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 DâUrbervilles (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. Itâs 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 itâs less interesting to me if thereâs 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 Iâm 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 DâUrbervilles, 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 thatâs 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 Iâm writing original work, but I canât write two original works at the same time. I wouldnât be able to hold two different sets of original voices and situations in my head. I get very emotionally engaged writing original fiction, because Iâm drawing on my own concerns and preoccupations. Even though my books arenât directly autobiographical, theyâve all originated in an experience Iâve had, or a set of emotions Iâve gone through. With adaptation thereâs usually an element of that, something in the source material which Iâve responded to, but the story Iâm telling isnât my own so I feel a little more distance. Itâs 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, thereâs 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 doesnât necessarily come through in the finished product, you donât always quite hit it, but the ones where my vision of the material has matched the final film are the projects that Iâm happiest with. I used to work as a script editor before I was a writer, so Iâve been at the other end of it and Iâm able to speak that language. Thereâs a certain amount of smoke and mirrors in pitching, because you often wonât find out what the source material is really about until youâve spent some time with it.
Do you usually produce an outline or treatment before you start writing the script?
No, I donât, but thatâs 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 Iâve made the pitch, Iâll go my own way. I think Iâm quite a safe pair of hands, in that I do what I say and wonât submit something crazy. I wonât suddenly change the ending without telling anyone, Iâll talk my choices through with the script editors and producers and so on. So apart from verbally stating my intentions, Iâm 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. Thereâs nothing youâd 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 thatâs the least story-led material Iâve ever worked on. With everything else thereâs 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?
Thatâs a really interesting one. No screenwriter thinks, âI wish I was getting more notes.â So I would expect them to have input, I just wouldnât crave it coming directly to me. Iâd want them to see every draft and feel free to give notes, but Iâd also want those notes to be put into a pot and mediated. What youâre doing is an act of vandalism. Youâre chopping things out and conflating characters, and undoubtedly theyâre going to read it and go, âThatâs not what I had in mind.â On Patrick Melrose, I had a meeting with Edward St Aubyn, whoâs a writer I massively admired and, as a different kind of novelist to me, was rather intimidated by. But heâs a very charming man and we had a lovely lunch; I asked him a certain number of questions and at the end he said, âWell, we can either talk every day, or we need never talk again. Itâs up to you.â He completely understood either approach. If youâre reading the books â and this applies to Blake Morrisonâs book as well â youâll inevitably think, âWe really need this scene and it isnât in the book so Iâm going to have to invent it,â and the most useful question to ask the author at that point is, âWhat really happened?â But in a way thatâs also the least useful question, because theyâve already given their experiences a shape which wasnât necessarily there in real life, so to ask them âWhat really happened?â 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, âBut in the bookâŠâ, because adaptation means change. And of course itâs a rule thatâs constantly broken and so not really a rule at all, but if you just go through and highlight the dialogue and copy the story, itâs 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. Iâve been on productions where we were not allowed to talk about the book, and Iâve been on productions where the book has been on set and people pick it up and flick through it and refer to it. Iâm not crazy about them doing that, but itâs okay if the adaptation is broadly faithful and weâre 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 theyâre usually, quite naturally, looking at their own scene, theyâre not taking into account, say, the directorâs 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. Iâve had the opposite experience, which is not that itâs 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 âcliffhangerâ, 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 â but it was extremely hard to do that because of the loss of the narratorâs voice. Things that were absolute highlights on the page didnât work without the irony of the narratorâs point of view, so it was difficult to find the comedy in it. Actually, I think the hardest things Iâve had to adapt have been written in first-person voices â or what we call an indirect third person, like the Melrose books, where itâs technically in the third person, but very much from a particular characterâs point of view â because youâre 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 couldnât, or shouldnât, be adapted?
Yes, I have, and Iâve often read books that Iâve loved and thought, âThis is unadaptable.â Iâve adapted several of my top-ten favourite books, but there are some in there that I wouldnât touch. I wouldnât touch anything by J.D. Salinger. Iâd have been very wary of The Great Gatsby. Iâve been approached more than once about Ford Madox Fordâs The Good Soldier, and I think thatâs unadaptable unless you throw away the point of the book, which is that youâre not sure who the narrator is and what really happened. Books with unreliable narrators, books which rely on ambiguity, books where thereâs no objective truth, books where thereâs very little narrative â so a lot of modernist fiction â are all very hard to adapt. But Iâve 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 Presidentâs 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 Iâd 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 Iâm not crazy about. Iâm not crazy about the David Lean versions of Dickens, even though Iâm absolutely sure his version of Great Expectations is better than ours. I love David Lean, but I donât 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 wasnât going to be a distillation of everything that happens. If you want to put things in because theyâre great incidents or great observations or great lines of dialogue, itâs very unlikely theyâll 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 wasnât necessarily so prominent on the page. Other ti...