An Interview with Stephen Schiff
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
page two of two

You said that the only source material used in writing the screenplay for Lolita was the novel itself. Did you also look at the Nabokov screenplay written but not used for the Kubrick film? If so, do you think it would have made an interesting movie; if not, why not?

I'm afraid my answer to this question is rather boring: no, I didn't look at the screenplay Nabokov wrote, since I wanted to be influenced no more by his take on himself than by Kubrick's take on him. Unfortunately, I still haven't allowed myself to read the Nabokov screenplay, though maybe I should hurry up and get to it, the better to respond to your questions. One more note: I have been given to understand that the published version of the Nabokov screenplay is already several generations removed from the screenplay Nabokov originally wrote and submitted.

In Camille Paglia's essay, "Lolita Unclothed," the author Anne Rice is quoted, "...Lolita has become today ...the image of the seductive young girl who is every man's dream of sensuality..." . Lolita the myth, the mirage created by Humbert from his childhood and his reading list has not popularly been differentiated from Dolores the girl, perhaps because, as you say it takes several readings to understand that there is a difference. The Kubrick film captured the invented (in part by Humbert, in part by Dolores Haze herself ) Lolita's charm and ravishing enchantment but very little of the real girl Dolores Haze. From your description, the new film will portray much more of the everyday but will it still attempt to convey the magic?

I don't know in what context Anne Rice made her comment, but if Lolita is viewed simply as an enchanting young seductress, then I think Nabokov's point is lost. It is true that when the seduction finally takes place, she instigates it, but Lolita isn't Blame It on Rio--this isn't the story of a naughty young thing and the walking midlife crisis she seduces. Nabokov's Humbert identifies Lolita as one of a small and distinct class--the class of nymphets--and I don't think the properties of that class are quite so coarse and obvious. Lolita is bewitching, but not always by intention; sometimes what bewitches Humbert about her is her very childishness, for it is that quality rather than any sexual precocity, that identifies her as something other than mere woman. Of course, our Lolita has magic, but it is not the rather porny allure that Sue Lyon had in the Kubrick film. Dominique Swain, the remarkable young girl who plays Lolita, lives very much along the line between childhood and womanhood that Lolita lives along, and she slips back onto the childish side at least as often as she surprises us by her womanliness. The magic I tried to give her in the screenplay is the magic of a very vital, very alive young girl, and I do think the audience will have no trouble perceiving it.

It was reported in the media that "Swifty" Lazar sold the rights to Lolita to Caroloco productions for 1 million dollars. Did Mr. Lazar actually possess the rights to the film or did he simply broker the sale? What role did the Nabokov estate play in this transaction?

I'm afraid I don't know too much about the details surrounding the rights to Lolita. I can say with some certainty that Swifty Lazar was the agent of the agreement between the estate and Carolco; I'm fairly certain that he never had any ownership of the property or any option on it. And I imagine, though I'm not a hundred percent sure, that the man whom he was optioning the book from was Nabokov's son (and translator) Dmitri, who would have been acting as executor of the estate.

Has Dmitri Nabokov seen the sceenplay and if so, what was his opinion of it?

I had long thought that there might be opposition to the film from the right, particularly the so-called Christian right, because of its subject matter alone. And my general feeling about that was that, as experience has shown, many of those people are so unthinking in their approach to the arts that they are liable to protest the film without even seeing it, without knowing that its source is one of the great literary works of the 20th century, and without in any way questioning the peculiar but common assumption that when a work explores certain themes or actions, that is the same as endorsing them. In any case, nothing I could do was going to have any effect on opposition from that quarter. What I cared about more was another sort of knee-jerk response--the one that was likely to come from the intellectuals, for whom the very idea of turning so beloved a novel into anything so tawdry as a movie (let alone a movie directed by the man who made Flashdance) was bound to be viewed as sacrilege. Since I believed (and believe) that we were making a very good and faithful film, I hoped at least to open some minds to it, and to that end, I sought Dmitri out. I knew he was coming to New York to promote his remarkable new translation of his father's short stories; in fact, I had been invited to a party celebrating his arrival. So I weighed the risk: if I showed him my screenplay and he liked it, the film would have gained the most valuable and respectable of allies; if I showed it to him and he hated it, his animosity could be very damaging.

I telephoned him. When he answered and heard who was calling, he immediately said, "Oh, Stephen, hello, I love the screenplay you wrote of Lolita." At which point he no doubt heard a long and relieved exhalation. As it turned out, he had been sent the screenplay as part of the movie company's contractual agreement with him. I then asked him whether he would be willing to support the film in some public way, but he, quite rightly, pointed out that there was no way he could know whether the final film would reflect what was in the screenplay he had read. So I invited him to come onto the set, watch some filming, and meet Adrian Lyne, Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Frank Langella (By that time, Melanie Griffith's role had already been completed and she was no longer on the set.)

He accepted, and a few weeks later we were in Hammond, Louisiana, where the Enchanted Hunters sequence was being filmed. Dmitri proved to be ebullient, charming, and very, very tall. He has been, in his eventful life, an opera singer (basso) and a race-car driver as well as his father's translator, and he did seem to like what he saw on the set. His only objection seemed to be to the car we were using to represent the "Melmoth"--the car in which Humbert and Lolita tour America. We had selected a beautiful old wood-paneled station wagon--a "woody"--which, truth to tell, was never what Vladimir Nabokov had in mind. Dmitri, who knows and loves cars, had a little trouble with that, and for understandable reasons. After all, it was not at all like the car he remembered traveling around America with his father in, and those travels were the basis for the ones in Lolita.

Have you read any of Nabokov's other writings? If so which ones and what is your opinion of those works?

Yes, I have read several. I have always been a great admirer of style in writing and a supporter of the notion that a style of sufficient beauty, grace, and profundity IS substance; those who decry high literary style and hanker for simple prose expounding simple truths are, I think, missing much of what is greatest in the heritage of literature. Among American prose stylists of the postwar era, Nabokov has no peers, and so, given that and the tenet above it, almost everything he has written is worth reading. Still, there are better books and worse books. There are, from my reading, three masterpieces: Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory, which I regard as one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. I am also an admirer of Laughter in the Dark, Invitation to a Beheading, Pnin, Bend Sinister, and especially Ada, or Ardor, which is at least as rich as Lolita or Pale Fire, but whose convolutions, delightful as they often are, interfere too much (I think) with the narrative momentum. If Lolita and Pale Fire are books full of tricks, Ada seems to me a book full of booby traps, so I cannot love it as well. I have also read Despair and King, Queen, Knave and found both a bit disappointing--they seem rehearsals for a Nabokov book, or pale imitations. Still, if these are failures, they are failures on a very high level.

Many of Nabokov's other books have been filmed, though not often very successfully. Would it be kosher to ask whoever is reading these words whether they have favorite Nabokov books (or even stories) that they think worth filming? By the way, I refuse even to contemplate movie versions of Pale Fire or Ada.

What other novelists do you admire?

I hardly know where to begin. I assume you're not asking for my list of the greatest novelists of all time--that familiar compilation of Proust, Joyce, Austen, Eliot, Flaubert, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Rabelais, Sterne, Richardson, Dickens, Musil, Gogol, Kafka, James, Wharton, Twain, Melville, Waugh, blah, blah, blah. Shall we do more contemporary authors? I think the greatest living American novelist is John Updike, and in so saying, I am betraying my Nabokovian predilection--after all, who more than Updike is the heir to Nabokov's musicality? I love Roth as well, and Bellow and--well, off the top of my head: Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, early Norman Mailer (up through The Executioner's Song, which, whether it's a novel or not, is his masterpiece), Stanley Elkin (rest in peace), Richard Yates (likewise), both Amises (Martin and the late Kingsley), Anne Tyler, Robert Stone, Elmore Leonard, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Helprin, John le Carre, Milan Kundera, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Ivan Klima. I'm sure I'm forgetting several that I absolutely love, but that's a pretty good start.

Who will do the soundtrack for the new film and what sort of musical atmosphere is the director hoping to capture?

No composer has yet been chosen for the film's soundtrack, though a great many are hoping for the job. I think what Adrian Lyne is after is something at once poignant and very spare, but we'll see what we wind up with.

Will Lyne try to achieve through music, the effect of a 1940s America?

Although Adrian Lyne's fealty to the demands of the period will result in his using a certain amount of music from the late forties--pop songs that would have been on the radio, for instance--I don't think he intends to make the movie's score particularly redolent of the forties. If you think about it, such an approach could be the kiss of death, because, even though the movie's look will evoke the period quite accurately, a movie's score has to evoke contemporary emotions. A movie's score is its emotional touchstone; it has to be very immediate, and it has to speak to an audience in a language that requires no transposition (to use a musical term). What you see will be 1947, but what you feel must be right now.

Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's Lolita but it was significantly altered by the time the filming was finished. Do you think Lyne's vision will be consistent with yours in the end, and that he is capable of translating onto film an artful version of Nabokov's masterpiece?

From what I've seen of the dailies (that is, the footage that has already been filmed and printed) and from what I've seen on the set, I do feel that Adrian Lyne and the actors are being as true to my screenplay as they can be. Inevitably, things change during the actual shooting process--actors stumble into an inspired improvisation, the set doesn't quite work the way I envisioned it, and so forth--but I seem to have become that rarity, a happy screenwriter, one who feels that not only is justice being done to his work but that where the director and actors depart from it, they depart for an even sunnier clime. Do keep in mind that Adrian and I worked together on the script for months before filming began, so that, by the time the cameras rolled, we were both happy with what was on the page. What I had not anticipated was how sensitive and indeed how inspired Adrian's approach to the material would prove to be. I come from a relatively literary world; even so, I know of no one who has read Lolita so many times, so attentively, and with such devotion. Adrian is not by nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting this most splendid of novels to the man who made Flashdance, and I did, too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. From working with him, and from all that I've seen of the filming, I dare to hope that he is making a masterpiece, and that with this movie he will surprise the world.

© 1996 by Stephen Schiff

Suellen Stringer-Hye can be reached by e-mail.