The Art of Screen Adaptation by Alistair Owen

Author:Alistair Owen [Owen, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Film and TV, Non-Fiction, Screen Adaptation
ISBN: 9780857302281
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2020-03-26T19:11:28+00:00

Olivia Hetreed

Olivia Hetreed was born in 1961 in Wells, Somerset.

Her screen adaptation credits include: The Treasure Seekers (1996, novel by E. Nesbit); The Canterville Ghost (1997, story by Oscar Wilde); What Katy Did (1999, novel by Susan Coolidge); Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003, novel by Tracy Chevalier); Canterbury Tales – The Man of Law’s Tale (2003, after Chaucer); Wuthering Heights (2011, novel by Emily Brontë); and three novels in Caroline Lawrence’s The Roman Mysteries series (2007).

Girl with a Pearl Earring was 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?

The opportunity to get an insight into something different is definitely part of the attraction of an adaptation for me. On the other hand, there are things I’ve looked at where I’ve thought, ‘I don’t have anything to add to this world.’ You’re quite bound in by the material and whatever research you do beyond it, so it’s a question of how tight that world feels. I did an Indian adaptation recently, set at a particular moment in recent Indian history, and the book is so fantastic and expansive that I could simply go into the writer’s world and it was all there. If it had been a much sparer story I would have been quite anxious about it, but the book was a brilliant guide to what I was trying to do. You can also sometimes tell a story because it’s an adaptation that you wouldn’t necessarily be allowed to tell if it were just a standalone piece. I’m thinking particularly of an adaptation I did of The Man of Law’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales. That gave me permission to put a story about Nigerian refugees on BBC primetime which never would have got there if it wasn’t pretending to be Chaucer.

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

No, I think it’s remarkably the same. It’s like building a house. If you’re doing an adaptation, there was already a house there and you knock most of it down and rebuild it. If you’re doing an original, you have to dig the foundations and put in the services and then build the house. So that initial work is very different because you’re trying to find the story – and sometimes that’s an all-encompassing, totally created world from a novel, and sometimes that’s just a newspaper story – but then the actual process of writing the script is not that different.

Do you always agree a mission statement or direction of travel with whoever has commissioned the adaptation?

More and more. I didn’t always realise the need for that, but it’s incredibly important to know that you both want to make the same film, and I’m very keen on doing lots of preparatory work to make sure that we are, so that when they get the script they’re not astonished and go, ‘We didn’t think it would be like this.

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