Dialogues of Naguib Mahfouz: Film memories By Mohamed Salmawy A film researcher, curious about Naguib Mahfouz's scriptwriting career, asked him what his motives were in working in cinema. Mahfouz: I enjoyed it of course, because it's an art. What particularly interested me was the dramatisation of each scene. Everything to do with dramatisation interests me; it has been my career. Researcher: What is the main difference between storytelling in literature and in cinema? Mahfouz: The main difference is that cinematic storytelling is constructed out of visual images. Literary storytelling, by contrast, is all verbal. In a way your freedom becomes limited when writing for films. You cannot go into matters that are hard to capture on film. But in a novel the writer has complete freedom. He can tell anything, even the things the cinema would be unable to address. Researcher: Aren't there things that cinema can tell that literature cannot? Mahfouz: Not really. The scope of literature is larger than that of cinema. Researcher: What kind of movies did you watch? Mahfouz: I used to watch a lot of films. I would go every week to at least one foreign film and one Arabic film. I loved action and crime in particular and was a fan of Hitchcock. I watched most of the great movies of my time. Researcher: Why did you write most of your scripts in cooperation with the directors? It seems there are very few scripts you wrote alone. Mahfouz: Some directors cooperated with me, not on the actual writing but in giving opinions and making suggestions that I would later incorporate into the script. Others just wanted to put their name on the script without doing anything. Niazy Mustafa was an exception. I would give him a script and he would just take it and thank me without altering a word. Sometimes not only the director interfered, but the producer as well. I didn't like that. Sometimes I had to say that if you want me to be more cooperative start by taking my name off the credits. Researcher: How about Salah Abu Seif? He used to supervise the script closely I hear. Mahfouz: Salah Abu Seif was a perfectionist. He used to discuss every single scene. We would spend hours in discussions and I would change the script accordingly. Then he would get depressed and unsure about what we'd done and begin discussing it all over again, looking for a way to make it better. Mustafa was different. I once gave him a draft script to read it before I wrote the final script. He read it, liked it, and said he would go ahead and film it as it was. I wrote my first film script in 1945 -- Antar we Ablah, directed by Mustafa. Then I went back to scriptwriting after I concluded the trilogy. I was totally exhausted and I couldn't face another novel. So I wrote scripts for a few years. Then the inspiration came back and I returned to novels and stopped working on films.
