was actually going to make the film approached me. And then I got a call from Mike Nichols, kind of out of the blue. I met with him, we fell in love, and we made a film together!
So what convinced you he was the right person?
He's very experienced at taking a play and turning it into a film, as he'd done with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, and more recently with Wit and Angels In America. And he came from a theatre background, so I knew he would understand the weirdness of being a playwright and having your play turned into something else. Also, he was just very funny, clever and charming, and put me at my ease. I was seduced immediately. I'm glad I was, because the last two years working on it have just been the most fun of my life.
It sounds like you had a different experience to most other rookie screenwriters, who tend to get abused by Hollywood rather than respected...
I know. I feel very, very spoilt and I probably won't ever have such a great experience again. It's not every day you work with Mike Nichols, and the fantastic thing about him is that, because he has so much power, status and is so respected, the studio just let him get on with the film. The studio were very supportive - in fact, they never asked me to tone it down, change the language, or change a word, really. It was just me and Mike in a room, talking about it. Things that I have done on other projects, like studio notes and conference calls - none of that occurred on this film. It was more like doing a play; just a $27 million-budgeted play!
Were you always going to write the screenplay?
That was always what Mike wanted. Had he said, "Listen, here's Fred, he's going to write the screenplay," I might have been a little bit stroppy about it, and I don't think I'd have agreed to it. But Mike knew the material was so personal, if not autobiographical, that it would have been illogical for someone else to write the screenplay.
So how difficult was it to adapt?
It was difficult adapting it for the screen, but only in terms of choosing what to cut - because Mike said he wanted to follow the structure of the play and do a film that was quite theatrical, in some respects. I'm well aware that the language of the play is not really how people speak. It's heightened and - dare I say it - poetic in places. Once he'd made the decision that it would be a mannerist film in the same mode as Carnal Knowledge - which he'd made more than 30 years ago - it was quite easy because the structure and shape were a given. It was all about the dialogue, and "OK, we've got this big long scene, let's chop it up and have some of it occur in the hospital, some in the street, some in the park, and some on the bus." Shape is always the most difficult thing.
What did Mike Nichols bring to Closer that maybe wasn't there on the page?
For a start he brought the actors in, which IS the film. Actors of that calibre wouldn't want to tackle material like this unless they absolutely felt that they were in safe hands with some great director they could really trust. I think the film has great humanity, tenderness and wit, yet is tough as old boots when it needs to be, and that's all Mike. Yes, some of it is on the page but, having directed this play myself, I know it's very hard to do this material and make all the elements cohere. He's done something magical, I think.
The film is slightly mellower than the play...
Yeah, I think it's less angry, but I also think it depends on where you're at when you see the material. It provokes a very personal response, and the response to both the play and the film are wildly divergent. People either seem to love it or hate it, and I think a lot depends on how your love life is going at the time! I mean, I'm happily married now, and I wasn't when I wrote it, and that's probably significant. I don't think I could write it like that now, I'd write something different.
Were you tempted to update the script to reflect your current feelings?
I didn't change it much for the film, because I wanted to be faithful to what I wrote then [in 1996/7]. And I kind of almost didn't want to give it the benefit of my hindsight and supposed new-found 'wisdom' about things. I wanted to be faithful to who I was when I was 32 when I wrote it. But the film has six sensibilities at work - it's me, Mike, and the four actors. And what I've learned about the material is the chemistry between the four actors is a crucial component as to how the material plays. If you have four actors who really get on well, respect each other, and enjoy playing the scenes together - as these four did - then it has more humanity. But if you'd seen it in the theatre with four actors who didn't really get on, it would feel much darker, much angrier, and much more violent.
How did you feel when Cate Blanchett dropped out and was replaced by Julia Roberts?
Very sad when Cate dropped out because she would have been a brilliant Anna. Very happy to have Julia Roberts, because she's a superb Anna. I think her performance is... I don't want to say it's the best thing she's ever done, because it's not my business to say that, but I've never seen her do anything like this before and go through the mill with such passion, anger and incredible non-sentimentality. She takes a tough line on character, she suffers beautifully, and doesn't duck it at all. I'm very pleased with all of them, but that's Mike. Obviously the actors are all incredibly talented, but he seems to get the best out of them, and I don't know how he does it because all he seems to do is encourage. He just seems to put them at their ease. There's something about him that actors respond to. They just want to give him their best shot and allow themselves to be very vulnerable.
Closer is released in UK cinemas on Friday 14th January 2005.
