From Hampstead to Hollywood

Edel Brosnan speaks to Deborah Moggach about adaptations, arbitration and Austen.

Adapting a novel for the big screen is a risky business for a writer: get it wrong and you face the wrath of the original book’s fans. Guild member Deborah Moggach penned the script for 2005’s acclaimed film version of Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. She has also dramatised many of her own books, and is the author of 15 novels, and two collections of short stories. Her best-known novel, Tulip Fever, is in development with DreamWorks.

I met Deborah Moggach at her home in north London, shortly after Pride And Prejudice opened in the UK. A power cut had plunged her Georgian home into darkness, creating a suitably 19th century ambience. We drank tea brewed on the kitchen range, and talked by candlelight about a writing career that has taken her from Hampstead to Hollywood.

Moggach grew up surrounded by writers; her father Richard Hough wrote over 100 books, including one that was made into a film, The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson (1984). Her mother Charlotte wrote and illustrated children’s books.  But, not wanting to emulate her parents, she trained as a teacher, and worked in publishing. Then, in her mid-20s, she got married, and moved to Pakistan for two years. She worked as a journalist, and returned to London with a half finished novel in her suitcase.

Moggach’s first novel, You Must Be Sisters, published in 1980, is semi-autobiographical, as is her second book Close To Home. Thereafter, she found ideas elsewhere: a fleeting glimpse of pigs being loaded onto a lorry inspired one book; her latest novel grew out of anger at the plight of pensioners in the UK.

So, did living abroad help you get started as a writer?

Yes, when you are starting to write it’s hugely liberating to go away, because you don’t feel inhibited. You’re very free. You don’t think: “what would my mother think of what I’m writing?”

You write a lot about family life and modern manners.

Yes, and quite strong, hard-hitting themes. I’m interested in people on the hinterlands – in trailer parks and so on. I’ve done a lot about loss of children through incest or kidnapping. I’m also quite a plotty writer and that’s why I can do screenplays.

Do you plan out your novels in the same way you plan out a film?

No, it’s not as mechanical a process, it’s more instinctive. With a screenplay you have to be so ruthless. Each scene has to move the story on, each scene has to tell us something new about one of the characters, and maybe give us a big reversal. Novels aren’t like that at all. There are fewer rules.

How did you get started as a dramatic writer?

I got my first break on an ITV series called Crown Court.  It was cheap afternoon TV, a great entry-level series for new writers. Then, while I was still relatively unknown, ITV commissioned me do to an eight-part serial about the dilemmas of surrogacy. I was thinking of being a surrogate mother at the time, so I asked myself “what-if” – as it’s sanctioned adultery, in a way. I enjoyed the discipline of writing for TV – a cliff-hanger every week.

How do you go about adapting a novel for the screen?

The first draft is a more or less faithful transcription of the book. The second draft is when the work really starts, when one throws the book away. Draft two feels quite different and subsequent drafts take on a life of their own.

Is it hard to adapt your own work?

If you have a good narrative instinct, you can be quite good at adapting your own work, as long as you’re not too retentive. I’m bored with the novel by then, so I’m not, at all.

What about Austen, was it intimidating taking her on?

Yes, people have such a strong sense of ownership of the book. They know every sentence; they’ve read it hundreds of times. I think I was hired for Pride And Prejudice because I had done Nancy Mitford’s Love In A Cold Climate for the BBC. Austen and Mitford have a lot in common: big families of girls, lots of hormones, lots of animals, country life, a laser sharp eye for the upper classes, and for comedy. I have three sisters and come from a family with lots of horses and guinea pigs and I’ve written quite funny novels. Not that I’m putting myself up with them!

Surely the real challenge in adapting Pride and Prejudice has to be: how do you make it clear that it’s Darcy that Elizabeth falls in love with, rather than his money, or his big house?

Good question. In the book, when she’s asked “when did you first fall in love with Mr Darcy?” Elizabeth actually says “when I first set eyes on the beautiful grounds at Pemberley”. Of course, Jane Austen herself was very conscious of money. This was pre-welfare state. Girls had no alternative to marrying for money.

I knew it was a problem and I tried to help when writing the script but they went much further in the film. For instance, with Keira Knightley’s delicious reaction when she sees Pemberley for the first time: she stands up in the carriage and gets an attack of the giggles. That’s just lovely because it undercuts any awe; it deflates it as an issue.

How did you get on with the director, Joe Wright?

He was totally extraordinary. There was another director on board originally and I worked with him over three drafts. But he disappeared and Joe was engaged.  I went on set when Joe was shooting the assembly ball scene. Before he started, he got all the extras together and told them the story of the film, and he told them about assembly balls and how everyone went to them. Then the actors came on and told the extras about their characters and what was happening to them in this scene. Mr Darcy said “I find this all a bit rural and provincial for my taste” and Elizabeth said “my mother’s going to be terribly embarrassing” so all the extras felt included, and part of it. What a wonderful thing to do. It took him half an hour.

It probably saved him untold hours – no overacting from the extras, no corpsing.

A lot of directors are very distracted on set, because they have eight thousand things to think about and the last thing they want to do is talk to the supporting artistes. But that’s what Joe is like. He’s also very young and gorgeous and I think that helped, with all those young girls in the cast.

Were you happy with the final film?

Absolutely. I was off and on the project, as you know. But the only jolt is a gag where Mr Collins says “intercourse” during a sermon – I didn’t write that. I don’t quite think he would say that.

What about post-production: did you see a rough cut?

Yes. I went in and wrote some ADR [Automatic Dialogue Replacement] lines, and they asked my opinion then. Like all writers, I love it when they say, “What do you think of this scene, should we cut it?” By that stage the producer, director and editor will have seen the scenes millions of times. So the writer can come in and say, “I don’t think that works”. That can be useful.

What is the key element in a script, for you?

Good film scripts are all about subtext. I’m a novelist, therefore I’m apt to over-write and not give the actors room enough to breathe. But you soon realise that less is more. It’s all in the acting – and the re-acting.  Even when the actors are having the most banal conversation, we can see they’re really saying a hundred things.

You had walk-on roles in your TV adaptations. Did you get a cameo in Pride and Prejudice?

No. I was going to be an extra, playing a woman drinking in a tavern, on the last day of the shoot. Then they found an amazing oak wood and got very excited about these wonderful gnarled oak trees, so they transferred the tavern scene to the oak wood. Bang went my cameo.

As well as working for British television you’ve also worked in Hollywood. What is that like?

Hollywood is run by people who are not stupid; quite the opposite, they’re clever. But their intelligence has been corrupted. Their first priority should be the quality of the scripts. But their priorities are all to do with money, and bankability of stars, and their own place in the studio’s pecking order and what their boss is going to think of what they say at meetings.

Other writers worked on the script for Pride and Prejudice, but the Writers’ Guild awarded you sole credit. Was it nerve-wracking, going to arbitration?

No, it was fine. It’s what the Guild is there for. The only thing I hated was that three scriptwriters from the WGGB, whose names I’ll never know, gave up three weeks of their time unpaid, to do the most ghastly, boring job, going through a lot of drafts and underlining things. It really is tedious work. I was very sorry they were put through it and I’d love to apologise to them, whoever they were. But I was grateful.

Once you get a WGGB ruling, that’s it. You’ve won.

Absolutely. A WGGB ruling is legally binding. But there was stuff in the papers that I was amazed at.  I was amazed that people were allowed to talk about it afterwards.

What’s your opinion on the state of British writing at the moment?

If you go into a bookshop and look at the fiction section, you could say we’re in a golden age; there are the most extraordinary books being published, and lots of them. Publishers are taking a punt on very unknown writers. You have those who say “it’s all going down the tubes, we have Scott Pack running Waterstone’s, they’re going to swallow Ottaker’s, we’re only going to have young gorgeous novelists or celebrities, and it’ll be death to independent bookshops and more chancy writers”. But I still think publishing is quite healthy.  Television, I think, is not giving enough scope to new writers to do their own stories. 

Are you a disciplined writer?

Writing is the one thing I look forward to. What I really have to do is fight to find the time to write.

I always try and work from half past nine till about one. That’s the prime time. I sit down with a roll-up and a cup of coffee; then inevitably, the phone goes. I always answer, because I’m quite polite. But if you have eight phone calls that’s the whole morning down the tube.  I’ve had a power cut for two days – no electricity – and it has been very nice in a way. I’ve not had any emails.

One final question: who’s the best person that you’ve worked with?

Kate Harwood, at the BBC, I did several things there. I adore her; she has ruthless narrative instincts and will always cut to the quick with a script. And she was great fun to work with. 

Edel Brosnan writes for television, radio and film. She is Chair of the Guild’s Editorial and Communications Committee.

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (New Year 2006).