Screenwriter John Romano knows a thing or two about adaptation. In addition to bringing Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer and Nicholas Sparks’ Nights in Rodanthe to the big screen, he’s also a college professor and published author himself.

His latest film is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, directed by and starring Ewan McGregor. Also starring Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning, the story takes place in the 1960s, and is about a stand-up middle class man and his struggle to reconnect with his politically rebellious daughter.

Roth’s novels are not the easiest of materials to adapt. But as an academic, Romano used his literary background to see him through a challenging adaptation process that lasted years and resulted in dozens of drafts. And at the end of the day, he seems to have loved the experience, whilst Roth himself was happy with the final product.

Creative Screenwriting talked to Romano about the challenges of adapting Philip Roth, identifying the central through line of a story, collaboration on set, and the importance of the spoken word.

Tell me about the adaptation of this book in particular. I understand that Roth is a bit of a challenge to adapt.

That’s a great question. What’s funny about it for me is that I started out at as an academic, teaching novels and writing and reviewing them. I taught at Columbia. So I was an academic until I fell into the wrong company and started writing movies!

But back in those days, I used to teach Roth. And I carried around the opinion when it came out that American Pastoral was his best book. I also thought that it was the great American novel. People are always saying “What is the great American novel?” – I think this is.

Those are things I thought before anyone asked me to adapt it. So I went in with an almost exalted opinion of the book. But then I started thinking about it as a movie and the challenge was that in addition to it being a great novel, it’s one that sprawls in many directions. Richly.

There’s a lot about urban America, the blue collar crash, World War II…There are things which I loved. Now would they find their way onto the screen?

What I decided to do – and I’d adapted novels before, like The Lincoln Lawyer and Nights in Rodanthe – and what I knew to do, especially in this case, with such a widely-flung novel, was I had to find that through line which was essentially cinematic. And by that I think I mean visual and emotional.

I found that the through line – which is very much Roth’s central theme, and it’s obvious when you think of it – is the powerful, universal father-daughter story, with a wife and mother jammed tragically in the crossfire. But essentially it’s the father-daughter love story, the way King Lear is a story about Lear and Cordelia.

That is the emotional backbone of the novel, I believe. The decision I had to make, which is always hard, was to say to myself that anything in the novel that did not really serve that through line wasn’t going to make it onto the page and then onto the screen.

Some of those things I didn’t mind, they were speculative and philosophical and interesting in their own way, but I didn’t mind saying “that’s not part of the movie”.

Other things I loved, you know? But if they didn’t end up really serving that central triangle of Swede-Merry-Dawn (the characters played by McGregor, Fanning and Connelly), then they weren’t going to be included. That was the hardest type and kind of decision to make, it always is.

But if you pull that through line out, if you center on Swede’s relation to his daughter and his marriage, a lot of things come with it. Politics come with it, because that’s the occasion for Merry’s rebellion. The Newark Riots come with it, with all their relevance and pertinence to what’s going on now in Baltimore and so forth: that comes with it, because that’s when Merry takes a stand in his face and declares her own commitment to revolution.

So when you choose that central through line, it’s not as if you’re dumping everything else. Some things become even more necessary and urgent. Then you write them and shoot them and act them in a way that serves this what I’m calling “emotional through line of the novel”.

I still regret some of the wonderful pages of things that I loved and that did not make it into the screenplay…but that is the reason. The movie can tell one story thoroughly, and that was the choice that we made. It happened to be exactly what the producers thought and exactly what Ewan McGregor thought. So we all had in common this focus on the father-daughter story.

Although as I say, it brought a lot of the richness of the novel with it. Of course not all.

How long was the process?

Well, all of these decisions that we’re talking about – it’s all about the “leaving out” business. It’s been said that that’s what screenwriting is, when you’re adapting. Once those decisions were made, the first draft did not take a long time; it may have taken me about two months.

But I have to tell you there were 30 or 40 revisions. And by revisions, I mean versions of the movie by me – not just fixing a line here and there or pressing a little asterisk. This was over the dozen years that I was busy writing this, through various directors, various incarnations…the movie went through that many versions on the page. So obviously what I’m describing is arduous and consuming if you’re a writer who cares about his stuff.

But to initially put it on the page? First of all, I had tremendous respect for Philip Roth’s language. And I had a lot of confidence that it would play on the screen. When I sit there and hear Jennifer Connelly say these lines, I feel very justified in those choices. So the language was there to help me, once I chose the scenes.

There was one very important thing I learned, which I had not experienced or deployed elsewhere in my career: with the right actor and the right words (and I say Philip Roth’s words), a speech can be a page, a page and a quarter, a page and a half.

We have three or four such speeches. The camera goes to Dawn when she’s in the sanatorium and she tells a story. That story fills more than one typed sheet on Final Draft.

Very often you say to yourself “I can’t hand in a script with speeches that are a page-and-a-half long,” but everyone knew that that was the strength of the book. This gorgeous language of Philip Roth’s needed to be there to create these characters with us and for us.

So we let it rip. We trusted the length of those speeches…although in Screenwriting 101, the teacher would tell you “maybe you can get by with six lines and then hit the Shift key and get on to something else”. But this movie required a love of language in transcribing, it required that from the actors…and it commands it out of the audience – I think they’re having a good time with those rich speeches.

That’s a very particular aspect of the screenwriting of American Pastoral. To trust that kind of length.

I understand that you were very involved in the filming process as well. What was that like, and were there many edits you had to make to the script during filming?

I wasn’t involved in editing at all, but I was on the set for weeks and weeks into the shooting – and before, as the actors were preparing.

There were a couple of things about that. One is that Ewan is a tremendously collaborative director. He’s very much the boss, and he’s very much in charge. But he does want your input.

If you’re an actor or a cinematographer or a writer, he wants to know why you’re making the choices you’re making, he wants to discuss those choices with you, he wants to say “yes” or “no”…And he had lived with the script for a long time. He had been on as an actor before he was director. So with the Swede part, I think we had our fewest discussions. He owned the Swede that was on the page and in the book.

Everyone knew the book. Jennifer Connelly and Peter Riegert showed up having not only signed on with the screenplay, but knowing the novel. Jennifer was an English major in her time and would come to me, maybe knowing that I taught literature, and we would have discussions about the book.

She never wanted to discuss her role with me – that’s not our job as screenwriters. But she would want to talk about things like “where does this scene come from? You do it differently than in the book” or “this isn’t the way it is in the book”. Or she’d say “Can I say this, which is in the book?” to which I would always say “Ask Ewan!”

But we worked together from the character that Roth had given us. I think it’s one of the things I’m proudest of in the movie. It’s very much a result of Jennifer having the book under her arm and wanting to understand the decisions that I made in adapting it – and therefore, in terms of her role, adapting it with me.

The spirit of the director’s inclusion is what you need in order to operate that way. Otherwise everyone’s staking their turf on the set – “that’s my decision, that’s my power”. Ewan made it something we were all doing together. I think that we all benefitted from that – and enjoyed the heck out of it.

You have a long history of television work. What did you learn from those early days, through your work on such series as Hill Street Blues?

I was very lucky to work with people like David Milch early on, and I learned a great deal. TV taught me how to write movies.

In TV there are a tremendous amount of revisions. You have a writer’s room and you’re all passing around our revision from last night. You’re all marking each other’s copies up – nothing to do with rank or class, that’s just how a good show runs. You’re paying for five minds around the table and you get work out of them.

I learned from the best – from Steven Bochco, David Milch, David Kelley and so forth. I always wanted everyone kicking in. So I think it taught me early on that I was in a very collaborative medium. That if I wanted to just hear my own voice, see it on the page, put it on the shelf, I should be writing poems or novels. Which is I guess what we all start out thinking as writers when we’re young.

I also learned that there are many ways to do a scene. There’s a constant revision going on as you write television. That was very useful in writing American Pastoral, a book that offered so many interpretations.

Also, I worked with and was taught by really good writers. You can’t get better than David Milch or Steven Bochco or David Kelley. I learned that what people really wanted to hear was how people speak. It wasn’t about delivering the cleverest line that you’re capable of thinking up. You want to ask yourself “how would she react? What would she say?” Even if it’s inelegant and sort of off the point…what actual sounds come out of people’s mouths?

In those days on television and with shows like Hill Street Blues, there was a house style of dictating into a word processor, with an assistant who was typing like mad. She would hear us say the speech out loud – and sometimes saying it out loud, it would come out differently than you would put it on the page. You wanted it the way it came out of your mouth, because that’s how it was going to play out because that’s how life is lived.

So I learned to make your language be the language that people speak. Now in the case of the people in American Pastoral, there are some peculiarities of speech. It’s very much a New Jersey accent, an East Coast sound. The repetitions, the emphases were there and I learned to say it aloud.

And as a strong piece of advice to people who get involved in adaptations, see if there’s a good version of your book on tape. There was a wonderful version of American Pastoral recorded by the late actor Ron Silver. Ewan and I drove around in our cars listening to the book, even well after we had drafts and were making the movie. We’d still have the spoken sound of this language in our ears from the tape. It made a tremendous difference in rendering the actuality of human speech.

That’s a very important thing. A lot of beginning screenwriters are trying to blow you away with a well-turned phrase. That’s fine and you admire their talent…but you have a funny feeling that you’re not watching a real-life comedy or a real-life drama. I think there are many wonderful young screenwriters who seem to know this. But it’s something I specifically learned from writing television.

What advice could you offer our readers?

The first three pieces of advice I have are read, read, read. You are in the business of language. Other people are in charge of the camera, other people are in charge of donuts on the set. The director’s in charge of everything. Your profession is a profession of words. And the only way you’ll get there is just by stuffing your brain with novels, history, essays. So the first three are read, read and read.

The fourth piece of advice is find and get to know how your favorite movies work. Whenever I think about great screenwriting, it’s a slightly different list than my favorite movies. Some movies you end up liking for reasons that have much more to do with the visual experience or the director and so forth. But I always turn back to the screenplays that meant the most to me.

One is The Philadelphia Story. Another is A Few Good Men. Not a perfect movie, but it sure is a perfect screenplay. Also, the screenplays by Harold Pinter – and I have a particular favorite that people don’t know, which is The Go-Between, starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie.

I will say that when I saw that movie (as a stuffy academic) and felt the screenplay behind it – it’s an adaptation from a not-very-good novel, but it’s a splendid movie – I suddenly realized that screenwriting was essentially a literary profession. I had not thought so. I thought the screenwriter was sort of carrying water for the director and the actors. At that moment, I realized that putting words on a page could make a movie. That it’s a very proud profession and that there are times when it’s the star of the movie and no good movie can proceed without it.

Seeing that movie, for whatever reason, meant to me that I could take my literary background and become and television screenwriter.

So those three movies come to mind and they’re very diverse – one’s a comedy, one’s a military drama, the other’s a powerful romance. But between those three I had lots of ways to write television and movies. And that would be my fourth piece of advice.

Featured image: Ewan McGregor as Swede Levov and Jennifer Conelly as Dawn Levov in American Pastoral. Photo by Richard Foreman – © 2016 – Lionsgate

[addtoany]

Before You Go