Cronenberg interviews Rushdie (updated)
Here’s more from the one-man PR machine, this one an interview by filmmaker David Cronenberg in ‘95. Rushdie talks about writing on a Macintosh and his switch from typewriters to word processors, which means he most likely uses a program I once helped design. Jai Word-rashtra 
I wrote The Satanic Verses on an electronic typewriter. It was a typewriter with a few hundred word memory… But East, West and my new novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh are the first two books I’ve written exclusively on a computer… In my view, my writing has got tighter and more concise because I no longer have to perform the mechanical act of re-typing endlessly. And all the time that was taken up by that mechanical act, is freed to think. So I have more thinking and less machine-time.
… I had this kind of fetish about presenting clean copy. I don’t like presenting my publisher with pages with lots of crossings-out and scribbling. So I would be manic at the end of typing a page where actually I didn’t want to change anything, not at all, I just didn’t want all these crossings-out. So there’s no doubt in my mind that the computer’s improved my writing. [Link]
On how writing is like software development, an entrepreneur’s and control freak’s playground. Each is the opposite of a large studio movie or a high capital investment industry like biotech:
… there is a thing about writing, because you can take a paper and pencil and sit in a corner and write. It’s so cheap to make it, that gives you more or less complete freedom.
I think a reason why I have not written a screenplay is because of that loss of control. Especially if you are a writer, for God’s sake, you’re the least important person in the movies if you’re a writer. [Link]
On the origins of Shame:
… I actually wrote a draft screenplay of an honour-killing which took place in England that I read about in the paper. You know, where a father kills his daughter because she’s consorting with a white boy and she’s brought shame on the family so he kills her. I wrote a draft of a screenplay for that and then I realized that I was actually writing this novel about honour and shame. It was quite obviously an English variation on the theme that I was exploring over there, so, in the end, I made it into a chapter in the novel, Shame. [Link]
Updated: On making readers faint:
… Midnight’s Children was a book that people loved and Shame was a book that people admired. The Satanic Verses, leaving aside the people who didn’t like it, was not a novel that inspired love. A lot of people admired it. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was a book that people loved. It seems to create in its readers a deeper emotional response than I’ve ever felt coming back at me…
… there’s this scene [in Midnight’s Children] where the boy gets a piece of his finger chopped off when he slams the door on it… And then I realized they were carrying someone out. This lady had passed out. [Link]
On asking Britain not to ban a cheesy Pakistani movie, International Gorillay, in which Rushdie is fried by a Koran shooting bolts of lightning:
If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town. Everybody would have seen it. Instead, it was unbanned at my request and the producers booked the biggest cinema in Bradford, which is the largest Muslim community, and nobody came. They lost a fortune, and the film just died overnight. [Link]
On how Muslims are not monolithic:
One of the things that’s not given a lot of attention is how much Muslim support for me there’s been… Iran, for example, is famous as the place in which the most pornographic jokes about the prophet are made… Iran is famous as being a place with dirty stories, dirty religious stories. [Link]
On not getting the Net in ‘95:
I’ve watched somebody, as they say, “surfing the Net,” but it seems to me that 99 per cent of what’s there is absolute… mind rot and nonsense… email and reference are useful functions. But all these conferences where you talk endlessly about nothing… there’s nothing remotely interesting ever said. [Link]
Related posts: Batman and Rushdie
on Thursday, January 18th, 2007, 9:57 pm in Film, Literature, Salman Rushdie › 
Email this
› 
Facebook this
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
I can’t understand why anybody who designed software like word would be tom-toming about it. :P
i like that bit of self-promotion, Manish ;)
Nah man, it’s a great editor.
Better safe than sorry..use Latex :)
Well MSword is good for non-techie writing..not for equations etc.
Insert > Object > Equation Editor :)
great Manish.,word is good for writing..I use that..
“I think a reason why I have not written a screenplay is because of that loss of control.”
I thought Rushdie was writing a screenplay where padma lakshmi was going to act…I might be wrong..
I took a screenplay writing class once..Unless u are very good dialogue writer writing screenplays is hard..Rushdies novel have expositions, narration and monologues and not much of a dialogue..
Rushdie is such a talented writer, it would be great to see what kind of movies/screenplays he would make/write..
Yes, The Firebird’s Nest, but this interview is from ‘95.
:-D. Let the haters hate. Word is good. WYSIWYG has its uses.
The Equation Editor sucks though.
A genius (no sarcasm, he is really father of his field) prof decided to write a technical text book with lots of (rather only) equations in word. By the time he realized what he did, it was too late. Fixing his equations part-time is what earned my living during a tough phase of grad school. I have tinkered with obscure options and seen a lot of quirks. I have a bitter-sweet relationship with word.
The MSWord Eqn editor sucks big time!
rest all is good :)
Thanks Manish, now I know where I read it.. from ur vij homepage long time back..
I read the extract from ” The firebird’s nest” in the link u provided and it again is more narration and description of place, people and emotions than active dialogue between people..
It will be interesting to see how it turns out as a movie.. looks like autobiographical screenplay from Rushdie, a younger woman falling in love with an older man…padma and his story..
Aynrand started as a screenplay writer , wrote for movies and then wrote Atlas shrugged..Her dialogues are so powerful and compact even in her novels..very few successful writers turn out to be good screenplay writers. Aynrands novel “Fountain head” to me was better than the movie “fountainhead” though dialogues were almost the same..
George clooneys “goodnight and goodluck” was an excellent screenplay following the lines of Aynrand where every sentence is meaningful and powerful and there is not much of narration or exposition and I also liked “good will hunting” screenplay which was also very unique and good , so if Clooney and Matt Damon try writing novels, have a feeling they will be very good at it.. But the reverse to me seems hard from being a novelist to becoming a great screenplay writer…..
Aynrand in her journals writes about how she started writing about Howard Roark , Galt ,Fransisco and Dagny as screenplay characters and then added objectivism philosophy to those characters and made it into one remarkable novel”Atlas Shrugged’.
Here are amazon reviews on “Aynrands journals” if you are interested.
I didnot finish reading her journals as yet, but its a very good guide to writing screenplays/novels or converting screenplays to novels..
http://www.amazon.com/Journals-Ayn-Rand/dp/0452278872/sr=8-37/qid=1169237330/ref=sr_1_37/105-1880818-9202839?ie=UTF8&s=books