Does Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodge's play, Collaborators – about an author forced to work for Stalin – echo his own Hollywood nightmare? Not quite, he tells Xan Brooks
One of the upsides to being a writer is the ability to write yourself out of trouble, to conjure a last-gasp escape for the imperilled hero. A few years ago, John Hodge found himself bogged down in a film script about Joseph Stalin. The subject was too vast, too elusive, and he was getting nowhere fast. So he spun the screenplay into a stage play instead. Collaborators is his tale of artistic compromise born out of artistic compromise; his freewheeling response to the hell of the deadline. It also happens to be his most purely successful, critically lauded piece of writing since Trainspotting crash-landed in UK cinemas way back in 1996.
Hodge's stage debut is a portrait of the mentor and his muse, the tyrant and the artist. Alex Jennings plays hapless Mikhail Bulgakov (of Master and Margarita fame), while Simon Russell Beale is Stalin, the author's "number one fan", who makes an offer he can't refuse. Stalin wants Bulgakov to write something he calls "Young Stalin", a play in honour of his 60th birthday. In accepting the commission, the writer is handcuffed. "It's man versus monster, Mikhail," says Stalin. "And the monster always wins."
When we meet, Hodge is upstairs at the National theatre, lying low ahead of the photo shoot ("Who wants to look at a picture of a late-40s playwright?"). I'm half-tempted to compare him to Bulgakov, hiding out from the secret police, except that he's having none of it. Bulgakov was brave, he says, and he is not. Bulgakov held out against Stalin for as long as he could, whereas he would have caved in immediately. "Bulgakov was the last man standing. That's why they chose him, because it means more. I'd have been in the first line of defectors. I'd have been putting my hand up: 'I'll do it!'" He shakes his head. "We talk about artistic compromise now. But we know nothing. The worst that can happen is that we have to get another job. It's not as though your life is at stake, or that your wife will be killed."
Hodge's own early years appear blissfully free of compromise. His 1990s were coloured by a golden run of good fortune. He was working as a junior doctor when he ran into producer Andrew Macdonald at the 1991 Edinburgh film festival; Hodge had penned a script for a low-budget thriller called Shallow Grave. Yet the writing, he says, was just a sideline: "If Shallow Grave hadn't worked out, I like to think I'd have had the sense to get out."
But Shallow Grave did work out, then Trainspotting exploded, and by the mid-1990s, Hodge, Madconald and director Danny Boyle found themselves hailed as saviours of the British film industry; the three musketeers of homegrown cinema, with Ewan McGregor their dashing D'Artagnan. "It worked out very easily," he says. "I just thought, 'Oh, this is nice. This will never stop.'" He shrugs. "What went wrong?"
That's just what I was going to ask him. "Well, maybe the films weren't as satisfying. Trainspotting was a pretty good film, but after that we didn't reach those heights again." He mulls it over. "I mean, we never fell out. Partly because we're all passive-aggressives. Arguing about things would be giving far too much away. But we probably got a bit tired of each other's company."
When the team broke up, Hodge found himself at a loose end. He had to start afresh, touting himself as a writer for hire on the Hollywood circuit. In 2006, he embarked on a disastrous, Americanised adaptation of Susan Cooper's classic, Arthurian-themed children's novel The Dark Is Rising. "I'm supposed to save the world?" squawks the film's teenaged hero. "I can't even figure out how to talk to girls!"
I'm a little wary about raising this matter, yet Hodge seems sanguine. The first problem, he says, was that he didn't much care for the book ("really trippy, very 1970s"). And too many cooks were involved. "You had Philip Anschutz of Walden Media, who is a rightwing evangelical Christian with a specific family remit to make films for 12 and under. It was co-produced by Fox, who wanted a teenage movie. The director, David Cunningham, was another evangelical. I'm an atheist. And the novel is pagan. So that tension inevitably led to a series of compromises that satisfied no one." The downside of the Trainspotting era, he reflects, was that it left him gloriously ignorant of the industry's harsh realities. "I'm learning all that now."
All things considered, though, he's come out of it well. Hodge recently reunited with Danny Boyle on the art-heist thriller Trance, which finished shooting last week. He has also beaten a path back to his original Stalin biopic, currently recrafting the tale as a six-part BBC miniseries. And in the meantime, he is justifiably proud of Collaborators, with its blackly comic take on the writer for hire, bullied and badgered by an all-powerful patron.
But this is Bulgakov's story, not his own, he insists. "I'm not going to pretend I'm the hurt artist here," he insists. "I'm sure there are a lot of studio heads who would love to be compared to Stalin. But none of these people are in the same league. When you control an empire that runs from the Pacific to Berlin and have had 20 million people killed, then maybe you're Stalin. Until then ..." He smiles. "Let's keep things in perspective."