Reshaping his play, he's happy to see "The Crucible" on film
NEW YORK --Looking more like a robust uncle than an age-bent grandfather, 81-year-old playwright Arthur Miller smiles seraphically. He's smiling for several reasons -- all connected to the Friday release of the film version of his now-classic witch-hunt drama, ``The Crucible.'' Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, it was produced by Miller's son, Robert. Following the 55-day shoot on Hog Island in Ipswich Bay, a romance developed between Day-Lewis and Miller's daughter, Rebecca, resulting in a quiet, paparazzi-free wedding in Vermont last month. And, lest you doubt that ``The Crucible'' is one of Miller's children, too, listen to him express (in a warm lava flow of Brooklynese, amiable bemusement) not so much that ``The Crucible'' became a film 43 years after its stage premiere, but that he, no stranger to the ways of Hollywood, was the one in charge of its refashioning.
``Anybody seeing `The Crucible' now would never dream that it had been a play,'' he says, in the voice of a playwright who called the shots when it came to cutting his playscript. ``For years, the commercial studios would never do this play,'' says Miller, lanky frame leaning forward on a hotel armchair too small to contain him.
``But my son kept pestering me because he had a friend, Joe Roth, who ran 20th Century Fox. I still didn't think they were gonna use it, but I wrote it. Then, as things happen in Hollywood, Roth moved to Disney. But to my utter amazement, the new people, whom I'd never heard of, were intent on making the film.``I knew they were serious when they actively began to look for directors. I figured before I'm dead, they'll find the right guy. Luckily, they found Nicholas Hytner, who had great success with `The Madness of King George,' and came from the theater, so we spoke the same language. He came to my place in Connecticut, and we worked on the script. The amazing thing was that nobody bothered me. Once they started shooting, they would call me up and say could they say this instead of that because they moved the scene outdoors. But we never heard from the studio. Sometimes we wondered whether they were there. And that was a relief. So was the finding of that beautiful location because the relation of the people to that scene is so important. I kept waiting for some disaster, but it never happened.''
What was a relief to Hytner, says the director, interviewed separately, was that Miller could take liberties in reshaping his play that no adapter would have dared take. ``I felt I was asking Shakespeare for amendments to `King Lear,' '' Hytner says.
Miller, however, treats the transformation with down-to-earth pragmatism. ``People mistake the theater for screenplays because both use dialogue and actors,'' he says. ``A screenplay is much closer to a novel or a painting than a play. In a novel, in the course of a page, you can change locations a number of times. You can introduce characters, or lose them. For instance, there's a second judge, Sewell. He only has about 10 or 12 lines throughout the picture, but his presence is fantastic.
``Also, the movie embraces the whole village in a way that is not possible on the stage. You see them as farmers, as people who lived off the earth. You see hundreds of people screaming and yelling at a church meeting. The movie follows the line of the play through images, whereas the play is purely language. It wasn't difficult to cut because when you can see the thing happening, then you don't have to describe it. Writing the screenplay took me probably less than three months. It took me a year to write the play, maybe more. But then I had to find the form. I visited Salem in 1952. I thought they still hadn't got over it, that they were ashamed about it. You couldn't get anyone to say anything about it.''
For Hytner, the animating principle of the film was that repressed sexuality gathered hurricane force and tore the community apart. Miller says the opening scene, in which village girls dance with abandon in a forest by moonlight, was added -- but is described by a character in the play. There's plenty of sexual smolder and frankness in the scenes portraying Ryder's adolescent servant and Day-Lewis' adulterous farmer, who rejects her to try to save his marriage to Joan Allen. This sexuality, Miller says, is in the play -- although often cut. ``In Salem in 1692, there was no outlet for the girls' sexuality,'' Hytner says. ``When they dance in the woods, it's so alarming to the rest of the community that it's identified as witchcraft.''
Miller is candid about the play's themes of betrayal, from the societal to the personal -- as expressed in the guilt felt by Day-Lewis' character, John Proctor. ``The trial metaphor was a very strong center. It was part of the way I could identify with that situation, when everything was being tested every day, and faith was being questioned. That was the open issue of society. And every play is more or less involved with the idea of people knowingly or not betraying one another. So the betrayal theme is not really that special. But the whole marriage element in the play reflected some of my own problems. I think Daniel has that wonderful double nature, which is that he's heroic enough to play lead, but he's also full of self-doubt and self-uncertainty, and that's a hard combination to get.''
On location, where Hytner felt buttressed by the thought that the authentic New England faces of the 300 or so villagers in some cases reflected ancestry with the settlers depicted in the play, everyone agrees that Day-Lewis' style of hermetic immersion in the character and milieu set the tone for a focused, intense shoot. The logistics were formidable. Hog Island is an uninhabited 180-acre wildlife refuge to which food and water and authentic sets had to be ferried, in addition to cast and crew -- and insect repellent to combat the island's legendary green flies. Portions of original rock walls guided construction. Day-Lewis felt he literally followed Proctor's footsteps.
Complementing the historical New World vibe, several associated with the production agree, was the play's ominous continuing relevance. Since it opened, nobody has doubted that Miller's play about the 1692 Salem witch trials was as much about Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee's political witch hunts. ``A lot of people were destroyed. They never recovered,'' Miller says. ``But I think the seeds of that social paranoia can be found in any society in any time. We're never that far removed from Salem. Actually, the American witch hunt was less destructive than in Europe. Sweden had 5,000 people killed. In France terrible numbers were killed. If anyone had stood up in 17th-century Massachusetts, or for that matter anywhere in Europe, and said there were no witches, they would have been hanged. There wasn't a philosopher, a crowned head, or anyone important in Europe who would have questioned the existence of witches.
``In 1692, people were hanged on what was called spectral evidence. Today we call it psychological speculation. I'm afraid it's a permament fixture. Today you have people accused of sexual abuse on the evidence of 5- or 6-year-old children. You have the suspicion that AIDS was generated in a lab by people out to destroy part of the population. Or, take the people out West in the militias. They're convinced the US government is running a plot. They see black helicopters in the air coming down from the CIA to ruin them, persecute them. I met a woman who went through the Cultural Revolution in China, Nien Chung was her name. She spent six years in solitary confinement. A friend of hers directed `The Crucible' in Shanghai. She went to see it and said she couldn't believe a non-Chinese had written that play.''
``So it isn't only on the conservative side. The whole Mao thing was on the left. Stalin was the arch-manipulator of this kind of stuff.'' Miller's own brush with the HUAC came in 1956, three years after ``The Crucible'' opened. ``I try not to be a cynic, but I think it was because I was about to marry Marilyn Monroe. The committee at that time was losing its clout. It was no longer able to get on the front page at will, and they needed something to bounce it up again. The chairman of the committee was a congressman from PA, Walters. He was a Democrat, I believe. The day before I was to be heard, they called my lawyer, Joseph Rauh, and said he would call off the hearing if he could have his picture taken with Marilyn. More cynical than that it was pretty hard to get.
``When I turned him down, then appeared in front of the committee, he was very angry at me for writing, what he called, so tragically about America. I mean, if I put this on stage, nobody would believe me. But they were angry at me well before `The Crucible.' By 1947 or so, the Army gave orders that `All My Sons' should not be played by anyone in the troops in Europe. Then they issued this order that not only could `All My Sons' not be played, but anything that I wrote could not be played. Well, `All My Sons' was about another wonderful performance -- the faking of war production by an unscrupuplous manufacturer, resulting in the deaths of American airmen. Now you would think that the Army would be interested in promoting such a play. On the contrary.''
``All My Sons,'' as it happens, has been filmed, along with Miller's better-known ``Death of a Salesman'' and ``A View from the Bridge.'' Strictly speaking, ``The Crucible,'' has, too, although Miller dismisses Jean-Paul Sartre's ``The Witches of Salem,'' filmed in 1956. ``I thought Simone Signoret was fantastic and Yves Montand was very good, too. But it wasn't really a movie, it was a photographed play. Sartre was in his Marxist phase, and the result was that all the people that were hanged were poor and all the people that prosecuted them were rich, which was ridiculous, because of 21 people hanged, a good part of them were rich landowners. Also, the French can't conceive of a peasant who isn't Catholic, so there were crucifixes on all the walls. I kind of laughed at that,'' Miller says, enjoying, if not a last laugh, a latter-day dues-fully-paid smile now. 