102 Boulevard Haussmann (1990) came out of wanting to write about Proust, which in turn came out of having written about Kafka, around whom I had done two plays, one for television, The Insurance Man (1985), and a stage play, Kafka’s Dick (1986), both directed by Richard Eyre. All three scripts have to do with writers and their lives, and how life and art don’t always measure up.

Virtually contemporaries, Kafka and Proust both gave up their lives for their work, though the self-sacrifice didn’t quite make them saints – how they lived sometimes falling short of what they wrote. This is a not uncommon discrepancy, and and why writers are such tempting subjects for biography, clay feet always making for a good read. Kafka himself said that to write is to do the work of the devil, and there is a sense in which both he and Proust were supremely selfish, allowing nothing and nobody to stand in the way of the work.

Proust is tempting to write about for other reasons. The difficulty in dealing with writers in films or plays is that so often they have dull lives. Proust on the other hand had such an eccentric way of going on that it wasn’t simply a case of showing someone tearing an unsatisfactory sheet from the typewriter, screwing it up and throwing it in the wastepaper basket (Proust didn’t have a typewriter anyway).

Proust’s way of life, though well known, has not often been presented on the screen. He worked at night and slept much of the day; he had elaborate rituals involving food and clothes, and was rich enough to indulge them or have them indulged by his lifelong servant, Céleste Albaret. We took trouble about the exact representation of this life, making sure that the layout of the set at Elstree corresponded to the actual topography of Proust’s airless and cork-lined apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann; not, I’m sure, that anybody noticed or would have cared if they had.

In other respects, too, it’s a film that is faithful to the facts of Proust’s life. The quartet were summoned to his apartment to play for him in the middle of the night; he did (over) pay them in notes from a box of money from the sideboard before sending them off home in cabs having earlier fed them on food from the Ritz, which he was accustomed to use as a takeaway. There are, of course, much darker and more sensational episodes in Proust’s life, but for all its sad undertones this is one of the most appealing.