巨匠联手演绎海明威传奇
A Famous Couple’s Tale Revives a Noted Pairing
巨匠联手演绎海明威传奇
ALMOST a quarter of a century has passed since the director Philip Kaufman last worked with the film editor Walter Murch. In 1988, when their “Unbearable Lightness of Being” was released, the Soviet Union was still in existence (the film memorably depicts the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague) and Pauline Kael was still the film critic at The New Yorker, where she gave it a rave review.
离他们上一次合作距今已经差不多有四分之一个世纪了，导演菲利普·考夫曼(Philip Kaufman)和电影剪辑师沃尔特·默奇(Walter Murch)再次相遇，创作了电视电影《海明威与盖尔霍恩》(Hemingway & Gellhorn)。1988年，当他们的电影《生命中不能承受之轻》(Unbearable Lightness of Being)上映时，苏联尚在——该片纪念性地描绘了1968年前苏联对布拉格的侵略;宝琳·凯尔(Pauline Kael)也还仍是《纽约客》杂志的影评人，她在杂志上对该片给予了高度评价。
In all that time, though, it has not become easier to make historically dense, sexually candid films like “Unbearable Lightness.”
一直以来，创作像《生命中不能承受之轻》这样历史底蕴深厚、性爱直白的电影都不是一件容易的事。
“These have always been tough sells,” Mr. Kaufman said recently by phone from San Francisco. “I guess the word ‘adult’ enters into the conversation somewhere here. Too often nowadays, a love story is a man and a woman saying: ‘Look out, here they come! Are you O.K.?’ ‘I’m fine.’ And then there’s six lines of fancy dialogue as they run from whatever they’re running from.”
"这样的片子一直都很难卖座"，考夫曼最近在旧金山接受电话采访时说：“我想‘成年人’这个字眼在现在有点出问题了。如今的爱情故事一般都是一男一女，说：‘看哪，他们要来了!你没事吧?’‘我没事。’然后就是他们开始逃跑，躲开他们要躲开的东西，同时说出6句左右奇怪的对白。”
Perhaps that is why it has taken so long for Mr. Kaufman, 75, and Mr. Murch, 68, to resume their collaboration, with “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” being shown Monday on HBO. Though it wound up being a television project, a first for each, their roots are deep in film. They met in the early ’70s at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope complex in San Francisco, when Mr. Murch was editing “The Conversation” and Mr. Kaufman was working on “The White Dawn.”
也许这正是75岁的考夫曼和68岁的默奇过了那么多年才再度合作的原因，俩人此次联手为大家奉上了5月底在HBO播出的影片《海明威与盖尔霍恩》。它最终成了一部电视电影，这对根基都深植于电影的他俩而言是第一次。他俩第一次见面是70年代初，在弗朗西斯·福特·科波拉(Francis Ford Coppola)位于旧金山的“美国活动画片工作室”里。当时默奇正在剪辑《窃听大阴谋》(The Conversation)，考夫曼正在拍摄《白色黎明》(The White Dawn)。
As Mr. Kaufman remembered it: “In a room — it was early in the morning — there was a guy just waking up from working all night with his head on the KEM editing machine.” And introductions were made.
考夫曼记得：“一大清早，一个缩在房间里对着KEM剪辑机(KEM editing machine)剪了一夜片子的家伙，刚刚醒过来。”他们就互相做了自我介绍。
“With sprocket holes on my forehead!” Mr. Murch said, in the same call.
“当时我脑门上还印着链齿痕迹呢!”默奇则回忆说。
A friendship was born between the two longtime Bay Area residents, one the director of seminal ’70s films like “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the other a three-time Academy Award winner as an editor and sound designer whose credits include “Apocalypse Now,” and “The English Patient.” But they weren’t to work together for several years.
两个都在湾区住了很久的人成为了朋友。他们一个导演了70年代具有开创性意义的电影《血洒北城》(The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid)和《天外夺命花》(Invasion of the Body Snatchers )，另一个作为剪辑和音效师三次荣膺奥斯卡奖，参与的影片包括《现代启示录》(Apocalypse Now )和《英国病人》(The English Patient)。他们认识后好几年，才开始真正合作。
When Mr. Kaufman developed “The Right Stuff,” his 1983 film about the space program, he enlisted Mr. Murch to edit, but a directing opportunity (“Return to Oz”) got in the way. The main evidence of that abortive collaboration is a “special thanks” credit for Mr. Murch’s preliminary work, which included accumulating real footage eventually interwoven into that film.
1983年，考夫曼拍摄关于太空计划的电影《太空英雄》(The Right Stuff)时，邀请默奇来剪辑，但默奇因为导演《回到绿野》(Return to Oz )而未能加盟。默奇为《太空英雄》做了初步的工作，一些他剪辑积累起来的真实史料素材最终被编进电影，在影片演职员名单中，专门对他提出了“特别致谢”，这是此次中途夭折合作的主要证据。
The chance to collaborate finally came with “Unbearable Lightness,” which, Mr. Murch said, was a good example of the way Mr. Kaufman fuses “the deeply personal” with “a historical sweep of events.” He added, “That combination really appeals to me because it’s super-cinematic.”
最后《生命中不能承受之轻》让他们有了合作的机会。默奇说它是一个展示考夫曼将“浓郁的个人风格”融入“历史洪流”的绝佳例子。“这种融合真的很吸引我，因为它非常电影化。”他说。
After that film, neither thought it would take so long to reunite. Mr. Kaufman said that he was “not interested in making the same type of movie over and over.” But “Hemingway & Gellhorn” feels of a piece with their past work.
拍完那部电影，他俩谁都没料到再度合作会是在那么多年以后。考夫曼说，他“对重复创作同一类型的电影不感兴趣”。但《海明威与盖尔霍恩》确实能让人回想起他们过去的作品。
He described “Unbearable Lightness” as “an intimate epic,” and that also suits this film, his first in eight years, which tells the story of Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) and his third wife, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman), set against the tide of history.
考夫曼把《生命中不能承受之轻》形容为“一部亲密的史诗”，这也适用于《海明威与盖尔霍恩》——这是他八年来的第一部作品，讲述了欧内斯特·海明威(克里夫·欧文饰)和他的第三任妻子、战地记者玛莎·盖尔霍恩(妮可·基德曼饰)，在历史巨流下的一段情感故事。
This is not the first time that Mr. Kaufman has taken iconic authors for his leading characters. His earlier films centered on Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin (“Henry & June”) and the Marquis de Sade (“Quills”). “I guess the saying is, ‘I read therefore I want to make movies about people who write,’ ” Mr. Kaufman said, adding that writers were “unsung as action figures.”
这不是考夫曼第一次以偶像作家为主角。他早前的电影曾把焦点对准过亨利·米勒和阿娜伊丝·宁(《亨利和琼》)，以及萨德侯爵(《鹅毛笔》)。“我想是这样的，‘我阅读，因此我想要拍关于作家的电影。”考夫曼说，他认为作家们“还不像动作明星似的经常被赞颂”。
As he developed the new project with the screenwriters Barbara Turner and Jerry Stahl, Mr. Kaufman said, he became captivated by the lesser-known Gellhorn and hoped the film would rekindle memories of her. (Coincidentally, the Mint Theater Company is staging “Love Goes to Press,” a play Gellhorn wrote with Virginia Cowles about journalists on the front lines.)
当他跟编剧芭芭拉·特纳(Barbara Turner)和杰瑞·斯塔尔(Jerry Stahl)开始这个新计划时，考夫曼被较少为人所知的盖尔霍恩迷住了，他希望电影重新唤起人们对她的记忆。恰巧，薄荷戏剧公司(Mint Theater Company)也正在排演《广而告之的爱》(Love Goes Press)，这是盖尔霍尔和弗吉尼亚·考利斯(Virginia Cowles)一起写的一出戏，讲的是记者在前线的故事。
“This bears witness to the fact that, as we say at the beginning of ‘The Right Stuff,’ when the test pilots die, they came to the high desert and nobody knew their names,” Mr. Kaufman said. “And that rings true for war correspondents, particularly women war correspondents.”
“这个故事见证了一个事实，正如我们在《太空英雄》开场时所说的：试飞员们死了后，他们的灵魂去了一片荒漠，没人知道他们的姓名。”考夫曼先生说：“这对战地记者而言也是事实，尤其是战地女记者。”
As depicted here, Hemingway and Gellhorn have something else in common with the pilots of “The Right Stuff”: a taste for adventure. In this case, it takes them to the Spanish Civil War and other hot spots in the ’30s and ’40s. Previous Kaufman films intercut archival and stock footage with staged scenes. In “The Right Stuff,” for example, shots of real NASA launchings were paired with shots of the actors playing the Mercury 7 astronauts. In “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” Mr. Murch (aided by green screens and the visual effects supervisor Chris Morley) increases the verisimilitude by placing the actors within the footage.
就像电影中所描述的那样，海明威和盖尔霍恩与《太空英雄》里的试飞员有相似之处：他们都爱好冒险，这把他们带往西班牙内战和上世纪3，40年代的其他危险地带。考夫曼以前的电影喜欢在真实的历史场面和艺术表现间切换镜头。比如在《太空英雄》里，美国国家航空航天局真实的发射画面与演员扮演“水星计划”的7名宇航员的镜头被放置在一起。在《海明威与盖尔霍恩》里，默奇(在绿色屏幕和视觉效果总监克里斯·莫利[Chris Morley]的协助下)把演员置于连续的镜头下，强化了逼真的效果。
Appropriate for a tale of creative partnership, there is an intuitive, unconscious quality to the way Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Murch work together. Until it was brought to their attention, neither realized that the image of a woman lighting a cigarette opens both “Unbearable Lightness” and “Hemingway & Gellhorn.”
考夫曼和默奇的合作方式中有一种靠直觉且无意识的特性，这对描述一段富有创造性的搭档关系而言是很合适的。他俩谁都没意识到《生命中不能承受之轻》和《海明威与盖尔霍恩》都是以一名女子点燃香烟作为开场，直到有人向他们指出这一点。
Mr. Murch reached back to “The Godfather,” on which he was a post-production consultant, to explain the coincidence:
默奇用自己担任后期制作顾问的影片《教父》(The Godfather)为例来解释这一巧合：
“It’s like somebody pointed out to Francis, after shooting ‘The Godfather,’ that every time death lingered there were oranges. This was long after the film was shot and Francis said just what Phil said. ‘Oh, yeah? I didn’t know that.’ So when he came to make ‘Godfather II,’ he put it in, but he made it conscious. These are wonderful things that happen almost by their own DNA. They have their own volition almost.”
“正如《教父》拍完后，有人向弗朗西斯指出，每次有人苟延残喘时，画面总是橙色的。电影杀青之后人家提出了这个疑问，而弗朗西斯说的话却和菲利普一样。‘哦，是吗?我原本不知道呢。’于是在他拍摄《教父II》时，他有意识地把这个元素加了进去。这些美好的东西仿佛是有了自己的DNA，都是自动发生的。它们甚至是拥有了自己的意志。”
“Hemingway & Gellhorn” comes on the heels of a kind of Philip Kaufman season. The first book-length study of his career, written by the Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf, was published in March, and in April he was the subject of a film series at the Museum of Modern Art.
《海明威与盖尔霍恩》紧跟着一个‘菲利普·考夫曼季’上映。2012年3月第一本研究考夫曼电影的书出版，作者是哥伦比亚大学的教授安妮特·因斯多夫(Annette Insdorf);4月，纽约现代艺术馆举办了考夫曼影展。
Ms. Insdorf said in an e-mail that the new film “builds on Murch’s visual achievements in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ seamlessly inserting characters into archival footage, and juxtaposing ‘authentic’ images with newly shot ones.”
因斯多夫女士在一封电子邮件里说，考夫曼的新片“以默奇在《生命中不能承受之轻》里取得的视觉成就为基础，天衣无缝地将角色融入史料镜头中，共同呈现了‘真实的’影像与新的镜头。”
Mr. Kaufman said that the film was “authenticated” through the liberal use of this footage, meaning “sets, costumes, even body language and motion” had to mesh with the old images. “We are going to nest our people into the grit and grain of the past,” he added.
考夫曼先生说，该片的真实性经受住了自由使用连续镜头的考验，意思是“场景、服装，甚至身体语言与动作”都必须契合过去的影像。“我们要用过去的气息网住我们的观众。”
If “Hemingway & Gellhorn’s” technical ambition suggests a theatrical feature, perhaps it is because it was planned as one. The project was brought to what was then the theatrical division of HBO, Picturehouse, by James Gandolfini, the star of the channel’s series “The Sopranos,” who was toying with the idea of playing Hemingway. But after Picturehouse went out of business, Mr. Kaufman said, HBO expressed interest and Mr. Gandolfini stayed on board as an executive producer.
如果说《海明威与盖尔霍恩》技术方面的野心显示了一种戏剧特质，那么这也许是因为对它的设计初衷就是这样的。最初是HBO剧集《黑道家族》(The Sopranos)里的明星詹姆斯·甘多费尼(James Gandolfini)将这个拍摄项目介绍给当时还是频道旗下戏剧分部的“影屋”电影公司的，甘多费尼本人有意扮演海明威。考夫曼介绍说，后来电影室公司歇业，HBO对此有兴趣，甘多费尼则作为执行制片人继续参与工作。
For Mr. Murch, the transition from film to television wasn’t too surprising. “The only difference,” he said, “was we did it all in seven months instead of a year, so everything was hop, hop.” He added, “Which just meant pre-planning and knowing where you were going.”
对默奇而言，从电影转变为电视并不是太令人吃惊。他说：“唯一的区别是我们在七个月而非一年里完成了所有工作，所以一切都非常紧张忙碌。”他还补充道：“这只是意味着需要事先计划，并明白你要朝哪里走。”
