INTERVIEWS

“I’m not a big lover of fantasy, generally.” Peter Harness on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

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By Ramona Zacharias.

Peter Harness

Peter Harness

It’s not often you hear a body of work referred to as “unfilmable” these days.

But that was precisely the reputation attached to Susanna Clarke’s epic novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. A ten-year effort for the author herself, this 1000-page story of two magicians in Napoleonic England is renowned for its complexity and attention to the minutest detail in terms of language, style and genre.  There are also some 200 footnotes, sometimes taking up entire pages, in which Clarke references an entire backstory of magic that she created.

So screenwriter Peter Harness (Wallander, Doctor Who: Kill the Moon) had his work cut out for him when it came to adapting the novel for a BBC One miniseries. Starring Bertie Carvel, Eddie Marsan and Marc Warren, the series is already underway in the UK and premiers in the US on June 13 via BBC America. I recently spoke with Harness about his approach to such a seemingly overwhelming task and how critical it was to have constant collaboration amongst all members of the production team throughout.

Paul Kaye as Vinculus in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Paul Kaye as Vinculus in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Tell me about the immensity of this project and how you went about tackling it.

It was a very challenging thing to do, but I was looking forward to it because I love the book so much. And I was looking forward to trying to turn a book that had been called “unfilmable” into something that could be filmed.

As for how I went about it, technically I split the book up into chunks and worked out where each episode would begin and end. We had initially been offered six parts, but I’d been writing it for a few weeks when I realized I wasn’t going to manage to get it all into six. So I asked for another and they gave me one. I did pretty much what I always do when I’m adapting something, which is basically take the book to pieces and build up the dramatic structure behind it; then graft all of the memorable bits and things that people will remember from the book back onto a dramatic storyline. If I’m adapting something, I always try to make it feel like the experience of reading the book. Even if the same things don’t happen or things happen for different reasons or not in the same order…I try to make it feel like the book, to make it honor its spirit. Which was a joy to do with Strange and Norrell, really.

Did Susanna collaborate with you on any of the episodes?

Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke

No, she didn’t. She was very supportive of it, but she wasn’t involved in the writing process…aside from sending us a very nice letter just before we started, telling us to beware of getting involved with Mr Norrell and Mr Strange! She said “they’re very vain and very ungrateful and they won’t thank you at all, so it will be hard work”. And I think there have been times when we’ve all thought that perhaps we should have taken her advice!

But she read the shooting scripts after we had them ready and she was very nice about it. She, Toby (Haynes, director), Nick (Hirschkorn, producer) and I all got together for dinner before we went to start filming and that was a very nice experience. She came to set and loved it, so she was quite often there. She was interested and very happy, but I think she feels a little bit distant from it now. It’s from ten years ago for her and I think she’s delighted that it’s happened – but feels like a different world now.

Going back to the letter she wrote to you, what did you enjoy the most about working with these very unique characters with such strong personalities?

They are such good characters that they just walk straight out of the book towards you. And Susanna’s dialogue is so good. Some novelists are quite bad at writing dialogue and often there’s very little of it from the book that makes it onto the screen. Susanna’s dialogue is really beautiful, so I tried to keep a lot of it. Her characters speak in such wonderful rhythms… it was just a joy to write all of them. I don’t really have a favorite character because they’re all funny in their different ways.

There were some that surprised me about how good fun they were to write; I loved writing the Duke of Wellington. We had to invent a fair bit for his sequence and he’s so rude and abrupt. There’s also a minor character who turns up in Episode 5… a beer brewer from Nottinghamshire, who I just found hysterically funny – I loved him so much that I brought him back in Episodes 6 and 7 as well.

But I really love all the characters. They’re all good fun to write in their different ways. Particularly the challenge of Mr Norrell… if you’ve read the book, you really feel for him, actually. Even though he’s a grotesquely unsympathetic character, you come out of the book loving him. I really wanted anyone watching it to come out of the series loving him as well. That was a hard thing to convey when you don’t have access to his inner voice or thoughts like the novel does – or the narrative voice. But I think we’ve managed it.

I think Arabella, Lady Pole and Stephen Black are rather underrepresented in the book, but on purpose. Part of the story is about the vague glimmerings of the female emancipation movement and also the end of slavery and the racial equality movement. That’s a very subtle but strong part of the book and I wanted to preserve that as well. That was a very important part of doing it.

Eddie Marsan as Mr Norrell in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Eddie Marsan as Mr Norrell in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Let’s talk about the infamous footnotes in the novel. Did they lead to further research and how helpful were they in understanding the history, setting and characters?

They were very helpful. Having those made it feel like if you opened a door, there’d be a whole world of magic and a whole history of it to go out and explore. I used a lot of the footnotes in different ways to provide a little more information and to help make the world feel authentic. They really helped in the “world building” of it. What we always wanted to do, actually, was send people in the direction of the book if they hadn’t read it. Of course we thought about seeing if we could have an extra program or something similar to cover some of the more interesting footnotes, but in the end it was far too much work just to get the series done itself! So we regretfully let go of that. But I think they’re preserved in their way and if anybody wants to explore the world in more depth and understand some of the things that we allude to, they’ve got this wonderful 1000-page encyclopedia of magic that they can go and read!

You’ve worked in film, theatre, stand-alone television episodes and obviously miniseries. In this particular case, was the seven-hour window enough or did you still struggle with keeping or cutting certain elements?

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

Actually, the seven was enough; the way that we looked at it was as a seven-hour movie. A definite story with a “once upon a time” beginning and a reasonably (or not particularly) “happily ever after” ending. So it felt as though it was its right length. I felt I needed seven and not eight, because it quite distinctly broke into dramatic sections. Each episode has its own tone and moves the story on in a different way.

Personally I don’t feel that we’ve lost a lot, and I think if we’d made it longer – ten or fifteen or twenty-two parts – we would have sacrificed a lot of the energy of it. I think that’s also been the challenge of it – to make that long book, which takes its time and is very leisurely, into something that is a compelling piece of drama.

So had it been longer, it would have been a lot more leisurely and things might have happened over a much greater period of time, but we also would have had to invent a lot more. For instance, when Jonathan Strange goes away to war, we follow him in the book for something like two or three years. And we’ve no idea what’s going on back in London. So for the parts of the series where Strange is away, we had to rationalize, think through and restructure what it is that’s going on with the other characters. That was probably one of the hardest bits to do – when we were creating new material, to get it right and make it feel as though Susanna had written it herself. If we’d made it longer, we’d have had to do much more of that and in a way, it would have been much less authentic.

I’m happy with it and it feels as though we’ve done it justice at seven; I don’t think it would have borne being really long unless we’d completely reimagined how we were going to approach it.

The novel was known for its remarkable realism in a world of fantasy. How did you go about balancing fantasy with realism for the screen?

I’m not a big lover of fantasy, generally. I don’t read too much fantasy literature and I don’t watch a hell of a lot of fantasy. Primarily because it can be extremely alienating and often loaded with mythology and this sort of “the Seventh Son has lost his magical sword and become the King of the Elves” and so on. All of these mythologies that you have to understand before you can actually get anywhere near it.

The great thing about this book is that it’s very real. It’s in a real world, but more than that, it’s dealing with real human beings with very tangible failings and desires. It was very important as we were going along to carefully try and think ourselves into “If this actually happened to me, or to any human being, how would that feel?” That’s a hard thing to do, because you don’t quite know how you would feel! But of course you can find analogies.

For instance, when Lady Pole is brought back to life and for all the world it seems as though she’s mad. That was a common experience that women had at that time. We really wanted to bring across the horror of that, of being thought mad. It’s basically trying to find the real experience and let the characters lead you through the story. The fact that it’s quite a lavish BBC One costume drama and the fact that it has magic and special effects in it… those were really secondary considerations. We only used those elements when we felt that they were making a contribution to the story or the journey of the characters. It’s all about the people, really.

Tell me about working on projects that have a cult following, particularly in fantasy. I know you’ve done some Doctor Who already and you’re doing more… how do you approach such material?

You can’t think about it, really! I think Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has a different kind of cult following to Doctor Who. It doesn’t have the kind of organized, massive fandom that Doctor Who does. And I also knew that we were all very big fans of the book, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who loved it more than Toby, Nick and myself, and many of the actors as well. So I wasn’t worried that we weren’t going to honor it, and I thought that we’d probably take the fans with us. So it wasn’t too daunting in that way.

Doctor Who is daunting, primarily because I am one of those fans. I’ve always loved Doctor Who and the weight of your own expectation is quite heavy. I’m aware of what can happen if people don’t like your story and of the huge fifty-year history of good stories and bad stories… and the thought of writing an absolute turkey is horrifying! So it’s primarily the self-inflicted terror of it.

Unfortunately – and it’s not just writing cult shows like Doctor Who, it’s writing anything – you have to develop quite a tough second skin. Find a way to let it slide off you and not interfere with your work too much. Which can be hard, but I don’t think there’s any other way to do it. Just look at what’s in front of you on the page and try and make it as good as you can.

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who in Doctor Who: Kill the Moon

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who in Doctor Who: Kill the Moon

With Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, there are so many intricacies at play in terms of style, genre and themes… how did you want the finished product to look such that it honored the original but had your own signature?

It was a very big collaborative effort so it’s not just my stamp on it. Toby, Nick and I really were a team on it. We were all on it from day one, right through to the end. Because I don’t think any of us would have gotten through it – it was such a punishing schedule and a hard thing to do. We all needed to be together, helping each other out and chipping in with ideas at every stage.

So I don’t feel that kind of sense of ownership of it. I feel that there was the three of us as the sort of core team of it, plus Susanna’s book, plus everybody who started to come in as we were going through – all of the designers, technicians and actors. You always say this on any project, but everybody really brought their A-game to this. And it was grueling, but everybody committed to it. I think they all sensed that those around them were doing their best work and they raised their games accordingly. So it feels like a really wonderful team effort and like a lot of people crafted it. I suppose that’s how I think of it now – I look at it and I think “A lot of people have done a really good job on that”. I’m very proud of them and of the finished product. To whatever level I’ve contributed to it, I’m also quite proud of myself.

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Movie aficionado, television devotee, music disciple, world traveller. Based in Toronto, Canada.

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