[In the following essay, Shaffer—the author of the play that Amadeus was based on—discusses his working relationship with Forman, describing the process of how they adapted the play into film.]

The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to work in. Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone living largely by the spoken word. Increasingly, as American films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent that the most successful are being spoken in Screenspeak, a kind of cinematic esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogota and Bulawayo. For example, dialogue in heavy-action pictures, horrific or intergalactic, now consists almost entirely of the alternation of two single words—a cry and a whisper—needing translation nowhere on the planet: ‘Lessgidowdaheer!’ and ‘Omygaad!’ Mastery of this new tongue is not easy for older writers.

Equally dismaying has to be the endemic restlessness of filmgoers. In his mind's ear as he writes for the live theatre, the dramatist can presume the attentiveness of his audience: its mutual agreement to listen, and to remain in one place while the performance is going on. No such agreement exists among movie audiences. Indeed the very word ‘movie’ nowadays can as accurately describe the viewers of films as films themselves. I never really understood the meaning of the phrase ‘upward mobility’ until I had experienced a Manhattan cinema on a recent Saturday night.

All of which is by way of saying that but for the enthusiasm of Milos Forman I doubt if there would be a film of Amadeus at all. He met me in London after the very first preview of the play at the National Theatre in November 1979, and declared without hesitation that what I had actually written was a natural film, and that if I were ever willing to let him do so, he would direct it. In this assertion he persisted for two years.

Persistence was coupled with perceptiveness. When finally I cautiously agreed to explore the possibility of working with him, he sensed quite plainly my unease about films in general, and my dissatisfaction with all previous films of my own plays in particular. When I asked him what he would do with my piece, he told me what he would not do: turn it into a stagey hybrid, neither play nor picture. He also pointed out that the film of a play is really a new work, another fulfillment of the same impulse which had created the original. The adapter's task was to explore many new paths in order to emerge in the end at the same emotional place. During this process a fair amount of demolition work would go on, some of it perhaps painful to the author. In the case of Amadeus, its operatic stylization would probably have to go, and its language would have to be made less formal, though not, of course, more juvenile.

Actually, my own personal taste in cinema inclines very much to the operatic and stylized—the opening sequence of The Magnificent Ambersons, for example, or the iconographic groupings in the First Part of Ivan the Terrible—but I also sensed, as we talked, how this vigorous man's brand of naturalism, infused with his huge humor and his obvious passion for my material, might make an enthralling new thing out of it. The possibility of working with him was suddenly very tempting.

Certainly I was not afraid of new approaches. In composing the play I had spent over a year simply finding a way of beginning it. I don't know how many be-wigged phantoms I chased down how many suddenly blocked avenues before settling on the final formulation. Why not join a brilliantly talented film director in even further exploration? Of course partnership would mean permitting him to write the script with me, alone in his house—the Forman method, and one not easy for an author to countenance—but I reckoned that I had ultimately far more to learn than to lose from such an adventure, and finally I agreed. On the first day of February 1982 our collaboration began.

It was a startling experience for me. In the end we spent well over four months together in a Connecticut farmhouse—five days a week, twelve hours a day—seeing virtually no other company. These were four months of sustained work, punctuated by innumerable tussles, falterings and depressions, but also by sudden gleeful break-throughs to relieve the monotony of the prevalent uncertainty. In some ways we made an Odd Couple, yoked together in a temporary form of marriage, cooking for each other in the evenings, and each day exploring whatever might contribute a Variation on the vast theme of Mozart and Salieri. We acted out countless versions of each scene, improvising them aloud. I sat at a long refectory table extracting, writing down, and polishing all dialogue. In the process I filled at least twenty thick notebooks. Some of the talk is inevitably simpler in the film than in the play, but none of it, I hope, is Screenspeak. At my urging, Milos set out to investigate an unfamiliar world of music; at his I set out to investigate an equally unfamiliar one of screen technique. If nothing else were to come out of this frenzied seclusion, we each discovered a new discipline and a new friendship.

From the start we agreed upon one thing: we were not making an objective Life of Wolfgang Mozart. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously Amadeus on stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer, and the film is even less of one. Certainly we have incorporated many real elements, new as well as true. The film shows the acerbic relationship between the fretful young genius and his haughty employer, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg; the disastrous visit of Papa Leopold to his married son in Vienna; Wolfgang's playing of his Piano Concerti in the open air; his delight in dancing and billiards. But we are also blatantly claiming the grand license of the storyteller to embellish his tale with fictional ornament and, above all, to supply it with a climax whose sole justification need be that it enthralls his audience and emblazons his theme. I believe that we have created just such a climax for the film of Amadeus.

To me there is something pure about Salieri's pursuit of an eternal Absolute through music, just as there is something irredeemably impure about his simultaneous pursuit of eternal fame. The yoking of these two clearly opposed drives led us finally to devise a climax totally different from that of the play: a night-long encounter between the physically dying Mozart and the spiritually ravenous Salieri, motivated entirely by the latter's crazed lust to snatch a piece of divinity for himself. Such a scene never took place in fact. However, our concern at this point was not with facts but with the undeniable laws of drama. It is where—holding fast to the thread of our protagonist's mania—we were finally led.

Some people may find this new climax hard to accept. Others may rejoice in it as a horribly logical end to the legend. To me it seems the most appropriate finish to our black fantasia. Even on stage I had to create a final confrontation quite outside historical record. I had to recognize and honor the change of atmosphere from clear Enlightenment to murky Gothic which inevitably occurred once the figure of the Masked Messenger was introduced. In the film this recognition is more carefully prepared for. Indeed the motif of masked people goes all through the picture—paralleling to some extent Mozart's own preoccupation with them. After all, the three great Da Ponte operas are all concerned with the dramatic effects of wearing disguise.

What pleased me best about this resolution is that we were able to construct a scene which is highly effective in cinematic terms, yet wholly concerned with the least visual of all possible subjects: music itself. I do not believe that a stage version of this scene would have been half as effective.

Filming Amadeus for six months in Czechoslovakia was a testing but perhaps indispensable experience, considering our subject. Prague offers the most complete Baroque and rococo setting in Europe, largely untouched by the savageries of war or city planners. It is possible to turn a camera there in a complete circle and see in its frame nothing built after Mozart's death. Architecturally, Czech buildings provide a perfect background for the story, just as aesthetically Czech faces provide a perfect foreground. The people of Central Europe are not embarrassed by wearing period costume: the smallest bit-player on a day's leave from the factory looks absolutely natural in perruque and pelisse. Contemplating the audiences of extras assembled in the Tyl theatre to watch the Mozart operas being played—the very theatre where Don Giovanni was first produced!—one experiences the miraculous feeling of time being reclaimed from oblivion. I hope profoundly that this eerie and exquisite sensation will seep through the print on to the screen.

What I hope will not seep through is any sense of the difficulties experienced in making the picture. These, of course, were considerable. Inevitably the very act of making a two-and-a half-hour costume picture entirely behind the Iron Curtain became something of an ordeal for all concerned. I keep meeting people who imagine that the business of setting up cameras and turning them on sets and actors is somehow a romantic and liberating occupation. It is impossible to convince them that the daily activity of a camera crew is just about as liberating as that of Sisyphus. On each visit I grew more and more impressed by the sheer staying-power of everyone concerned: by the manner in which a hundred differing skills were kept keen and shining in the face of all that could blunt and rust them. Throughout what seemed an interminable time (for the river of Time unquestionably flows slower than it does elsewhere through the channels of Czechoslovakia) the producer Saul Zaentz defied all known rules laid down for the behavior of movie producers by presenting each morning to the world of delay and confusion a countenance of unalterable equanimity.

I am extremely grateful to him for this example of poise, as I am to the entire team for its endurance, and to Milos above all, for showing me how you can hold every detail of a long film in your head simultaneously for six frenzied months—provided that you have prepared it properly first over another six. Fine directors do not appear by accident, nor do fine pictures.

Nevertheless, despite this and all his other dazzling demonstrations to me, which may yet result one day in my attempting an original film script, our joint movie is definitely the first and last of the metamorphoses of Amadeus. Unlike Equus it will not also become a ballet; unlike The Royal Hunt of the Sun it will not become an opera. Above all, and no matter how fortunate our effort may prove in its reception, it will spawn no sequels. There will be no television series of half-hour dramas in which Salieri plots a different method of murdering Mozart each week, only to be frustrated by the wily little genius in the twenty-ninth minute. Even Milos Forman will agree that there can be a limit to adaptation.