William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

In fact, you were one of the few critics who disliked the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

I was teaching at Oxford at the time and knew the novel inside out, so I was probably a bit self-righteous. It was a memorable event in television history and was compelling in its own way. It was nine hours long, which seems extraordinary today. Again, the problem is one of adaptation. It’s a first-person novel, so everything is in the voice of Charles Ryder, which is why there was masses of voiceover.

What do you think of voiceover, by and large?

Voiceover is one of the tools in your toolkit and should be employed whenever it works well. I remember having an argument with someone who put money into The Mission. He said, “I didn’t have the faintest idea where this country was.” I said, “Why didn’t they use a map?” Shock! Horror! I’m a great believer in maps or captions if they do the job, otherwise you have to explain it all with dialogue. “Of course, you used to be the ambassador to Indo-China and then you were fired. What was it for, now? Yes, it was because of …” That’s classic bad screen-writing, and you can cut through that nonsense by putting, say, “The Libyan Desert—1942.” Captions are very succinct and very effective. With voiceover, however, I think there are certain ground-rules. It should be present from the start: often it’s a rescue attempt, bolted on here and there, and usually that doesn’t work. I’ve been guilty of this myself, so I know what’s involved. And it should have nothing to do with what’s happening in the scene: there’s nothing worse than seeing a man going into a house and hearing him say, “When I went into my house … All this is to do with the problems of adapting for film. No one goes to see Verdi’s Falstaff, then comes home to compare it to The Merry Wives of Windsor. No one goes to see the ballet of Eugene Onegin then comes home and compares it to Pushkin’s epic poem. The two art forms are allowed to coexist. But the first thing people say about a film adaptation of a novel is, “Why did you leave out the bit about …?” It’s a mistake, a complete category error. “Did it work as a film?” is the question you should be asking, and if you say, “Yes, I enjoyed myself and I was engaged,” end of story. Having been a victim on numerous occasions of that sort of critical misunderstanding, I feel this can’t be said often enough. You have to make it work as a film, not as a simulacrum of the novel. The two forms are quite distinct, and there are different aesthetic pleasures to be derived from each.

Scoop was adapted from a single novel into a single drama. Sword of Honour was adapted from three novels into two parts totalling four hours, with adverts, yet a trilogy would seem to lend itself to three parts. Whose decision was that?

It was Channel 4’s decision. Initially they asked for six times one hour — it was going to be weekly — but then there was a change of thinking: “Channel 4 audiences do not tune in every Sunday night to watch the classic serial, so could we do it as two film-length episodes back to back on consecutive nights?” For me, having written my six-hour version, moving the goalposts in this way was something of a kick in the teeth, but in fact I think it was the right decision. I said to the director, Bill Anderson, “This is the David Lean version. Think of it as Lawrence of Arabia.” And, of course, when you think of it like that you can strip away all the stuff which you’d normally do in a leisurely TV way and concentrate on the essence of the story. The novels are wonderful but incredibly uneven, full of longueurs. Guy Crouchback’s war is essentially Evelyn Waugh’s, and when Waugh was bored rigid from 1942 to 1944 there’s an enormous sag in the books. He left a seven-year gap after writing Volume Two, and was jaded and embittered and close to the end of his life when he wrote Volume Three, but because we had our new format we were able to make the narrative lines more graceful and more telling. But there’s a lot left out.

Whether it’s six hours or four hours it’s still a difficult story to tell because it’s about lives intersecting randomly, one of your favourite themes.

To a certain extent that’s my interpretation of it. Evelyn Waugh might disagree with me. What makes the books endure, I think, is that they’re like an English Catch-22. War is horrifying. Armies can’t function. You think something is going to happen and the opposite will happen. You try to be brave but you’re forced to be a coward. These are very cynical, disenchanted, Joseph Helleresque points of view. Waugh would argue, as he did in the preface to the novels, that he was actually writing about the collapse of Roman Catholic values in contemporary Britain, but what you take away from the trilogy now is its modernity, its sense of the cruel and absurd, its dark and ruthless observation of human beings in a war zone. I stressed that angle because as a devout atheist I wasn’t remotely interested in Evelyn Waugh’s tormented workings-out of a Catholic gentleman attempting to cling on to his faith when the hideous modern world was trying to trample it underfoot.

Did you tailor the script to suit the budget?

I don’t think you really do tailor your first draft because these decisions often come later on, but you know you’re not making Gladiator, and you don’t have $185 million to spend, so you save your bravura shots for things you can actually deliver. The Battle for Crete was going to be our big set-piece and would need a cast of thousands, so there was no point in writing earlier, “A convoy steams over the horizon and we see it from the coast of Africa.” That’s just common sense. But because of special effects you can now do stuff which looks fantastic. We had two Dako-tas, one with American markings and one with RAF markings, but we couldn’t get a Stuka in Majorca because Spanish air-traffic control wouldn’t allow us to fly one into their airspace. So we did the Stuka attack with CGI and it actually looks better, because we had three Stukas coming out of the sky. These decisions are often taken on the hoof. You don’t really think about them when you’re writing. But there is a scene on board a destroyer off the coast of Africa, and I knew that could be done on a blue screen, so the whole scene was written shooting out, as it were, from two men leaning on a railing. It works well, it looks great, it didn’t cost a lot and it’s underpinned in the writing by a sense of, “What’s the best way of shooting this that will give us the biggest bang for our buck?”

Do you prefer writing for the big screen or the small screen?

I would never say, “I’ll only write movies,” like certain actors say, “I don’t do television.” It’s really a question of what works best — and what’s available — although for me that choice is a luxury because I’m primarily a novelist: that satisfies so many urges and needs.

Mister Johnson and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter were based on novels by Joyce Cary and Mario Vargas Llosa which both feature highly exotic settings, something they share with your own fiction. Is that why you were approached?

Commissioned work is often very attractive because the book appeals to your tastes or chimes with your interests. Mister Johnson is set in Nigeria, and I’d lived in Nigeria and written an introduction to the Penguin World Classics edition of the book, so it was an easy decision. Aunt Julia came about as a result of my relationship with David Puttnam, because the adaptation of my novel Stars and Bars was with his company, Enigma, before he went off to run Columbia Pictures. It was suggested that I might be the person to adapt it, so I read it and loved it but knew it was going to be a bold adaptation. By then it was no longer at Columbia but with an independent company, and they said it could be set anywhere in America but not in Peru, so it seemed to me that New Orleans delivered the same polyglot mix as Lima. That was one of those nice jobs which comes your way, and the relationships I built up at that time endure to this day. Mark Tarlov, who produced Aunt Julia, also produced A Good Man in Africa, and we have any number of irons in the fire.