Adaptation Adepts – Part I
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 that when I was a teenager going to the pictures I'd have a book in my pocket. Simple as that. I loved both and when it came to deciding, well, 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.

DR: But if there had been a culture of film or writing screenplays, would it have been a first choice?

RD: I hope not. No. Because what I like about writing is the independence of it all. Well, it’s one of the many things I like about it. If you're writing for the screen you're never independent – there are other satisfactions, but there's too much money involved and, you know, deadlines are essential. I prefer writing for the page really, writing fiction, because there's more elbowroom.

DR: Pat?

Pat McCabe: Well, I'm a little bit older than Roddy but I come from pretty much a literary tradition – there wasn't any talk about movies, except as fans. There was only Neil Jordan, that was about it. And he was only just starting at that time; I think Angel came out around ’92 or ’93. Before that, you know, anybody who could manage to get their hands on a handheld camera would try and do something after there was that spat down in Wexford when Neil Jordan got all the money for Angel. Maybe there was some justification, I don't know, they must have felt they were shortchanged. 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. But as a fan I like to see the finished product. I was blessed anyway because I haven't really worked with that many people in both worlds.

DR: Eugene – yourself?

Eugene O'Brien: Well, I suppose I was always into movies first and foremost because I was in the lucky position of the family having a cinema in the town, in Edenderry, on the square. 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 showing on the Friday, on the Saturday. So we'd see very violent Westerns and I remember seeing The Wild Bunch. I was nine and absolutely being transported by it – the opening scene with the kids and the scorpion and the ants – it just hit me on a level that I couldn't kind of explain, I was hot and bothered after it. We all ran out and died in slow motion in the square. So I suppose I was always pretty obsessed with films, and then did college and that, Communications in Rathmines – which wasn’t a real course! It wasn't really, it was a mad house. So that was my thing and I suppose I got into the theatre through acting and just wanting to write something.

DR: I suppose it would be easier to get a theatre play on than a film?

EOB: I wasn't thinking about film at that stage and it seemed to be a thing that you had to have done something before you could get into it, and the Eden play was always going to be a play – it had been in my head for ten years and it just kind of blurted out onto the page and there it was. It was just a thing that happened. I don't think you plan. Sometimes these things just happen.

DR: Roddy, you adapted all three of your books. What was the biggest challenge in bringing them to the screen? There are obviously a lot of decisions to be made about what you leave in and what you throw out.

RD: Yeah, even with the short book it happens that way. I suppose, I wasn't anticipating the question when I started doing it – it must be twenty years ago – so it's a bit vague. The screenplay of The Commitments ended up being co-written with Dick Clement, so that probably tells you the big challenge there was utter ignorance really. I had never even seen a script, I don't know if Faber had started publishing scripts then, I'm not sure. So I'd never even seen either a printed or a working script. Luckily, Lynda Myles was the producer, and she was a great help, she was a great teacher. I think it was just my own ignorance really that was the first stumbling block. But I'm a reasonably quick learner. I think one of the things you have to get into your head is that the book is the book and it's safe. It's a finished thing and it's safe and it's – Pat used the word precious, and it is precious – but it's safe. You're adapting it for the screen and you can go at it with a machete and it's not going to affect the book.

I suppose the challenge with experience is kind of making something that is designed to be read – and it's an obvious point – into something that's designed to be seen. With The Snapper, what became apparent quite quickly was that there was way too much talking. It works on paper but if you'd just transcribed it into a script and let somebody with less experience than Stephen Frears direct it, it would have been an absolute disaster. People say the virtue of the book is the fact it has a lot of dialogue, but in fact when you're doing the screenplay there's too much of it and you're not leaving any room for anything else. So there are different challenges. I suppose working with a different type of book – a denser book – would be an entirely different challenge, but I've never done that.

DR: Do you worry at all that you'll alienate fans of the original material?

RD: I wouldn't be worried about alienating fans. I don't know what they are to be honest with you, and I don't have a website with points of contact for my few remaining fans, you know, so no, that wouldn't be something I'd be worried about.

DR: So you view it as a completely new work?

RD: Yeah.

DR: Would you be the same, Pat?

PMC: Something occurred to me many years ago. Someone said to me, ‘Why don't you write plays? Dialogue seems to be your forté’, and I tried to write these plays and I began to realise, well, dialogue may or may not be one's forté but there's an awful lot in writing a play that has nothing to do with dialogue. Because I was writing these reams of dialogue that didn't seem to be going anywhere. And then I discovered that exactly the same is true of screenwriting – you can bang in all the dialogue you like but if it's too much you'll give people a headache. So I realised that the most important thing in my estimation and appreciation of it would be architecture. That's what's important in film.

I asked Neil Jordan what he thought and he said, ‘You've got to keep the ball moving forward all the time, always moving forward, never let the audience get ahead of you, and always move from side to side as well.’ So it seemed a simple rule of thumb, but I'm not good at architecture so I needed someone co-writing with me. The plants, pay-offs and all that kind of stuff, is desperately important to the film. It can be taken to extremes, however. I was reading there that Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood were cutting up bits of paper and sticking them into the script a week before filming what turned out to be Coogan's Bluff, which is a great cop thriller and flawless in many ways. So that defies the orthodoxy of screenwriting in many ways, like Bergman. So there's no real rule, apart from architecture and succinctness. For that reason I'm not as attracted to it as I would be to prose writing, which comes from a far deeper source. You kind of know that it's over when it's over. There's a moment of post-coital bliss almost. It doesn't last very long but you know it's over and you can go off looking for another girlfriend then.

DR: Would you look at that and say that adapting The Butcher Boy was an opportunity to explore or develop things that you hadn't in the book?

PMC: Normally the book is safe, I'd totally concur with that, but the problem with The Butcher Boy was that it had every constituent part of every God-awful Irish movie or novel that had ever been made. You had the alcoholic priest, the long-suffering mother, everything, it was almost like a stew of every Seán Ó Faoláin, Patrick Kavanagh... They're clichés because they're true, and the thing in The Butcher Boy was to treat these people right and be fair to it, but you could see that on screen in the wrong hands it would have been an absolute disaster. So there were a few people interested in it, but I withdrew because I wanted a poetic sensibility and I felt that that had to be there, it had to be a mytho-poetry almost. And I thought when Neil Jordan expressed an interest that this was a person that probably could do it. And if that hadn't happened I wouldn't have allowed it to be filmed, not because I'm precious about it, I just thought it wouldn't work, I thought it could have been an embarrassment and I don't think I could have lived with that embarrassment.

DR: The music was really important as well. Was that always in your head when you were re-writing it?

PMC: Very much the music of the ’50s. The music that was important to me was not the ’60s music so much as Ruby Murray, and the Andrews Sisters, and John McCormack, which really would have been the beat of that generation rather than my own. The ’60s were only just beginning. What we were trying to photograph or socially analyse was the post-war generation who I think were burdened with a huge responsibility. It was really unfair to them but it was nobody's fault, they had an awful job getting their children educated and, you know, fulfilling themselves. So I wanted to make that kind of movie, or book, but not to be God-awfully sentimental about it, or dishonest either.

DR: In between the book and the film you also had your play Frank Pig Says Hello. Obviously you had to approach that in a different way.

PMC: Well, getting back to the architecture thing, Joe O’Byrne had asked me to do something and I wrote this script two hundred pages long. He went white when I gave him the script; I just handed him this slab. We were in Skerries, and he said, ‘I can't go to a rehearsal with this’. There was no dialogue. So we went away, and we hacked at it again and I said, ‘Well, you know, maybe the style of this is wrong’. I'd been approaching it like a classic drama. So then we thought we’d try to do it like the German Expressionist plays he'd been working on in Dublin with his theatre company Co-motion. These were like a play, but not really, about classic payoff. So I did it in this style like Buster Keaton meets Büchner. It sort of led off and I was able to make a ninety-minute script out of it. It was a Cinderella success, it shouldn't have been a success but it was. So that was totally by accident, as often these things are, because nobody ever sits down and thinks, ‘Okay, let’s make a hit play now.’ If you start thinking like that you'll probably lose your shirt. And it was a pleasurable experience all round, it meant that what had been perceived as an eccentric, unclassifiable, rural voice beforehand now was understood. So it gave me a way in. I wasn't going to stop anyway, but it's very frustrating if you know you're insisting on your own vernacular and pushing it and wanting to create something but nobody's getting it. So that was a nice breakthrough. It's become old-fashioned now, which is great because that means it's become accepted. There's a lot of that stuff outside of Kavanagh that wouldn't really have been around that much. That's the way it seemed to me.

DR: Roddy, you worked with Joe O’Byrne on The Woman That Walked Into Doors. But that came the other way around, didn’t it?

RD: It started off as Family, yeah. I wrote Family over a two-year period. I was teaching at the same time and writing the book that became Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. So I'd been asked would I write this series and I spent about a year thinking about it and jotting down notes and dividing out four episodes, and then I wrote the four episodes, and when I was writing the last one I wondered an awful lot about the woman who became Paula Spencer, and I thought there might be a book in her. So I started writing the book before Family was filmed, and I'd actually finished it, I think, before it was broadcast, or it was very close to completion. But then Joe came along – and in the meantime it was also an opera in Belgium, believe it or not – so it's had a long life, and it's coming back, there's a French version coming out next year. One of the joys of that book is seeing it taking shape in all sorts of ways. But Joe suggested an adaptation, and it was actually very short work. I think it took four days, we went down to Wexford. With my knowledge of the book and his more recent knowledge of the book – he was keen to emphasize parts of it – it ended up being quite an easy and pleasurable job. I like Joe very much.

PMC: There was kind of a crossover with Breakfast on Pluto because I saw the production of it and the opening scene is amazing – you've got these ’70s flares and the song Sugar Baby Love. I had to ring Joe up and tell him I didn't steal the song because Neil Jordan had said to me, ‘I want to use this song Sugar Baby Love’.

RD: It's such a wonderful song. I actually wanted it in, I think, one of the episodes of Family, and it never appeared, and I was pissed off because it's such a great, great song.

PMC: It's an impossible falsetto, it's insane the way it begins.

RD: I've attempted it myself, but without success. I have it on my iPod and it's probably my most played song.

PMC: And it's almost the same scene but only by accident – Neil Jordan hadn't seen the production.

DR: Eugene, when Eden was on I know you were probably under a lot of pressure, well, I was pushing you to develop it into a film. Instead you went and wrote a TV series, which I suppose was inspired by Eden, exploring the same themes, the same environment, Pure Mule. Had you had enough of Eden at that stage and just didn't want to explore those characters again?

EOB: It was the first thing that had been a success that I'd written, and it had been on a few times and there was great mileage in it. It went around Europe and stuff and I saw loads of different versions of it, which was great fun. But I suppose I'd had enough of it and I just wanted to move on to something else, onto other characters, though I always thought there was a film in it. Again, like we were talking about, I think I wanted to do it with you because it's very important to get people that click with it and I think it's vital if you're adapting something that you're with someone who you're very comfortable with. You know that they know the stuff, and also they're going to push you in the right way and you're not going to be fighting or pulling your hair out. And they can shine a light on it that makes you see it in another way as well, an interesting way or whatever. So I think that's why I pursued it. We had done Pure Mule together so I knew that we were on the same Offaly road.

DR: I know you did have an opportunity to change some things. It wasn’t that you weren't happy with it but there was an opportunity to clarify some things like, say, Breda's character, or particularly her sexual experience at the end.

EOB: Yeah, well we looked at it again. Like the lads said: the thing is secure, the play is the play and people go and see it and have a memory of it and it's there, and this is a film and it's a totally different. I was interested in exploring the Billy character more as to what was going on with him and why he was the way he was. I also think the ending a big decision, it was one of the big decisions we made and which you have to make when you're adapting stuff. We made a big decision to have some little glimmer of hope, because the play ends pretty devastatingly: the man is lying drunk in front of his children. It didn't feel right, you had to have some kind of meeting of the two of them and to see would there be a future for them.

It was an interesting thing again, we delved into what Pat has mentioned: the architecture. The thing about adapting your own stuff is at least you have a story, at least you know what it is, you don't have to make up the story, you have to try and do something with it. It was a good training ground in screenwriting in terms of how do we bring these two monologues that were essentially thirty pages of dialogue into a more visual representation. We made a big decision with the Billy character that he would be a very quiet man in the film. In the play he's a big man about town, he's in the bars and full of aul shite in the bars but not great at home. So this Billy we made ended up being a lot broodier or more thoughtful character, but still completely at sea about who he was and what he was and where he was going.

DR: Have you found, Roddy, in any of your adaptations that characters appear different due to the different type of presentation even though they've essentially got the same traits?

RD: Actors bring an awful lot to it. When I was writing The Van for example, I never really thought about what the characters looked like, generally, I really don't care what they look like. I know a lot about what they feel like, what they seem like and what they think. Donal O'Kelly's interpretation of Bimbo wasn't as I had imagined it, which is not a criticism at all, it's actually quite the opposite in many ways. I suppose because I'd seen Colm before and he'd been in The Snapper and he's been in The Committments so it was kinda Colm coming again for the third time, but Donal was brand new. It was great actually, it was terrific, but I'd never visualised him that way. And when it's too late I'm also quite surprised at how people react to a character, like Charlo Spencer in Family – I thought he was an out-and-out bollox and I drew him as an out-and-out bollox and yet he became something of a hero, you know. Again, I'm happy to take responsibility for it.

PMC: Sean McGinley had that sort of dark star-quality about him though, didn't he?

RD: It's a ridiculous thing to say, Sean has always been a great actor, but if I had been casting it, such are my limits, I would never have even thought of him. But Michael Winterbottom did think of him and he was absolutely extraordinary. But I would never have visualised him that way. He had to have charm, obviously, or it wouldn't have worked, but I just never saw him taking off in the way that he did as a character when he appeared in 1994, it was quite amazing. It's one of the good things about opening up your work to others; they bring their skills – though it's a gamble obviously. I think that I've been fortunate in that the gamble has paid off. The actors come along and the designer comes along, there’s a bit of music put in, Sugar Baby Love, and you'll be happy for the rest of your life. Certain little moments of pride where something happens that you wouldn't have anticipated, because the script is very flat.

PMC: There's something about the music when it goes on that really is extraordinary. There was a scene in The Butcher Boy which was really flat when we played it first, it's a scene where Eamonn Owens is just thinking about his buddy and an atom bomb goes off behind him, but we had The Shadows on originally – ‘Apache’ or something like that, and it was really, really flat, it did nothing. And then someone found a song by Frank Sinatra called ‘Where Are You’, and the thing just became sublime. It's just a chance finding, someone thought that this would work, and it's not the same scene any more. So that's the moment of pride, one of those little nuggets that you think that's sheer accident now that that happened.

RD: The Snapper was struggling in a rough cut, I remember, I used to go over to London to see it once a week, to see a rough cut, and there was a soundtrack added to it and it was awful, really crap, and there were a lot of heads in hands wondering what to do, and then – I don't know who made the decision, it wasn't me – but the decision was made just to get rid of all the soundtrack and just rely on what was on the radio, what was on the telly, people singing, and that was a great decision. Because it was full of music anyway, people are singing and humming and have the radio on and you could add bits. And I don't know who chose that great song, you know, Lick the Tins or whatever they're called, the Belfast band. They had a great song – the Elvis song, ‘Can't Help Falling in Love’ stuck at the beginning and the end. It was just great because it freed the whole thing up, it suddenly became about the people talking and not about superimposing the soundtrack. Actually taking the music away was inspired.

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Read 'Adaptation Adepts – Part II' here
An edited version of the roundtable is printed in Film Ireland 122.