By Carlos Aguilar.
David Nicholls
Fascinated by the lavish and intricate characters of Victorian novels, British author and screenwriter David Nicholls has been successful at adapting several of them for the screen both in TV and film. In contrast, however, his books deal with contemporary narratives, which sometimes differ in tone from the classics he loves. Particularly interesting is the fact that Nicholls has had the chance to adapt his own novels for the screen in what might be the closest thing to a seamless transition from source material to screenplay. Both of these processes of adaption present their individual obstacles and satisfactions. Understandably, Nicholls considers the attachment to his own stories the most difficult barrier for objectivity.
Reimagining Thomas Hardy’s exquisite 19th century love story was a struggle between his desire to be truthful to the material, rediscovering the characters and rendering them as current as possible, and toning down the melodramatic aspects that would not work for today’s audiences.
In this in-depth interview with David Nicholls, the writer talks about numerous aspects and challenges in creating his version of Far from the Madding Crowd for Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg to direct.
Matthias Schoenaerts as Gabriel Oak and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Before Far from the Madding Crowd you’ve adapted other classic works like Great Expectations, but you’ve also adapted your own books into screenplays. What’s the main difference between translating a well-known work and one of your own works for the screen?
I’ve done it three times now, Tess for TV, then Great Expectations, and now Madding Crowd, and they are all favorite books of mine. They are books I’ve loved since I was a teenager, so I think part of the process is digging back into them and rediscovering what you loved about them, what makes them special, why they stayed with you. With my own work, which I’ve done twice now, is more much harder to be objective or to step away.
It’s a very tricky process to adapt your own book because when you wrote the novel you saw the movie in your head. The novel is already a transcription of the story in your head, the way the characters look, the way they behave, and the way the dialogue sounds. With adapting a classic you are working from the page and there is a sort of obligation to be true to the spirit of the novel if not to every twist and turn. I think you have to respect what people love about that book and honor it, but at the same time give your own take on the material. If you gave the same novel to twenty different scriptwriters you’d get twenty wildly different versions of the story. That’s what’s fascinating about it.
In both instances, whether adapting a classic or your own novel, there is always the pain of leaving some material out, that’s the harshest thing. And in both cases, there is also this tricky thing of somehow transcribing the characters and the voices, their emotions and thoughts. That’s always the trickiest thing, especially with 19th century novels because with someone like Hardy the character might convey nothing, but it’s all in the description of how the character thinks and feels. No action, no dialogue.
In Far From the Madding Crowd each of the four main characters have a chapter in which Hardy tell you what they’re like. He tells you about their background, their philosophy, their feelings, their emotions, none of it is useable dramatically, but all of is vital. That’s always a challenge with a 19th century novel because they were written before screenwriting, before film. Even if the novels can sometimes be extraordinarily cinematic, they are also often concern with the precise workings of the characters’ inner lives. With these classics finding a way to get them onto the screen is terrifically difficult.
With Far from the Madding Crowd there were two source materials, the novel and the 1967 film. Did you go back to both of these to create your version?
I grew up with that movie and it’s a movie that I like very much. When you take on great novels, which was also the same case with Great Expectations, there are several versions of these stories and there always will be. It’s like Hamlet, there are any number of interpretations and I’m sure there will be more in the future as well.
In the case of all three adaptations I’ve done from classic texts, I’ve consciously decided not to revisit previous film versions while at the same time having pretty good knowledge of the previous versions. I love John Schlesinger as a director, and I particularly like his work with screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who wrote the 1967 version of Far from the Madding Crowd. I wrote my version with admiration, but also wanting to do something different, wanting to place the emphasis elsewhere. My knowledge of those films comes from my memories of those films. I wanted to go back to the original text. I didn’t rewatch those films, but at the same time they are burnt into my memory. It’s not that I think John Schlesinger and Frederic Raphael got it wrong [laughs], but it’s very much a product of its time. It’s about as 1960s as a movie can get, and none the worse for it. But we wanted to do something pretty different.
Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene and Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)
When working with a classic tale like this, how do you make it your own while still keeping the essentials intact? What do you get rid of and what do you try to reinvent?
Another distinction between Schlesinger and our version is running time. Schlesinger is about over 2 and half hours, and I knew that we wouldn’t have all that time. When I did Tess for TV I had 4 hours to do it, which I loved doing. With Madding Crowd in two hours we had to make some pretty severe cuts both at the script stage and in post-production, that was one of the hardest things. The novel is much more of an ensemble novel, to put on the screen we had to focus on four or five central characters, and to really put Bathsheba at the center of the story.
In the novel the viewpoint keeps switching and you hear the story from the viewpoint of five different characters. With our version we tried to stick primarily to Bathsheba and Gabriel’s viewpoint, there are exceptions, but there are very few scenes that don’t feature either Bathsheba or Gabriel. When I reread the novel I remembered the Schlesinger being about the love story between Bathsheba and Troy. While reading I was fascinated by Troy, but it struck me that the novel is about Bathsheba and Gabriel.
They are the characters on the first page and they are the characters on the last page, and both of them go on a huge journey. There was a very conscious decision to make this version about these two characters, about their love story, and about the changes in their relationship. It was very important to always have that as a central focus. That helped us when selecting the material.
Another thing to take into account is that the novel, like a lot of novels from the time, is extremely melodramatic. There are lots of chance encounters and some of the characters’ behaviors are hard to get away with on the screen, especially when you are working quite hard to establish a reality. Some of the sections of the novel, which feel very, very heightened, we pulled back slightly, either by cutting them out or altering them so that they didn’t strain credulity as much as they do in the novel.
Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
Audiences have become sort of cynical and less receptive to melodrama, yet here seems to be something very modern in Madding Crowd. Were you concerned with this while writing?
What I really liked about it was the relevance of the story. When I reread the novel I was struck at how modern it was. We tend to lump all Victorian novels together, but this is 60 years older than Jane Austen’s first novel. We think of the Victorian novel or period films as being about very controlled, buttoned up, repressed behavior, but it’s not the case with Madding Crowd, it’s very emotional, very extreme.
What I never doubted was Bathsheba’s central dynamic: which man to choose, or whether to stay independent, or how to make her business thrive. All of that would seem extremely modern. In the novel when Troy comes back from the death he appears at a great party and there is an element of performance. It’s an extremely melodramatic scene, and kind of a wonderful scene in the novel.
We struggled, Thomas Vinterberg and I, to imagine how that would work on screen. Whether it would turn Troy into a sort of pantomime villain by turning up out of a ball of smoke twirling his mustache. We didn’t want that to be the case, so we made a private conversation and took away from the party. It’s about finding a balance between your love for the book and the recognition that movies and fiction novels work in different ways. To a large degree movie storytelling is quite realistic, and some of the very flamboyant characterizations in the novel needed to be turned down a little.
But whether you think about Jane Eyre or Great Expectations or all of Hardy’s novels, there are these moments that are gothic, almost operatic, and you have to go with them. But it’s definitely something Thomas and I talked about a lot, at times when we felt that it was too much, too rich, or too ripe, we just pulled back a bit.
Carey Mulligan’s character Bathsheba is a very strong female lead and it feels even more modern when you think about when the novel was written. How much did you create and how much did you translate directly from the page to create this character?
It’s all on the page. The novel is not a feminist novel, because she has all kinds of conventional female failings like vanity, a sort of skittishness, and girlishness on the page. What we didn’t have to invent was her strength, her intelligence, and her determination. I think as a character she has a great legacy, I think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind is clearly influenced by Bathsheba Everdene, this business of keeping the farm running, falling in love with the bad boy, and all of that stuff is in Far from the Madding Crowd.
If you look at Katniss Everdeene in The Hunger Games, she shares the same surname and some of the same rebellion, defiance, and courage. All of this is in the novel, and I think what Carey brings is intelligence, fearlessness, and principles. That to me is what made revisiting this novel worthwhile, the extraordinary modernity of that character. Often, with some exceptions, Victorian heroines, are light and very straightforwardly molded, but Bathsheba at times is maddening, enraging, and why not? I think it’s refreshing to have central female characters that aren’t pictures of virtue.
Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
The male characters are also crucial for the story. You have three different versions of 19th century masculinity and they all have qualities that appeal to Bathsheba. Tell me about writing these characters and making Gabriel the male lead for the film.
What they say or do in the novel is very little, but what we learn is fascinating. But you are right; Bathsheba has to choose between companionship, status, and sex. They all have their virtues and they all have their failings. We were very keen to put Gabriel at the center because he goes through an extraordinary journey. When we first meet him he is a bit of a country bumpkin. He is very conventional, he is rather bashful, and he is not very eloquent. He is rather foolish, and yet by the end of the movie he and Bathsheba are working together as a team, which I thought it was very modern. We wanted to place that at the center of the movie. In terms of movie references, I feel Carey Mulligan shares a certain quality with Katharine Hepburn, a kind of wit and sometimes a kind of pride. We were thinking that with Gabriel and Bathsheba there should be something of a Cary Grant – Katharine Hepburn relationship. They drive each other crazy but they love each other. That’s we absolutely wanted at the center of our version.
The largest change comes in respect to Michael Sheen’s character Boldwood, and I think he gives a really wonderful performance in the movie. He is great. In the novel the character is rather histrionic. He is sort of irrational, insane, and a bit of a stalker, but we thought it would be more interesting to have him as a very suitable match for her in many ways, a very wise and gentle man. That was a slight change of emphasis regarding that character. In the novel he does a lot more ranting and raving, we brought some of that down. Thomas in particular wanted him to be very likeable, charming, and attractive and not this kind of obsessive stalker that he sometimes is in the book. These were some of the changes, not a betrayal of the book, but just a change in emphasis.
Michael Sheen as William Boldwood in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
You’ve mentioned that novel didn’t give you much to work with in terms of dialogue. How did you find the characters voices in his writing?
Hardy is one of my favorite novelists. He is wonderful at setting up these set pieces or these kind of great sequences like the fire in the farmyard, the sheep falling off the cliff, or the sheep being sick as their stomachs are blowing up, etc. These dramatic set pieces are wonderful, but his dialogue is sometimes a little bit verbose and stagey. I didn’t invent very much, but I have dome some amount of paraphrasing just to make the dialogue feel a little more grounded and a little more natural. If you were to say the dialogue as written by Hardy it would seem very florid. Hardy is a wonderful novelist, but this is a very early novel and it has a kind of flamboyance that his late novels don’t have.
I invented a few things but not very many, in the novel when Bathsheba has to humbly beg Gabriel to come back after she sacks him and the sheep are about to die, she writes a note. When you think about putting that on the screen you think, “Are we going to do a close-up of the page and that’s going to be it?” That’s not as dramatic and effective as Bathsheba speaking to him in person. Whenever I could I tried to put these characters in front of each other. The dialogue is there but sometimes it’s sometimes made less stagey. But I would say that the bulk of the script is in the novel.
The action in the novel takes several years, but we wanted the sense of one year passing. In the novel there is quite a lot of material after Troy appears to have drowned, after that there is still a good 150 pages. We trimmed that pretty thoroughly. There is that passage in the novel about Troy coming back in disguise, and that felt very melodramatic. Even though it existed in previous drafts of the script that got cut.
The origin of the title Far from the Madding Crowd comes from this sense of pastoral of country life, about the seasons changing and life going on. In a movie that doesn’t really work, you want the sense of pace. We were very influenced by movies such as Bertolucci’s 1900, Gone with the Wind, and Malick’s Days of Heaven.
Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlet in Gone with the Wind
Tell me about working with Thomas Vinterberg and the writer-director relationship you developed?
It was great. I really loved Thomas. I’ve worked with a lot of good directors but Thomas has a reputation for being a European art house auteur, and I’ve never had that experience before. Thomas is also a writer and he wants to get to the depths of the scene, and I’ve never worked quite so closely with a director before. I had never sat with a director and gone page by a director before, but I really loved it.
Of course, there are some times when you disagree about things, but the main difference is that I grew up immersed in 19th century English literature, and I’ve loved Thomas Hardy and I know his works pretty well. Thomas doesn’t have any of that, which is wonderful, in lots of ways because he can approach it from a cinematic point of view rather than from an English literature point of view.
I had to train myself not to say, “Well, that’s not what happens in the book,” because in some ways I’m the custodian of the original material and in other ways I had to say, “Well, that’s not what happens in the book but let’s give it a go.” For me it was an exercise in saying “Yes” rather than “No.” With Thomas there is always a sense that if he doesn’t like it then he wont want to shoot it [laughs], so it was much more of collaboration than I’m used.
Us, by David Nicholls
What’s next now that this Thomas Hardy chapter has been completed?
There is another adaption of Tender is the Night, which is my other great favorite novel and that’s in development. I’m also publicizing my new novel which is called Us, and which might find its way to the screen but I won’t write the script for that, I’ll let someone else do it this time. I’m working on my first play and I’m waiting for hear about a TV series. At the moment I’m tangled up in book publicity and I’ll be doing that for another couple of months and then I’m going to sit down and try to write another novel. I love doing films, but I also love the power and control you have when it’s just you [laughs].
