Hackman gave it another go, adapting a book called Ada Blackjack: A True Story Of Survival In The Arctic. “It was the true story of an Inuit woman who had gone on an expedition in the Arctic, and everybody on the expedition had died,” he explains. “She was on her own for six months up there – it was kind of a fascinating story in some ways, but I couldn’t quite lick it. I couldn’t quite get it to come alive. I didn’t have any confidence in it.”
That lack of confidence in his writing might explain why, when Hackman finally decided to pick up a pen (he writes longhand, and his wife gets it all typed up) again, he didn’t go it alone. When he was preparing to star alongside Tom Cruise in The Firm, and needed to learn how to scuba dive, he was put in touch with Lenihan, a local marine biologist and accomplished diver. “In Santa Fe, there’s not a lot of scuba diving,” chuckles Hackman. “But Daniel took me to this public swimming pool – it had a depth of nine feet or something like that – and I got my first introduction to scuba through him.”
From there, the two got chatting about authors they liked – Melville, Hemingway, “all the traditional adventure type writers” – and tentatively decided to try writing together. “I said to him, ‘Hey, I’ve never written anything…’” says Hackman. “So I went home and I made up a scene about a young man up in the sheets in a forerigged sailing ship in a storm, and that was the start of it.”
That became the basis for The Wake Of The Perdido Star, and the formation of an unusual writing process, whereby they would each write separate chapters, focusing on a particular character, so in Escape From Andersonville, Lenihan would focus on the lead, Nathaniel Parker, while Hackman would write chapters featuring the roguish Southern soldier, Marcel La Farge. They also learned never to write in the same room. “The process grew out of some long, painful nights of pounding away at this partnership,” admits Hackman. “We had a good writing relationship, though.”
“One asks oneself questions as an actor like, ‘where am I coming from? Where am I going? What do I want?’ Those three simple things can carry you a long way as an actor. As a writer, you can start the same way.”
Emphasis on ‘had’, for the partnership has been dissolved, with Lenihan moving onto non-fiction projects, while Hackman is venturing out on his own, with a Western. “I like it a lot,” he says of being on his lonesome. “There’s times when I wish I had another hundred and fifty pages to go, that someone could come in and slot something in there, but generally speaking, I like that.”
nypost.com
metroairportnews.com
www.bbc.com
www.euronews.com
www.cnn.com
notthebee.com
www.washingtontimes.com
www.sciencenews.org
www.dailymail.co.uk
