DANNY the Director's Cut

Okay, we've done the acting talent. Now who's going to direct the movie?

Me, of course. Absolutely, love to.

Fat chance.

No-one in Hollywood, or out of it, is going to let a maverick like me loose on a film set. If I had a track record in films maybe, but I don't, so, even if I write the screenplay and insist as part of my price that I get to sit at the director's elbow like a whispering serpent, I still won't be calling the shots.

So, who then?

Tricky, very tricky. We can't just use a director because I like them.

For example, I'm a fan of Tony Scott, preferring him by far over Ridley, but can you imagine what he'd make of DANNY?

Lots of tricksy jump cuts, fast action, partial shots, innovative camerawork.

Actually, on second thoughts I can kind of see that. DANNY as a conspiracy movie with Danny playing one side off the other and it ending in a bloody shoot out on the pub roof.

Of course, we could take that to the nth and give it to John Woo. I rather like the idea of the cast fast-drawing on each other every two minutes, and facing each other down in the kitchen with the Siamese fighting fish gun thing, and white doves taking off in slo-mo behind them.

There are gay directors who would turn it into a gay angst movie, or a club & drug movie with shots of DANNY in a netherworld of neon lights, bondage gear and beautiful boys. The world's first farmer in tight leather chaps - never mind the pre-Raphaelite shit.

Or we could go arty and give it the Derek Jarman treatment (although we'd have to dig him up first) and turn it into a long, slow wank of male beauty. There's a faction of fans who think that's what the book is anyway so they'd go home happy.

Or maybe Peter Greenaway. Lots of nudity with sumptuous visuals, and fabulous longeurs, and I could write a four hour screenplay so that proper numbness could set in. But, let's face it, it takes a certain kind of intellectual poseur with too much time and not enough empathic skill to truly enjoy that.

There are directors it wouldn't kill me to let have a shot. Gus Van Sant, Lasse Hallstrom (that would be an interesting one), Jonathan Demme. But I wouldn't expect to see my DANNY at the end of it.

Believe it or not, though, that isn't the important thing for me. Films are not books and I've always found the 'It's not as good as the book' argument to be futile. For example, I think I'm the only living fan of the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow modern day Great Expectations. Everybody howls, Oh the sacrilege. But what that film is, is true to the essence of the book, and that's worth a thousand physical accuracies and literal scene translations.

Think about it realistically for a moment. How could you possibly fit DANNY into a 90 minute film? For those of you who don't care about such trivia, a page of screenplay translates into roughly a minute of screen time. So, even if we said, DANNY's a long book, we can get away with a long film, we can only push it up to two hours or so. That's 150 pages say, tops. We've got to get 990 pages into 150.

A TV mini-series, that's what we need. I'm thinking adult cable, Deadwood without the cowboys, but with the dirt and swearing intact, and more sex. A sure-fire winner if ever I saw one.

Which still brings us back to the inescapable problem of who the hell is going to direct it, if they won't let me run amok with a $30 million budget. (Ah, the sheer unadulterated pleasure...)

Okay, my dream team?

There's only really two of them. And really only one of them. The runner-up is only there because he has the requisite fearlessness and doesn't-give-a-fuckness to get it through Hollywood relatively unscathed.

Yes, Paul Verhoeven.

A strange choice some might say. But if you look at his film history he invariably does very dodgy, dark things. He's never shy of being politically incorrect, has the necessary touch of acid-black humour, doesn't think twice about getting actors properly, Europeanly naked, has no hang-ups about sexualising men, in fact is very egalitarian about his sex scenes altogether, and generally has the necessary maverick in-your-face qualities to just about pull it off.

It's unlikely he'd provide a cleaned-up, tidy, middle class version of the book, and whatever he did it would surely be different.

But no, the main man has to be David Cronenberg. The only straight male director I know who can convey the male on male (or indeed male alone) thing without going into nauseating buddiness, or having to stay at a clinical distance from it in case he looks too gay. If he took it on he wouldn't be worrying if people were wondering why, and he definitely wouldn't be trying to clean it up, make it more acceptable, or turn it into something suitable for a 15 certificate.

On top of this, he casts brilliantly and gets great performances out his actors. And he's weird, and understands weird, and is the maestro of visceral - and if Danny isn't visceral I don't know what is.

And, as if this isn't enough, he's one of the few people working in the film industry who not only doesn't want to tone down and conventionalise things but actually goes out of his way to see things from a different perspective, goes places where no-one else will, and had to put up with being branded as a low-class schlock director for years, but went right on and did things his way regardless.

In short, I might not have to kill him on set for fucking with my book.

And that's a very good thing.

PS: See the illustrated version of this article here