Oscar-winning screenwriter, playwright and film director Christopher Hampton was on feisty form in a masterclass in Qatar earlier this week as part of the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra talent incubator event (March 10-16).

Hampton, who won Academy Awards for the screenplays of Dangerous Liaisons and The Father and was Oscar-nominated for Atonement, urged aspiring screenwriters in the auditorium to try to retain some sort of control of their work and creative vision.

“I would advise anybody to try to get at least some sort of associate producer credit to maintain a grip on the material and you have to fight… fight with a lot of people,” he said. “They don’t want to give it to you. They don’t want to give you those powers, but I’ve always argued that since the writer is the origin of the piece, they deserve to be respected.”

“Don’t be unreasonable because there is a very strong possibility that other people’s ideas will be as good as yours but there comes a moment when your original idea is being deformed.”

Hampton recalled pushing back against Sydney Pollack over modifications to his script for the 2002 adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, on which the latter was an executive producer.

“The notes I got had the effect of shifting the character a tiny, tiny bit every time we did a revision,” he recounted. “I said to him, ‘I’ve just realised that you keep doing this and you end up with a character facing in entirely the opposite direction to where it was in the first place. You’ve made so many little modifications to the character that it’s not the same character anymore.”

“Only you the writer know what the character is meant to represent, and small changes can compromise that vision, you’ve really got to fight for all that stuff but remain diplomatic.”

In an example of why retaining some control matters, Hampton regaled the audience with an account of his race to bring his adaptation of the 18th-Century French novel Dangerous Liaisons to the big screen in face of stiff competition from Miloš Forman.

The screenplay was drawn from Hampton’s 1984 theatre play based on the novel. Hampton had toyed with the idea of adapting the novel from the early 1970s but received pushback from commissioners who could not envisage how the epistolary framework in which the protagonists never meet could be transposed to the stage.

When the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) offered Hampton an open commission in 1984, he seized the opportunity.

“I thought there will never be a better chance, so I went and wrote the play, which they weren’t very pleased to receive at all. It was commissioned for the big new theatre at the Barbican, but they decided there was no audience appeal, and it was demoted to the 150-seat studio theatre in Stratford,” he recalled.

Hampton said this was the first of a series of “amazing strokes of luck” because the play worked well in the smaller space.

“It attracted enormously positive reviews and then we were on this helter-skelter which culminated in the film. There were a lot of extremely lucky things that happened along the way. One of these was my decision not to sell the rights to any of the big studios. Uniquely among my work, all the big studios had bid for it.”

Instead, Hampton decided to go with the smaller, independent company Lorimar because it allowed him to maintain more control of the project.

“Unbeknownst to me it [Lorimar] was sliding towards bankruptcy,” he recounted.

Hampton’s push to develop the production with a smaller independent company did not go down well with the RSC.

“I had a fight with the Royal Shakespeare Company because they were due a percentage of whatever I was paid and they were not at all happy with my doing it with an independent company, which of course could afford much less,” he revealed. “With everything else that was going, there was that too.”

Around the same time, director Miloš Forman, who was on a roll in Hollywood on the back of his Oscar Best Picture wins for One Flew Out Of The Cuckoos Nest and Amadeus, announced he was going to do a film based on Dangerous Liaisons.

“Which was a little bit annoying because I knew he had seen the play about four times,” recounted Hampton. “So that made me very determined to fight this.”

Hampton said his next piece of luck was persuading Lorimar to accept Stephen Frears, who had not directed a large-scale production at that point, as director. 

“I had been taking meetings with all sorts of fancy directors like Polanski, Alan Pakula and Louis Malle. As I got into conversations with these people, they would get the call from Miloš saying, ‘You’re not doing this, I am’. Stephen was the last man standing.”

The pair went to New York to meet Lorimar head Bernie Brillstein to discuss the production. 

“He said, ‘We’re in a race. I am not going to let you make this film unless you guarantee to come out first before Miloš Forman,” recounted Hampton. “He said to Stephen, ‘When can you start work?’. Stephen got out a tiny diary and started to look through it, he looked through it for some time, and then looked up and said ‘Tuesday’.”

Hampton had already secured Glenn Close and John Malkovich for the lead roles of Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont. 

“Normally, you’d waited for the director but we were in such a rush while I was meeting all these other directors, I thought I might as well try and find the right actors on my account and hope the director agrees,” said Hampton.

He had reeled in Malkovich by standing outside the stage door of the Broadway play the actor was performing in at the time and stuffing the screenplay in his hands as he came out.

“It’s amazing now when I look back at it. First of all, he was alarmed. Then I said who I was. He had heard of the play and in fact, it turned out that Steppenwolf, his company in Chicago, had had a reading of one of my earlier plays. He took the play away with him and then phoned me at noon the next day to say he would do it.”

“We started shooting at the very end of May 1988 and had the film in cinemas before Christmas because we knew we had this monster breathing down our backs.”

In the interim, there was one final moment of drama when Lorimar went bankrupt in the first week on set, bringing the production to a halt.

“We thought this is it, we’re done for but luckily Close’s agent contacted Warner Brothers who made a quick calculation and thought this is a cheap film, we’re not risking much on this. They came in and financed the whole thing,” said Hampton.

The film grossed $34M against its $14M budget and went on to win Hampton his first Oscar for best-adapted screenplay and also clinched Academy Awards for Best Production Design and Best Costume in 1989.

Forman’s rival picture Valmont, starring Colin Firth and Annette Bening, came out in November 1989 on a limited release, grossing just  $1.1M on the back of an estimated $33M budget and garnering one Oscar nomination for Best Costume in 1990.

“As often in the film business, there were a series of miracles that were required for the film to be made in the first place,” said Hampton. “It’s such a serendipitous business we’re in.”

Hampton was among five cinema-established cinema names attending the DFI Qumra event this year as one of its so-called Qumra Masters.

The wide-ranging masterclass, moderated by Richard Peña, Professor of Films Studies at Columbia University, also touched on Hampton’s directorial credits Carrington and Imagining Argentina as well as his collaboration with Florian Zeller on The Father.

The writer also revealed details of his upcoming project with French director Anne Fontaine about iconic feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren’s transatlantic affair as well as hopes to bring his play White Chameleon to the big screen.