English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
I read some older books when I worked at Barnes And Noble, like some of the American classics. I read a lot of Hemingway. I fell in love with Hemingway's prose and with the way he wrote. I feel like he's talking to me, like we're in a bar and he's not trying to jazz it up and sound smart, he's just being him.
If I had to get lost in a fictional world? I would love to go with those Hemingway characters in 'The Sun Also Rises' when they go on that trip in Spain, and they go fishing. And they take the wine bottles, and they put them in the river.
I had been very dismissive of popular fiction - in fact, I'd refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren't the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way.
I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.
After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.
The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.
I think, sometimes, actors having a holistic view of what they're in can be overrated. Especially when you're playing somebody as narcissistic and self-involved as Ernest Hemingway, it doesn't really matter what else is in the script.
People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'
I'm out of the terse Hemingway school.
