'The Children Act' novelist and screenwriter reflects on what he's learned about endings and studio execs' suggestions: "They were all formed out of a pattern, as if they’d all taken Screenwriting 101 years ago."
After penning 14 novels and winning the Man Booker Prize, Ian McEwan seemingly doesn't have much left to prove. Still, the author says, "I don’t think I've ever worked harder in my life" than in 2018. This year, three film and television adaptations of McEwan's books — two of which he wrote the screenplays for — are rolling out while just last week, McEwan finished another novel. "So yes, it's been quite an interesting year," he says.The latest of McEwan's works to be released is The Children Act, his own adaptation of his 2014 novella about a judge deciding on a right-to-die case. The film, released in theaters and on VOD today, roughly follows the plot points of the short novel, with a few exceptions: When a 17-year-old boy and Jehovah's Witness (Fionn Whitehead) refuses a potentially life-saving blood transfusion on religious grounds, judge Fiona Maye (Emma Thompson) must deliberate on whether to force him to accept the treatment or let him make his own decision, months shy of his 18th birthday. As she faces trouble at home, Maye takes the unusual step of visiting the boy at his bedside, a decision that will have lasting and unintended consequences.
Plot aside, The Children Act also sees McEwan working on his own terms to adapt one of his stories. After 12 screen adaptations of his books, inside and outside of Hollywood, McEwan says he's determined the best way to work in the movie business: with close friends, "in a kind of intimacy and extended negotiation that is never going to break a friendship apart." (The process of negotiating ideas on The Children Act was "animated" but stopped short of hostile, he says.)
Right before the New York premiere of The Children Act, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to McEwan about what he's learned from screenwriting, his experiences in Hollywood and why it's easier to end a novel than a film.
You’ve adapted your books into films only twice before, with The Innocent and On Chesil Beach. What galvanized you to take that step with The Children Act?
Partly I wanted to work with my friend Richard Eyre again, and I was looking for something we could both do. Years back we made a couple of movies — one was called The Imitation Game, long before the more recent one, and then we made a state-of-the-nation movie in the early 1980s called The Ploughman's Lunch — and we've been friends ever since. So I gave Richard the novel when it was still in its penultimate draft and said that I thought there was a movie in here, and did he agree? And if so, would he like to direct it?
Second to that is that I’ve always held strongly to the belief that the novella, or the short novel, is in some ways ideal material — if it's got the plotlines and characters, et cetera — for a screenplay. Structurally, I think the screenplay is a kind of novella, that's how I approach it.
And for a rather more negative reason, there was already some interest in it [from filmmakers], and I thought, if I don’t do it, someone else will, and I wouldn't like that. Right from the beginning, it was a dog-in-the-manger approach that I wanted to do this and I only wanted Richard to direct, so that's how we got going.
With The Children Act and other instances when you've adapted your own novel, do you discover anything new about the story or characters in the screenplay format, as opposed to the novel format?
Yes, in a way. Especially with The Children Act, a lot of it is run through the mind of the judge, Fiona Maye, and that has to be translated into dialogue scenes, or scenes that somehow illuminate what the novel is privileged to do purely as a line of consciousness. So I find I'm really forced to confront the characters from the outside and really see this judge Fiona Maye, and everything she sees and does.
Also there's always that opportunity to go back and do things a little differently, and that's true with On Chesil Beach. There were one or two ideas I had with that, where, if I thought of them at the time, I probably would have included them in the novel. There's a kind of reverse process.
You [also] get impelled to a greater accuracy in a movie: I had the help of a very renowned, now-retired judge, Alan Ward, when I was writing the novel, and then we got him on board to help us with the movie. When you've actually got to see everything, when it's so literal as cinema is, you have to get things bang-on right: what people are wearing, how the courtroom looks. That’s a kind of discovery in itself.
Cinema demands something differently about endings. So in The Children Act the novel, the boy’s death or impending death is very much offstage — he sort of vanishes from the novel in the last third and everything is played through the mind of Fiona. That really wouldn't work dramatically, and so I changed the novel to have the judge go to the boy’s bedside, and so that she gets the news halfway through the Christmas concert. And likewise in On Chesil Beach, I found it more interesting to have the elderly man, Edward, see one last time the woman he once loved 40 years ago and screwed everything up by skulking on the beach. It was useful to dramatize that moment and really see it again. So, for me, writing a screenplay is a way of really laying out the whole corpse and bringing it back to life in a different way.
Courtesy of A24
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