The Art of Screen Adaptation

Alistair Owen

• Publisher: Creative Essentials
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780857302281
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Drehbuchschreiben

'If you decide to adapt a classic or much-loved book, your working maxim should be, 'How will it work best as a film?' However faithful it is to the original, if it's not interesting onscreen then you've failed.' - William Boyd in Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters

Hollywood. Netflix. Amazon. BBC. Producers and audiences are hungrier than ever for stories, and a lot of those stories begin life as a book - but how exactly do you transfer a story from the page to the screen? Do adaptations use the same creative gears as original screenplays? Does a true story give a project more weight than a fictional one? Is it helpful to have the original author's input on the script? And how much pressure is the screenwriter under, knowing they won't be able to please everyone with the finished product?

Alistair Owen puts all these questions and many more to some of the top names in screenwriting, including Hossein Amini (Drive), Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland), Moira Buffini (Jane Eyre), Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl), Andrew Davies (War & Peace), Christopher Hampton (Atonement), David Hare (The Hours), Olivia Hetreed (Girl with a Pearl Earring), Nick Hornby (An Education), Deborah Moggach (Pride & Prejudice), David Nicholls (Patrick Melrose) and Sarah Phelps (And Then There Were None).

Exploring fiction and nonfiction projects, contemporary and classic books, films and TV series, The Art of Screen Adaptation reveals the challenges and pleasures of reimagining stories for cinema and television, and provides a frank and fascinating masterclass with the writers who have done it - and have the awards and acclaim to show for it.

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Praise for Alistair Owen

'A fascinating, insightful collection' - Independent on Sunday on Story and Character

'Owen's thorough research and penetrating questions are what make Story and Character... the conversation is hilarious as well as informative, and budding screenwriters should pay close attention to extraordinary nuggets' - Guardian on Story and Character

David Nicholls

David Nicholls was born in 1966 in Eastleigh, Hampshire.

His screen adaptation credits include: Sympatico (1999, play by Sam Shepard); Much Ado About Nothing (2005, after Shakespeare); And When Did You Last See Your Father? (2007, book by Blake Morrison); Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008, novel by Thomas Hardy); Great Expectations (2012, novel by Charles Dickens); Far from the Madding Crowd (2015, novel by Thomas Hardy); Patrick Melrose (2018, novels by Edward St Aubyn); and dramatisations of his own novels Starter for 10 (2006), One Day (2011) and Us (2020).

He wrote the BBC drama The 7.39 (2013), created and wrote the ITV and BBC series I Saw You and Rescue Me (both 2002) and contributed to the third series of Cold Feet (1999). His most recent novel is Sweet Sorrow (2019).

Patrick Melrose won the 2019 BAFTA Television Craft Award for Best Writer: Drama.

Approaches to Adaptation

Do you prefer to adapt material which chimes with your own work, or material which is completely different and gives you a chance to try out new things?

The latter, I think. It’s changed, because my own work has changed. When I first started writing, my own material was broadly romantic comedy and relationship drama, and I got sent a lot of books in that vein to adapt. It was easy to say no, even when I could see their commercial appeal, because it’s less interesting to me if there’s an overlap with material that I want to deal with in my own way. What I like about adaptation is that it coaxes me into writing about things I’m not necessarily confident enough to write about in an original form. To begin with, I was quite scared of original material that was outside my usual style. I would have been scared of the melodrama of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which was the first thing I adapted, or the darkness of Patrick Melrose, or the emotional rawness of And When Did You Last See Your Father? Material that’s different from mine serves as a sort of scaffolding which has elements of my own work, but gives me some parameters. But it would feel a little pointless to adapt a book that was too similar in style to, say, Starter for Ten or One Day.

Do you think adaptations involve a completely different set of creative gears to original screenplays?

Yes. I can adapt while I’m writing original work, but I can’t write two original works at the same time. I wouldn’t be able to hold two different sets of original voices and situations in my head. I get very emotionally engaged writing original fiction, because I’m drawing on my own concerns and preoccupations. Even though my books aren’t directly autobiographical, they’ve all originated in an experience I’ve had, or a set of emotions I’ve gone through. With adaptation there’s usually an element of that, something in the source material which I’ve responded to, but the story I’m telling isn’t my own so I feel a little more distance. It’s much more of an editing job, a technical, structural process.

Do you always agree a mission statement or direction of travel with whoever has commissioned the adaptation?

I think so. I mean, there’s always a pitching element involved. When I took on Patrick Melrose, I knew there were other writers in the frame, and I had to go and meet the producers and say what I loved about the books, and what I wanted to keep and take out, and how I might augment that. Likewise, I remember my pitch for Far from the Madding Crowd, and how it would differ from the John Schlesinger/Frederic Raphael version. That pitch doesn’t necessarily come through in the finished product, you don’t always quite hit it, but the ones where my vision of the material has matched the final film are the projects that I’m happiest with. I used to work as a script editor before I was a writer, so I’ve been at the other end of it and I’m able to speak that language. There’s a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in pitching, because you often won’t find out what the source material is really about until you’ve spent some time with it.

Do you usually produce an outline or treatment before you start writing the script?

No, I don’t, but that’s probably to do with having some experience in all fields of writing. When I started out as a novelist and as an original screenwriter, I did do them and got notes on them and went back and did them again. Now, once I’ve made the pitch, I’ll go my own way. I think I’m quite a safe pair of hands, in that I do what I say and won’t submit something crazy. I won’t suddenly change the ending without telling anyone, I’ll talk my choices through with the script editors and producers and so on. So apart from verbally stating my intentions, I’m allowed to do what I want. The exception to that was the latter episodes of Patrick Melrose. As the books go on, they become less and less story-driven and more like montages of memories. There’s nothing you’d call a plot in the last book, really. So with those there was a certain amount of planning and cards on the wall and story breakdowns, but that’s the least story-led material I’ve ever worked on. With everything else there’s been a great deal of discussion, but not a lot of pre-planning, except in my head.

If the author of the source material is living, do you find it useful to have their input on the script?

That’s a really interesting one. No screenwriter thinks, ‘I wish I was getting more notes.’ So I would expect them to have input, I just wouldn’t crave it coming directly to me. I’d want them to see every draft and feel free to give notes, but I’d also want those notes to be put into a pot and mediated. What you’re doing is an act of vandalism. You’re chopping things out and conflating characters, and undoubtedly they’re going to read it and go, ‘That’s not what I had in mind.’ On Patrick Melrose, I had a meeting with Edward St Aubyn, who’s a writer I massively admired and, as a different kind of novelist to me, was rather intimidated by. But he’s a very charming man and we had a lovely lunch; I asked him a certain number of questions and at the end he said, ‘Well, we can either talk every day, or we need never talk again. It’s up to you.’ He completely understood either approach. If you’re reading the books – and this applies to Blake Morrison’s book as well – you’ll inevitably think, ‘We really need this scene and it isn’t in the book so I’m going to have to invent it,’ and the most useful question to ask the author at that point is, ‘What really happened?’ But in a way that’s also the least useful question, because they’ve already given their experiences a shape which wasn’t necessarily there in real life, so to ask them ‘What really happened?’ is a step backwards. It ruins the shape.

Is it easier to navigate notes from directors, producers and script editors when you have a piece of source material to measure the screenplay against?

I have a rule that no one is allowed to say, ‘But in the book…’, because adaptation means change. And of course it’s a rule that’s constantly broken and so not really a rule at all, but if you just go through and highlight the dialogue and copy the story, it’s probably not going to work. You all have to be in agreement about what you think is important in the book, but the success of an adaptation is not necessarily how much of the book you manage to cram in, so there are limits to the extent you can use the book as evidence for your point of view. I’ve been on productions where we were not allowed to talk about the book, and I’ve been on productions where the book has been on set and people pick it up and flick through it and refer to it. I’m not crazy about them doing that, but it’s okay if the adaptation is broadly faithful and we’re not trying to do something different with it. I do get a little prickly if an actor says they preferred something in the book, because they’re usually, quite naturally, looking at their own scene, they’re not taking into account, say, the director’s view or the style of the production. You might adapt Dickens or Hardy and want the dialogue to feel very up-to-date and real, and if an individual actor goes back to the book and likes the more verbose, old-fashioned version of a line, that might be more fun for them to say, but it might not fit in with the overall tone. So I am wary of the book being used as a weapon.

Have you ever started work on an adaptation and found it harder to adapt than you anticipated?

The hardest was Patrick Melrose, but I knew that was going to be a tough one. I’ve had the opposite experience, which is not that it’s easier, but that it falls naturally into a certain structure. On Tess, for instance, we were doing four episodes and the book fell neatly into four narrative chunks with strong cliffhangers. Hardy actually originated the term ‘cliffhanger’, and books written for serialisation adapt particularly well to serial television. Weirdly, I found my own book, Starter for Ten, much harder than expected. It was inspired by a lot of films, and it had a three-act structure and a protagonist with wants and needs and various obstacles along the way, so I thought it would just be a case of picking the best scenes – but it was extremely hard to do that because of the loss of the narrator’s voice. Things that were absolute highlights on the page didn’t work without the irony of the narrator’s point of view, so it was difficult to find the comedy in it. Actually, I think the hardest things I’ve had to adapt have been written in first-person voices – or what we call an indirect third person, like the Melrose books, where it’s technically in the third person, but very much from a particular character’s point of view – because you’re constantly looking for ways to put thoughts into dialogue without slathering it in voiceover.

Have you ever been offered material to adapt which you felt couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be adapted?

Yes, I have, and I’ve often read books that I’ve loved and thought, ‘This is unadaptable.’ I’ve adapted several of my top-ten favourite books, but there are some in there that I wouldn’t touch. I wouldn’t touch anything by J.D. Salinger. I’d have been very wary of The Great Gatsby. I’ve been approached more than once about Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and I think that’s unadaptable unless you throw away the point of the book, which is that you’re not sure who the narrator is and what really happened. Books with unreliable narrators, books which rely on ambiguity, books where there’s no objective truth, books where there’s very little narrative – so a lot of modernist fiction – are all very hard to adapt. But I’ve been proved wrong many times. You think something can never be done, then someone does it really well.

Are there any screen adaptations which you think are especially good or you particularly admire?

There are lots. All the President’s Men, by William Goldman, is a wonderful adaptation, probably one of the best, because it approaches Watergate in an entirely unexpected way. The Wings of the Dove, by Hossein Amini, is also a fantastic adaptation, of a novel I’d be very scared to adapt. I thought it was amazing that someone could deal with that material in that tone of voice. There are also celebrated adaptations that I’m not crazy about. I’m not crazy about the David Lean versions of Dickens, even though I’m absolutely sure his version of Great Expectations is better than ours. I love David Lean, but I don’t love those.

Adapting Fiction

Some writers try to include as much of the novel as possible by boiling scenes down to their essence. Others are more ruthless in editing it down to a sort of greatest hits, but being true to the spirit of it. Do you favour either of those approaches?

It depends on the project. With Patrick Melrose, because we were doing 800 pages of fiction in five hours, it clearly wasn’t going to be a distillation of everything that happens. If you want to put things in because they’re great incidents or great observations or great lines of dialogue, it’s very unlikely they’ll be essential to telling the story. So it was about selecting material and discarding upwards of 50 per cent of the action. The first three episodes are pretty faithful to the books, but in the last two there are great chunks missing and a story is teased out that wasn’t necessarily so prominent on the page. Other ti...