Litro #88 Film and LIterature Teaser

Welcome to issue 88 of LiTRO editor’s blurb Film and literature make strange bedfellows. As you will read from the varied contributions of Jeremy Page, Simon Relph, Olivia Hetreed and myself, the two media are often at odds with each other. But conflict, as we know, is at the heart of good drama. I therefore hope that you find the ensuing battle of words and images as interesting to read as it has been for me to assemble.

I was flattered to be asked to guest-edit this cinema-focused edition and it seemed to me, given the nature of the publication, that adaptation was the natural subject to draw all the elements together.

I hoped to find contributors from different disciplines – and have just about managed it: Jeremy Page is a novelist as well as a script editor; Olivia Hetreed is a screenwriter who was once a film editor; Simon Relph is one of the UK’s most eminent producers, having come up the ranks as an assistant director; and I’m an actor-turnedscreenwriter-turned-producer/director. The discourse on adaptation could fill several libraries – but I do believe the pieces here touch on all the key components. In essence, when adapting any work for the screen, it’s about choice: what to leave in and what to leave out. Why we make those choices is the nub of the matter – which is now down to you to discover.

Anthony Fabian - Director of Skin, starring Sophie Okonedo, Sam Neill and Alice Krige, released in the UK through ICA Films 24th July 2009.

CONTENTS PUTTING WORDS IN A GOAT’S MOUTH Jeremy Page THE FILM OF THE SCRIPT OF THE BOOK Olivia Hetreed TRUTH IN FICTION Anthony Fabian ADAPTATION FROM A PRODUCER’S PERSPECTIVE Simon Relph

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PuTTing WORds in a gOaT’s MOuTh Jeremy PAge One of my guilty pleasures is to sit on Norwegian public transport and think up stories. With the eternal landscapes of rock, fjord and tree, the often dreary weather, the indecipherable town names and long distances, making up fiction is just about the best use of your time. That was where, several years ago, I had the idea of writing about a goat that could speak. The story arrived fully formed – two sisters living in a decrepit cottage, a dirty caravan at the end of the garden, a mysterious goat tethered to a heavy iron chain. As I looked at the millionth tree of Norway passing by the window, this goat appeared, suddenly travelling with me, in perfect detail. I saw the tobacco whiskers of its beard, the horizontally slit pupils in its pale ungodly eyes, and its blackened tongue behind a filthy white row of teeth. Little did I know that one day I would peer into a trailer and meet this goat, on a film-set. And I would make it talk.

A few weeks ago I received UK Film Council lottery funding to adapt my first novel, Salt, into a film script.

I started the process symbolically, by taking the novel off the shelf and placing it on my desk. But the business of adapting your own work into a film-script is far from straightforward. Long before the battles with financing, casting, script editors and producers, executives and production coordinators, you have to do battle with yourself. Salt had once been a heavy-weight draft coming in at 130,000 words. For publication I slimmed that down to a leaner and meaner fighting weight of 106,000 words, but there, on my desk, it seemed a fairly heavy beast, none the less. One of the more surprising aspects about being a novelist is just how often your books appear fuller of words than you remember.

Pages and pages of them, sentences you can’t recall ever writing, words you don’t even use in your vocabulary any more. It’s daunting, as if the novel might have been 5

The fiLM Of The scRiPT Of The bOOk oliviA hetreed Why? When there’s a great novel, a complete work of art, a pleasure ground for the imagination of the reader to explore, gently guided by the author, or a gripping thriller to keep one up till the small hours greedily turning just one more page to find out what happens next, then why oh why must those lumbering, leadenwitted film people come along and turn it into a major motion picture? (Wouldn’t it be nice to pick up the tie-in just once and have it say now a minor motion picture? But that, like the moderate-selling book, will never happen: it’s major, best or nothing in marketing speak.)

Since I make my living largely by adapting books for the screen, large and small, it seems only reasonable that I should have an answer to this frequent and frequently indignant question. And although the Mary Whitehouse response – you don’t have to watch, you can switch off or not buy a ticket – has some validity, there is something so invasive about the adaptation that this won’t quite do. Who now, for instance, can picture the Harry Potter characters without their film counterparts springing unbidden to mind? Or, for an older generation, George Smiley without seeing Alec Guinness?

The truth is no one complains about a successful adaptation, especially if the source material was not in itself stellar, just as nobody outside academia bothers with the source material of Romeo and Juliet. Casablanca, The Godfather, Kes, LA Confidential: these are films first and foremost. The best adaptations are works that stand alone and succeed on their own terms, regardless of how close or far they are from the original material.

John Le Carré, in his first Smiley novel, describes Smiley thus: 12

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TRuTh in ficTiOn Anthony fAbiAn I’m often asked whether the screenplay for my film Skin, based on the life of Sandra Laing, is adapted from a book. The simple answer is No, but as I’ve often found, the truth, the whole truth, is not only stranger than fiction, but far more complicated.

I first heard Sandra’s extraordinary story – born black to white Afrikaner parents, who were unaware of their black ancestry, in apartheid South Africa – sitting in my kitchen, listening to Radio Four, in July 2000.

The BBC’s blind broadcaster Peter White had gone to South Africa to interview Sandra as part of his series, No Triumph, No Tragedy, exploring the particular forms of prejudice experienced by the disabled.

“No one in their right mind would consider being black a disability,” he reported, “Not until, as in South Africa during apartheid, the whole apparatus of the state was employed to exclude and disempower, in the same way that disability is often said to do.”

Sandra’s testimony left me stunned. For days afterwards, I had a lump in my throat whenever I thought about her story. As a director seeking a strong subject for his first feature film, I recognised its socio-political significance and, perhaps more importantly, its emotional power.

But how to adapt someone’s true life story for the big screen? I began digging, and soon discovered two documentaries that had been made about Sandra – the first in 1977 by the acclaimed filmmaker Antony Thomas: The Search for Sandra Laing; the second, Sandra Laing: A Spiritual Journey, by TV journalist Karien van der Merwe, made in 1998 for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

I also found a wealth of print coverage. Shortly after I heard the BBC radio interview, The Sunday Times published a Relative Values article about Sandra and 20

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adaPTaTiOn fROM a PROduceR’s PeRsPecTive simon relPh As a producer, I prefer to make films that are conceived for the cinema, not adaptations of material originated in another medium. However, financiers and film distributors much prefer adaptations. Thus, despite my own preferences, of the sixteen films I have produced, nine are adaptations. So for instance my first film as a producer, and what might be my last, are adaptations of novels set around the First World War. Filmmaking, even more than politics, is the art of the possible.

The producer’s job is to understand and fight for the best that is possible for his or her film. The marketplace and the collaborators the producer is able attract define the limits of what is possible. In the special case of adaptations, the producer must also consider whether the film rights are available and on what terms.

A well-known source can open the way to substantial money to make the film. A work in which audiences have already demonstrated interest has obvious strengths.

A successful book does not guarantee a successful film, but in a business where, as William Goldman famously observed, “nobody knows anything”, it can give a sense of confidence, of buying a known quantity, not just to financiers but audiences as well. Two of the films with which I have been associated as producer, Damage and the yet to be made Birdsong, are based on bestselling novels with high audience awareness.

The rights to a bestseller can be a curse as well as a blessing. Competition with other producers drives up the price and stiffens the terms of the deal. With a less 31

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events litro events August film might be herAlded As the modern medium, but it’s the Age-old use of story-telling thAt brings it to life.

Without the story We’d hAve no JAmes deAn, olivier, or litro. find our Pick of literAry events, thAt this month come With A film-like tWist. All you need for A culturAl August, edited by Alex JAmes.

All of August, Richard Burton Season, British Film Institute. The Southbank Centre. Burton could read Dylan Thomas with the smoothness of honey easing a Pig Flu-induced sore throat. To mark the twentyfifth anniversary of his death, the BFI present a longoverdue retrospective of Richard Burton’s work with highlights from his entire career, including some of the best ever Shakespeare performances that made it to the screen, see: www.bfi.org.uk 1st August, Frank’s Cafe, 10th-Floor, Peckham Multi-Story Car Park, Peckham. An unlikely place to feature as a bookish landmark, but this month sees the summer opening of a cafe and Campari bar, set among the backdrop to literary greats such as Muriel Spark’s, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, also a spot where William Blake is reported to have childhood visions of angels: www.frankscafe.org.uk 3rd August, Shawshank Redemption, Somerset House Open Air Theatre. There’s hot debate to whether you could call Steven King literary or not, but few could doubt there’s something poetical about this film adaptation of his novel, screened on one of London’s finest screens.

See: see: www.somersethouse.org.uk 8 and 9th of August, The House of Fairy Tales.

Clumber Park, Notts. They’ve been the inspiration of numerous film plots. Go back to the world’s most famous stories with The House of Fairy Tales, an organisation that uses the fairy tale model to provide creative, innovative and transformative learning experiences for young people of all ages. One recommended feature, The Handmade Cinema, lets you act out your own film version of your favourite tale.

events 8th of August, Motown - Dancing in the Streets, Kenwood House. It’s the music that’s inspired contemporary novels such as High Fidelity and even had a few films named in honour of its pop-poetry style lyrics. The record label celebrates its 50th anniversary with a picnic concert at Kenwood House, in the heart of literary Hampstead, home to John Keats who also sees a film launched in honour of his love affair with Fanny Brawne later this year, see: www. picnicconcerts.com/2009 14th to the 27th of August, The Time Traveller’s Wife, Barbican Arts Centre. It was one of the unexpected hit novels of the last year, after first being published in 2003, it launches on the big screen as the adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s best-seller, about a Chicago librarian whose rogue gene causes him to involuntarily leap forwards and backwards through time during his life. See: www.barbican.org.uk 17 August (6.30 pm), WritLoud, RADA Foyer Bar, Malet Street, London WC1E 7JN. A monthly readings event showcasing both new writers from Birkbeck’s Creative Writing courses and established authors. Writers in a range of forms – short story, novel, poetry, life writing – read their work aloud in front of a friendly, supportive audience of students, related-industry professionals and the public in the relaxed, convivial surroundings of the RADA Foyer Bar. Each event features 3-4 current and former students from Birkbeck’s Creative Writing courses plus a guest author. This month it’s Amanda Smyth, one of Waterstone’s New Voices 2009: www.bbk. ac.uk/writloud 27-31 August, Film4 Frightfest, Empire Leicester Square. For more shocks than Bram Stoker. Scare yourself at the 10th London FrightFest. Take your pick from 35 horror and fantasy films – including 11 world premieres and 15 UK premieres. As well as the films themselves, other events include cast meetand-greets, a horror-writing competition, signings and giveaways.

From 31 August. Forget any film reference to Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill, this is the arts centre’s that helped make the London area a world-wide name before Julia Roberts was dowsed in OJ/Coffee. Tabernacle, the

iconic Notting Hill multi arts venue re-opens its doors in time for the famous Carnival with a stellar summer series of music, art, dance, literary and theatrical programming, to celebrate its legacy of championing race relations through the power of the word. See: www.thenottinghillcarnival.com

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