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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Was it a good risk?
Sure, it paid off in the sense that I feel like what I set out to do was accomplished. Tackling the period from two points of view, that is a very immediate thing to me. It's not precious. These people don't know they're in a period film, they're just alive, and feeling these emotions. You want to get the manners and the mores right -- the look of the hat, all of those things -- but it would be a pretty hollow exercise if that's all you cared about, was to get the carriages going in the right direction. You have to make the emotional points. That's what really interested me. And the two separate relationships.
And that's the through line, that's the line I used to sell myself to Warner Brothers initially: "Look, I may not be the obvious choice for this material, but I think I'm a good one because it's about two sets of people who are in love and in relationships at least, and things happen to them where they're emotionally tested. And I have continued to write about that, not just as a filmmaker, but as a playwright, sometimes as a short story writer."
You can always hire people to do the rest. You can hire a costume designer. But believe me, you don't want just costumes. You really want to believe in the predicaments of these people. [Warner Bros.] seemed to believe that and I set about doing it. Also, there are a couple of highly questionable nasty boys along the way, who seem to fit my interests. Not that I look for stories with just bad men -- they just happen to show up.
How much convincing did it take with the studio?
It took a bit of dancing and singing, and I don't sing and dance well. It was the volume, I think, of singing and dancing. It really exponentially grows from the kind of project it is, to how much money the project is going to cost. Had this been a little small endeavor, relatively small compared to a studio's thinking, there probably wouldn't be as much hand-wringing about it as for, say, something that's $25 million.
It's a bigger investment, so there's more curiosity, more interest about it. It either happens or it doesn't. You just hope for the best. In this case, Warner Bros. said yes, but they wanted to work with another studio and split the costs. That was their safety valve. Another safety valve, I'm sure, was the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow. That made complete sense to them. On all the fronts we could come up with -- period film, romantic film, someone who's done a dialect, someone who's had success at the box office, has personal success -- all of those things were green lights.
What was it like adapting a book for film?
It was hard. At the base of it, it was a book I respected as a fan. And you have a living author that you don't want to let down. I didn't want her to look at it and go, "Well what was it about it that you loved? Because you decimated it. I recognize the title."
The book had been optioned about 10 years before I started at Warner Bros. We had the benefit of where everybody else had gone before. But the key was seeing this series of notes, from A.S. Byatt, in response to earlier drafts of other writers. For someone who doesn't write screenplays, she seemed to really know what a movie was. She was able to say, "Look, it can't be like the book; Roland cannot be the same kind of character that he was on the page of the book."
We wanted to be, not reverential, but certainly respectful of the book. And yet we knew there were great episodes that would be lost and characters who would not exist any longer. The mandate was sort of to get the spirit of the thing. Of course you just want to make a good movie that people enjoy, but for that next layer of people who have read the novel, you want them to say, "Yeah, they got it." That's pretty key.
There are such rabid fans of the book, that even during production, I was getting e-mails (how they got my e-mail I don't know; it speaks to their tenacity) questioning my choices. It becomes a bit of a bible to them. So if it's different than on the page, they say it's wrong. Whereas A.S. Byatt was much more open to changes.
