Adaptation Adepts
Declan Recks talks to Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe and Eugene O’Brien about the art of adaptation. Words by Eamonn Gray. Photos by Nicola Bodano.

Declan Recks: All three of you are big film fans and that has influenced your work. Roddy, your first book The Commitments was almost like reading a film script: it had very little descriptive passages, was dialogue heavy, and you got to know the characters through dialogue. Did you make a conscious decision to write it as a book rather than as a film script?

Roddy Doyle: I was hoping I’d never have to hear that again. The answer I can give you is when
I was a teenager and going to the pictures, I’d have a book in my pocket. Simple as that. I loved both and when it came to deciding – I didn’t even decide to do film because I didn’t know such a thing happened in this country to be honest with you. I’m not sure it even did. There was nothing at all.

Pat McCabe: Well, I’m a little bit older than Roddy but I come from pretty much a literary tradition really – there wasn’t any talk about movies, except as fans, there was no idea that anybody would make anything. There was only Neil Jordan, that was about it. And he was only just starting at that time. There’s something in me that says that screenwriting is not real writing in that, by the time everyone’s got their paws on it, it’s so far away from you that the bond is broken to some extent. Whereas, for better or worse, every word on the page of a novel is your own. That’s quite pure, it’s like a poem, so it’s always going to be more precious.

DR: Eugene, yourself?

Eugene O’Brien: Well, I suppose I was always into movies as first and foremost because I was in the lucky position of the family having a cinema in the town, in Edenderry. So I used to go to the Saturday matinees every week, it was like the ritual, and we used to see an extraordinary amount of stuff, like the Disneys and the James Bonds and all that, but if there wasn’t anything suitable on they used to fire whatever was on on the Friday on the Saturday. So we’d see very violent Westerns and I remember seeing The Wild Bunch when I was nine and absolutely being transported by it – I was always pretty obsessed with films and I suppose I got into the theatre through acting and just wanting to write something.

An edited version of the roundtable is printed in Film Ireland 122.
The full unedited transcript will be soon posted on the website.