PhotobucketI just turned my revision of Unbounded in to Elisabeth last night, and so this week it’s going to be about balance for me. Taking my dog for a few more walks. Going for a massage. Catching up on current events (Brangelina had their baby Saturday? Where have I been?). Finishing the paint job on my daughter’s room. Making tabbouleh salad. Reading Ann Aguirre‘s Wanderlust, which she so kindly sent to me. And watching a few good flicks.

Anyone who’s hung around Writer Unboxed for any length of time knows Kath and I love film and appreciate what a storyteller can learn from the medium. I feel particularly strongly about watching the director’s notes whenever I can, especially when a film has been translated from a novel. Atonement was a deep novel, a literary and epic work. The challenges for adapting it to film had to have been immense. The director’s notes affirmed that they were, but that they were certainly overcome. How this was done amazes me.

Novelist Ian McEwan said of Atonement that it was a “very interior novel” and recognized that the largest challenge for screenwriter Christopher Hampton would be in getting that feel across. It concerned him, as did the prospect of reducing a 110,000-word novel to a 20,000-word screenplay. It would be, as he said, “A demolition job.”

But director Joe Wright loved this book. When Hampton strayed too far from the novel’s structure, he asked him to start over and stay truer to McEwan’s vision. Said Hampton of his challenge: “The job is to try to identify what makes this book a masterpiece and then preserve that.”

Staying true to the book paid off with fabulously interlaced storylines and POVs. And really interesting tricks were employed along the way–tricks I think we can all benefit from hearing about. Look at the movie and the settings throughout. Wright intended for the interior feeling of the character to be seen in the exterior, so he matched feeling to setting. Shots of death, desolation, hopelessness, elation, they’re all there in the subtle lift of a foot, in flat-lined environs, in a depleted carnival atmosphere, in a white cloud of smoke drifting over a half-dead man’s face. These are not tricks reserved for screenwriters.

PhotobucketWright chose to create clarity for viewers at the end of the movie, to “remove the veil of fiction” by putting one of the characters in an interview situation. Finally the audience is let in on the truth. Very smart technique to choose a personal forum we can all identify with.

Wright also shared many of the deleted scenes. I always turn on the director’s commentary for these, because they’re so telling. Why did Wright want the shots killed? Many of them he didn’t, as it turns out. Many of them were his favorite scenes. But that, in part, is why they had to go. They interfered with telling the story economically; they were the screenwriter’s darlings. Wright realized they slowed the flow or were boring, that he was being self-indulgent and letting his ego get in the way. He chopped scenes with heavy-handed foreboding, scenes that depleted tension, scenes that he just felt weren’t up to par–not his best work and dispensable. He dropped scenes that didn’t propel the story forward, that confused more than anything, and kept instead to a mantra of proper orientation.

Now that I’ve finally seen the film, I understand why it was up for an Academy Award. If you haven’t read Atonement, read it. And definitely see the film. It does justice to McEwan’s work of art. At least in this writer’s opinion.

Eastern Promises is next up on my NetFlix list. Anyone see it?

Write on, all!

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.
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