When Sarah makes a pact with God and He seems to answer her prayer, it also deals with the power of belief.

And that's the biggest issue of all -- whether it drives individuals to suicide or it kills half the people of Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

Greene did bring an obsession with Catholicism to the end of the novel. I think in a way he became Thomas Hardy a bit: He began to push his characters toward different positions to express his point of view. The main thing I felt I had to do with the movie was to change the characters so they could find their way to their own conclusions -- that's why I put the birthmark on the boy and eliminated the character of the rationalist preacher, and merged him into a priest. But that guy was the least successful character in the book. Did he ever work for you? He was a position, wasn't he?

Yes, he is part of the book's deadwood, although he did lead to one of my favorite insights in the novel. Sarah says that believers didn't make a believer out of her, but a disbeliever did. Without this rationalist preacher, though, Bendrix's character is strengthened --

Because he carries all the weight of disbelief! That's interesting; I hadn't thought about that.

The way the movie plays, it's very tricky, because the first half is mostly bitter comedy, and then it changes when it shifts from Bendrix's point of view to Sarah's.

That's dangerous, isn't it? There's all this coldness and bile, and audiences may not like these characters. But do audiences always have to like the characters? The change was very interesting formally -- even the question of whether you could see the same event twice. I looked at "Rashomon," wondering how I could deal with the same sort of thing that Kurosawa dealt with before. But he didn't, actually. Your memory of it is that four people give some account of the same event, and that isn't the case, because they each tell a different bit of it. Then I thought I could do this: show the same event but with the benefit of separate levels of knowledge.

When Bendrix tells Sarah that she seems disappointed that he's alive, it gets an uncomfortable laugh. But you replay that scene quickly from her point of view, and by the time you replay one more scene from their past, you could hear a pin drop in the audience.

The audience can't leave, even though they may want to! Making a movie is so odd. It's always interesting to me how an audience responds. I have to preview movies all the time -- you preview something like my film "The Butcher Boy," and half the audience just walks out. They get angry and impatient with it. But I watched "Being John Malkovich" -- very funny -- with my daughter at a cheap theater in L.A. We paid $5 a ticket. Twenty minutes in, about 10 kids just got up and left. Isn't that funny? That's the nature of filmmaking. You always know some people are not going to go along with it.

Did you feel pressured into making the romance more "romantic"? For example, in the book Bendrix simply says he has a lame leg, not that he got it from a wound he suffered in the Spanish Civil War.

Well, we had this narrative problem -- how do you explain a guy who's not part of the war effort? And if you give a character a club foot, you build up his heel, don't you? And in fact that makes his foot taller, so the wrong leg limps. So I made Bendrix part of the Spanish Civil War. It was full of writers, that war.

There's also no discussion of Sarah having had other affairs.

To some extent, I did have to look at these relationships from a contemporary standpoint. People are profoundly disapproving of men and women who have not sorted out their lives and lived them according to the moral, therapeutic patterns you're supposed to have nowadays. I think people are terribly moralistic now -- not moral, but moralistic. I know this from showing the film in previews. They think a married woman having sex with another man is necessarily evil. And put two people in the throes of passion, having a sexual affair, and they think, "Oh, the relationship is entirely about sexuality, it's not about love." It must have something to do with American Puritanism.

I think we're in a transitional time.

Well, there's not a lot of eroticism around, not in the sense that Rubens would understand it. It's just bizarre to me.

So you didn't want to burden Sarah with any additional onus of "immorality"?

It's difficult enough to make a woman in a love affair understandable to people nowadays, know what I mean?

Julianne Moore has been telling the press that she grabbed your attention with a letter.

She tells that happily herself, doesn't she? She did write me a letter -- one of the sweetest letters I've ever gotten. She said the script was a beautiful story "about loss" -- and that told me she absolutely understood it. But she didn't have to grab my attention. She may have misunderstood me. I had written the script, and I didn't want it to get out. But the minute you give it to an agent it gets everywhere, it's like a virus, and all these people begin to read it. I almost had to change my phone number so many people were calling me, wanting the part. I didn't realize that Julianne was in London when I was in Ireland and that she expected to see me at a time when I was flying off to Italy; at that point, I was trying to resist getting my head around the casting. The problem with casting is that you can never trust what agents say. I was definitely considering her and was actually desperate that it work out.

There's a photograph of Greene's lover Catherine Walston in the second volume of Norman Sherry's biography ["The Life of Graham Greene"] that resembles Julianne strongly.

It's not quite Julianne, but we had that picture, and there's something there. Catherine was a very strange lady, very odd. When you read the letters of him to her, you realize she could take or leave that relationship. And he was in agony, you know? And you realize how much wish-fulfillment there is in the book. If only he could have read her diary and learned that she actually loved him desperately all along and that the barrier to their living together was the Almighty!

Recent Stories