Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, starring Sir Ian McKellen as an aging iteration of everyone’s favorite detective, is a classic Sherlock page-turner in movie form. And rightfully so: it’s based on Mitch Cullin‘s 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind, which follows Holmes in his twilight years in a countryside home, his mind deteriorating, as he’s cared for by a housekeeper (played in the film by Laura Linney) and her son, Roger (Milo Parker). In Roger he finds a companion with whom he can share his memories before they fade away. The film also follows two parallel, flashback stories: Holmes’ trip to see the mysterious Mr. Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada) in Japan in search for a cure for his mental condition, and a classic Sherlock mystery involving a troubled woman reeling following two failed pregnancies.

I spoke with screenwriter Jefferey Hatcher about his experience working on Mr. Holmes, which comes out tomorrow, July 17th.

Were you on set during filming?
Yeah, for a little bit. For about two weeks at the end.

What’s it like writing the script, not being on set all that much, and then seeing the final product?
The things you focus on are the things you were on-set for. You remember, “They did this 800 times. They kept knocking that thing over.” You tend to have reference points no audience member would have. I’m always amazed with how actors can work with so much focus on them. Dozens and dozens of people watching you do something terribly intimate. I’ve done a little acting myself, but that kind of intimacy with that audience…[pauses] It’s always amazing to think how they can focus and function.

Would it be more nerve-racking for you to do something on camera as opposed to on stage?
Oh yeah, in front of a camera. It’s the same way we feel when we see ourselves in photographs. Onstage, there’s always some distance. There’s a bit of a haze.

The lights…
Yeah, right. I remember reading something Cary Grant said: “Screen acting is very difficult because I’ve got a double chin.” He’d have to keep his head a certain way or they’d see his double chin. It’s like, really? You’re thinking about this? I wouldn’t want to see myself on the screen.

So it’s the proximity.
I think so. I think actors who don’t care about that stuff, or actors who don’t care about how you perceive them and know exactly how to present themselves, do well. To have to think [like a screen actor] is kind of amazing. But the theater allows you a little more distance, even if it’s a small house.

The lights help because you can’t see faces.
No one quite gets that. I get up onstage and deliver a soliloquy to the house, and it’s like, I can’t see any of you. I can see a couple faces in the first couple of rows.

And you can hear them messing with their peanut bags.
Especially in England. The Brits, more so than us, eat during shows.

It’s more of an English thing?
Yeah. You come back from intermission during Shakespeare, and they’re eating ice cream. [In a British accent] This is the theater of the Elizabethans!

I hadn’t read the book going into the film. I was expecting more of a meditative, slower-paced movie. I was surprised to find the momentum of the film so brisk and thrilling.
The book has those parallel stories, though they’re in different sequence. That was always there. The question was, how do you shuffle it? At one point we had him going to Japan later in the script, giving it its own section of the movie. But it felt like we spent too much time just in Japan that way, so we rearranged it and made it a flashback. That was dangerous at first glance, because we had two flashbacks going on. But I think it makes sense because each story is progressing in its own direction.

The classic Holmes tale is the one with the woman in the past. Then you’ve got the domestic, current tale. Then there’s the sort of oddball tale in Japan. Holmes was going to a place where rational thinking and reason had ended up with the atom bomb going off. It comes off much more strongly in the book, but I hope it comes off in the film as well. In a sense, that’s my favorite section because it’s so controlled and tight and neat. His relationship with Mr. Umezaki is so peculiar. I’m glad the movie feels like it’s moving forward all the time and it’s not a bunch of people sitting around, talking about death.

The cast is really good. The kid, Milo Parker—he’s gotten a lot of praise.
McKellen was attached when Bill said he wanted to do it. We talked about various actresses, but very quickly, Bill said, “What about Laura Linney?” Beyond that I don’t think I had any suggestions about other actors. I adore Roger Allam, who plays the doctor. He’s got a great, soupy kind of voice. He should play Christopher Hitchens in a biopic sometime. We knew the kid had to be someone who wasn’t the classic, adorable kid. There had to be a strangeness and a quiet about him.

There’s rage in him as well.
I’d never say this to him, but he’s got, like, thyroid eyes that really pop out at you.

His glare is killer.
Oh yeah. I like the fact that you kind of have to work to get to him, which is very much like Holmes. He’s not like, “Come! Love me!” When there’s distancing like that, it makes it even better when you do embrace. Laura Linney does things I can’t even imagine. She’s so honest, never less than completely truthful. Her rage is real, her tears are real. She makes what could be an unsympathetic character very sympathetic, just by virtue of being herself. She’s a wonderful actor.

I think the three main actors are incredibly generous to each other. No one tries to steal a scene.
Sometimes there are people who say, “I’m giving you this scene,” and then they go away. None of these actors do. Their presence is so key. It’s almost as if they say, “Even if I’m off-screen, the camera’s on me.” It’s good for the film because Holmes sees people as supporting characters in his life. It’s a world of interns and secretaries and drivers, not people you actually live with. What’s cool about the film is, bit by bit, he brings them into his level, whatever that may be.

What is Holmes’ greatest fear?
He famously says to Watson in one of the stories, “I am an intellect; the rest of me is mere appendage, “which is a line we couldn’t use because it’s cut off in that copyright thing. The idea that your intellect goes away means that everything goes away. Because Holmes is suffering some form of dementia, that kind of fear of not being able to remember things or think through a problem…[pauses] It’s not simply, “I’m having some befogged days.” My essence, my soul, is being eradicated. For a man who depends, thrives, finds sustenance in that kind of intellectual pursuit, you’re really left with only two outs: commit suicide or embrace someone. The embrace is the hardest thing, because it’s not based on intellect. He had Watson and Mrs. Hudson, but they never talked about it. Here’s an example where he actually has to say to someone, “Live with me. Stay with me.”

In the post-internet age, it’s becoming harder and harder to surprise modern audiences with mystery stories. Everyone’s savvy and trying to stay five steps ahead of the plot. How do you surprise them?
It’s wildly tricky. I can’t go see a thriller where I’m not trying to out-guess it. Having the experience of having something just flow over you and be surprised [is great]. I’m probably the last person in America who was surprised by the ending of The Sixth Sense. I’m like, “He’s dead?!” It was great to be surprised. When I do out-guess something, there’s a sort of “meh” quality to it. You’re right about that. You want to play fair with the audience. There’s a bit in the movie where Holmes explains to Ann Kelmot how he knows one thing versus the other. There are quick flashes. You want the audience to say, “Yes, we saw that. The filmmakers played fair with us. But we did not expect to see the things that Holmes picked up on.” It is very tricky. The hardest thing these days is knowing the audience can go back and forth simply by moving the cursor. Have you seen The Conversation?

Yeah.
Remember the beginning? “He’d kill us if he had the chance. He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Then, when he listens to it near the end, he hears, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” If you were watching that in 1971, you’d say, “Oh, he heard it wrong.” But now, with DVDs, you can turn it back and say, “No, she doesn’t say it that way!” They didn’t expect a world where somebody would be able to do that, technically. Now it’s harder to cheat the audience and say that something happened when they can go back and check it. If you cheat like that, the audience gets really pissed off.

You just really hope to god that, when you do the revelation, the audience goes, “Gasp!” It’s okay, actually, if some of them say, “I knew it!” Audiences sometimes like to think they’re ahead a few minutes. That’s okay. To be ahead 30 minutes is bad. But a couple of minutes isn’t such a terrible thing. Sometimes the audience wants their suspicion confirmed. You always want to present options for the audience to consider. It’s the red herring thing. If they have one option to consider, that’s what they’ll pick. So you have to give them at least two options, stated or unstated. A friend of mine says, “If the answer is either A or B, the answer should be C.”

I think being genuinely surprised is one of the rarest joys at the movies these days.
The big one here that I think we’re all so pleased with is the difference between bees and wasps. We say it right at the beginning of the film. We show you close-ups, something getting plucked out of someone’s neck. And yet, at a certain point, I hope the audience forgets that difference in the same way the characters do. To me, that’s playing fair.

In Chinatown, there’s a part where Nicholson looks into this pool, and there’s this stuff glittering. He turns to this guy, who says, “Bad for glass! Bad for glass!” Of course, it sounds like it’s a joke because he can’t pronounce grass. But he is saying glass, and he’s looking at glasses. All through the film, Nicholson is opening drawers, and there are glasses there. When he fishes out the glasses at the end and realizes they’re John Huston’s, they never say, “Oh, of course. That was a pair of glasses.” But there are these clues everywhere. The audience goes, “Aw, geez. I should have picked up on what he did.”

I think the bees/wasps thing is poetic and artistic as well. It’s not just a juke.
Something Bill put in that I hadn’t realized was how many times McKellen passes between glass. You see him in reflections and in windows. It’s all this glass within glass within glass. Some of these things aren’t things you think about, but it’s almost like you’re exercising some poetic muscle, but not intentionally. I think if you’re doing it intentionally, you can tell.

What makes Sherlock Holmes so enduring as a character? Depending on what’s going on in society in culture at any given time, we view him in a new light.
You can always tell what era Holmes stories are from. For example, Basil Rathbone, during World War II, kind of imagined that you’d need a Holmes who’s not doubting himself much, who’s going to win all the time. Nicol Williamson is a coke freak in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. It makes sense that it’s the ’70s. Jeremy Brett is this sort of crazy, near psychopath in the ’80s ones. I tend to think [he endures] because Sherlock is so anchored in the Victorian, Edwardian world. He’s so defined: we know what he looks like, what he sounds like, what he thinks. But there’s also a sadness and emptiness to him. There’s something missing in him. [Arthur] Conan Doyle will refer to it, and sometimes it’s a joke, and sometimes it’s not. But it’s always there. That’s the crack actors, writers and directors get to fill.

Starting tomorrow, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival once again bestows upon the Bay Area some of the most rarified film experiences you’ll find in the world. It runs from May 28th-June 1st, and as always, the program is like a gilded treasure box lifted from the past, containing precious jewels you won’t find anywhere else.

Take, for instance, the special presentation of a film called Lime Kiln Field Day by Burt Williams. It was a 1913 production with an all-black cast that never saw the light of day due to its white producers slamming the door shut on it indefinitely. Jump forward one century to 2013, when MoMA found and reconstructed the film’s unedited reels so that we may enjoy and appreciate one of the earliest artifacts of black film history. The film will be playing as a special presentation called “100 Years In Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.” MoMA Associate Curator Ron Magliozzi will be presenting a variety of materials from the production as well.

Also on the lineup is the silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which many consider to be superior to the award-winning talkie version. Sherlock Holmes will be making an appearance as well in Sherlock Holmes, a pivotal piece of Sherlockian history once thought long lost. Contributing to the conversation of modern feminism are Why Be Good?, The Deadlier Sex, and Sweden’s Norrtullsligan, three films that serve as fascinating reminders that feminist filmmaking has had a long history. The Last Laugh, a must-see for any true film fan, also rounds out the program.

One of my favorite parts of the festival is the live instrumentation, and the lineup of musicians on-hand is typically tremendous. The world-renowned silent film players include Stephen Horne, Frank Bockius, Guenter Buchwald, Diana Rowan, Steve Sterner, Serge Bromberg, the Matti Bye Ensemble, the Donald Sosin Ensemble, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, and Bruce Goldstein and the Gower Gulch Players.

I sat down for my annual chat with festival’s Artistic Director, Anita Monga, to talk about this year’s program and examine the silent era’s influence on modern filmmaking.

For more info on the festival, visit silentfilm.org

Farm-to-table dining is something that’s swept the nation but has always been a big part of San Francisco. It’s about artisans putting a lot of love and work and time into presenting the best ingredients with utmost respect. I think this festival is the film version of that, where everybody involved—the preservationists, the programmers, the musicians—really get their hands dirty to present an incredibly special experience.
Yeah, it’s a one-of-a-kind experience, each and every screening. People always say, “Aw, I’m not going to see The Last Laugh. I’ve already seen it a million times.” You’re not going to come to see it with the group of students from the Berklee College of music perform it once in your lifetime? Come on!

Right. I’ve seen some silents several times live, but it’s a different experience every time.
Absolutely. But I also have to say that masterpieces are worth revisiting again and again. There are some films that I’ve seen 20, 30 times. And it’s amazing to see them in a movie theater like the Castro with that amazing screen and people who also appreciate this live cinema. It’s an extraordinary experience. We’re very lucky in San Francisco.

We are. I was sharing a nice lunch with a friend here in the city today, and I was telling him that one of the best things about the festival is the crowd. Being with those people, you feel like you’re part of something special.
It really is special.

You mentioned masterpieces, and I’ve got to mention All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s interesting to me that the silent version is considered by many superior to the award-winning sound version.
That’s not completely unheard of during that transition from silent to sound. Films were often made in two versions because many theaters didn’t have the capacity to make that transition. We’re living through a relatively similar transition from 35mm to DCP. A lot of little theaters have had a really hard time making that transition because it’s really expensive. The answer during the transition from silents to talkies was that different versions were made. At the beginning of sound, it was very rudimentary. The silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front has a different kind of rhythm. It isn’t bogged down by the script.

The editing is the biggest difference.
Right, because you can’t have paragraph-long intertitle cards, so the story has to be told through the action and through the characters’ faces.

People seem to have forgotten what cinema really is. Most critique I hear from younger people is focused on the script or narrative rather than what’s actually on-screen. It’s like they’re writing a book review of the screenplay.
David Thompson wrote a piece for our book on All Quiet on the Wester Front in which he has a very poetic waxing. At the end of the essay he’s talking about ways of watching a film, and he did an experiment by watching sound movies with the sound turned off. Film is both a visual and aural experience. There are amazing things to be heard. When you have a modern film you think is being silent, if you pay attention, you’ll hear all of the sounds the filmmakers put in to suspend the film in a bath of sound.

Have you seen Mad Max?
I haven’t seen it yet! I’m so looking forward to seeing it.

I’m excited for you to see it because I think it pays homage to old-school movie-making. There are things like people wobbling on tall poles that really reminds me of Keaton and Lloyd. Really daring stuff.
That’ll be the first thing I see. I remember seeing the original Mad Max, and what a revelation that was.

I remember when you guys did the “Hitchcock 9” program, with all the silents he made. I loved it. I remember seeing a vignette where Martin Scorsese said he’d watch Hitchcock with the sound turned off.
Hitchcock is amazing, but I wouldn’t advise turning off Bernard Hermann’s score! [laughs] You watch a film like Vertigo, and there are whole parts of that movie that seem suspended in some kind of other world. There isn’t a lot of talking. The sound design of those movies is extraordinary. That “Hitchcock 9” thing we did was a real revelation to me because Hitchcock was at one of the earliest junctures of filmmaking. He was just born, fully formed as a storyteller.

I know Hitchcock mourned the end of the silent era.
Film is a marriage of technology and art, and any filmmaker would be happy with technology as it changes and enhances. The silent era was an incredible period for honing visual expression, but I think the best filmmakers embraced sound and technology. Who doesn’t want to be able to do something extraordinary that was impossible before?

Back to the festival: I just watched Cave of the Spider Woman. That was something else! The imagination on display was wonderful.
My mind boggles at how that print got to Norway. It was a very popular genre in Shanghai in the ’20s, that kind of spirit story. Films were made, but there are no prints left. This one was sitting in a library in Norway. The film was made in 1927 and imported and distributed around Norway in 1929. They burned the Norwegian subtitles on the cards, so the translations came from the Norwegians, not the Chinese. Our contribution was that we had a translator go back to the Chinese intertitles and translate those. The Chinese translator found that the frames were slipped, so the Norwegian subtitles would be printed on cards that would be flipped and upside down. It was a really difficult job.

This movie was a big hit when it came out, but there’s only the one print!
Right! Only one that we know of.

Sherlock Holmes is as trendy as he’s ever been right now.
The restoration we’re presenting was kind of the holy grail for Sherlockians because the person behind it was William Gillette, who convinced Arthur Conan Doyle to do this Sherlock Holmes film. It was years after Conan Doyle had killed off Sherlock, but Gillette was known as the major stage interpreter of Sherlock Holmes. He wrote a script that combined several of the Sherlock stories, and Doyle was impressed. That film was completely lost. A number of people went looking for it, and it was discovered in a vault at the Cinémateque Francaise.

I also caught The Deadlier Sex and loved it.
Good! That was a restoration that just happened at the Academy Film Archive. Blanche Sweet is pretty great. It’s a really small part, but it’s a really early role for Boris Karloff.

I love how nimbly that one switches from drama to comedy. It’s really modern in that way. Why Be Good is another one I really liked.
It’s really great. Colleen Moore plays an effervescent flapper, a “good girl” who the boss’ son falls in love with.

Feminism is such a hot topic today, as it should be. I think it’s important to look back at films like this to get a sense of how feminism has evolved over the years.
If you’re interested in that, Norrtullsligan has very strong female characters. It’s definitely a feminist film.

Let’s take a look at some other things on the program.
“100 Years in Post-Production” is going to be a really great presentation. Lime Kiln Field Day started production in 1913 and was shelved before it ever came to fruition. MoMA found the unedited reels of this all-black production. We all know what happened in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation, and it’s been speculated that that kind of put the kibosh on this film coming out. MoMA reconstructed it. Don’t miss Flesh and the Devil, don’t miss Pan…

I’m really excited for that one.
I love this film so much. It has a very strong, modern psychological sensibility that will be really surprising and revelatory to a lot of people.

As a bit of a musician myself, I always try to sit close to the musicians during the show. You can feel the sound from their instruments wrap around you in a really magical way.
Do you ever watch the musicians?

I do!
It’s so interesting. We have this wonderful photographer, Pamela Gentile, and my favorite thing she does is take a picture from the audience; you see the screen, the musicians, and sometimes you’ll see the musicians looking up and the characters in the film looking down. It’s beautiful.

For people who say things like, “I don’t want to watch old movies,” I say, at the very least, you can just watch the musicians. They’re incredible.
People who say they’re going to be put off by things being old…I get where they’re coming from. Some people have a problem with seeing a black and white film. I can tell you that you’ll forget that they’re not talking. Plus, there are plenty of bad films made in the silent era; we just don’t play those films. We have 20 films we’re showing every year. We don’t have to show the bad stuff. We try to show a breadth of the silent era, but every film has some relevance for modern audiences.