Literati to glitterati
It should be simple, right? Take a great book and make a great film. If only. Jonathon Rodgers finds out why it's rather more complicated than that
Candy stars Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish with Davies (middle)
James Bogle sounds like a man at the end of his rope. The West Australia-based director is in the final stages of post-production on Elise - a new Australian drama starring petite ex-pat pop star Natalie Imbruglia. Adapted from Georgia Blaine's Closed for Winter, Bogle began working on the film nine years ago.
"It's been a marathon," he admits. "Making a novel into a film is only enjoyed by the mentally afflicted. You need to want to do it more than anything else in your life."
Adaptation may not always be as painful as Bogle makes out. Sydney screenwriter Pip Karmel, who has just finished re-working Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders, admits that she was obsessed with "not wrecking" the story. "The novel had way too much in it for a film. But that was the challenge. It wasn't a particularly difficult birth."
"The most important thing to preserve is the intention of the author," she adds. "It was a great relief to finally give a copy of the screenplay to Geraldine Brooks. Fortunately she gave it her blessing."
Los Angeles-based Sydney writer Luke Davies has been on both sides of the process. When his novel Candy - based on his experience as a heroin addict - was optioned for a film treatment, Davies demanded a turn at adaptation. Working with director Neil Armfield, he stripped Candy to its core. "The guy is brilliant," Davies says of Armfield. "I learned about compression, economy and moving quickly. In a novel you can explore east and west as well as north and south. A film is very north-south."
There are almost as many different approaches to adaptation as there are books that would make good films. Some screenwriters map out a pared down version, then build on that skeleton. James Bogle takes the full immersion approach.
"When I read a book I like, the first step for me is to do a massive re-write of the whole book as I imagine it," he revealed to Time Out.
Karmel agrees. "I annotate everything that happens in the book. But I also try to nut out a structure and essential plot points. I have to kind of deconstruct a sense of what the essential story is."
"The second part of the process," according to Bogle, "is structure. Because the demands of filmmaking slowly impact on the book." Karmel concurs. "I'm not looking for the cinema, so much as the story that grabbed me when I first read it," she explains. "Hopefully that will grab the cinema audience as well."
There are times, as in the case of Candy, when the book is more of a springboard. "The film's emotional texture and tone are really similar to the book," says Davies, "but there are all sorts of other differences."
In the novel, for instance, Davies spent several chapters establishing what a heroin addiction feels like.
"Everything is innocent and beautiful as it heads towards being completely fucked up," Davies explains. But the feeling didn't translate onto the screen until Armfield and Davies boiled it down into the scene, early in the film, where the characters are hitting up inside a car going through a carwash. "They are enjoying the weirdness of the car wash, laughing at the big brushes," says Davies today. "But that scene doesn't exist in the book at all."
James Bogle believes the novel eventually infects the screenwriter.
"By the third part of the process I've got so far into the writer's head I'm starting to write the same way. That's always an interesting alchemy, and that's when I start writing new dialogue, and changing dialogue."
"It's completely different to writing your own stuff," Karmel weighs in. "You are starting out with this fantastic resource rather than a blank page. You've got room to be creative but you already have a solid base. It's like collaborating with a silent partner."
In the final analysis, says Bogle, "you have to be brutal in order to make a book fit 100 minutes of film. When people read a book and then say, ‘The film is not like how I imagined it to be' - that's because they didn't fucking direct it!"