Miracles of Life

She finished and we waited for Hinds to speak. ‘Water?’ he repeated. ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with water.’

It turned out that they planned to shoot the film in the Canary Islands. I remembered that the surrealists had made field trips to the Canaries, fascinated by the black volcanic beaches and the extraordinary fauna and flora. All Hammer had seen was the tax incentives.

Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original,’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon – in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits.

In 1986, two years after the publication of Empire of the Sun, a very different kind of film company appeared on the scene. Warner Brothers bought the rights to the novel, and asked Steven Spielberg, the world’s most successful film-maker, to direct the production. Spielberg at first proposed that he would produce the film, and asked David Lean to direct. But Lean declined, saying that he couldn’t handle the boy. Perhaps Jim was too aggressive and too conflicted for Lean, who liked his boy actors to be lisping and slightly effeminate. In any event Spielberg, who had a unique gift for drawing superb performances from child actors, decided to direct it himself.

Most of the film was shot in Shanghai and near Jerez, in Spain, where Lunghua Camp was recreated, but a few scenes were shot in and near London. The Ballard house in Amherst Avenue was divided between three houses in Sunningdale, to the west of London, and Spielberg invited me to play a walk-on part at the fancy-dress party that opens the film. I appeared as John Bull in scarlet coat and top hat. It was on set that I met Spielberg for the first time, and was immediately impressed by his thoughtfulness and his commitment to the novel. Difficult scenes that could easily have been dropped were tackled head-on, like Jim’s ‘resuscitation’ of the young kamikaze pilot who briefly merges into his younger, blazer-wearing self, a powerful image that expresses the essence of the whole novel.

A Spielberg production is a huge event, with hundreds of people involved – technicians, actors, bodyguards, bus drivers and catering staff, publicists and make-up artists. Given the costs involved, the sheer scale of Hollywood films demands the highest degree of professionalism. This is the central paradox of film-making, as far I can see. For hours on the set nothing is happening, but not a second is being wasted. The lighting is in many ways more important than the actors’ performances, which can be strengthened by astute cutting and editing. Spielberg, of course, is a master of film narrative, and his films far transcend the performances of individual actors. He told me that he ‘saw’ the film of Empire of the Sun in the scene where the Mustangs are attacking the airfield next to Lunghua Camp, and the fighter aircraft move in slow motion in the eyes of the watching Jim. It’s an unsettling moment, one of many in what I think of as Spielberg’s best, and most imagined, film.

It was fascinating for me to take part in the Sunningdale scenes, and strange to be involved in a painstakingly accurate recreation of my childhood home. The white telephones and original copies of Time magazine, the art deco lamps and rugs, carried me straight back to the Shanghai of the 1930s. The large Sunningdale houses were uncannily similar in their fittings, their door handles and window frames. In fact, the English architects in Shanghai had modelled their Tudor-style houses on the Sunningdale mansions rather than the reverse.

When the fancy-dress party ended, the ‘guests’ were filmed leaving the house, and I stepped out into the drive to find a line of 1930s American Packards and Buicks, each with a uniformed Chinese chauffeur. The scene was so like the real Shanghai of my childhood that for a moment I fainted.

Other curious reversals occurred during the making of the film. Several of my neighbours in Shepperton worked as extras, drawn by the nearby film studios, and took part in the scenes shot in England. I vividly remember the mother of a girl at the same school as my daughters calling out to me: ‘We’re going back to Shanghai, Mr Ballard. We’re in the film…’ I had the uncanny sense that I had chosen to live in Shepperton in 1960 because I knew unconsciously that I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that extras among my neighbours would one day appear in a film based on the novel.

Another eerie moment occurred when I was on the set at Sunningdale, and a 12-year-old boy in fancy dress came up to me and said: ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you.’ This was Christian Bale, who played Jim so brilliantly, virtually carrying the whole film on his shoulders. Behind him were two actors in their late thirties, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, also in fancy dress, who smiled and said: ‘And we’re your mother and father.’ They were twenty years younger than me at the time, and I had the strange feeling that the intervening years had vanished and I was back in wartime Shanghai.

The Los Angeles premiere of the film in December 1987 was a Hollywood epic in its own right. Claire and I stayed at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, just within sight of the Hollywood sign, where we met Tom Stoppard, the writer of the script, a pleasant but intensely nervous man. Dozens of stars attended the charity screening, some in mink coats, like Dolly Parton, and others in T-shirts, like Sean Connery. Later the nearby streets were closed to traffic and we walked in procession along red carpets laid in the centre of the road to a vast marquee where a themed banquet was held with Chinese food and Chinese dancers bopping to jive numbers.

In early 1988 my American publisher Farrar Straus arranged a six-city, two-week-long book tour to promote my latest novel. The schedule was exhausting, a non-stop round of interviews, book signings, radio and television appearances. At its best, radio is a thoughtful medium in America, while television is regarded as nothing but a continuous stream of advertising, the programmes included. Publicity and promotion are the air that Americans breathe, and they take it for granted that in every minute of the day someone is trying to sell them something.

Many of my bookshop readings and signings were packed, but others were completely empty, for reasons no one could explain. Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful, though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow Spielberg to make a film of your novel?’ When I replied that he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.’ This was the only time that I’ve heard success downplayed in America. Usually it marks the end of any argument about the merits or otherwise of a film or book. Perhaps American journalists, who see themselves as the consciences of their nation, resent Spielberg for revealing the sentimental and childlike strains that lie just below the surface of American life. There is certainly a missing dimension that European visitors become aware of within a few days of arrival, a trust in the idea of America that no Frenchman or Briton ever feels about his own country. Or it may be that we in Europe are by nature more depressed.

In London in the spring of 1988 there was a royal command performance of Empire of the