Seven things that author and screen playwriter Menno Meyjes wants us to know about him
Author and Screen Playwrite Menno Meyjes
1) I was born and raised in the Netherlands.
When I lived in California and worked in Hollywood people would often give a Spanish spin to my name as in Mey-gez with a hard G instead of Mey-jes with a soft J. But I am really quite Dutch. When I made a film in Spain nobody ever thought I was Spanish. Too tall. Too guiri.
2) Dutch people are really tall.
We are the white Watusi. I am 6.3 (on a good day) but when I am in Amsterdam I am average (annoying). Nobody really knows why. Reasons range from genetics and diet to having to stand on our toes for centuries in order not to drown in our very watery country. I prefer the latter.
3) Dutch politicians talk about the future more than any other politicians in the world.
In Dutch the future is the toekomst; that what is coming towards us. What’s coming towards us is more visceral than the future which comes to us from the latin Futurus; to grow, to become’ But if you google ‘ future’ you get a rapper.
4) I am rather obsessed with language.
I attended an international boarding school in order to learn, you guessed it, my languages. I used to copy Hemingway. I just read that Joan Didion used to do the same so I am in good company. There’s a school of thought that language is a kind of virus. That we catch it. That it exists outside of us. Sometimes you watch great speakers like MLK and the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech and they seem to catch a kind of up draft of language.
5) I like paintings.
I sometimes go to Madrid just to go to the Prado. Ditto the National Gallery and it’s free. I come back to paintings all the time. I just stood in front of Rembrandt at sixty three for at least five minutes. I think that would have made him happy. Some slightly over-excited character swooning over his work 356 years later. There are very few films I come back to. I used to think that the directors we admired like Fellini Visconti and Bergman were immortal but they’re not. Certainly not at the moment.
6) I like reading Sally Rooney and Miranda July.
Although I find Intermezzo Sally Rooney’s latest slightly tough sledding. Her other books were so easy. Easy is underrated. Easy is not that easy. Anna Karenina is such a great book except for the last chapter when Tolstoy feels he has to get a message across. I know it is heresy but politics is the great enemy of art.
7) When people say the world is this and the world is that, I try to remember that they are referring to the world of people.
The world we come from and live on and return to is still by en large a mystery. That was Cormac McCarthy’s great strength. Here’s my favourite quote from All the Pretty Horses: ‘and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead’
About Menno Meyjes
Menno Meyjes is the screenplay writer of The Colour Purple, which was Bafta- and Academy Award-nominated. He is also the winner of a Goya Award and gained global recognition for co-writing Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. More recently, he directed Max with John Cusack in 2022.
Menno's latest book Blood Axe is an ebook exclusive, published on 8th May and is available here now.
Tagged in author facts