USA: AARP Honours Ronald Harwood

SAN FRANCISCO, California (San Francisco Chronicle), February 16, 2008: By Hugh Hart "They're giving me an award for being elderly," joked Ronald Harwood, who flew in from London earlier this month to attend the Oscar Nominee Luncheon and a ceremony hosted by AARP honoring the best screenplay by a writer older than 50. "It's wonderful that I'm getting an ageist award." The 73-year-old British writer runs circles around movers and shakers half his age. He won the 2003 best adapted screenplay Oscar for "The Pianist," and this year his script for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," based on Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography, goes up against "Atonement," "Away From Her," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" in the same category. " 'Diving Bell' was the most difficult screenplay I've ever had to write," Harwood says. "I was terribly stuck for about three weeks." The problem: how to dramatize the inherently static predicament of a paralyzed, mute stroke victim without boring audiences to tears. "Most films are told objectively, from God's point of view," Harwood says. "I knew that would be impossible in this film. I didn't want to look at the man for two hours in a state of paralysis. There'd be no exit point for the audience into his state if you just saw it from the outside." Finally, Harwood had a breakthrough. "The idea came suddenly, a eureka moment: How do you make an audience understand what locked-in syndrome is? Tell the story from Jean-Dominique's point of view. Have the camera be him, have the camera do the blinking. I went straight to my computer and wrote the first scene. It was liberating." Unlike his close collaboration with Roman Polanski in "The Pianist," Harwood had no contact with Oscar-nominated "Diving Bell" director Julian Schnabel. "My first draft was green-lit by Universal and I never did any more work on it. I didn't work with Schnabel at all," he says. "Julian is an artist, and therefore he thinks of himself an auteur. What Schnabel did was inject all that imagery and the interpretation." Harwood recently co-wrote Baz Luhrman's World War II period piece "Australia," starring Nicole Kidman, which the writer describes as "Dr. Zhivago in the outback." He also has a new book, "Ronald Harwood's Adaptations," detailing his adventures in the screen trade. "It is not a how-to book," Harwood says. "I can't bear that kind of thinking because it makes for mechanics, not for art. There is no golden rule. I never plan the end of Act 1 should be this, the climax should be there, the character should have an arc - I don't believe in any of that. Every time I come to a screenplay it's as if I've never written one before. You have to get to the truth of the character." © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.