The Observer
January 21, 2001
By Nicci Gerrard

The simple bit was writing a thriller with her husband. The complications began when Hollywood came calling, using Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham as the bait

Iit is blue , cold, clean weather in the City of London. The streets gleam and the pale sun shines down between the corridor of tall buildings. People hurry about their daily business: men and women in suits or jeans; people carrying shopping bags, briefcases, newspapers, gloves; heads down against the wind. Cars, double-decker buses, lorries and cabs drive past. A horn sounds. At the traffic light across the road a bunch of pedestrians wait for the signal to cross. A young man in a battered leather jacket, with dark hair and dark eyes, stands in front of them, next to a tall, blonde woman with a sweet and lovely face. Strangers. They glance at each other and their eyes lock. You can almost feel the tremor of shock that passes through them.

The lights change, and they step out into the road together. At the other side they separate, but they do not stop looking at each other. They cannot. Is this love, this sudden jolting recognition of the other? Or madness? Can life so turn on a single glance, and everything that went before become muted and dull?

Can falling in love take a fraction of a second and yet bring the patient work of years crashing down?

At last, the young woman with the entranced face goes into the building where she works; he watches as she walks away from him and disappears from view.

I watch this scene - over and over again I watch it - and it feels infinitely strange to me. I know it and I don't know it. It is vivid and yet at the same time it feels far-off, a bit like a shred of a dream, or something lying underwater, shining and mysteriously refracted. It feels like memory.

"Cut!" shouts the director, and Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham turn round, retrace their steps and it all begins again. There are hundreds of extras; a large production crew. The camera rolls along a specially-constructed track beside the two actors. People throw buckets of water over the road to keep it wet (in case it rains later and destroys continuity). Heather Graham snags her tights and has to change them. Someone else fiddles with the collar of Fiennes' jacket, making an invisible difference.

Everyone seems to know what they're doing. But I don't quite know what I'm doing. I watch the scene on the director's monitor, and it looks quite different from the scene being acted out a few feet away on the street. The camera changes everything.

Two-and-a-quarter years ago, Sean and I were driving to my parents' house in Shropshire. My mother had been very ill, frightening all of us. I had returned from our summer holiday early to be with her, but now she seemed to be slowly recovering (fingers crossed and pray to a God I don't believe in). We were in the middle of writing our third Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) novel together, a psychological thriller. It was going all right, but slowly, without that sense of urgency and fire. And it had been pushed into the background a bit by other events.

One of us (who? we can't remember any more) said to the other something about the blurred line between love and madness, passion and danger. Maybe we were discussing a recent case of stalking that had, perhaps, been in the news. Or we were arguing about A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the lovers go into a dark forest and let wild dreams grip them. Or about our own early relationship. Or maybe it's just one of those subjects that two people who talk to each other a lot discuss when on a long car journey towards an uncertain destination. And one of us said to the other: that would make a good basis for a novel. So the discussion became Killing Me Softly (except that wasn't its name, then).

We immediately jettisoned the work-in-progress and wrote the novel very quickly. It was the story of an English woman called Alice - who has now become the American Heather Graham, walking across the road - who has everything she thinks she wants (good job, nice and kind and reliable boyfriend, close group of friends) and throws it all up because she meets the gaze of a stranger on a crowded street. We wanted to express, in the novel, the weirdness of falling in love, its disorder and irrationality and danger.

I think that most of us have in some way or other experienced love as risk and loss of control. We let ourselves trust someone we don't really know. There's a click. We change our lives because of the way someone looks at us, smiles at us, listens.

Later, we must come out of the dark woods and return to ordinary life. We get mortgages, children, bank accounts, domestic squabbles and family routines. Our heart doesn't thump all the time. But it all begins with desire and longing and the sense that we can upturn our own life and begin afresh. So, in our story, Alice falls head-over-heels in love with Adam and puts herself in danger.

The process of getting a novel published is partly about letting go. Sean and I wrote it together, passing it to and fro on our computers, and it was a secret, intimate exchange - particularly so since the novel's subject was erotic intimacy and trust. Then (in more or less this order) it was sent out to our agent, our editors, copy editors, family, friends, reviewers and finally our readers. Our grip on the book weakened; we let it go.

That's the theory at least - but it's nothing compared to the letting go that takes place when a book is turned into a film. First the book was optioned by Montecito Pictures, a new production company created by Ivan Reitman (the director of Animal House and Ghostbusters) and Tom Pollock (who for many years was head of Universal Pictures). All that was a simple, uninhibited delight. 'Hollywood', you think, and you drink champagne (or sparkling wine, probably), and allow yourself a fantasy cast list, a dream of attending some glam premiere in a gown that miraculously makes you look like a film star yourself, a photograph in your addled head that shows you lying by a pool somewhere drinking cocktails.

Everyone tells you not to get too excited (because few books ever make it beyond the option stage). You tell everybody not to get too excited (because ditto). You try to be casual about it. Cool and intelligent. No chance. The novel was optioned before it was published and we immediately ran into a problem. Montecito Pictures did not like its title: Crazy For Me. They thought it sounded too like a comedy or a musical. They wanted us to change it. For the book as well as for the film.

We didn't mind that, as long as we could come up with a new name that everyone liked. We talked about it all the time, like expectant parents with a dictionary of names. We picked the brains of everyone we met. My eldest son was determined, for some unfathomable reason, that is should be called The Bus Driver. We thought about calling it Alice, Adam and Alice, On the Edge, Danger, Stranger, The Stranger, Abyss, Falling... We came up with some truly dreadful names.

One evening we went out for a meal with Sean's family, drank dry martinis, and came up with even more. The next morning we received an email from one of Sean's brothers, Karl, and his wife Fiona: they had continued drinking and name-chasing after they got home and had sent us a list of parodic suggestions. We have it still: An Affair to Forget (we think this is the most brilliantly bad title we've ever heard). Kiss Me, Kill Me (this must be some cheesy B movie title). Till I kissed You (ditto). Killing Me Softly. Stranger Love. Somebody New. One of the suggestions seemed rather good to us.

You learn bit by bit what you always knew: that it isn't your book any longer, it is their film. The script was sent to us in its different stages, bristling with unfamiliar, curt instructions (POVs and INTs and EXTs and ECUs and VOS), and of course we looked at it and discovered that yes, some of the characters we'd created had disappeared; others we hadn't created had appeared. Scenes we'd laboured over had been snipped away. Plot lines were altered. The dialogue was sometimes unfamiliar, and sometimes it was written by us. The book came back in small glimpses and muffled echoes.

But you know, it didn't matter because it was somebody else's raw material now, somebody else's inspiration or problem. We have four children who have colds, homework problems, loud voices, bad dreams, strange anxieties, sudden enthusiasms, big appetites and muddy shoes. We have other books to write. Killing Me Softly continued without us, on the other side of the Atlantic. Almost, we forgot about it.

Then we heard that Heather Graham had agreed to play Alice. We looked at her on videos; sexy and touching. The great Chinese director Chen Kaige was going to be the director - his first film outside China. We watched Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin and were stunned by how epic and gorgeous they are. We blinked to think that what had started out as an idea we talked about in the car one day would become his film.

We met the producers; met Chen Kaige. We heard that Joseph Fiennes was going to be Adam. We watched Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, and tried to picture his smouldering face without its beard.

Books are so beautifully simple. Just the writer (or in our case the two writers) and the page or computer screen. Just words, and you can do anything you want - send your characters up mountains, plunge them into great crowds, take their clothes off, see them from a distance, get inside their heads. Films are so magnificently, insanely complicated, so intricate and cumbersome and expensive to make. I watched the shooting of the scene where Alice and Adam first meet, on that blue cold day. In the book we had briefly mentioned a passing lorry, a taxi, passing commuters - and now here they all were. They had had to be ordered, paid for, delivered. It was like seeing an army prepare for battle.

We walked through a square where the caterers were parked. The area where buses and cars and cabs, hired for day, were parked. Past the trailers. Into a crowd of people working efficiently: producers, assistant producers, line producers, cameramen, make-up women, people in charge of lighting, sound, continuity; actors, stand-ins, extras who know they'll probably end up on the cutting room floor. So much painstaking attention to detail. So much numbing repetition; over and over again the extras blur past, over and over again Alice and Adam's eyes meet.

We watched it on the director's monitor: one take stood out; nothing you could quite put your finger on, but there was a sense of rapture and terror in their faces. 'The camera loves her face,' said Chen Kaige softly, bundled up in a red padded jacket against the cold and staring intently at the screen.

One day to make one minute. When you're writing you pretty much know if it's going well or not, but they say that you can never tell if a movie has worked until it is showing in a cinema. Frame by frame and second by second, it has to add up to more than the sum of its million parts. Something to do with magic.

In a few days' time we are taking the four children to Shepperton Studios to see an hour or so of filming. We had to find a day when sexual content was low - just, I'm told, his hand up her dress. Some of Killing Me Softly has been filmed on a closed set, with only a handful of people allowed to see the rushes.

Writing about sex can be suggestive and nuanced. In Killing Me Softly we wanted to saturate the relationship in eroticism without being explicit. It's harder to be suggestive in a film. The actors are flesh and blood, they must imitate the actions of besotted lovers. I recently saw the front-page photo from the shoot of Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham kissing. Blood trickled down her face. Their lips bruised against each other. It looked so real and urgent and raw that I flinched.

When a book is published it's like making a boat and pushing it out into the choppy waters and watching it to see if it floats or sinks. When you sell a book to be filmed, it's like watching the boat getting dismantled and rebuilt into a different craft altogether. This is not our film. We sold the book, and like some miracle it is now being shot, by one of the world's great directors who talks about colours and textures and can make ordinary things look gorgeous. We watch its progress now as startled, giggly outsiders, staring in on something which came from us and which we let go. Even when we were on the set we felt almost like trespassers in what had once been our own work.

We only wrote about a woman who thinks she's ordinary and discovers how desirable she can be to a man who adores her. We saw Heather Graham convey it in the briefest of facial expressions. The hero is a mountain climber, and when we met Fiennes we talked about climbing. For our research into the subject we did some hiking, stayed in climbing hotels, read books. But Fiennes, who had never climbed before, prepared for the role by climbing in the Cairngorms with two top instructors. When filming stops he is going to do two things: star on stage as Edward II and go climbing again. He's a climber now. We're still just writers.

To order Nicci French's latest novel Beneath the Skin for pounds 7.99. and Killing Me Softly for pounds 4.99 plus 99p p&p, call Observer CultureShop on 0800 3168 171