From Issue 7, November 2002:

Tipping The Eng. Lit.

Andrew Davies Interviewed by Nic Ransome

It’s that time of year again. Fast becoming as traditional as Halloween, Guy Fawkes and the London Film Festival, the lavish Andrew Davies literary adaptation is now a firm fixture in the autumn diary. This year, with the added appeal of a BBC / ITV face-off, it could be said that Davies is right at the top of his game. With the niche delights of Tipping The Velvet soon to be a fading  memory, it’s time for the doorstop classics Daniel Deronda and Doctor Zhivago.

Squeezing us into his schedule between Melvyn Bragg (he has finally been, in his own words, ‘Melvyned’) and Deronda’s director Tom Hooper, Davies gave us his thoughts on Bridget Jones, literary dialogue and druidic curses plus a perfectly-formed Hollywood anecdote

Nic Ransome: Could you take us right back to the beginning and tell us about the adaptation process on both Zhivago and Daniel Deronda?

Andrew Davies: Daniel Deronda had a very long genesis. I think I first started looking at it in about 1994/5 straight after I’d done Middlemarch. I took it on holiday with me, read it, came back, wrote a two-page treatment and gave it to Michael Wearing [then Head of Drama Serials at the BBC]. I suggested it would make a nice 2 x 75 minute serial. He agreed and commissioned it and I started writing it, with Louis Marks [who produced Middlemarch] as producer.

Then after I’d done a first draft and maybe one set of revisions, Stephen Evans – who was running Renaissance Films – wanted to have a look at our script because he was interested in doing a film version of Daniel Deronda himself. The upshot of it was that he proposed we go in together and make a film and that the BBC could co-produce it. So I started whittling it down into movie length but trying to set it up as a film never quite seemed to gel. Mike Barker was attached as director at the time. It was difficult. Casting and money kept on falling at the last hurdle. All sorts of people were suggested.

NR: Moving from 2 x 75 minutes to a feature, did you find you had any structural problems?

AD: In terms of what was in the beginning and what was in the end, it stayed substantially the same but we took several radical short cuts in the middle. Some minor characters were brutally chopped down. In essence it’s quite a compact story and really it only has four important characters, so it wasn’t ever going to be one of those big, unwieldy, Dickensian-type BBC serials.

Eventually we managed to reduce it to a script of about 120 minutes that I was quite pleased with, although I feel it would be better if longer. What happened then was that Jane Tranter asked me what I would like to do next. I said I had a couple of languishing movie scripts, of which Deronda was one. Renaissance never owned it so it was mine to take away. Jane said she would do it and put it in that November slot, but she wanted it as a 3 x 1 hour serial. So it was a case of taking the 120-minute script and structuring it into three parts and finding the divisions.

That was reasonably easy because I found my original and put back substantial amounts. I also worked on it with Louis and with director Tom Hooper. It’s come out rather long though, so at the moment it looks like it might be a first episode of 90 minutes followed by two of 60 minutes, which means that Tom Hooper and Louis are going to cut it to those lengths and try to find the episode endings.

NR: So there’s some restructuring going on in the editing room?

AD: Absolutely. I think restructuring in the editing room happens all the time. Many people think that movies are actually made in the editing room. I’m reasonably relaxed about this; I think they’ll do something good. At first they were saying we have four hours worth of material and that made me worry because I thought it was always going to be quite a tight three hours the way I’d written it.

NR: Dialogue is always particularly interesting in terms of a literary adaptation. How did you deal with the dialogue for Deronda?

AD: I used quite a bit from the book. George Eliot was on slightly unfamiliar territory with Deronda. She’s so good at ordinary people’s dialogue but this is rather posh and intellectual, though she was an intellectual herself. There are wonderful key lines for most of the characters that give a real short cut to the nature of that character. I’d take just a few lines and then build around them writing similar lines. The villain of the piece has a wonderfully upper-class, clipped and bored kind of speech, like a sort of malignant version of Darcy. I think it’s a Helen Fielding phrase: ‘He could hardly be bothered to open his mouth to say anything.’

NR: Did you find you could use the same approach with Zhivago?

AD: The trouble is that in the novel there’s virtually no dialogue at all. Or rather the dialogue that is there is dialogue that you don’t want, or can’t use. Pasternak writes these long political arguments between minor characters who don’t appear elsewhere in the book and craftily avoids writing dialogue in any of the crucial scenes. There are exceptions: when Komarovsky comes to find Yuri and Lara towards the end, there’s some good dialogue there, but mostly, no. It was hard graft. Not only was I having to invent dialogue, I was obliged to imagine whole scenes.

NR: Did you find that fulfilling from a writer’s point of view?

AD: It was wonderful. It certainly made me admire the Robert Bolt script. I realised just how much invention he’d had to do. Then I thought there’s a myriad of other lines that can be taken from the book and there’s a great deal of material in it that can be followed up. Since Pasternak didn’t really write any of the major scenes – he didn’t write the meeting or falling in love scenes for Yuri or Lara or Komarovsky’s seduction – it was up to me to do it.

NR: Was there any unexpected cross-fertilisation between the two projects or did you work on them completely separately?

AD: I did most of Zhivago before the final writing on Deronda. I do find that when working on several of these scripts, there’s a danger of thinking of the leading female characters as the same person: Gwendolen, Lara, Molly [Wives and Daughters], Nan [Tipping the Velvet] etc. But there are similarities. I’ve done some things with Lara. I’ve made her much less of an innocent prim virgin than Julie Christie’s portrayal. Of course she’s a virgin but there are some nice little suggestions in the book from Pasternak that she is hungry to learn about life and eager to learn from Komarovsky everything he can teach her.

I have her making the first move. He takes her out on a rather gentle exploratory first date of what would be hundreds before he would really make his first move. I have her saying: ‘All right, I’ll do it. What do you do? Get a private room? You must have done this before.’ So she’s almost shocking him. Then when she finds out what it’s really like… She really is a kind of innocent.

CONT. in Issue 7.