One of my guilty pleasures is to sit on Norwegian public transport and think up stories. With the eternal landscapes of rock, fjord and tree, the often dreary weather, the indecipherable town names and long distances, making up fiction is just about the best use of your time. That was where, several years ago, I had the idea of writing about a goat that could speak. The story arrived fully formed – two sisters living in a decrepit cottage, a dirty caravan at the end of the garden, a mysterious goat tethered to a heavy iron chain. As I looked at the millionth tree of Norway passing by the window, this goat appeared, suddenly travelling with me, in perfect detail. I saw the tobacco whiskers of its beard, the horizontally slit pupils in its pale ungodly eyes, and its blackened tongue behind a filthy white row of teeth. Little did I know that one day I would peer into a trailer and meet this goat, on a film-set. And I would make it talk.

A few weeks ago I received UK Film Council lottery funding to adapt my first novel, Salt, into a film script. I started the process symbolically, by taking the novel off the shelf and placing it on my desk. But the business of adapting your own work into a film-script is far from straightforward. Long before the battles with financing, casting, script editors and producers, executives and production coordinators, you have to do battle with yourself. Salt had once been a heavy-weight draft coming in at 130,000 words. For publication I slimmed that down to a leaner and meaner fighting weight of 106,000 words, but there, on my desk, it seemed a fairly heavy beast, none the less. One of the more surprising aspects about being a novelist is just how often your books appear fuller of words than you remember. Pages and pages of them, sentences you can’t recall ever writing, words you don’t even use in your vocabulary any more. It’s daunting, as if the novel might have been growing fatter on the shelf, after spending so much time mixing with other books.
Faced with the task of arranging a sprawling text into a precisely organised film script, some writers begin with impressive wall charts and plot breakdowns, or get holy with it, writing Character Bibles and Mission Statements. Others go to the stationers for advice, and emerge with lurid day-glo highlighter pens. But I tend to start with a casual mid-morning assassination of my lesser characters. I try to be civilised about it, but it soon becomes a vicious fistfight. For a start, they outnumber you. Salt has a hoard of them, wandering through the pages, full of self-importance and author-given right to be there. Giving them the elbow can be savage. Some characters, of course, behave from the start, knowing the rigours and economy required of a film script not to mess around. They quickly learn to talk succinctly, don’t mind rapid cuts between scenes, will never demand a Winnebago. But others – usually the minor ones – the ones holding on to a few prize lines of dialogue, can suddenly whip up a storm, nagging you with the possibility of extra scenes, explaining how they are key to an otherwise meandering plotline. In short, they turn out to have more character than you gave them credit for. And devious, too. They wait for you to weaken, to feel sorry for them, and then suddenly there you have it – you’ve written three extra pages of Lonnie Lemon eating a cooked breakfast in the middle of the script. He’s done it right at the point where all the How to Write a Film Script manuals would tell you there Needs To Be An Inciting Incident.
What soon becomes apparent is the rocky road of your characters reinventing themselves a second time round. Now there is nothing automatically wrong with that, clearly they will have to change, because a film is not a novel, it requires a more specific language, but it’s worth bearing in mind characters can be wrecking balls, jostling for space, and you need to learn a new discipline in bringing them to order. Otherwise, your film script will move from the acceptable term of ‘Adaptation,’ to the more loose-jointed term of ‘Based On,’ and then beyond, into the uncharted and probably un-financeable – ‘New Story with Little Reference to…’

A similar dirty war can happen with story. We all know how a novel can sluggishly meander across its own created landscape, with pretty little digressions, tangential ideas, and the occasional whiff of purple prose. A few pages of the author’s childhood anecdotes can shore up the text here and there, and no one really minds if you go into a little bit of extra detail if the writing’s good. There’s a gravity and maturity in a good thick book – it makes you think of Dostoyevsky and Melville, authors with real ideas to talk about, real whales to chase. But you can forget those high ideals when it comes to a script. Pages mean money, simple as that. All you need to make a film is cash, lots of it, and the more expense that’s written onto the page, the less chance it has of getting made.
With this in mind, it might be advisable to get those day-glo highlighter pens after all. Yellow for ‘essential,’ orange for ‘they might stretch to it,’ and red for ‘you’ll never be commissioned again.’ It’s surprising, applying these criteria, just how much of a novel becomes problematic. As you begin to break it down, slashing and burning all your previous hard work, the ghostly spectres of future executive producers gather at your elbows, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes as you try to hold on to vestiges of story. You can form quite a strong relationship with these phantom executives, they whisper left-field suggestions in your ear such as – should this be an animation? or, let’s start at the end, lose the mother, drop the father, make it a comedy, is comedy still funny? It’s worth rehearsing such random creative battles, because one day, believe it, you’ll be hearing them for real.
But there’s a sport to be had fighting these money battles, and personally, I like to keep a few high-expense set-pieces on the page, as negotiation chips I can trade in down the line. OK, let’s drop the aerial shot, but keep the tiger chase? That’s worth saying in an executive’s office at some point. In ten years of working as a script editor for the BBC and Film Four, I heard some pretty astonishing comments.

But something more worrying is bothering me as I look at that book on my desk. For some reason, I tend to write unfilmable novels. The protagonist in Salt is mostly mute. Now that’s a difficult one to solve. Your middle-of-the-night solutions to that emerge in the light of day as the thoughts of a madman. And get this – my new novel, The Wake, which was published in July, features a rampaging stallion running amok, a violent storm in the middle of the North Sea, and a roving cinematic landscape across the Southern States of America from Florida to Texas. I clearly don’t learn. In fact, I remember thinking how impossible a film script of this novel might be, as I sat writing it in my shed. Given my film background, this tendency of mine to write unfilmable novels is a surprise, even to me.

When your morale slips, it helps to remember just how awful the process of novel writing can be, with all that prose scene-setting, the moving of characters from one place to another, and all the he said and she saids that navigate the reader through an essentially unseen landscape. All those pulled teeth spent worrying. Surely a film script, with its eloquent use of directions and cuts, offers an amazing liberation. Cut to: Lonnie Lemon, eating his sausage, is a sheer joy to write – a saving not just of wordage, but of the agony too. The beauty of the film script is that most of it doesn’t exist. It’s a series of suggestions for others to interpret.
And writing a novel is often a solitary and exhausting business. The buck stops with you, on every word, it’s continually demanding. But with a film-script, the knowledge that you are one part of an ever-expanding team can be a huge relief. The writer is just one of the many talents working hard to bring it to life. The director, producer, editor, actors, and every last member of crew and support from make-up to gaffer, are all there to bring their own expertise and imagination to the project. Your creativity can double, then triple, as others become inspired, and areas of sound and vision you’d never considered bring a vital new life to your work. Personally, I love this feeling of creative get-together, and the script really has to acknowledge it too. You need to know your place.
But you also have to be prepared for a possible downside to this team approach. One of those talents coming to your adaptation might be a cuckoo, a new writer brought on board to bring new dimensions to your script. I’ve seen it happen many times before, and seen it work well, too.
Which reminds me, it’s often said authors don’t make the best adapters of their own work. It’s worth forgetting that, because you have to believe in the script with the same commitment you had when you wrote the book. But with one difference – you no longer own it. You have to adapt, as an author, before you begin to adapt your book. My only real tip is to know the material well, and imagine the film it might be. Often this involves a kind of imaginative projection of it, and your role is to transcribe the possibilities of what your seeing.

As I begin to adapt Salt, it’s useful to remember how the process has succeeded before. And that’s where the goat comes back in. After getting off that Norwegian bus, the goat made its first appearance in a short story – a contemporary ghost story. A couple of years later I looked at what I’d written and decided to adapt it into a short film script. The sisters changed names, they became younger, in more precarious circumstances, and the cottage became a scruffy low-rise block by a South London allotment. The goat survived the transition to script relatively unchanged. Still rough, old, mysterious and malevolent. It still had those tobacco whiskers and black tongue. Soon after I wrote the script, Channel Four decided to fund it, and then the real changes began. A director was hired, then fired, another one found, executives rattled their sabres, testing how loyal I was to the characters, actresses were cast and locations found. Throughout this process, it seemed the one untouchable aspect was the goat itself. But as the production neared, even this became up for grabs. If you’ve never been to a goat casting session, believe me it’s one of the more peculiar aspects of film-making. I was shown many photos of varying livestock: from magnificent regimental mascots (in full military regalia) to fluffy blow-dried pets. But not so many of my stinky stubborn variety. At a wedding I met a woman who kept an old goat in Bath – she offered to shove it in the back of a car and drive it up to London. I also went to a circus and saw a troupe of performing goats, and was reassured that they could be taught. One was very devilish looking. It couldn’t speak, but it could probably roll a cigarette with one hoof. Then goat wranglers – now that’s a job-title! – started to demand special conditions for themselves and their cloven-footed charges, and extraordinary bureaucratic conditions emerged concerning the transporting of livestock across London. It looked like filming would be virtually impossible – unless a goat could be walked to set. One goat – boy he was the real deal – belligerent and mean – just plain refused to do anything for camera. I rather respected him for that.

It was two years after coming up with the story when I finally walked across an allotment in Merton and peered into the trailer to meet my goat. Cut to ‘Billy’: a handsome, proud, long-horned goat, standing in the hay. At last, the illusionary drafts of fiction had condensed into a real, living, breathing animal. It looked back at me, with no sign of recognition. That day it was pouring with rain, the lights of the film set were steaming and the crew were gathered round in all weather gear as the goat was led by a short tether, first to do a scene in a caravan, and second, to go into a house, where it would climb onto a bed and look down menacingly at an actress. Throughout that day, the goat was clearly convinced it was due a particularly strange ritual slaughter. Goats have a nose for approaching sacrifice, and I felt ashamed, and guilty, that I had led this animal to screen, for this. But I also had feelings of endless possibilities – that fiction can be spun and refashioned, transforming from ideas to notebooks to novels to scripts, and at times it can even exist in the real world, with real people speaking real lines. So, next time you’re on a bus in Norway, listen to the goat. You never know where he may lead you.

Jeremy Page’s new novel, The Wake, is published this month by Penguin. His first novel, Salt, was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s.

Why? When there’s a great novel, a complete work of art, a pleasure ground for the imagination of the reader to explore, gently guided by the author, or a gripping thriller to keep one up till the small hours greedily turning just one more page to find out what happens next, then why oh why must those lumbering, leaden-witted film people come along and turn it into a major motion picture? (Wouldn’t it be nice to pick up the tie-in just once and have it say now a minor motion picture? But that, like the moderate-selling book, will never happen: it’s major, best or nothing in marketing speak.)

Since I make my living largely by adapting books for the screen, large and small, it seems only reasonable that I should have an answer to this frequent and frequently indignant question. And although the Mary Whitehouse response – you don’t have to watch, you can switch off or not buy a ticket – has some validity, there is something so invasive about the adaptation that this won’t quite do. Who now, for instance, can picture the Harry Potter characters without their film counterparts springing unbidden to mind? Or, for an older generation, George Smiley without seeing Alec Guinness?

The truth is no one complains about a successful adaptation, especially if the source material was not in itself stellar, just as nobody outside academia bothers with the source material of Romeo and Juliet. Casablanca, The Godfather, Kes, LA Confidential: these are films first and foremost. The best adaptations are works that stand alone and succeed on their own terms, regardless of how close or far they are from the original material.

John Le Carré, in his first Smiley novel, describes Smiley thus:
“Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”
This does not sound much like Alec Guinness who, though no great beauty, had an understated elegance and was always slim. But these are unimportant details compared with the truth of his characterisation: he captured the sad, intelligent heart of the man, and the scripts, adapted by John Hopkins and John Le Carré, richly conveyed the shadowy world of the Circus with its Old Etonians and dirty tricks, in spite of the strictures of BBC budgets and schedules.

One of the great advantages of the television adaptation compared with film is having time to tell the story. Famously, the Granada Television version of Brideshead Revisited (adapted by John Mortimer) took twelve hours to spin out Charles Ryder’s obsession with the Flyte family, whereas the recent film version (screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock) had only 133 minutes of screen time to cram in what they could. Perversely, recent classic adaptations on television have aped the film format (perhaps in pursuit of foreign sales) and squash delicate novels of manners like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park into an action-packed hour and a half.

For the last couple of years I have been engaged in adapting Wuthering Heights for the big screen. I am by no means the first and will no doubt not be the last screenwriter to attempt this quixotic feat. For most of that time there has been the lurking presence of the “other” Wuthering Heights – an adaptation for ITV by Pete Bowker – and not surprisingly I have kept an eye on its progress. Now apparently tangled in ITV’s financial meltdown, the two-parter was shown with some success in the States a few months back. But why a two-parter? One of the huge challenges for adaptors of this novel, which is in almost every way a challenging text, is that there is so much story. I was jealous of the TV format which would allow scope for events to unfold without turning into a crazed Yorkshire soap opera of births, scandals and deaths – most of all deaths. But no, the whole thing has been shoehorned into two and a half hours.

The film version will not even be as long as that, certainly less than two hours, which means pretty brutal decisions have to be made. They almost always do. One of the few recent adaptations I can think of that was able to include everything from its source material is Brokeback Mountain, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx’s short story. Almost every sentence in the story is used as the basis of a scene or a moment in the film, which won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Unsurprisingly Annie Proulx thought it was a wonderful adaptation and was charmingly and openly furious that it didn’t win Best Picture too. Perhaps more impressively, it is one of the all-time highest grossing romantic dramas: a story about a failed gay relationship between two smalltime modern cowboys, strung out over twenty largely uneventful years. Who could have predicted that?

Although I have written screenplays based on true stories, court records and mediaeval poetry (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), the usual source material for adaptation is the novel. Your average novel is unlikely to come in under 200 pages and a classic, the “loose baggy monsters” of Henry James’ disparaging phrase (his own novels often tip over 500: glass houses, Mr James, glass houses), may easily be twice as long. Wuthering Heights is not especially long (300 pages in my edition) but it is packed with events – and what is more challenging, with an atmosphere and poetry which could easily be lost in the process of compression.

So when I consider a book with a view to adapting it, I certainly reckon its weight in the hand. In order to make a screenplay out of this novel I will have to effectively rip out more than half the pages. What will be left? Will it still represent what was special and thrilling about this book? If the book is Jaws – a great idea, a few strong characters, a monster we hadn’t met before – then the answer is a resounding yes. If it is, for example, one of my favourite books of recent years, Cold Mountain, I think the answer has to be no.

Even though Cold Mountain was adapted by Anthony Minghella, a brilliant writer who had proved himself the master of unlikely source material with his epic version of Michael Ondaatje’s highly literary novel The English Patient, Cold Mountain the movie was a considerably less interesting artistic piece than Cold Mountain the novel and, unless you are a big fan of Nicole Kidman’s wardrobe changes, not much fun to watch either. The novel is picaresque in construction: a string of incidents along a journey, with more than a nod to the Odyssey. As in its classical forebear, the hero and heroine are not reunited till the very end of the story. The pleasure for the reader is in the journey itself, the myriad details Charles Frazier weaves in of the flora and fauna Inman passes on his travels and the quotidian struggles of the women to farm under difficult and primitive conditions. This is all gone from the film, which is left with a set of almost unconnected scenes: set piece battles and encounters with a string of British character actors arrayed in artistically dirtied costumes and unconvincing accents, while Nicole waits, pale and lovely, alongside Renee Zellweger’s strange comic turn as a salt of the earth countrywoman.

Often I read a novel and though I enjoy it I feel the essence of it will not translate well into a film. Novels can wander, take interesting detours, never come to a resolution. Writing for film is more like servicing a shark: it can never lose momentum or the whole thing dies. That’s not to say the only films you should write have to be hectic action. One of the books I was lucky enough to be sent with a view to adaptation was a then-unpublished novel by a then-unknown writer – Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. This is the imagined story of the young girl in the eponymous painting by the enigmatic seventeenth-century Dutch artist Vermeer.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, like Vermeer’s paintings, relies for its effects on the rendering of tiny details, on pregnant pauses and stillness, the judicious placing or removal of a single precious object. Yet I read this novel without breathing, or so it felt, and was immediately convinced that not only should this be a film but that I had to be the one to write the screenplay. With its intense concentration on an artist’s process, and such a cinematic artist at that, it is an obviously visual piece, but I also felt that the story’s tight focus on a single household in which all the characters had powerful motives driving them towards an inevitable but highly dramatic conclusion was a perfect film story.

Although it isn’t a long novel I still had to shed a great deal of material, losing a painting, several siblings (in Vermeer’s family and Griet’s), an outbreak of the plague and, inevitably but to my regret, much of the fascinating detail about the process of painting. Once we reached the editing stage, even more of the rich context fell away to highlight the romance between the main characters. The final film is, I think, very faithful in tone and spirit to the original novel but surprisingly far removed in terms of the specifics. There is hardly a line of dialogue or even many scenes that follow the book exactly, though the gist of both is clearly recognisable. Audiences who loved the book have generally loved the film too and those who have not read the book have not had trouble engaging with the film. Tracy Chevalier refers to the film as a sister to the book, alike but not identical, each existing happily on her own.

When I first started working on Girl with a Pearl Earring, the novel had not been published and it took some time before it became the worldwide bestseller it is now. It was a classic word-of-mouth success, everyone who read it passing it on to a friend. This meant that I did not feel any pressure from the reader, real or imagined, in my approach, and was able simply to offer my personal response to the novel in the form of a screenplay.

By contrast Wuthering Heights is not only one of the most famous books in the world, a set text, a regular on every top ten list, a keystone of the Bronte mythology, it has also been adapted a great many times – as film, TV series, play, pop song, rock opera… So in this case there is not only the pressure of tackling such a well known and loved work, there is also the trail of previous assaults, like the garbage that lines the route to Everest base camp. Not only: how can I fashion a coherent film of this extraordinary book, but what can I say that no one else has managed to say before me?

The single most famous adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the 1939 film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. It is certainly the one I know best, though I have seen a couple of television versions in the distant past. William Wyler’s film is delightful, swooningly romantic, but nothing like the novel. Olivier is wildly different from Bronte’s Heathcliff and the whole thing is presented in a Hollywood Victorian packaging that is a long way from the bleak moorland farmhouse and the sheer savagery of the novel. Famously, a “happy ending” was stuck on with acting doubles, but, like many adaptations, the film only dealt with half the story as told in the novel. Catherine Earnshaw, the most fascinating, infuriating, elusive anti-heroine in fiction, is dead halfway through the novel. Her daughter, also Catherine, is the focus of the rest of the story, as Heathcliff grinds his way through a slow-burning revenge on everyone who he deems to have wronged him.

I began my adaptation determined on two points. First, the main characters all had to be teenagers, not the thirty-year-olds of the various screen versions. This is a story that makes absolute sense when one reads it at fifteen and seems borderline psychotic at forty. Cathy and Heathcliff have to be of an age when love and death seem almost synonymous – she is married at sixteen, dead at nineteen. Even Heathcliff, who outlives everyone else, dies in his early thirties.

This turned out to be a hard fight, for although everyone involved was very excited by this idea, putting flesh on it in terms of casting was more problematic. I think we got there, but till the film is actually made I can’t be sure!

My second realisation, from reading the novel, was that Heathcliff is clearly not white. Not like Laurence Olivier, nor any of the dark-haired but thoroughly white-skinned and Caucasian actors who have portrayed him over the years. In every description of him, Emily Bronte harps on his colour and exoticism: he is “a Lascar”; “a dark-skinned gypsy”; “an American or Spanish castaway”. “Who knows but what your father was Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen?” says Nelly Dean, who hasn’t much multi-racial experience to base her ideas on. Yet the power of the filmed versions is so strong that people are astonished or disbelieving at any suggestion that Heathcliff is not pure WASP.

Neither of these choices answers the original question of why do it at all, but they go some way towards an answer. Although there have been many films before, I don’t think there has been a version so definitive that it precludes all future attempts (there would not, to my mind, be any point in making a new version of Cabaret, for instance). And I feel I have something to add by way of a dramatic rendering of this strange story that may excite a new audience, thrill them in the cinema, and yes, encourage them to read the novel.

I heard that Stephanie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ vampire novels, now filmed or filming, boosted sales of Wuthering Heights, thanks to her frequent references to the grandmother of all twisted love stories. If a new generation can feel the power of this story through the movie and then discover the complexity and strangeness of the novel, that would be wonderful. If any viewer watches this Wuthering Heights and feels transported for an hour or two to a world of heightened emotion, of agony and ecstasy, regardless of the novel, that will be even better.

Olivia Hetreed started her career as a documentary, drama and film editor and later began writing with a series of family films for ITV. Her first feature film, Girl With A Pearl Earring, was nominated for multiple Oscars and BAFTAs including Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2008, Ecosse Films produced her adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

I’m often asked whether the screenplay for my film Skin, based on the life of Sandra Laing, is adapted from a book. The simple answer is No, but as I’ve often found, the truth, the whole truth, is not only stranger than fiction, but far more complicated.

I first heard Sandra’s extraordinary story – born black to white Afrikaner parents, who were unaware of their black ancestry, in apartheid South Africa – sitting in my kitchen, listening to Radio Four, in July 2000. The BBC’s blind broadcaster Peter White had gone to South Africa to interview Sandra as part of his series, No Triumph, No Tragedy, exploring the particular forms of prejudice experienced by the disabled.

“No one in their right mind would consider being black a disability,” he reported, “Not until, as in South Africa during apartheid, the whole apparatus of the state was employed to exclude and disempower, in the same way that disability is often said to do.”

Sandra’s testimony left me stunned. For days afterwards, I had a lump in my throat whenever I thought about her story. As a director seeking a strong subject for his first feature film, I recognised its socio-political significance and, perhaps more importantly, its emotional power.

But how to adapt someone’s true life story for the big screen? I began digging, and soon discovered two documentaries that had been made about Sandra – the first in 1977 by the acclaimed filmmaker Antony Thomas: The Search for Sandra Laing; the second, Sandra Laing: A Spiritual Journey, by TV journalist Karien van der Merwe, made in 1998 for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

I also found a wealth of print coverage. Shortly after I heard the BBC radio interview, The Sunday Times published a Relative Values article about Sandra and her mother Sannie; they had just been reunited after a 27-year separation. It gave a rare insight into their relationship and was very inspiring. Which of these – the radio interview, the documentaries, the journalism – would be the principal source material for the screenplay? What rights did I need to acquire?

Stephen Bayly, then head of the National Film and Television School. as well as a veteran film director and producer, explained that I needed the ‘life rights’ to Sandra’s story – from Sandra herself. Very often, when adapting true stories for the big screen, producers are encouraged to buy the rights to published biographies, because it gives them a purchase on the subject that, in theory, no one else has. The fact is, many famous people’s stories are in the public domain – and unless a biography contains facts that cannot be obtained elsewhere, acquiring an option to a book is no guarantee that no-one else can write a script or make a film on the same subject. But it does give comfort to investors that a pre-existing property is ‘owned’. In the case of Sandra’s story, there was no book – not yet – so the ‘life rights’ would constitute a security that the information obtained, and the access to the subject, would be exclusive from then on.

The next challenge was tracking Sandra down. I knew from the radio interview that she lived in a sprawling township east of Johannesburg, in a tiny, two-room rented house. One of the things that upset me about her interview was hearing that she was still living in abject poverty while her white family had prospered. I felt compelled to make some form of reparation – to share her story with the world through a feature film, of course, but also to help the person at the centre of it.

Peter White’s producer at the BBC refused to pass on Sandra’s contact details. But two journalists in South Africa who had recently written about her – Karien van der Merwe and Karen Le Roux – gave me Sandra’s neighbour’s telephone number (Sandra herself did not have a phone), in Tsakane Township, East Rand, and wished me luck. My fingers trembling, I rang the number. Her neighbour went to fetch Sandra, and when she reached the phone, I explained what I hoped to do.

She asked if there would be any money for her – she was struggling to pay the kids’ school fees and buy them clothes. It was winter, and cold. I told her there would be option fees and a bonus if the film were made. She agreed to meet me.

Three weeks later, I was on a plane to South Africa, a country I had never visited before, my head filled with stories about Johannesburg – the world’s most dangerous city. My trip was brief and the goal simple: to gain Sandra’s trust and obtain the rights to dramatise her story for the big screen. I met her family – her husband, Johannes, her five children, Henry, Elsie, Prince, Anthony and Steve, and her mother, Sannie. I took Sandra to see Sannie in a nursing home outside Pretoria. Sandra hadn’t visited her for several months because she couldn’t afford the transport. Sannie was frail; she’d suffered three strokes. Before we left, she said she wanted to speak to me privately.

“Who are you?” she asked.
“A friend from London.”
“Are you taking Sandra back to England with you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Look after her, will you?”

I was touched by the request, and promised that I would. When I boarded the plane back to London, armed with the rights to Sandra’s story (and a more realistic sense of Johannesburg as a ‘normal’ big city where of course you have to be vigilant, but not paranoid), I felt certain that nothing could prevent the film from happening now. What I never imagined was how long and tortuous the journey to develop the script would be, how many writers it would take, and how such a complex story, spanning so many years, would end up asking so many questions.

Although my focus at UCLA’s Film and Television Department was on screenwriting, and I had subsequently worked as a professional writer, I felt strongly that the script should be written by a South African. I knew Sandra’s story went to the heart of South Africa’s history and culture, spanning the last 30 years of apartheid, and I wanted the script to be as authentic as possible. The more specific and particular a work is, the more it deals with aspects of the human condition that we all recognise, the more it becomes universal. I also (naively) thought a South African writer would produce the goods more quickly – as he/she wouldn’t have to spend years doing the research.

Helena Kriel was one of a small list of South African writers who were recommended to me (there are few experienced screenwriters in South Africa because the country’s industry is still young). Helena was born and brought up in Johannesburg but had made a career for herself in Hollywood. It seemed the perfect match and I was impressed by her writing samples. I raised development finance from private sources and, after many discussions about what the arc of the story would be, commissioned the script.

Around this time, I also conceived the notion of selling the publication rights to Sandra’s story. People constantly asked, “Is there a book?” and I realised there probably should be. I was very lucky to have the biography commissioned by the first publisher I approached: Talk Miramax Books. Miramax Films had just set up an imprint for books that they thought might make interesting films, so it seemed a natural fit.

Sandra’s biographer, Judith Stone – an American journalist based in New York and contributing editor to Oprah Magazine – was chosen to give an ‘outsider’s perspective’ on the story, which was primarily intended for an international readership. The aims of the book and the film were very different, the former being to tell the full story and put it in context, the latter, to be highly selective and shape the events to heighten the drama and give the story narrative coherence.

Judith Stone proved a wonderful ally and collaborator in the screenwriting process. Rather unusually, the script and book were written in parallel. Judy procured two large tomes documenting Sandra’s life from the South African Office of Home Affairs – the first, a series of newspaper cuttings dating back to 1966, when Sandra was expelled from school for being ‘coloured’ (the official term for mixed race); the second including letters between various authorities involved in her re-classification from white to coloured, to white, to coloured…

This was Kafkaesque stuff that would be hard to believe if it weren’t true, and Judy shared it with us, as well as interviews she conducted with people who’d known Sandra since childhood. So Helena Kriel and I were provided with all the materials we needed to create as factually accurate a biopic as the god of drama would allow. This is one reason why the question of whether the script is an adaptation is not so easy to answer. The other has to do with how the script came to be developed further down the line.

Helena Kriel wrote two drafts of the script and I began to send it out for comment. It was clear that, although the bones of the story and structure were in place, there was still a long way to go in terms of characterisation, complexity and the detail that would give it real resonance.

However the story’s potential was clear enough at this point for the UK Film Council to contribute development finance for further drafts of the script. Helena felt she had taken the project as far as she could, so we turned to an Afrikaner called Johann Potgieter. As I was to discover, any writer coming on board wants to plough his own furrow. Johann created some interesting and authentic new material, but his interest in the story was primarily the father’s journey, not Sandra Laing’s – so we agreed to part company after just one draft.

Convinced now that I needed the best writer I could find, irrespective of his or her nationality, I approached a young American whose sample scripts had impressed me: Jessie Keyt. Jessie had taught at schools in Swaziland and South Africa for a year, so she was reasonably familiar with the country and culture. And she seemed to share my vision of the story. She used some of Helena and Johann’s material, created a great deal of her own, and was largely successful in giving the script greater depth – but there was still work to be done.

The story fell into three sections: Act I was Sandra’s childhood; Act II was what I called the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ part – Sandra falls in love with a black man and her father disowns her; Act III begins when Sandra leaves her lover, who has become abusive, and seeks reconciliation with her mother. It was this latter part which seemed to cause all the headaches. The real events were messy and less dramatic than in the preceding sections – yet I knew that that reunion formed the story’s emotional heart. Somehow, we had to get there. Sadly, visa problems forced Jessie to move away, and other commitments prevented her from continuing to work on the script.

Having run out of writers, it was clearly time for me to take over. We were four years into the process now and I had learned enough about the story, about South African history and culture – and knew where I wanted the script to go; it seemed pointless hiring another writer to get inside my head. Still concerned about authenticity and wishing to work on the material in a fresh way, I persuaded the UK Film Council to fund a three-week series of script development workshops – using actors to improvise scenes based on a draft of the script I’d prepared before heading off to Johannesburg – so that we could test every scene and create new material. I auditioned over 90 actors and chose 15, most of whom got parts in the final movie. It was a tremendously exciting and creative process. It was also wonderful to see the material coming alive. The workshops were emotional and cathartic, confirming the power of the story and emerging script.

I returned from South Africa with my batteries recharged and wrote a draft that seemed to answer most of the questions people had about the story. Finally, we were getting the kinds of responses to the script we were looking for. It was time to start casting and financing.

A few months later, Oscar-nominee (for Hotel Rwanda) Sophie Okonedo committed to playing Sandra – and not long thereafter, Sigourney Weaver said it was the most important story she’d come across in years and she wanted to play Sannie. But Ms Weaver wanted some changes to the script – mainly concerning her character… Having done my bit, I felt I needed extra help to get us there, a fresh pair of eyes.

Helen Crawley, a rising screenwriter, had just come off contract from Paramount, having won a coveted fellowship to write two scripts for the studio. I asked Helen whether she’d be willing to do a ‘quick polish for Sigourney’, taking on board her notes, and to my delight, she agreed.

Like all writers worth their salt, as mentioned previously, Helen did not simply want to implement changes or gloss over the material – she felt there was still deep structural work to do, as well as a fair amount of dialogue-polishing. She attacked the material with fervour, contributing a great deal to the structure and characterisation – and going much further than I had anticipated. Helen made great improvements, but equally gave us new things to sort out, and she was no longer available. Once more, the script was in pieces and needed to be pieced together again – and once more, the task fell to me.

As is clear from the credits, the wonderful South African actress Alice Krige plays Sannie Laing. So what happened to Sigourney Weaver? We did two drafts for her. After the second draft, she said she still felt she couldn’t commit. I asked why she’d taken so much trouble to make the script better – which had certainly been the result – only for another actress to benefit? She’d done too many independent films recently that hadn’t seen the light of day, she replied. And so we parted company.

Happily, Skin has seen the light of day. It took nine years from the date I first heard Sandra being interviewed to the day of the UK release. But at last it’s out there.

Whether this convoluted development process constitutes an adaptation is anyone’s guess. It does not, I am sure, in the official sense. But I do feel that as it didn’t entirely spring from our imaginations, it is an adaptation of sorts, even if it is from countless sources.

Skin has won seven prizes at international film festivals and is being released in the UK through ICA Films from 24th July 2009. More information can be found at www.skinthemovie.net.

As a producer, I prefer to make films that are conceived for the cinema, not adaptations of material originated in another medium. However, financiers and film distributors much prefer adaptations. Thus, despite my own preferences, of the sixteen films I have produced, nine are adaptations. So for instance my first film as a producer, and what might be my last, are adaptations of novels set around the First World War. Filmmaking, even more than politics, is the art of the possible.

The producer’s job is to understand and fight for the best that is possible for his or her film. The marketplace and the collaborators the producer is able attract define the limits of what is possible. In the special case of adaptations, the producer must also consider whether the film rights are available and on what terms.

A well-known source can open the way to substantial money to make the film. A work in which audiences have already demonstrated interest has obvious strengths. A successful book does not guarantee a successful film, but in a business where, as William Goldman famously observed, “nobody knows anything”, it can give a sense of confidence, of buying a known quantity, not just to financiers but audiences as well. Two of the films with which I have been associated as producer, Damage and the yet to be made Birdsong, are based on bestselling novels with high audience awareness.

The rights to a bestseller can be a curse as well as a blessing. Competition with other producers drives up the price and stiffens the terms of the deal. With a less well-known work, it is possible both to pay less and achieve options and extensions for quite modest sums. Mostly producers seek to option rights, but agents for the authors of high-profile works can demand full payment for rights up front.

For a producer who works independently, as I do, borrowing to pay a high price for rights means ceding significant control at an early stage. The creative approach to the adaptation, the choice of a director, casting, the whole vision of the project can drift away from the producer – the person who first wanted to make the film. Even if the film is not a personal project, diffusion of control can make for a less effective film.

A published source also helps attract talent, but there can be pitfalls. The first film I produced, alongside Ann Skinner who found the project and invited me to be her partner on it, was The Return of the Soldier. It was based on Rebecca West’s novel of 1918. The book has three strong, complex characters, immediately attractive to actors. Ann gave the book to Glenda Jackson, an avid reader, with the idea that she would play the central role. Happily she liked it and said she would. It was a great help to have a double Oscar-winning actress associated with the project before the screenplay was written.

Ann approached Dame Rebecca’s agent, who was somewhat disdainful, Ann never having produced a film before. However, as no one had been clamouring to acquire rights in the book, he granted an option, and at a price that she could afford. Somewhat impertinently, or so it seemed by the reaction she got, Ann asked if the agent was sure that Dame Rebecca still retained the rights in her novel. She was roundly ticked off and told that the agency had represented Dame Rebecca since 1935 and they were sure that she did indeed still own the rights in her book.

Ann set about the first steps in the adaptation process. She decided to engage a writer first, finding it impossible to get a commitment from a director based on the book alone, despite Glenda Jackson’s attachment. Money was needed both for the screenwriter and the option. Having no track record on which to raise money from outsiders, Ann paid for the option and the first draft of the screenplay herself out of her earnings as a script supervisor. The writer agreed to modest fees in return for a better deal if the film got made.

It must have been about this time that our lawyer advised a copyright search. There is a law firm in Washington that specialises in these searches. Their search revealed that soon after the book was published, Rebecca West had sold the rights in The Return of the Soldier to MGM, who in turn had sold them on to Warner Brothers in the ‘30s, apparently as a vehicle for Bette Davis. Ann had spent a great deal of time and money on a project she did not have the rights to.

The disdainful agent was apologetic, and Ann and he set about retrieving the rights from Warner Brothers. Dame Rebecca was not too put out at being asked for the money back, and, with the help of a couple of friends at the studio, the rights that Ann thought she already owned were properly obtained. Although this story ends happily, it is what they call learning the hard way. Producers cannot be too careful about ensuring that the person with whom they are negotiating actually controls the rights. A copyright check on anything published more than a year or two ago is an essential first step.

All this assumes you can persuade the author that the work should be filmed in the first place. That is not usually difficult because films pay writers a good deal more than publication. Often the author will want to discuss the vision for the film and may seek to be directly involved in the process even if they are not writing the screenplay themselves. All this has to be handled delicately. Giving too much influence to an author at the outset can inhibit the financing of the film.

Honesty is always the best policy. Producers always hope that their creative approach will be sympathetic to the author, but the author must understand that there will be many other influences as the film progresses: the director, the actors, the distributor and the financiers will all have input. It is impossible to run back to the original author for approvals at every turn. It is unwise to grant any such approvals unless the book is, like the Harry Potter series, so hot that the rights are not available otherwise. The sensible compromise, giving authors their deserved respect, is consultation that keeps the author in touch with the film and gives him or her a voice in the process.

Sometimes an idea for a film comes from a work that does not merit such respect. Many good films have been made from bad books. In those cases, it is not sensible to agree either approval or consultation. You know from the outset that the film will be different from the book. Fortunately, authors of less successful books are likely to be less fussy, and most likely pleased to sell the film rights at all.

Often the original author wants to write the screenplay. Many producers resist. Authors can be over-protective of their work and are usually inexperienced in the craft of screenwriting, a different discipline from other kinds of writing. The self-evident dominance of the visual in movies means that, for me, the story must be told in pictures. A respected author who has already written screenplays may be able to force the producer’s hand. However, the screenwriter’s contract customarily allows the producer to replace the writer, usually after two drafts, regardless of his or her eminence.

Top novels demand top writers. They are part of the package that sells the film. Sadly, there are few accomplished screenwriters in the UK. They are constantly in demand, hard to pin down and unaffordable for a producer starting out or without the backing of a substantial financier. The quality of the work to be adapted can help. Many screenwriters’ bread, butter and jam is commercially-driven popular cinema. It pays well, but it doesn’t feed the hunger that made them screenwriters in the first place. If a producer offers a novel that appeals creatively, a screenwriter will work hard to be available and affordable. This was the case with The Return of the Soldier: Hugh Whitemore came on board enthusiastically and fitted in with the timetable.

The assessment of a writer’s work and subsequent guidance of it are critical. I was never trained in that although through the years I have learnt a lot. I have been fortunate in my career in having two partners, Ann Scott and Ann Skinner, both of whom are specialists. Ann Scott became a producer through the BBC’s story department, and Ann Skinner was a top script supervisor in movies, relied upon by many great talents such as Joe Losey, John Schlesinger and John Boorman.

In the early stages of adaptation, the screenwriter only has to contend with the producer and perhaps a financier’s script development executive. As work progresses, the writer is subjected to more and more “input” from directors, financiers, distributors and, ultimately, actors. The producer must guide the process so that the screenwriter is not pulled in different directions. There will be a moment when the screenplay becomes a film in its own right and the source material is put aside. It is the producer’s responsibility to judge when that moment has been reached.

At some point, the director becomes involved. In the fastest book to screen development I have experienced, the director was there before me. Louis Malle’s Damage was adapted from a novel by Josephine Hart set in London. Louis had worked on the script with Jean-Claude Carrière but they had concluded that an English screenwriter was needed. I was becoming attached to the film as English co-producer, my preference for original material more than trumped by my desire to work with a master filmmaker. I encouraged Louis’s thought of working with David Hare, with whom I had worked at the National Theatre as well as on the film Wetherby.

Their process was interesting. They spent several weeks talking through the narrative structure, working out which scenes would be in the film, in what order, and how their content would differ from the book or not, until they had a script in which each scene was described in a couple of lines but not dramatised. Then David went away on his own to write the screenplay, sticking absolutely to the outline. Because the director was involved from the outset, the first screenplay that David produced was very close to what we finally shot.

On some occasions directors have little input. I was Executive Producer of Enchanted April, which my partner Ann Scott produced and Mike Newell directed. Peter Barnes wrote the screenplay under Ann’s guidance and with input from Mark Shivas at the BBC. It became a BBC production. Mike came in when Peter’s script was very close to its final form. That screenplay was eventually nominated for an Oscar.

Another of my adaptations, Land Girls based on the novel by Angela Huth, had a more eventful writing process. Ann Scott and I had been commissioned to produce the film. We developed a screenplay with a very distinguished writer, whom I prefer not to name. We were all pleased with the resulting script.

David Leland, our first choice director, liked it and agreed to make the film. It was our intention that David, himself an excellent screenwriter, should work with our writer to produce the final shooting script. They met to discuss it and here we hit the rocks. The two knew and respected each other, but couldn’t agree about the film. The writer withdrew, unhappy with us, feeling we should have stuck with him and found another director. We didn’t because the whole point of commissioning a script in the first place was to attract a director. We felt David was right for the film.

This kind of ethical dilemma arises quite often in the adaptation process, often because a director, joining the process halfway through, wants to take the film in a different direction. Nothing is harder for a producer than to have to tell a senior creative contributor that they are no longer needed, especially when, as often happens, their work is good. Frequently, film adaptations go through a number of writers, although much less so with original work where the writer’s ownership is much more significant. In the end there is often an arbitration process overseen by the Writers Guild before credit is finally agreed. That process involves the analysis of many different versions of the script to determine which writer is first responsible for each line.

David Leland didn’t want to work on the script alone. As director, he needed input from a trusted colleague and thus Keith Dewhurst was brought in to fill that role as David’s co-writer. Curiously, some might say perversely, David never read the original novel, although Keith did. He argued that he had been attracted to the project by the screenplay we had sent him, and that was a film not, any longer, a book. Angela Huth was rather put out, but in the end I think she was happy. The film was popular and retained the spirit of the book.

I have worked for some fourteen years alongside Ann Skinner and for a lot of that time under the direction of Working Title on the adaptation of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. The reasons why the film is not yet made are another story. Sebastian, as you might expect after so long, has lost patience with the whole process. However, I remember how wise his attitude to the adaptation was from the outset. Essentially he said, “A film is a film and a book is a book – all I hope is that it will be about the same things that inspired me to write the book in the first place”. Throughout the process, we and our now numerous collaborators have tried to be true to the powerful themes that run through his book, however much the narrative varies from it or individual characters’ stories change. It is an enormous challenge. Birdsong is a huge, complex novel that cannot be encompassed in two hours of screen time, but we believe a powerful, cinematic story can be distilled from it.

Filmmaking is consecutively as well as concurrently collaborative. As the shooting script is finalised, designers, a cinematographer, actors and an editor become part of a huge collaboration in adaptation. Sequences from a book that have survived rewrites and been filmed can disappear or be radically altered in an edit suite years after the producer first approached the author. The producer’s task is to take the best of what his collaborators have to offer.

In this process, the original work is a collaborator too, reworked, reimagined, yet respected when it matters. It is a great joy for a producer when an original author is happy with the final film. Ann Skinner and I are proud to have a note from Rebecca West thanking us for improving her book.

Simon Relph is an independent film producer and the author of the Relph Report on low budget film production. He is a past chairman of Bafta and a governor of the NFTS and Chairman of the Screenwriters Festival. His adaptation of Birdsong will go into production later this year.