This recent interview from the British Council in Poland with Tom Stoppard gives quite a lot of new information, including Tom Stoppard´s views on the length of The Amber Spyglass, and how it will ever fit into a movie. It also confirms that 'The film version of the first book, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, will be released Christmas 2004'.
Sir Tom Stoppard, award winning playwright and screenwriter, visited Warsaw in November 2003 as a guest of the British Council. He found time in his busy schedule to talk to us about his forthcoming film adaptation of the fantasy trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’ by Philip Pullman.
Talking Books: You’re adapting Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials for the screen. Are there many other fantasy novels on your bookshelves?
Tom Stoppard: No, it’s an unusual work for me. I’m not a Ray Bradbury or Dennis Wheatley reader. I’ve just tasted these people at long intervals but I’ve never fixed on them. I’d known about the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials, but I hadn’t read it. When I was approached about writing a film, of course the first thing I wanted to do was to start reading the books and I found the first one particularly deeply absorbing – a wonderful piece of invention, a really imaginative good book. And I was immediately enthusiastic about trying to write a film version.
Talking Books: His Dark Materials has been adapted for the stage by Nicholas Wright for the National Theatre in Britain, and it’s also been adapted for radio. Now you’re adapting it for the screen. Do you think that it has a particular dramatic quality?
Tom Stoppard: It’s got a wonderful narrative, a tremendous story. It was a complete coincidence that the National Theatre was working on a stage version while I was starting on the film version. This is a book that will be a natural candidate in any medium and I’m looking forward to the National Theatre production.
Talking Books: The Association of Christian Teachers in the UK lobbied schools to boycott visiting the National production, accusing it of ‘discrediting Christianity, undermining the church, and attacking God.’
Tom Stoppard: Yes, this has come up in different parts of the world at different times regarding these books. Philip Pullman is making a very uncontentious point that some of the worst excesses in our hundreds of years of history all over the globe have been committed in the service of religious fervour. He clearly takes the view that religious fervour has spread a lot of wretchedness and violence and so forth around the world. I don’t think even the Association of Christian Teachers would dispute that. It’s not a particularly Christian phenomenon and certainly great religious teachers and leaders have always preached peace, but unfortunately the reconciliation is hard to come by.
Talking Books: You said in an interview in The Times that it’s been tough work adapting the trilogy because it was quite hard to follow the logical structure.
Tom Stoppard: Well, to his great credit, Philip doesn’t chop up the food on the plate before he gives it to you. He’s the best kind of writer. He writes with his nerve endings open and follows his nose, as it were, and goes to where his instinct tells him. There are tremendous gains to be had from that, and to the reader of the book it’s all gain. When you’re deconstructing it to turn it into something else –whether it’s a play or a film– you come up against a different set of challenges really to do with what causes which and consistency of the logic and time scheme. Philip is very blithe about it, actually. He knows that he’s played fast and loose with how much time could have possibly gone by between this event and that event. I like to think of it as taking place in an imaginative world beyond the ones that Philip has created. The whole exercise is in a parallel world.
Talking Books: One of the criticisms leveled at the Harry Potter film adaptations, which people will inevitably compare this trilogy to, is that they include too much of the original books. Have you had a hard time deciding what should stay in and what should be left out?
Tom Stoppard: It is difficult and it’s going to become more difficult because the third book The Amber Spyglass is considerably longer than the second, and there’s an awful lot to get in. But you know one shouldn’t complain about an embarrassment of riches. It does mean that you’ve got to be quite clever sometimes just to make the plot work when you’re leaving out chunks of it.
Talking Books: You’ve written quite a lot of science in fiction, as opposed to science fiction. Did the science provide the initial impetus for plays like Arcadia or Hapgood?
Tom Stoppard: Yes, I got interested, perhaps I read a book or two. But I became fascinated by the science which underlies Hapgood and the science which underlies part of Arcadia. In the latter case it was through a book called Chaos by James Gleik. I didn’t research these matters. I read for enjoyment and the plays came out of it.
Talking Books: You started your career as a journalist.
Tom Stoppard: Yes.
Talking Books: I read that you did a lot of research for your recent trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia. Is the research part of the pleasure of the writing process for you?
Tom Stoppard: It is a great pleasure. I can get addicted to it and go on for too long actually and forget that I’m supposed to be writing a play at some point. I have an appetite for all kinds of fact. In my case, actually, I have to remind myself not to forget to read some fiction from time to time.
Talking Books: The character of Henry is your 1982 play The Real Thing is a writer not unlike yourself -
Tom Stoppard: Yes.
Talking Books: - and he is criticized at one point in the play for wasting his talent on a science fiction script. Your one experience of a science fiction script was Brazil, which you contributed to. How much of that up there on the screen is yours and how much is it director Terry Gilliam’s?
Tom Stoppard: Terry Gilliam actually wrote a script before I did, so the character and the main events were all in his script. I can’t remember very clearly what I did, but I sort of structured things and put in jokes. I think it was largely to do with making a narrative out of his material. Terry’s got a very quirky interesting mind and he felt he had left out a rail on which the viewer might hang on to in order to follow his story. Terry actually created the world that was Brazil – I didn’t. I kept telling him that Orwell had done it before and he kept saying, “Never mind, never mind.” It wasn’t until after the film was released that Terry admitted that he had never read 1984 and he was surprised at its resemblance to Brazil.
Talking Books: You’ve worked with Steven Spielberg on several occasions. You adapted J.G.Ballard’s wartime novel Empire of the Sun for him, but you also acted as uncredited script doctor on the last Indiana Jones film and other projects.
Tom Stoppard: These things get overstated. I’ve had a long friendship with him and I tend to be shown scripts and make comments on them and so on. That’s about it.
Talking Books: And are you at all interested in science fiction as a genre, in books or in film?
Tom Stoppard: No, I’m not. Not in the least, I’m afraid. [Laughs].
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman consists of three novels: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The trilogy is part of the Imagine This collection. The film version of the first book, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, will be released Christmas 2004.
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