Commissioning the Canon: An Interview with Faber & Faber film book editor Walter Donohue (Web Exclusive)
by Paul Cronin

Staggering through a lackluster educational moment in 2000, with my back against the wall, I quickly came to realize that college offered no viable career path. A decision had to be made, and quickly. Nothing to do but re-engage with my first love—CINEMA—one that had, over the years, been displaced by another life. The passion manifested itself not necessarily in a desire to make films but to read and write about them, and for years I had been collecting books on the subject.

In 1980s and ’90s Britain, the foundation of any such assemblage would be volumes published by Faber & Faber, including its Directors on Directors series, a torrent of screenplays, and the anthology series Projections (“A Forum for Film Makers”), which lasted from 1992 until 2008. I would loiter in Foyles on Charing Cross Road, the National Film Theatre cubbyhole bookstore, and Fred Zentner’s Cinema Bookshop on Great Russell Street, perusing and coveting. It all made for a real education—along with Channel 4 and BBC2 retrospectives, plus the occasional VHS videotape that came my way, and endless hours up at the Everyman in Hampstead (at the time a slightly less cultish Scala—no all-nighters), where my English teacher at school had struck a deal: present your film club card, and a triple bill (Cassavetes, Godard, Tarkovsky, etc.) cost just 90p.

There weren’t many film offerings from Faber in its earliest years, but those that did appear have emerged as standard works in the field. Rudolf Arnheim’s Film (translated from German) and Roger Spottiswoode’s Grammar of the Film (both 1933) came first, accompanied by For Filmgoers Only (1933, a collection of essays by Paul Rotha, Caroline Lejeune, Andrew Buchanan, Mary Field, and R. S. Lambert), Rotha’s Documentary Film (1936, updated 1939 and 1952), Kurt London’s Film Music (1936) (“It is, so far as we know, the first in its field”), Buchanan’s Film Making from Script to Screen (1937), an English edition of Nancy Naumberg’s We Make the Movies (1938), Michael Powell’s account of the making of The Edge of the World (1938), Sergei Eisenstein’s The Film Sense (1943), J. P. Mayer’s Sociology of Film, and Margaret Farrand Thorp’s America at the Movies (“it explains the business and psychological side of the industry”) (both 1946). Spottiswoode’s Film and Its Technique followed in 1952, and a Rotha anthology in 1958.

Between 1959 and 1983, the year Walter Donohue arrived to begin building Faber’s list, the company published only a handful of film books. If we discount reissues of Rotha, Arnheim, and Spottiswoode, and titles by and about Scottish theorist and filmmaker John Grierson (Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy [1966], Forsyth Hardy’s John Grierson—A Documentary History [1979], Grierson on the Movies, ed. Forsyth Hardy [1981]), and four books by British critic Raymond Durgnat (The Crazy Mirror [1969], A Mirror for England [1970], The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock [1973], Durgnat on Film [1976]), we are left with little more than Michael Pye and Lynda Myless’ The Movie Brats (1979), an early collection of Woody Allen screenplays (1982), and John Russell Taylor’s Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigrés 1933–1950 (1983). Compared with Faber’s crucial theater list, for example, and its roster of poets, it’s extremely slim pickings.

Walter’s first commission was born partly out of Colin Welland’s wishful cry upon receiving the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1982 for Chariots of Fire, “The British are coming!” Learning to Dream, published in 1984, written by Variety journalist James Park, sporting an image from Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract on its cover, describes “the emergence of a new generation of British filmmakers determined to create a vibrant national cinema,” and takes in that year’s Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy, Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, Michael Radford’s 1984, and Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields. There quickly followed an English translation of Nestor Almendros’s A Man With a Camera, several books by or about John Boorman (the script of Hope and Glory, Michel Ciment’s interview book, and Money Into Light, his diary of the making of The Emerald Forest), Steven Bach’s Final Cut (the making of Heaven’s Gate), a reprint of Karl Brown’s Adventures with D. W. Griffith, and a rush of screenplays, including three Greenaway scripts, Jordan’s Mona Lisa and Angel, Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, Bill Douglas’s Comrades, Chris Menges’s A World Apart, Steven Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, David Leland’s Wish You Were Here and David Byrne’s True Stories. Using his connections from his years working in British theater and film production, Walter steadily turned Faber into the publishing wing of British cinema’s resurgence in the 1980s and into the ’90s. 

His adventures in film books really get going around 1989, when the first of the Directors on Directors series—Ian Christie and David Thompson’s Scorsese on Scorsese—appeared. A tidal wave followed, including multiple volumes from Wim Wenders and several Tarkovsky titles, script reprints (The Third Man, Les Enfants du paradis, Battleship Potemkin, Gone With the Wind, Jules et Jim, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Greed, On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai, The Wizard of Oz—some of which had originated at Lorrimer Books, created by filmmaker Peter Whitehead in the late ’60s), the screenplay of Chen Kaige’s King of the Children accompanied by an extended essay by Tony Rayns about recent Chinese cinema, Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott’s Goldcrest exposé My Indecision is Final, Peter Cowie’s Coppola biography, scripts of Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Kieślowski’s Decalogue (with a foreword by Stanley Kubrick), various screenplay collections of Harold Pinter (long a Faber stalwart), an update of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock study, volumes of letters from François Truffaut, Jean Renoir, and the Lumière brothers, and Kevin Jackson’s Schrader on Schrader (interviews with Paul Schrader alongside a selection of his critical essays). 1992 alone brought Chris Rodley’s Cronenberg on Cronenberg, David Mamet’s On Directing Film, Patrick McGilligan’s Cukor biography, the first of several Coen brothers scripts (Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing), Joseph McBride on Capra, Pedro Almodóvar’s collected writings, Philip French’s Malle on Malle, Don Siegel’s autobiography, and a book of Terence Davies scripts.

Also in 1992: the first volume of the unique Projections, co-edited by Walter and John Boorman, which, over a ten-year period, was vital reading for filmmakers, historians, and critics alike. “It will reflect the past year in the movies,” states Faber’s 1992 catalogue, “as well as speculating about the future. It will be a forum for practitioners of cinema to write about their work without the intervention of journalists, nor the need to look over their shoulders at audiences.” The editorial of the first issue presents the remit at hand: “Projections has come about so that filmmakers may reflect on their concerns with as much honesty as they can muster and speak directly to fellow practitioners.” A sampling of the extraordinary range of pieces: extended diary entries by Boorman, Coppola, Sally Potter, and Bertrand Tavernier, poet Tony Harrison on George Cukor, Eleanor Coppola’s sequel to her book Notes, a series of inspired conversational pairings (Boorman and Sydney Pollack, River Phoenix and Gus Van Sant, Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino, Van Sant and Derek Jarman, Frances McDormand and Willem Dafoe, and Jamie Lee Curtis twice: with father Tony Curtis and mother Janet Leigh), Godfrey Cheshire on Abbas Kiarostami, transcripts of Mark Cousins’s Scene by Scene sessions from the Edinburgh Film Festival (Robert Towne, the Coen brothers, Walter Murch, Susu Cecchi d’Amico, Terence Davies, Brian Cox, Leslie Caron), an English-language version of Cahiers du cinéma’s 500th issue (guest edited by Scorsese), and mini-versions of Directors on Directors (Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Demme, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Arthur Penn, Ken Burns, Gene Kelly). Oren Moverman reported from the set of Vanya on 42nd Street and detailed the production of Todd Haynes’s Safe, Tarantino wrote about Reservoir Dogs and True Romance, Viggo Mortensen eulogized Sandy Dennis, and John Seale described the cinematographer’s relationship with the film director. There is a novel-in-progress by Gus van Sant, a short script by Hal Hartley, and Tim Robbins’s complete Bob Roberts screenplay. Walter himself wrote a substantial piece about his months working on John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon, filmed in Malaysia. 

A golden age? It seemed like a never-ending stream, many books commissioned—not bid on and bought—by Walter. Danusia Stok’s Kieślowski interview book, David Caute on Losey, Kevin MacDonald on his grandfather Emeric Pressburger, Ian Christie on Powell and Pressburger, Simon Louvish on W. C. Fields, Mae West, the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, Bernard Eisenschitz on Nicholas Ray, Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes (recently voted in a Hollywood Reporter poll as one of the greatest film books of all time), David Thompson’s Barry Levinson interviews, Mark Salisbury’s Burton on Burton, Sidney Gottlieb’s Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Constanzo Constantini’s Fellini on Fellini, Jean-Claude Carrière’s Secret Language of Film, Rob van Scheers on Verhoeven, Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch, Graham Fuller’s Loach on Loach, Gavin Smith on John Sayles, Ian Christie’s Terry Gilliam interviews, David Weddle on Peckinpah, Satyajit Ray on his Apu trilogy, memoirs from Jack Cardiff, André de Toth, Miloš Forman, and Ingmar Bergman, Christian Braad Thomsen on Fassbinder, Gavin Lambert on Lindsay Anderson, a classic script series that included The Apartment, Peeping Tom, Bonnie and Clyde, and Sweet Smell of Success, Powell and Pressburger’s screenplay of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Steven Soderbergh on Richard Lester, Christopher Frayling on Sergio Leone, a collection of Marx Brothers scripts, Frederic Dannen on Hong Kong cinema, and screenplays by Mike Leigh, Hal Hartley, Sally Potter, Whit Stillman, Harmony Korine, Tom DiCillo, Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Haynes, David O. Russell, Todd Solondz, Michael Almereyda, Paul Auster, Charlie Kaufman, Lynne Ramsay, Mike Figgis, Darren Aronofsky, James Mangold, Kevin Smith, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, and Tarantino.

I wanted very much to be a part of that operation. And so, impulsively, because I had nothing to lose, and because I had determined he was the person to catch the eye of, one Wednesday in 2000 I sent a letter to Walter (he was also Auster’s long-time fiction editor). It said something like, “You don’t know who I am, but I know I have something to offer you.” Friday evening the landline rang. It was Walter. 

“My assistant, Richard Kelly”—editor of Faber books about Dogme 95 and Alan Clarke—“is going away on Monday to the Cannes Film Festival. I can’t pay you, but if you want to come into the office for a few weeks and see how we do things, you’re welcome.”

It goes without saying that there is a direct line between time spent in close quarters with Walter that spring in the Queen Square offices and the interview book I did with Werner Herzog in 2002 (Herzog on Herzog, expanded and reissued in 2015 as A Guide for the Perplexed) and the collection of writings by Alexander Mackendrick I edited as On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director (2004), both published by Faber, as well as my more recent adventures in publishing. It’s me trying to take a page out of Walter’s book(s).

“My Faber movie books take up three long shelves,” says Wes Anderson. “I met Walter in 1998 to talk about publishing the script for Rushmore. It was one of those first meetings where you both seem to act like you’ve already known each other for twenty-five years, and now we have. He pops in and out of my life regularly. He appears on a collapsible scooter which he leaves in the coat check. We’ve had little Walter Moments all over the world.” 

“His antennae reach out to the far corners of the world, and he manages to identify exceptional work wherever it occurs,” wrote John Boorman of Walter in the first issue of Projections. It turns out he’s been doing that kind of work—nurturing writers—his entire life.

Explains Joel Coen, “Not only is he a steady friend and a discerning intellect, he has also carved out a space in the movie business that no one else really occupies. In the theater you would call it a “dramaturg”—a creative advisor to the director, both from a literary and a production point of view. This position doesn’t exist in the movie business. At least not officially. I can’t say that there aren’t legions of people who are eager to analyze and offer an opinion, but I will say that there are precious few that are so consistently right. You might call Walter a Movie Whisperer.”

During one of our final chats, I finally got Walter—notoriously reticent to step into any kind of spotlight—to admit, “I have to accept that I may have achieved something in my life.” I wholeheartedly agree. And as far as I’m concerned, much more than that. Credit where credit is due. Just when I needed it, Walter is one of the few people who took a chance on me and made it possible for me to do my work. I know there are many who could say the same of him.

This interview, recorded mostly in Faber’s spanking new Clerkenwell offices, with follow-ups on the phone, in which, nearly a quarter of a century after I first encountered him, I come to understand the background to Walter’s open-mindedness, fair play, and skillful intuition as a talent scout, is a small tribute.—Paul Cronin 

Cineaste: You’re American-born but have lived in London for how long?

Walter Donohue: I’m from a small suburban town, near New Brunswick [in New Jersey], and did an undergraduate degree at Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., which at the time had an incredible reputation because [theater critic] Walter Kerr taught there for years. It became an important drama school—people like Susan Sarandon, Jon Voight, and Jason Miller, who played the priest in The Exorcist, studied there. Then I started a master’s degree at UC Davis, which had just built a new arts complex. They turned a cattle-judging pavilion into an Elizabethan theater, which is where I began directing. During my first year, in the spring of 1966, the University of California set up a study center in Delphi, Greece, where I went for a few months, and on my way home I spent a week in London watching plays. 

In May 1967, I was on the verge of graduating and all set to start a job as an assistant director at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., but the Vietnam War suddenly escalated and all us guys were immediately eligible to be drafted. What the hell was I going to do? The only way out was to stay in school. For some reason I decided I wanted to be a film editor and applied to a graduate program at USC but was told I was too late and that there were no places left. If I had gone, Walter Murch—who I got to know years later here in London—would have been a year ahead of me.

A few months earlier, a UC Davis production design teacher, who had worked for a ballet company in Manchester, told me that if I wanted to work in the theater, I should go to England since they had the best theater in the world. He suggested that I apply for a Fulbright, which would mean that the U.S. government would pay the fees for a student to study abroad. To qualify you had to be accepted by a university, so I applied to Bristol University, which was the only university in the U.K. where you could study theater. I got accepted, mainly because the head of the department needed research done for a book he was writing about medieval theater, and I had directed a couple of short medieval mystery plays as part of my degree. 

I didn’t get the Fulbright award, so forgot about the whole thing until I was facing the prospect of being sent to Vietnam. I suddenly remembered that I had been accepted to Bristol, so I contacted them and ended up going. Five of my fellow Davis students were drafted and two died in Vietnam, so it really was a matter of life or death. 

Over the two years I was in Bristol I did the research—which the professor ended using in his book—but whenever I could I directed plays with students in whatever space we could find. 

Cineaste: Was there a particular trend of modern theater that you were drawn to? Or was it the classics that you found most interesting? 

Donohue: I was very taken with The Tulane Drama Review when it was under the editorship of Richard Schechner. I read a piece by Charles Marowitz in Tulane [“Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty,” Winter 1966] about his work with Peter Brook and the Theatre of Cruelty ideas they were working with—which eventually evolved into the Marat/Sade—in which he listed the kinds of exercises they had done. That article became my mini-bible, the basis of my work with students. We put on a production of a play about Thomas Paine [by Paul Foster, co-founder of La MaMa in New York] which I thought was good enough to pitch to Marowitz, who by then had his own operation, The Open Space Theatre, in London. His theater was dark on Sunday night, though occasionally it would host special one-off performances, so I wrote to Marowitz and told him what we were doing, and he invited us to perform one Sunday, which we did. 

When I finished my degree and submitted my thesis, I hoped I would be able to jump into regular employment as a theater director, but that turned out to be difficult because directors had to be members of the union, which was reluctant to let an American in. I figured I had no alternative but to return to America, but then, out of the blue, the woman who ran Marowitz’s theater contacted me and said that Charles needed an assistant. Some British people had tried the job, but they couldn’t get on with him, and they thought that perhaps an American might stand a better chance. For the most part it worked out and I learned a lot from the experience. 

For Charles, actors were just objects to push around on the stage. He didn’t seem to give much thought to the inner lives of the characters. I was assistant director [in 1972] on a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, and when Charles left town to do his version of Hamlet in Denmark, I took over and worked with the actors. I asked Sam, who was living in London, to come in and watch a run-through, which he absolutely hated. He felt that the actors were speaking their lines and moving around in such a way that had nothing to do with the dramatic situation they were meant to be playing. “But that’s how Charles directed it,” I said. “OK,” said Sam, “I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m going home. Let me know when the thing is ready to open and I’ll come see it.” 

I knew that was a bad idea. Obviously, the production should somehow embody his intentions as a playwright, so I sat him down, asked what was wrong with the production, and we set about reblocking the entire play. The actors clearly felt a sense of relief. We were all so pleased with ourselves, but when Charles got back into town and watched what we had done, he threw out all our work and insisted we go back to his conception. During previews, it was clear that things weren’t going well. It was the company’s secretary who had the courage to tell Charles that it wasn’t working. The actors and I spent what little time we had to pull the production closer to what Sam had envisioned, but it was too late. 

While Sam was still living in London, I set up a production of Cowboy Mouth, which Sam had written with Patti Smith. It was in a small, basement theater, just Sam, me, and the two actors. No sense of hierarchy, no egos—just commitment to the vision of the writer. 

Cineaste: Tell me about how you helped create what became the Donmar Warehouse, which today is one of London’s most important theaters beyond the West End. 

Donohue: Howard Davies—who I had shared a flat with when we were students at Bristol University—was working as a director at the Old Vic in Bristol. He thought the place was too staid and wanted them to turn their rehearsal space into a theater that did challenging work. The management agreed, and the New Vic was born. Howard asked me to come and join him. He directed Edward Bond’s Early Morning and a new adaption of Woyzeck, and I did The Tooth of Crime and Howard Brenton’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Screens. We felt that we had brought a new kind of energy to rep theater, but the season lost money and Howard lost his job. When he ended up at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he told [the RSC artistic director] Trevor Nunn that the RSC shouldn’t just be doing the classics and plays by established writers but should also be working with the new generation of playwrights that was emerging. 

Howard pushed the RSC to create a space where they could do new plays. Trevor told him to find a location and write a business plan, which Howard did. He found a space on Earlham Street, a warehouse owned by the Donmar lighting company, and talked the Donmar people into turning it into a theater. Howard asked me to come and help because he didn’t have time to read all the new plays that were being sent in. I was sort of the literary manager. We called it the Warehouse Theatre, but when the RSC left to go to the Barbican, the space became the Donmar. As far as Howard was concerned, we were continuing what we had started in Bristol: staging new work by British writers.

I spent ten years as a theater director. What’s consistent about my work throughout that period is that I focused on new writing. No Chekhov, no Shakespeare—only new writers. I hadn’t realized at the time that the interactions I had with playwrights were honing a skill that came into fruition when I was asked to work at Channel 4.

Cineaste: Had you worked at all in film or television at this point? 

Donohue: I had met casting director Mary Selway, who said they were doing a film of Flash Gordon and were having a bit of trouble with the guy they had cast as the lead, Sam Jones. Apparently, no one was happy with his screen test. The film’s director, Mike Hodges, was set against casting Sam but the producer, Dino De Laurentiis, was insistent he get the part. It was agreed that I would work with Sam for two weeks in Dino’s office, then they would give him another screen test. He got quite good at reciting Shakespeare sonnets, but I gather that in the end, most of his lines were dubbed by another actor.

I was briefly at the BBC, working on a series called Play for Tomorrow, which was a futuristic riff on their long-standing Play for Today strand. I commissioned six scripts, including one from Caryl Churchill. They were kind of science fiction stories, all set in 2001, which clearly wasn’t going to be as space-agey as Kubrick’s film. And around that time, I met David Rose.

Cineaste: Who for many years had been in charge of the BBC drama department in Birmingham, working with people like Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh, and David Hare. 

Donohue: He told David Hare that he was about to start work running the film production office at Britain’s new television channel, Channel 4, but that he wasn’t familiar with the new generation of writers. David told him to contact me. We had lunch, and two days later he called me and offered me a job as his assistant. This was maybe eighteen months before Channel 4 began broadcasting. It was a tiny operation at the time—just six of us in a small office in Knightsbridge. The people running Channel 4 had decided that they didn’t want to be lumbered with the kind of huge studio filmmaking apparatus that the BBC had. Channel 4 was to be a kind of bank which invested in films.

David and I figured that as soon as we opened the door to our office, scripts would come pouring in, but that didn’t happen. Channel 4 was too new. People just didn’t know about it, and we scrambled to start commissioning scripts. We made an early decision that what we weren’t going to do was work with theater writers. That, I felt, was one of the problems of contemporary British cinema. There was this process of writers working for the theater, then being picked up by the BBC and writing television plays, then eventually moving on to cinema. The result was often heavily dialogue-driven films without much of a visual style. I thought we should do something different and commission novelists. The first writer I approached was Neil Jordan, whose short stories I had read when I was at the RSC. He had a script to hand—what became Angel. We also commissioned Angela Carter to write the screenplay of her version of Red Riding Hood, The Company of Wolves, which ended up becoming Neil’s next film after Angel.

Eventually people started sending their scripts to us. If I liked them, I would forward them to David, and if he liked them, they would come back to me because they always needed work. I became involved in the production of various films from their inception, which included going with David to the sets and watching these films being made, then looking at the various cuts with David when the films were in postproduction. In some cases, we gave a hundred percent of a film’s budget, but usually Channel 4 would put in only a limited amount of money. The filmmaker would show up with some kind of budget already in place and ask how much we could contribute.

It took a year or so before filmmakers realized what we were doing at Channel 4 might finance their work, so it was probably only in the second or third year that the more interesting films started being produced. The problem for me was that we were working on so many films at the same time and I couldn’t really immerse myself in one film completely. I ended up using my holiday time from Channel 4 to do so when I worked with John Boorman on a film he was producing [Nemo, 1984] and on Angel with Neil, who asked me to help him with the actors—though in the end he didn’t really need me.

I encouraged David to support Paris, Texas, partly because Sam Shepard was the writer. Wim Wenders, who had recently made Hammett in America and The State of Things, came to us asking for money. David thought that Channel 4 should produce only British films, but it was clear to me that if Wim was asking us for money, it was because he was having trouble getting it elsewhere. Wim came up with a solution that satisfied David. We had promised to invest money in a film by Chris Petit called Flight to Paris. At the last minute, the other partner withdrew their money, so Wim suggested that if the film became Flight to Berlin, he would be able to secure the missing money in Germany. A two-film deal was made. 

Paris, Texas winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes really put Channel 4 on the map, and Channel 4’s Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs decided that we should get more involved in European films. I worked on Alain Tanner’s In the White City but had already left when Channel 4 was producing films like Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.

Cineaste: What did you do on Paris, Texas?

Donohue: I was sort of the script editor. Wim and Sam began with a stack of paper with the basic scene descriptions on them: Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Scene 2: Travis walks into a bar. That’s all they wrote, all the way to the end. Once they had done that, they went back and filled out each scene. Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Stops. Drinks from a carton. Throws it away. Walks off. Scene 2: Travis goes into a bar to find something to drink. He eats some ice and faints. That kind of thing. Wim and Sam felt that the best way to conceive the film on paper was to represent the story in terms of what was seen, not what was heard. Because Channel 4 was the main financier, I spent a week with Wim in Los Angeles because Sam, at that stage, was beginning to send the dialogue. Then I visited Berlin when Wim was in postproduction. 

Cineaste: How long were you at Channel 4? 

Donohue: The way Channel 4 was set up was that most people working there were offered a three-year contract, with an option to stay for another three years. That was supposed to be it. In other words, for Channel 4 to stay cutting edge and innovative as it was supposed to be, it shouldn’t have a permanent staff. Six years was all you could do. My contract was actually only for two years because all my experience had been in theater, and they didn’t know if I would be suited to the processes involved with filmmaking. When my contract ended—it must have been 1983—I said I didn’t want to stay. In those two years we made ten or fifteen films each year. We were involved from the very start to the very end. I decided that rather than working on fifteen films in such a cursory way, I would rather work closely on just one film. By the end of my second year, I was exhausted and told them I didn’t want my contract renewed. 

Cineaste: How did you end up at Faber?

Donohue: When we were looking for novelists to commission, I came across a thriller called In the Secret State by Robert McCrum. I thought he was the new Le Carré, so I went to meet him. It turned out he was working at Faber as its editorial director. He told me that Granada television had bought the rights, but we got on very well and he introduced me to the chief executive of Faber, Matthew Evans. I was invited to all their parties and got to know the people there, especially the other editors.

I was in the elevator with Matthew when I told him I was leaving Channel 4. He immediately said I should come work at Faber. I said I wasn’t interested in publishing; I wanted to work in movies. Matthew was a governor of the British Film Institute and was aware that something was bubbling up in British cinema, in part because of what was happening at Channel 4. Instinctively, he thought that Faber should be part of what was going on. He knew about the film business, and said, “Listen, British films only shoot at certain times of the year because of the weather. I’ll give you a desk and typewriter and a telephone, and can you start building Faber’s film list. When you’re not here, when you’re working on a film, someone else from the company will look after things.” 

For the first few years, working as a script editor on films was my job and working at Faber a hobby. When I was working with Wim [Wenders] on Until the End of the World, I told Matthew I was going off to Paris and would be back in two weeks, but didn’t show up for four months as I followed the film around the world. In cases like that, Faber always found someone to help push books through the production process. 

Cineaste: Did you have a budget to build a new film list at Faber?

Donohue: Financially, the whole thing was made possible because Faber got a percentage of T. S. Eliot’s cut from the royalties of the Cats musical, which sustained the company for years and enabled it to be more adventurous. What Matthew Evans and Robert McCrum also did was hire a design company, Pentagram, which rebranded Faber and created a new visual identity for the company. That definitely helped sell books. The first time I met Wes Anderson, in his New York apartment, I saw all those black Faber spines on his shelves.

In the beginning, most of the film books never made money. But then, in 1994, we published the screenplay of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Tarantino had never gone to film school, so every eighteen-year-old thought they could be a filmmaker if they watched enough videos. But what gave Tarantino’s films their impact was their original structure and the music of the dialogue—which meant that neophyte filmmakers needed to read screenplays. They became teaching tools, of a kind, and in the wake of Pulp Fiction there was a huge spike in the sale of screenplays, as well as our interview books with filmmakers. At one point, Faber’s sales director said to me, “All you need to do is slap a clapperboard on a book and it’ll sell.” Film books hit a cultural moment because in the 1990s there was an explosion of film talent. For one financial quarter—I forget exactly when—Faber’s film books were the most profitable across the entire company. 

The books sometimes came together in the most roundabout way. Two friends of mine who were production designers working on a Jonathan Ross TV chat show on Channel 4 told me that the guy who had won the Palme d’Or was going to be on the show, and why didn’t I come down and meet him. That was the first time I encountered Steven Soderbergh. It was as simple as that—and we stayed in touch. Whenever he was in England, he would go see Richard Lester because he admired him so much, and that’s how his book [Getting Away With It (2000)] came about.  

Some books I edited myself. Nicolas Roeg wanted to write a book, so he sat down in front of a camera with his wife recording him and talked about his films and his ideas about cinema. I took the transcripts and smoothed them out. [The book was published in 2013 as The World is Ever Changing.]

Cineaste: Every one of Faber’s Directors on Directors books is a key text.

Donohue: There were precedents, of course, like Truffaut’s book with Hitchcock. The genesis of that series was when Ian Christie came to me and said that there was a lot of controversy surrounded Scorsese’s latest film, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Scorsese was coming to the U.K. to launch it and do a series of Q&As, sponsored by the BFI, at their cinemas across the country. The events were all recorded, and once that tour was over, Ian contacted me and said that over the course of the two weeks that Scorsese had traveled around the country, he had talked about most of his films, in response to questions from Ian and David Thompson, or the audience. Ian and David wanted to edit the material into a book and would fill in any gaps. Michael Powell contributed the foreword. That was the germination of the interview books. Some of them were bought in, like Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks, which had first been published in the America the early 1980s, but I commissioned most of the other books in the series.

Cineaste: How did Projections come about?

Donohue: It was John Boorman’s idea. He didn’t like the fact that most of the time filmmakers talk about their work only when they’re selling a new film on the press junket. They’re restricted to talking only about the film they have just made. John conceived of a publication where filmmakers could write about whatever they wanted to write about. They could contribute in any way they wanted. We commissioned most pieces, though some of what we published was archival material. The first few issues contained extensive diaries from filmmakers, but that was always a big ask. Most filmmakers are too busy making films to take time to record what’s happening to them across a year. And it was hard for them to be as honest as they would have liked, so we decided to publish lengthy interviews instead. Projections had a natural life. It just gently faded away, in part because Faber’s distribution deal in the United States with Farrar, Straus and Giroux ended and wasn’t renewed, and we could never sell enough copies in the U.K. alone. Nowadays, Projections would be a podcast or something like that. Even after the expiration of that agreement, FSG asked to retain distribution rights over three Faber film books—two of which are yours, Herzog and Mackendrick—which keep on selling.

Cineaste: What was the third?

Donohue: Richard Williams’s The Animator’s Survival Kit. All the animation students seem to buy it. 

Cineaste: You don’t publish as many screenplays as you used to.

Donohue: The ones that sell are the ones that are structurally interesting or have a chime to their dialogue. Scripts that have a more naturalistic approach to their storytelling don’t seem to do very well. With Wes Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, or Christopher Nolan, reading their screenplays adds to the pleasure of the film. It enhances the experience. And Christopher provides storyboards that are included in the books. Some of Wes’s scripts have short interviews with him, sometimes by me, like the recent The French Dispatch.

Cineaste: Do you remember when you first encountered Nolan? 

Donohue: I saw Following and liked it, and when we published Memento, we included the script of Following in the same book. Then a journalist, James Mottram, contacted me because he wanted to write a book about Memento. We’ve published the screenplay of every Nolan film since, except for Inception, because the timing wasn’t right.

Wes and Christopher and Joel and Ethan would continue making films if Faber didn’t publish their scripts, and maybe another publisher would do the job if we didn’t. But if I look back, the thing that’s consistent, whether I was working in the theater or at Channel 4 or at Faber, it’s all more or less the same thing: dealing with writers. Helping them get their work out there. I certainly enjoy the process. I don’t think that there’s anything particularly special that I do. When a writer sends me their scripts, my response is based entirely on instinct, honed by all the years I spent working in the theater and at Channel 4. And I never made statements, I never imposed anything. I only ever asked the writers questions, to see if I could draw out from them anything that would clarify their intentions. Given the diversity of the filmmakers who approached Channel 4 for money, the best approach was just to respond to the originality of the writers. 

Cineaste: When it comes to film books, Faber has a certain prestige.  

Donohue: I was in the right place at the right time. When I began building the film list—the screenplays, for example—it was a moment when it was possible for someone to do something, and other people notice it. Today, it’s much more difficult. I found out about Wes Anderson, for example, because Kevin MacDonald had seen Rushmore in LA and told me I had to see it and meet the filmmaker and publish the script. There’s always a certain amount of luck in these things. One year I was at Cannes and heard about a new film called Reservoir Dogs, so I tracked down where Tarantino was staying, walked over to his hotel, and left a copy of Projections. Not long after that we published Pulp Fiction, then went back and published the script of Reservoir Dogs, and Natural Born Killers and True Romance.

Cineaste: Why are you not publishing those kinds of scripts these days? 

Donohue: The market cooled. The problem has to do with the availability of the scripts. The high point of the Faber film list was pre-Internet. The only place you could read this material was in the books you bought. But the last Tarantino script we published, Inglourious Basterds, was uploaded to the Internet the day we released the book, so naturally it didn’t sell well. It’s the same with interview books. We haven’t done as many recently as we were doing twenty years ago. Perhaps it’s because people can read interviews with their favorite directors on the Internet or listen to DVD commentaries. 

Cineaste: Do I remember some story about Harmony Korine stealing your scooter?

Donohue: Well, he didn’t exactly steal it. Harmony was living here for a time, and we were doing some books with him—a collection of scripts and a novel called A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. He wasn’t doing particularly well at the time. I think he was broke and living in some dingy basement near Camden Town. I got a message from him saying he was about leave for Paris because someone there—I think Agnès b.—was going to finance some new work of his. I went to see him. He was obviously desperate, because he asked to borrow my scooter so he could catch his train. I suppose he didn’t have any money. And I suppose I thought I would get my scooter back one day. And off he went, over the hill. I haven’t seen him, or that scooter, since—though my scooter seems to have created an alternate life for itself on Instagram!

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1