MICHAEL ONDAATJE: As a writer are you influenced more by writing than by art?

JOHN BERGER: I think I’m most influenced — only when writing fiction — by cinema.

ONDAATJE: Why cinema?

BERGER: First of all, cinematographic editing seems to me to be close to a form of written narrative. Also, that one can have long vistas and close-ups one after the other. And lastly, because of the relationship of the cinema to its public. It’s in the dark. There are people together and yet each is listening and looking alone. People can’t look at paintings like that; they can’t read books like that and somehow, that image is an image of collaboration, the collaboration of the spectator who is no longer a spectator but part of the telling of the story. That image, which comes from the cinema is, to me, more encouraging.

ONDAATJE: Yet there’s something about reading that is a wonderful private secret thing . . .

BERGER: But don’t you think being in the cinema is private and secret?

ONDAATJE: It is, but I’m not sure that will influence me as a writer, because I think, in order to write, I need to go somewhere that’s excessively private in myself.

BERGER: Yes, I understand that, but you sometimes make films for yourself, yes? Is that a very different you that makes those films from the you that writes?

ONDAATJE: I think there’s a limit to what films can do in getting below the surface of things . . . I think that to write, sometimes you need to escape that kind of place where you are very conscious of the audience or of a response. And when I’m editing my books, like you I am very conscious of what I’ve learnt from film editing, which by its microscopic nature is taken tremendously seriously, much more seriously sometimes than by novelists, with their books.

BERGER: Yes. And when you have that need, which I fully recognise, to be intensely private, to withdraw, are you withdrawing into yourself or to somewhere else?

ONDAATJE: I don’t think it’s withdrawing. It’s more like descending, in the sense that I’m trying to descend to a level that I haven’t gone to before. If I began to write something that I already knew, it would be a problem to me, so I’m trying to accept the given of what I know and begin by writing something I don’t know. That’s why that privacy and secrecy, which in a way I’m obsessed with, is necessary, and it becomes a time of discovery as opposed to clarification.

BERGER: And when you make that descent, and if we take for a minute the image of the diver, and you need oxygen, is the oxygen language or something else?

ONDAATJE: It’s curiosity . . . I have in my head as well, when I begin a book, that it’s a completely unfinished ideal, and it’s not all verbal, it’s sort of like a tone of music. You go towards that tone.