Patrick Marber

As the film of his play Closer is released in America, British playwright Patrick Marber talks to the Writers Guild of America, west.

I was very open to how we were going to do it. There was one part of me that wanted to rip up the play and start again... and then there was another part of me that thought, well, this is an interesting shape and an interesting way of telling a story and it worked on stage so why shouldn't we make it work on film. Mike was of the latter view. He loved the play, and a lot of the time he was persuading me to keep stuff in that I wanted to cut. It was kind of the reverse of the cliché writer-director relationship. I was all for rewriting it and he was always trying to preserve stuff I wanted to cut. I did do a lot of rewriting with lots of new material in the screenplay that's not in the play, but it all stems from the play.