I am in a screening room somewhere in the suburbs of Paris, waiting for the film of my novel Intimacy to begin. A few months ago, I saw some of the rushes, but I have seen no cut material. Now the film is almost finished, with most of the scenes in their definitive order and a good deal of the music in place. The only missing scene is the final one, where the characters played by Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance meet for the last time.
The French director Patrice Chéreau sits behind me. Although he and I worked closely together at times, and the film was shot in English, the script was written by his own writer, a woman, in French. I had decided I'd spent long enough with the material and lacked the heart to look at it again. So it is my film but not mine. I made the characters and most of the story, but Patrice transformed, cast and cut it; and, of course, his style and voice as a director are his own.
Patrice arranged to come and see me in London a couple of years ago. He was shy, he said, and didn't speak good English. My French is hopeless, but it seemed better to meet without an interpreter. He is, I suppose, 10 years older than me. He is gentle and unpretentious; modest but not unaware of his own ability. He is less impatient and bad-tempered than me.
In our first meeting he explained that he wanted to make a film of Intimacy, which he had read in French. Also, he said he liked mystories, particularly Nightlight, collected in Love in a Blue Time. In it a couple who run into each other by chance begin to meet once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, to make love. Somehow, they never speak; after a while they are unable to.
At that time, I did not know Patrice's work as a director and actor. I had seen neither of the films for which he is known internationally, La Reine Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, and had no idea of his impressive reputation in France. This made it easier for me to see him without enthusiasm or dismay.
After we'd looked at one another for a bit - not unlike the couple at the beginning of the film, about to embark on something big, neither one knowing the "little things" about the other - I said he should take what he wanted from my work and make the film he wanted to make. That was easy to say, but I didn't quite mean it. Later, I thought, what can these two strangers, a gay Frenchman and a straight British-Indian, make together, if anything?
Collaborations don't always succeed. A few years ago, a director asked me to come up with an idea we would then develop into a script. Together, he and I sat in an expensive rented room every weekday afternoon, for a month. Most of the time he seemed to have his head in his hands, while I made notes on various stories I was writing, and then put my head in my hands. We would go round and round, but rarely forwards. Occasionally, we'd have an idea we liked, or break into laughter, but we remained mysterious to one another, too guarded and too respectful. I expected him to take the lead, to tell me what he wanted. Maybe he expected the same of me. The project disappeared into a miasma of misplaced politeness. I suspect we were both trying to write, and were inhibiting one another.
There was little hesitation in Patrice; he didn't lack tenacity or appear to doubt this was a film he wanted to make. So we started to meet regularly in London. We decided early on that Intimacy was too internal and probably too dark to make a conventional film on its own. It could, though, function as the background to, or beginning of, another film. We needed something else on top - more stories, characters, action.
I showed him a collection of my stories in manuscript, Midnight All Day, to see whether there was anything in them he fancied. Some of the material from Strangers When We Meet went into the film; parts of In a Blue Time were utilised; and ideas from other stories: I forget which. During our meetings we improvised stories, we gossiped, we talked about the theatre, literature, our lives.
If our age seems "un-ideological" compared with the the mid-1960s to mid-1980s; if Britain seems hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics have moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable.
So we talked about bodies, about death and decay; about Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; about the hyper-realism of some recent photography, and how close you could get to the face without losing the image. We talked about how many modern visual artists are interested in the body and its needs: the body rather than the mind or ideas; and the body on its own, in relative isolation.
We talked about what bodies do and what they tell us. We seem to inhabit a culture of disgust and of shock, in which humans are reduced to zero, the achievements of culture rendered meaningless. Yet this kind of fastidious despair can become an aesthetic pose, creating its own cultural privileges and be coming a kind of vanity.
We talked about the character Jay, about London and the speed with which it is changing into an international city, about the couple who meet without speaking. Why don't they talk rather than touch? What is the terror of communication? If you speak to someone, what might happen? If you don't, what other possibilities are there? To what extent are people disposable? What do we owe them or they us?
Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away from strong feeling and emotional complexity. We talked about what sex enables people to do together, and what it can stop them doing. Impersonality frees the imagination, of course; but imagination isn't sufficient when it comes to other people. What we usually need is more of them and less of us. We have to let a certain amount of them in. But that can seem like the hardest, most frightening thing, particularly as you get older, particularly when you feel you have failed before.
What Patrice wanted was to capture the desperation of Jay and Claire's lovemaking. These intense sessions were called "the Wednesdays" and would punctuate the film, different each time.
We are fascinated by what goes on in other couples' privacy. Their bodies, thoughts and conversation are compelling. However, I can't help wondering whether sexuality is better written than filmed. Looking may be more immediate than reading, but it may also fail to capture the intricacies of feeling. It won't necessarily increase our understanding. In fact, all it may do is make us embarrassed, or conscious that we are watching a choreographed sexual act. It might merely make us feel left out. Perhaps this is because of the way sexuality is usually portrayed on film.
Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies - not overlighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealised. The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what an obscenity our pleasures can be. Patrice will, therefore, have to make a sexually explicit film.
This will initially, I guess, seem shocking in the cinema. Not that it won't take long for the shock to wear off, and for the act to seem common. The kiss between the boys in My Beautiful Laundrette seemed outrageous and even liberating, to some people, in the mid-1980s; now you can hardly turn on the television without seeing boys snogging, particularly on the sports channels.
Interest in sexuality takes different forms at different times: it might be paedophilia, miscegenation, gerontophilia, lesbianism or fetishism. But there always seems to be some aspect of desire that is of concern. It's the one thing that never goes away, or leaves people's minds. Perhaps desire never stops feeling like madness.
Our conversations would fertilise the film rather than determine it. I generated ideas for him to use, alter or throw away as he liked, trying not to become too possessive of them. Patrice had his own interests and preoccupations, and is not the sort merely to find a style to fit the writer. What we tried to do was find a starting point to help one another.
Shortly afterwards, the scriptwriter began work. Scripts started to arrive regularly at my house. They got longer and longer. It always seems endless, the continuous sifting of material. Patrice moved to London, looked for locations and began to see actors for the main parts. Among those cast were Marianne Faithfull and Timothy Spall. Almost all the male actors we met were terrified of having others see their bodies: there was no way they would strip for the camera. The women seemed to expect it would be required.
During filming Patrice sometimes dropped by in the evening for a drink. I could see on his face how stressful and difficult making a movie is. On top of everything else, he was making a film in a foreign language, with a mostly English crew, in a city he didn't know well.
Unsurprisingly, most film directors I know are a bag of maladies. They want you to know how tough their job is. What exactly is tough about it? I suppose it is hard wanting something to be so good; it is hard to care so much about something that could so easily be dismissed. Fortunately, Patrice mostly shot what he needed and was pleased with the performances.
Now the almost completed film rushes at me. The camera moves quickly; the cutting is fast and the music loud, not only for effect but to show us the force, speed and impersonality of London today. Perhaps it takes a foreign director to make London look the way it feels. This seems like the city I live in. The method of filming represents, too, the wild fury of Jay's mind.
At the end of the screening my mind seems to be going in all directions at once. I try to clear my head. What do I feel? Relief, confusion, excitement, dismay, delight! Bits of criticism surface. I have to try and say something coherent. My mind feels crowded with important, irrelevant remarks.
As always, Patrice is patient. He listens; we talk and argue. I am laudatory, critical and apologetic at the same time. I have ideas for cuts, changes, rearrangements. There are several things I don't understand, that don't seem clear. I keep saying I have only seen the film once. He says that is how many times, if we are lucky, the audience will see the film. More screenings, he says, and you'll be too sympathetic, you'll understand too much.
In the end, when finishing the film, I know he will go his own way. That is what I would recommend; it is what I would do. For me, it is enough that what has been accomplished was worth the effort and a pleasure. Whether anyone else will agree is up to them.
• Edited from an essay in the current issue of Prospect magazine For subscription details, call 020-7255 1278. Hanif Kureishi's new novel, Gabriel's Gift, is published by Faber & Faber on March 5, price £9.99. Intimacy is due for release later this year.
