Edinburgh Festival `98: Why less is more for Mamet

THROUGHOUT THE shooting of The Postman Always Rings Twice, director Bob Rafelson kept his writer on set. Whenever there was a problem with the dialogue, he made the writer change it.

Once, he set the writer to work revising three or four lines spoken by Frank (Jack Nicholson) and Cora (Jessica Lange) just after they have attempted to murder Cora's husband. Rafelson still wasn't happy. He asked the writer to re-revise them. The process repeated itself again and again. "It was four or five in the morning," Rafelson recalls. "I went back to the trailer to see the 51st rewrite of the lines I was going to shoot later that evening. There was a note from the writer saying that he had decided to go back and that if I needed him, to call. So I called the motel where we were staying, but he meant he had gone back, not simply to Los Angeles or even New York - he had gone to London. As far away from me as he could get. He claims I never gave him a free hand."

The writer in question was David Mamet and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) was his first screenplay. Judging by the vanishing trick, it wasn't a happy baptism but, since then, Mamet's enthusiasm for the movies has grown. As he recently commented, "I used to be a rather committed gambler and I always wanted to play at the Big Table. And the Big Table is movies."

He has gone on to script such films as Hoffa, The Untouchables, The Verdict, We're No Angels and Wag the Dog, while also writing and directing several features of his own. His new film, The Spanish Prisoner, has its British premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival today before its general release next week.

The Spanish Prisoner deals with role-playing, greed, deal-making and duplicity. It is a hugely enjoyable thriller, a sort of Nineties counterpart to ripping yarns such as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, in which a clean-cut hero has the carpet pulled from beneath his feet again and again. Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) is a scientist who has created a new formula which is going to make his boss (Ben Gazzara) a fortune. He suspects the boss plans to swindle him. He doesn't suspect that his handsome, wealthy lawyer Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin) might have similar intentions.

"Telegrammatic" is the word Rafelson uses to describe Mamet's writing style. He recalls that Mamet's first draft of The Postman Always Rings Twice didn't much resemble a screenplay in the conventional sense. There were no stage instructions. The dialogue was typically terse. "But I wasn't so startled by this as I was inspired - it was a road map to character."

Mamet, famously, pares down, excising everything which doesn't have a direct bearing on the story. As he writes in his essay On Film Directing, "my experience as a director and a dramatist is this: the piece is moving in proportion to how much the author can leave out... always do things the least interesting way and you make a better movie."

He is not the kind of auteur who aims for startling visual effects. His shooting style is strictly functional. His protagonists, whether the con- artist played by Joe Mantegna in House Of Games, the cobbler-turned-Mafia boss (Don Ameche) in Things Change or, indeed, bland, clean-cut Campbell Scott in The Spanish Prisoner, are almost aggressively neutral. They don't show obvious character traits. "The less the hero of the play is inflected, identified and characterised," Mamet has observed, "the more we will endow him with our own internal meaning - the more we will identify with him."

Ironically, despite his Jesuit-like devotion to austere, simple storytelling, Mamet's dialogue is usually instantly recognisable. His characters have a habit of repeating each other's lines and of speaking in a flat monotone. Nobody else writes quite like him.

The Spanish Prisoner might best be described as Mamet's homage to the MacGuffin. This, as most Hitchcock fans know, is a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. The fact that there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands is precisely the point. The MacGuffin sets the narrative moving. At first, it seems to be of crucial importance, "that thing which the hero is chasing. The secret documents... the great seal of the Republic of blah-blah-blah, the delivery of the secret message." By the final reel, though, the original MacGuffin will be long forgotten. In The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock by stuffing the plot so full of MacGuffins that the audience never quite knows who or what to trust. Even the most innocent-looking characters - the Japanese tourist with the big camera or the man at the zoo - are complicit in the plot against us.

To audiences exasperated by summer blockbusters which give away all their secrets freely, the sheer flirtatiousness of The Spanish Prisoner can't help but come as a relief. It is an exercise in teasing and tantalising.

"I think that critics are generally a bunch of unfortunates and should be ashamed of themselves," Mamet wrote in his book of essays, The Cabin. Nevertheless, he admitted, he was not entirely immune to the desire for their praise. "Do you seek the good opinion of frauds and imbeciles?" he asked himself. "Well, I guess I do."

If his 1988 play Speed The Plow is taken as the litmus, he doesn't think much of Philistine film executives either. The Spanish Prisoner pleased both constituencies, performing creditably at the US box-office while garnering enthusiastic reviews.

Whatever else, it proves that Mamet is unique: the only Pulitzer prize- winning playwright who can play the Hollywood game better than the studio bosses.

Yesterday's film round-up, which was incorrectly attributed to Ryan Gilbey, was written by Geoffrey Macnab