Alistair Owen - The Art of Screen Adaptation

PRAISE FOR ALISTAIR OWEN

Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson

The most purely likeable book about cinema I have ever read

DAVID HARE , Guardian , Books of the Year

Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters

Owens thorough research and penetrating questions are what make this book. The conversation is hilarious as well as informative, and budding screenwriters should pay close attention

NINA CAPLAN , Observer

I look forward to reading more volumes from Owen that will match this fascinating, insightful collection

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER , Independent on Sunday

Hampton on Hampton

Intellectually intimate, unpretentious, informative, entertaining, anecdotal, fearless, funny, serious, an addictive page-turner, one of the great memoirs

CRAIG RAINE , Observer , Books of the Year

A hugely enjoyable book. Droll and very intelligent, but also highly informative about the making of plays and films, and more or less essential reading if you want to know what a writer does and feels

RICHARD EYRE

THE ART OF

SCREEN ADAPTATION

Top Writers Reveal Their Craft

Alistair Owen

creative essentials

Introduction

My first screenplay commission was an adaptation. By the time I had sketched out a screen story with the producer and was sitting down to start the script, the location had shifted from Devon to New England, the leads had aged from early teenagers to young adults, and the last third of the novel had been jettisoned. The novel didnt inspire me, so that wasnt a problem. But cut adrift from it, without the compass of the source material or a compelling alternative course, I wrote rubbish and that was a problem. We had barely begun the second pass before I, too, was jettisoned. I learned some good lessons, though. Never adapt a book you dont love. Never accept a job just for the work. And never, ever, tell yourself, Ill fix it in the next draft, because you might not get a chance to write one.

I subsequently turned out other, better adaptations and my first rewrite; adaptation of a different kind. Even so, when Creative Essentials suggested I write a How To book on the subject, I still had one key question: can I really tell other people how to adapt when I cant back it up with a produced adaptation of my own? The answer was no, I couldnt. What I could do, however, was assemble some of the best screenwriters in the business and ask them how it was done. So I did, and here they are: 12 writers, 22 case studies and one career retrospective, exploring adaptations of modern and classic novels, nonfiction books and stage plays, on film and television, in the UK and Hollywood. None of the interviewees has fewer than five produced adaptations on their CVs and some of them have scripted a lot more offering a unique and varied insight into the art and craft of adapting for the screen.

Each interview explores the writers general approach to adaptation before focusing on two specific case studies with the exception of the conversation with Andrew Davies, perhaps screen adaptations most prolific practitioner, where I took the opportunity to couple the set questions with a broader tour of his extensive career. Otherwise, the set questions asked depend on the case studies discussed: fiction, or nonfiction, or both. The case studies were my choice in every instance, and were chosen to provide as wide and as recent a range of feature films and television series as possible although I have deliberately not included plot synopses, in the hope that readers will be inspired to go on the same journey I made through the source material and resulting adaptations. I have, on the other hand, included interviews with two writers I have talked to previously Hossein Amini (in Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters , Bloomsbury, 2002) and Christopher Hampton (in Hampton on Hampton , Faber, 2005) as both can claim significant adaptation credits since those books appeared, and both have had a considerable influence on my own writing over the years.

At this point, my thanks must go to all the interviewees for so generously giving up their time, and to their various agents and publishers (particularly Mary Mount at Penguin and Dinah Wood at Faber) for putting me in touch with them. Extra thanks to my first interviewee (chronologically if not alphabetically), Jeremy Brock, who helped me road-test the Q&A format and has remained an unfailing source of encouragement throughout. A big thank you, too, to the entire team at Creative Essentials: Ion, Lisa, Ellie, Elsa, Jennifer, Clare and Claire and my editor, Hannah Patterson, who enthusiastically embraced my adaptation of her original pitch. Thanks also to Bethany Davies for her invaluable transcription skills; to Rob Benton and Daniel Rosenthal for their insightful comments on the manuscript (twice over to Daniel for thoughtfully pointing Hannah in my direction in the first place); and to my book and screen agents at Sheil Land Associates, Gaia Banks and Lucy Fawcett, for all their efforts on my behalf while this project was under way. And a huge thank you, finally, to my friends and my parents and especially to Louise Halfpenny, the best cheerleader any writer could hope for.

Alistair Owen

January 2020

Hossein Amini

Hossein Amini was born in 1966 in Tehran, Iran.

His screen adaptation credits include: Jude (1996, novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy); The Wings of the Dove (1997, novel by Henry James); Drive (2011, novel by James Sallis); Our Kind of Traitor (2016, novel by John le Carr); and The Alienist (2017, novel by Caleb Carr). He also wrote and directed The Two Faces of January (2014), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, and co-created and co-wrote the BBC series McMafia (2018), based on the book by Misha Glenny.

The Wings of the Dove was Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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?

I like to do both. I think theyre almost different challenges, especially doing them consecutively. After working on something personal, something I wanted to explore more deeply, the idea of going on an intellectual holiday by reading up on stuff that I dont know anything about is actually really attractive. Research has always been the bit I love most, learning about a completely new subject, and usually Ill choose assignments based on how interested I am in those subjects. Often they tend to be history, because that was something I studied and have always been quite passionate about. But if a sci-fi thing comes along and I like the idea of researching space and stars and the creation of planets, then Ill go, Yeah, thatll be fun. I dont necessarily only think about the source material; sometimes the work around it is just as interesting.

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

Yes and no. For me, the research is equally important in both. With an adaptation, Ill always read 20 other books to inform what Im writing. Likewise with an original, Ill probably read around it. In that way its the same. There are a couple of adaptations Ive done where the dialogue was there, scenes were there. Thats almost a different gig, because that becomes about selecting and filleting and filling in the gaps. I generally tend to do adaptations where theres not a lot of scenes you can transcribe literally. Those interest me less, because Im more interested in the combination of what the source material has and what I can bring to it as an individual, with my own experiences.