Adaptation Adepts – Part II
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.

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DR: When you're working on a novel you've got total control. Is it daunting to hand it over to someone else? Obviously, you have to trust the director, like with yourself and Neil Jordan.

PMC: Those were two freak movies, that'll never happen again. The thing about finishing a novel is, it's lovely to be asked because you know you'll get a load of money, but there's no guarantee that someone will buy the film rights. Now at this stage I would just tend to hand it over and forget about it. It was kind of a fluke to get two movies made so I'm happy with it.

DR: Were you involved at all in the script of Breakfast on Pluto?

PMC: I co-wrote both of them. But that really meant I didn't have to do the architecture.

DR: Do you find that all your books, or a lot of your books are optioned immediately?

PMC: No, not at all.

DR: That's surprising, because it seems like producers are looking for material.

PMC: It's a very unpredictable business. In my experience there's no guarantee, I mean, I produced a book that sold in abysmal quantities, and after a book like that you can find yourself beginning to crawl back up, you know. It can happen very easily, there's no point in anybody thinking that just because you might have had a hit book then that's that, it's not.

DR: But obviously if a book is successful then it's more attractive to producers, it's almost like market research?

RD: I've noticed that when I've a book coming out (in the world of publishing there's usually a year gap between finishing the book and it coming out) there's kind of a vague interest. I don't have a London or New York agent or anything but there's a vague ‘We believe Mr Doyle has a new book out and we're interested in reading it,’ and it's not because they know anything about it, but they’re just looking to see if it's The Committments 2, and it isn't, so that's the end of that.

I think 9/11 had a huge impact on the curiosity of filmmakers, in the States anyway. I remember a friend of mine, literally days before 9/11, was on the phone all the time and picking and choosing the projects he was going to do, and then post-9/11, all the phone calls just stopped. Literally stopped. And by the time they started again it was too late. But I don't like this optioning idea anyway; unless it's a human being you're talking to, somebody like a director who wants to make the thing.

PMC: A lot of the time it's just trawling around and there's a squad of people looking for something and they'll give you a few bob for it, I don't take much interest in it really.

RD: With the optioning thing, it just goes up on a shelf, I think it's almost like get the thing before anyone else gets it, it's a negative really, not a positive.

DR: If you've written something and you believe yourself that it's worth bringing to the screen, have you put the machine into motion yourself?

RD: I haven't actually done anything for the screen in a while. There's something about the shape of the page when you're writing for screen that I enjoy, I like writing plays as well, there's something about it. I like filling those pages.

I had a book called A Star Called Henry, and everybody was saying it would make a great film, and I was inclined to agree with them. But it was one of those where it was a big budget thing and you had to have three things happening in the same afternoon before the money fell into place. So I remember I did about four drafts, everybody was happy and – this is about four years ago now – I was asked to go to Prague to meet Star A, me and the director Michael Winterbottom. I said, ‘Okay, sure’. But it never happened. Star A went off somewhere else instead. So it was hot for about two hours on a Wednesday afternoon, with two things in place: the script and the director. And half the money as well. But then Star A had to go off somewhere else and it never happened. Obviously there's disappointment because it doesn't get made and it's another project up on the shelf, but I just felt: I don't want to spend all my time doing this. I can be writing books or short stories. Short stories, you write them for a couple of thousand people if you're lucky but at least you're getting work done and published.

PMC: I found that all that travelling interrupts your work an awful lot. I don't know do other writers work differently in prose, but I found that writing prose is like being a seamstress or something, and if you lose the stitch on a loom you spend weeks getting back there. It's not like when you're directing something. It means that you get really unhappy and irritable. I stopped doing all that, because a lot of that Star A stuff just comes to nothing. But in fact you're losing out at the end of the day.

DR: You write every day, obviously?

PMC: I just write the same hours that I used to teach, it’s the rhythm I have.

RD: So you go walking out the yard for ten minutes at eleven o'clock looking for lads smoking.

DR: Eugene, are you the same?

EOB: Yeah, well it depends on what you're at, but if you're deadlining you do your day and try to make each day the same as the last one. You have to be very careful and not break your habits. Like a little aul fella, you go out to the shop with you little bag at half twelve and come back and do the thing. If anything happens in the day, like you have to do something or you have to go and meet someone, then that throws it all out of whack. You come home and you go, ‘Ah, fuck it, I can't get back into this now.’

DR: But I suppose in television or film, deadlines are more of an issue. lf you're writing a novel, is there a deadline hanging over you?

RD: I've never had a deadline. I probably should have in some ways, although I work five days a week and I work till six o'clock, so I'm very disciplined in that regard. But I've never had a deadline for a novel or a short story or anything like that.

DR: So did you find that odd, working in film, the pressure, or did you find it helped you make decisions quicker?

RD: Yeah, well that's the adult world really, you know, that's okay. It's a bit stressful, but you're not opening up anybody's body and prodding around looking for the tumour and hoping that's the tumour and not this bit here. So it's not life or death. I suspect Pat would probably agree with me there, you know, the odd author tour you go on, and you do two interviews in a row, or a reading, and people go: ‘You must be exhausted’, and it's just that, we're so spoiled in many ways.

PMC: I say it beats working one day, I mean, you're staying in the best hotels. You can get annoyed alright, but it's not like teaching forty-two fractious school-kids.

RD: Yeah, so you know, the deadlines are grand really, it's fine, it's the adult world, it's responsibility. It's feeding your kids, you know, it's alright.

DR: Do you think there's a newer generation of writers out there who are writing directly for the screen, like Mark O'Halloran, people who see that as an option, whereas before, like yourselves, people came from more of a literary background?

PMC: Definitely. My kids would never read the same way I did, simply because the literary thing is not as strong as it was. But there was nothing to do in the ’70s except read; it's as simple and blunt as that. You went to college, there was nothing to do in Dublin after half eleven. There was one club that was full of cops; there was nothing else to do as far as I could see. You could steal everything in the library in St Pat's college except the things you were supposed to read, so we went through the whole library, but there was nothing else to do except go to the movies, smoke cigarettes, drink a bit. Now there are so many avenues competing for the attention of kids, why would they, in a way?

RD: One of my kids now, he was out the back garden this morning doing a sweded version of King Kong.

PMC: Have they sweded any of your movies yet?

RD: No, not yet.

PMC: They've done The Butcher Boy.

RD: I saw a few scenes from The Commitments alright. There was one where Adam and Paul come into the audition scene in The Commitments. Adam and Paul are in the queue there. I thought that was class!

PMC: The sweding thing is great.

RD: So that's what my fifteen-year-old was doing, he's doing little scripts. That's how he's expressing himself, whereas there was no such thing as a handheld camera when I was a kid.

PMC: It just didn't come into your head.

EOB: And now there's the phones, you actually have the video phones. My niece shows me videos that young fellas make of them doing handbrake turns in a car and getting out and having a mock fight and getting back into the car and going off again. They send these mini-films to each other, so their thinking is all that.

PMC: Will any of them ever come to anything though, do you think?

EOB: I don't know.

PMC: It's almost too easy, isn't it?

DR: Well it's so easy to reach an audience now, isn't it, with YouTube.

PMC: But I can't see much discipline involved.

EOB: Architecture, out the window.

RD: All you have to do is run up behind a Guard and push him into the water and run, and you're up on YouTube and you're famous for the rest of your life.

DR: You've all written for television – Family and Pure Mule. Pat, you wrote A Mother's Love Is a Blessing, what do you think of the current state of Irish television?

PMC: Oh it's much improved I think. A lot of the Irish drama now is way, way ahead. I mean, even looking at some of the Reeling in the Years, some of the stuff they had on in the ’70s and ’80s was pretty abysmal. I think even Frank Hall – God rest his soul, he was a colossus in many ways – but to have someone so appallingly stagey… It's so lacking in guts. It was proclaimed that it brought down governments and everything like that, but I remember trying to get stuff on RTÉ years ago that was far gutsier than that. I'm not saying it was better, but I wanted to push it on a bit farther than that kind of stuff. But you wouldn't get it up, they were far too conservative. Now I think that those kind of constraints are gone, and production values have gone way up, really gone way up. I live in London part of the year, and I think it's far better than what you see in England now, which is a real turnaround. The BBC's gone down the tubes. If there's anything to see it's on BBC 4. But we're pretty likely once a week to come up with something, like The Panel for example. It's not drama but it’s highly sophisticated stuff of that kind.

DR: Are you interested in writing for television?

PMC: Yeah, very. Because I think it's very compact and I like the half hour because you don't get into that development thing. It's very, very succinct like a short story, it happens in the same time frame. But I'm trying to get a thing going now which is a labour of love. It's the first time I've ever pushed something myself, so hopefully it will happen. It's a big thing, but they're all half hours.

In Ireland right now there's a weird flux in its history, the old and the new all mixed in together. You've got a multicultural city now being born, so it's a very interesting period. I like to come from almost this Ireland's Own traditional kind of perspective. And Ireland's Own is a good example because it's a magazine that has a weird sort of eccentricity about it; there are things in there that shouldn't be there. Ireland's a bit like that now, you have this small town, you look at it, then you look at it from another angle and it's something else. So that's the kind of angle I'm coming at, and television is perfect for that.

DR: And there's a whole new media scene on television now as well. That, I suppose, is closer to writing a novel than a film. A film you could be working on for seven or eight years.

PMC: Well you've got producers here now, don't you, Alan Moloney and people like that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago. You had to go to England. But now they're playing on a world stage and they're highly respected, so although it goes in dribs and drabs, there's an infrastructure there now.

DR: Roddy, do you see yourself writing for television again?

RD: Yeah, I'd love to, I mean, I would in theory, and in practice I'd love to. I had a meeting in RTÉ there about a year and a half ago, and to say it didn't go well would be an understatement. I felt quickly it was a job interview and I wasn't going to get the job, you know, so I said, ‘fuck it’.

PMC: That's incredible.

RD: I'll go back to writing books now.

PMC: So a frosty reception, then? Like, ‘Don't think you're going to just walk in here Mr Doyle.’

RD: Well, they're your words Pat, but it was a little bit...snooty. The project may not have been for them, that's grand, but I just thought the whole tone was that no project was going to be for them. So, obviously there are two people and I'm on one side of the desk and the other person on the other side of the desk could have an entirely different interpretation, but I just thought: if I'm going write for telly again, it won't be through that door. But, to be fair, I'm working on other stuff and I'm very busy. In theory, I'd love to add working for television to my list of things that I will do. If I was asked to do it again I think I would, because Family is something that I feel proud of. I have to say I rarely feel pride, not in anything I do anyway, though I constantly feel proud of my children. But I do feel proud of it because of the impact it had, and the way it shook people.

DR: It was one of those things you had to see, that people talked about for weeks and weeks afterwards.

RD: Yeah, well, again it was one of the things you could never anticipate, you could never realise it was going to happen. I remember after the first episode was broadcast it was on the news the following day. This aul one on my mother's road pushed her, you know, actually pushed her! She reacted so violently to the thing that she actually attacked my mother. A tiny gentle woman, you know.

PMC: What would you have to do now to get a reaction like that?

RD: Yeah. I got death threats, you know, I can't imagine getting any anymore – well not from people I don't know. I might get one or two from people who know me but not from strangers. It'd be very hard to rattle Ireland's cage anymore.

PMC: They wouldn't be interested enough.

RD: They wouldn't be shocked enough. It's only fourteen years ago, and you didn't even see Charlo hitting Paula on screen. It was the better for it, the threat of it, and there was that hysterical denial on the part of some people and then the overreaction of other people. You know, either it never happened, or every man in the country was doing it.

PMC: Do you think that the gene of malignant shame was always overactive in the Irish psyche until say ten, fifteen years ago? I did an article that was a tiny little thing but had exactly the same reaction as Family: there were police on the door of the Great Hotel in Clones, there was all sorts of things. But it wasn't funny; it's not funny in a small place when that happens. But if the same article were written now I think the indifference would be there. No one's making a laugh of us, we don't care because we have as much money as anyone else now. That art or whatever just wouldn't have that impact anymore.

RD: I've got to say that when I was writing the thing, I wasn't writing it to shock, so I think if you set out to shock people you probably wouldn't because you'd write something tedious.

DR: And that's a problem with a lot of television now is it does set out just to shock or to have that shock value.

PMC: Well how would you shock someone now?

RD: Turn off the telly! No telly tonight.

DR: Eugene, I think you had a similar reaction to Pure Mule. I mean it seemed to hit – in a positive way – but there was a fair bit of negative stuff, say down the country.

EOB: It was mainly very positive. I think the audience that it was aimed at really embraced it and that was all good. I think there was negative stuff about accents: ‘We don't talk like that!’ or ‘There isn't that much drinking’, or that kind of stuff. But overall it was a very positive experience. There was a lot of reaction to it which surprised me because I didn't think in the last few years you would get that on television anymore – the old thing where they'd all sit down to watch the big shows like Strumpet City. Now there are just so many channels.

PMC: Pennies from Heaven.

EOB: Yeah. And everybody would watch Pennies from Heaven, you know, there was a thing, and television was amazing because you could do stuff that actually had an impact on society like Boys from the Black Stuff. That made middle England actually think about what this was doing. But I don't think you'd really get that anymore, but a lot of television, certainly now in England and America, it's very, very slick. It’s brilliantly written and it's brilliantly done, but it's very much about the hook, you know, and hooking people like on a video game. Lost, for example, or Desperate Housewives. There are a few shows really good ones. The Wire is an astonishing show about Baltimore and who has power and who hasn't. Then again, it's an exception.

PMC: It's like the death of the political theatre in Britain. These people, they don't exist anymore, so it's inevitable that television was going to be affected by that kind of consciousness, you know.

RD: I think another thing about television is the box-set. The Wire: Seasons One to whatever. I've never seen The Wire on telly, and it's amazing stuff, but I think that's why we don't feel the burning need to sit down to watch something on a Monday night anymore. My kids watch Skins on a Monday night. It’s fantastic, really great. I watch it with them then as well, and presumably other people of that age sit down and watch it at ten o'clock because they can't wait for the boxset to come out at Christmas. So that's one that they watch religiously, Lost is another one. Mind you, they seem to be able to watch Lost before it comes out here, which is a crime isn't it?

EOB: Don't do it, kids.

DR: What's probably missing at the moment on Irish television is that authored voice, like Family or Pure Mule, or like the really great British TV of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

RD: Well, Prosperity. Which was brilliant.

DR: And there has to be a place for The Clinic.

RD: This is true, there has to be a place for those of us that don't want to watch it either, but I think it's fantastic the amount of work that's being done. I mean, when I was on the Film Board there was so little, and that's only four years ago. But I think now and then stuff is shoved before it's quite ready. I've seen scripts that could have done with more time and I think that's a pity. There are series made out of people who are one-trick-ponies and there might be a half-hour in them but they're made to do six half-hours and they struggle.

DR: Do you think that's a problem with the commissioning process then?

RD: I really don't know because I never got that far.

EOB: I would have certain views on that, but I'm not going to get into it, because it'll be a tirade.

RD: But I suppose because I'm used to writing books and I'm working at my own pace, I get a phonecall once a year from the publisher asking me how I am and if there's a book on the way, and that's all I want. I like the man, and he's the same one I've always had.

DR: Do you think there's maybe too much compromise when you're working on a screenplay or TV?

RD: Well actually, that's one of the attractions of it in many ways. I think myself and Pat and Eugene, we've been lucky to have compromised.

PMC: It's a break from solitude. It's unthinkable for any novelist to have the idea of someone coming in and say, ‘I don't like that’. When you’re writing a novel you really have to fight for every comma and full stop. When you're writing a film script you can’t because there are all sorts of compromises that have to be made. But it's so unthinkable for a novel, apart from essential editing and structure and so on. The rhythm and tone is so your own that I don't think anyone can change that, it's just unthinkable. So, in a way, it's kind of lovely to be in a group.

RD: Especially when you’re essentially with somebody you like. I mean, having a chat with Stephen Frears is one of the joys of living, it's fantastic, you know. You're talking about the work and he's giggling away.

EOB: That's all great, but the downside is the uncertainty about whether this thing that you've worked on, put blood sweat and tears into, will be actually made in the end or not. That's the most trying thing. And waiting for decisions, especially in television, it’s such a long process. You'd be getting a few bob for treatments and they may commission a first episode and you get half the money and it keeps you going, but it's more that frustration, and wondering whether they're really trusting you to bring it home or not. They say they do but, you know, that kind of thing can be extremely frustrating.

DR: Do you find it quite hard to commit yourself to it?

EOB: Well you have to commit yourself to it, but there are the meetings where you actually don't know which way they're going to go because they haven't indicated anything or communicated anything.

PMC: There seem to be an awful amount of meetings in the film world, don't there? I just wonder what all these meetings are about.

EOB: They’re meetings about meetings.

PMC: They're saying let's meet and chew the fat. Chew the fat about what though? There's the script, you go and get the people and then we do it.

EOB: Yeah. That was the big thing I found because coming from the theatre into the film world was like, yeah, we'll have a meeting – a meeting about nothing.

RD: I cut out meetings for two years and I wrote a book.  Didn't meet anyone. Didn't meet me kids, haven't seen me mother in two years. And it produced a book.

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