Emeric Pressburger: The Early Life of a Screenwriter

Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian-born screenwriter who wrote and produced innovative and visually striking motion pictures in collaboration with British director Michael Powell, most notably The Red Shoes (1948).

Pressburger was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in the Hungarian village of Miskolc, and attended college in Prague and Stuttgart, before moving to Berlin in 1925. There, he wrote newspaper articles and film scripts, which he submitted to UFA, the German film company. 

Pressburger was hired by UFA’s script department in 1928, and his first writing credit was for a 1930 sound film by Robert Siodmak called Abschied (Farewell). He contributed to about eight films between 1930 and 1932, including Emil and the Detectives (1932) and many musicals. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Pressburger went to Paris, where he wrote several scripts, including La Vie Parisienne, a 1935 film directed by Siodmak.

Pressburger moved to London in 1935, and began working for Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British film producer and launched his partnership with Powell with The Spy in Black (1939; U.S. title U-Boat). In 1941 he won an Academy Award for best original story for their third film, The 49th Parallel (U.S., The Invaders).

From 1942 Pressburger and Powell shared equal credit for writing, producing, and directing the 14 films that were released by their joint production company, The Archers. The team’s most successful films, which were notable for their use of lavish sets and vivid colours, included The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), Black Narcissus (1947), A Matter of Life and Death (1946; U.S. Stairway to Heaven), and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). After The Archers was amicably disbanded in 1956, Pressburger wrote two novels, Killing a Mouse on Sunday (1961; filmed as Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) and The Glass Pearls (1966). He was named fellow of the British Film Institute in 1983.

In the following extract, Emeric Pressburger describes how he started out working as a scriptwriter for the mighty German film studio UFA in the 1920s.

I called again at UFA for my appointment with Herr Podehl. He was a splendid man, genuinely anxious to do a good job and a true friend of writers. He fought for them and for their work, supporting them when they were ground up in the huge mills of the organiz­ation. He liked me, I believe, and I certainly took to him at once. He explained, with a total lack of condescension, how production worked at UFA. There were six production units, each with a leader, and they chose and developed about twelve subjects a year, from each of which about half were actually made. It was the dramaturgy department which found subjects, wrote treat­ments, doctored scripts and made contact with writers, before handing the material on to the production units. Herr Podehl said that he had liked my story and had circulated it among some of the production heads, but he couldn't generate a lasting interest in it. I immediately opened my battered attache case and handed him another treatment.

A fortnight later he contacted me again to say that he liked this one too, but that, again, the production chiefs had been lukewarm. When a third story met the same fate I was again summoned to Podehl’s office, and he admitted that he was a little worried by the situation. ‘You have brought me three decent stories. I encouraged you, and yet you haven’t earned a thing from us yet. So, if you want to do it, take a look at this book. If you like it, write me a short film treatment. That would be a commission, of course. I can pay 200 marks.’ I took the book from him and left the office, trying not to appear too eager, although I knew, and he probably did as well, that it wasn't a case of liking it, or even reading it - I would do it.

When I had completed my assignment I took the treatment to Podehl and he seemed pleased with it. But I don't think he ever imagined it would get made into a film. It was one of those dud properties which every film company has which are given out to young writers just to let them practise and cam a little money. My mother couldn't believe her eyes when I showed her that handful of crisp, new ten-mark notes, and she shook her head in awe and disbelief when I said, ‘Mother, I'm going to leave my job as a house agent's clerk. I’m going to be an author.’ ‘Don't rush it, darling,'’she pleaded. ‘Don’t throwaway a good job, a lasting job.’ But I had already made up my mind.

The next time I went to see Herr Podehl he told me that he had still had no luck with my stories. However, a new young director working in Bruno Duday’s production group had been very interested in one of them called Mondnacht (‘A Moonlit Night’), a clever romantic trifle about the power of the moon over the lives of ordinary Berlin folk:

That was the introduction. Anyway, Podehl wanted me to go and see this new director who had been under contract for months hut who had not found a subject which he found sympathetic. I found the director in his office, quite depressed. His first film had been an avant-garde success called Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on Sunday’), a short, silent documentary-style 
film about the ordinary adventures of four ordinary working-class Berliners. UFA had hired him on the strength of it and now he couldn't find anything to follow it up with. Did I have any ideas? I told him that I did, and rushed straight home. Of course, I hadn’t had any ideas when I was in his office, but by the time I arrived home I had the whole story mapped out in my head. I stayed up all night typing and retyping, and first thing in the morning I went to see the director. I waited in his office as he read the treatment, and when he had finished he looked at me and said, ‘This is my next film.’ I was overjoyed, stunned speechless. In his autobiography Robert Siodmak, for that was the director, says that I started to cry. I don’t remember that, but it is quite possible.

To write the script I was given a collaborator by Herr Podehl, a wonderful lady called Irma von Cuhe, an experienced writer who would teach me how to write in the proper style. The film was called Abschied (‘Farewell’) and was set in a boarding house of the type I knew well. It was about ordinary Berliners and the tragic misunderstanding which splits up two young lovers. The great invention in it, and what Siodmak particularly loved, was that it was a film that took place in real time. It was a two-hour film and concerned itself with two hours in the life of the boarding house.

The critics loved it, the ordinary people shunned it, but on the strength of it I was employed by the mighty edifice of UFA, as Lektor und Dramaturg. I was given my own little office, and on my first day there I bought a camera – being an UFA employee you got terrific discounts at the camera shops ­ and photographed myself at work. And that was how I got started in films.

– The Early Life of a Screenwriter by Emeric Pressburger, edited by Kevin Macdonald in Projections ed. John Boorman.

Terrence Malick on Badlands

Badlands (Directed by Terrence Malick)

The son of an oil company executive, Terrence Malick grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He went to Harvard and later to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to study Philosophy but failed to complete his thesis – his topic proving unacceptable to his tutor, Gilbert Ryle. 

Summer jobs took him from the wheat harvests in America and Canada, to working in oilfields and driving a cement mixer in a railyard, to journalistic endeavours for Life, Newsweek and The New Yorker. 

In 1967 he was sent on assignment to Bolivia to observe the trial of French intellectual Regis Debray who had fought alongside Che Guevera. Guevara was himself killed the day after Malick’s arrival. 

In 1968 Malick was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at MIT but abandoned teaching within a year. He explained: ‘I was not a good teacher; I didn’t have the sort of edge one should have on the students, so I decided to do something else’.

Terrence Malick's lyrical directorial debut is based on the true tale of Charles Starkweather, a young James Dean obsessive who fled through the Midwest on a murderous rampage with his teenage girlfriend. Avoiding both the cliches of pulp crime story or the French New Wave’s romantic take on Bonnie and Clyde, Malick offers something unique: an eloquent fable about the cross over between crime, romance, and myth-making in contemporary America, and is noticeable for its inventive use of colour, editing, and voice-over. 

Martin Sheen, who plays Kit/Starkweather, considered Badlands as the finest screenplay he had ever read. "It is still," he states. "It was hypnotic. It rendered you defenceless. It was a period piece, yet it was timeless. It was unmistakably American; it captured the essence of the people, of the culture, in an instantly recognisable manner." Sissy Spacek starred as Holly, a baton-twirling high school student who takes off with Kit after he murders her father (Warren Oates). 

The film's disjointed emotional impact is nearly completely due to Holly, whose dull, matter of fact, narration runs counter to the film's theme, characterised by a discrepancy between what we see and what we hear. Badlands remains one of the most extraordinary debuts in American film

In a rare interview in 1975 for Sight and Sound magazine, Malick explained how he turned to making movies and the influences behind his first feature film, the semi-factual Badlands, which starred Martin Sheen as the serial-killer Kit Carruthers and Sissy Spacek as his girlfriend, Holly.

‘I’d always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else. I came to Los Angeles in the fall of 1969 to study at the AFI; I made a short called Lanton Mills. I found the AFI very helpful; it’s a marvellous place. My wife was going to law school and I was working for a time as a rewrite man – two days on Drive, He Said, five weeks on the predecessor to Dirty Harry at a time when Brando was going to do it with Irving Kershner directing. Then we all got fired by Warners; the project went to Clint Eastwood. I rewrote Pocket Money and Deadhead Miles. I got this work because of a phenomenal agent, Mike Medavoy.

‘At the end of my second year here, I began work on Badlands. I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. To my surprise, they didn’t pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and Edward Pressman (the executive producer) the other half. We started in July of 1972. 


‘The critics talked about influences on the picture and in most cases referred to films I had never seen. My influences were books like The Hardy Boys, Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn – all involving an innocent in a drama over his or her head. I didn’t actually think about those books before I did the script, but it’s obvious to me now. Nancy Drew, the children’s story child detective – I did think about her. 


‘There is some humour in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation of her audience, of what they will be interested in or ready to believe. (She seems at time to think of her narration as like what you get in audio-visual courses in high school.) When they’re crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what’s going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what we’d like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience, this way. 


‘She’s a typical Southern girl in her desire to help, to give hard fact; not to dwell upon herself, which to her would be unseemly, but always to keep in mind the needs of others. She wants to come off in the best possible light, but she’s scrupulous enough to take responsibility where in any way she might have contributed.’

(Interviewer) 
I suggest to Malick that the film has been criticised for patronising Holly and her milieu.

‘That’s foolishness. I grew up around people like Kit and Holly. I see no gulf between them and myself. One of the things the actors and I used to talk about was never stepping outside the characters and winking at the audience, never getting off the hook. If you keep your hands off the characters you open yourself to charges like that; at least you have no defence against them. What I find patronising is people not leaving the characters alone, stacking the deck for them, not respecting their integrity, their difference. 


‘Holly’s Southernness is essential to taking her right. She isn’t indifferent about her father’s death...
You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she’s not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety. You might well wonder how anyone going through what she does could be at all concerned with proprieties. But she is. And her kind of cliché didn’t begin with pulp magazines, as some critics have suggested. It exists in Nancy Drew and Tom Sawyer. It’s not the mark of a diminished, pulp-fed mind, I’m trying to say, but of the ‘innocent abroad.’ When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public. 


‘Holly is in a way the more important character; at least you get a glimpse of what she’s like. And I liked women characters better than men; they’re more open to things around them, more demonstrative. Kit, on the other hand, is a closed book, not a rare trait in people who have tasted more than their share of bitterness in life. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It inclines you to say deep things. It builds character and is generally healthful. It teaches you lessons you never forget. People who’ve suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It’s not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It’s had this kind of effect on Kit.

‘Kit doesn’t see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what’s going on inside him. Death, other people’s feelings, the consequences of his actions – they’re all sort of abstract for him. He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean – a Rebel without a Cause – when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative. ‘Consider the minority opinion,’ he says into the rich man’s tape recorder, ‘but try to get along with the majority opinion once it’s accepted.’ He doesn’t really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn’t kill, the only man he sympathises with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It’s not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there. 


‘And there’s something about growing up in the Midwest. There’s no check on you. People imagine it’s the kind of place where your behaviour is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis. But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.

‘I don’t think he’s a character peculiar to his time. I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality. Children’s books are full of violence. Long John Silver slits the throats of the faithful crew. Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale. Holly says, ‘Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.’ But she enough believes there is such a place that she must confess to you she never got there.’ 


- ‘Beverly Walker: Malick on Badlands’. Sight and Sound, Spring 1975. Copyright Sight and Sound.