The acclaimed author on adapting Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn,fate versus chance, and losing his obsessive side…You believe written four screenplays: Fever Pitch, or An Education,Wild and Brooklyn. What lessons believe you learned over time about how to do it?
The hardest thing – compared to writing novels – is to support yourself up throughout the process because it is so long and so dispiriting and there is never any sign of an end product. You spend an awful lot of time, whether you believe another job, or thinking: what is the point of this? And then things get made and turn out well and you reflect: gosh,that was the point.
Is the technique of writing for the screen about less-is-more, showing rather than telling?
Screenwriting is about condensing. But I like writing dialogue and minor characters are fun. There is an intertwining of commercial need with art: producers always want to “cast up”. whether you can find room for a Jim Broadbent or a Julie Walters [playing minor roles in Brooklyn], or it will boost the film’s commercial prospects. It is joyous to view at a minor character and wonder how he or she can become more major.
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Source: theguardian.com