Making an Elephant by Graham Swift

Author:Graham Swift [Swift, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27235-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Jirí Wolf, Prague, December 1988.

FILMING THE FENS

NORFOLK AND TWICKENHAM, 1991

The days are gone, if they ever really existed, when to have a novel adapted for film was like being touched by the gods. And anyway the gods can have a clumsy touch. For every successful movie adaptation—however one defines that—there are lists of clunkers that must have made the authors shudder. The analogy should really be the other way round. The books come first and it’s the authors who are the gods to whom the film industry, with a massive inferiority complex about its own creative initiative, has to come beseeching. But try suggesting that to the film industry. And it’s certainly not how it feels to the godlike but perhaps near-destitute author when the movie people knock on the door. The instances of authors being launched into the stratosphere by a movie adaptation are rare. Among my own author-friends, Michael Ondaatje is the outstanding example, but I’m not sure that I envy Michael. Anthony Minghella’s hugely successful film of The English Patient put into worldwide circulation oceans of copies of Michael’s book, but in the long run it also swamped it. Minghella, to his credit, made a good film of a novel that was by no means an obvious or easy choice for adaptation, but the book is more wonderful than the film, though it’s now very hard to extricate it from the film’s phenomenal success. It’s even harder to extricate from the film the other work of a writer who, by the time The English Patient was published and won the Booker Prize (another fact that the film has rather made forgotten), had already published two other superb novels and a memoir. And how many people, if they equate the words English Patient with a book or an author at all, would know that Michael Ondaatje has also written almost a dozen volumes of poetry?

When Jeremy Irons put himself up to star with Meryl Streep in Karel Reisz’s film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it was clearly going to be a big-number production of an already highly successful novel. When, ten years later, he agreed to star in the film of Waterland, something he very much wanted to do, it was clearly going to be a low-budget operation which, but for Irons’s participation, might never have happened at all. I’m not sorry that the filming of Waterland was a modest undertaking (of a difficult task) or even that the film wasn’t a great success. It certainly didn’t swamp the book for me (a rather water-filled book anyway), and, looking back, what I feel is that, despite an inauspicious start, I had a good time during the making of it which I might never have had if it had got the really big treatment—or, of course, if it had never been filmed at all.

I’ve been generally lucky with the movies. I’m, manifestly, not a purist: I let my work be filmed, though I try to be careful in doing so.

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