Since the cinema first came into being 100 years ago, most novelists have written with the knowledge of how stories work on the screen. Many of them have written with the awareness, and sometimes the hope, that the novel they’re writing might be adapted for the cinema. Some even write the screenplay alongside the novel so they can sell it straight away.

As a matter of fact, from a storytelling point of view, the novel and the film aren’t so different; Christopher Hampton once pointed out that they have more in common than either of them does with the stage play, because in both the novel and the film you can use that great narrative device, the close-up, which is impossible in the theatre. And David Mamet said that the basic question each film director has to ask is “Where do I put the camera?” — which is exactly what the novelist has to think about with every sentence.

However, I didn’t want to write the screenplay for the film that’s going to be called The Golden Compass. It isn’t a complete story in itself; it’s the first part of a long story published in three volumes. The whole thing took me seven years to write, and the last thing I wanted to do when the film rights were sold, quite early on, was to take it all apart and put it together differently. I was happy to let someone else do it while I got on with the next book.

But to say that is to invite the question that was well answered by James M Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, which was made into the famous film by Billy Wilder. “People tell me, Don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”

Not many writers are as hard-boiled as that, and of course we care what they do to our book. So when I heard that the script was to be written by Tom Stoppard, I was interested to see how he’d go about it. Having admired everything of his that I’d seen, I knew that his adaptation wouldn’t lack for intelligence or dramatic invention. Nor did it, but I don’t think I was much help. While he was writing it, he asked me many questions about various aspects of the story, questions to which often the only true answer would have been “I don’t know — I just made it up,” or “It felt right,” or “I just thought it needed X at that point.”

It felt as if I were being viva’d for a pass degree by a genial but profoundly clever don who knew my subject better than I ever would. So I stumbled around offering what I thought were intelligent answers, but that were almost certainly not. Actually, I doubt whether authors ever know what their own novels mean. If they do, they’ve probably written them to make them attractive to university teachers of modern literature, or so they could sound interesting when discussing them on Newsnight Review. I don’t think I conveyed a lot to Stoppard, but perhaps he didn’t need my answers so much as he needed to articulate the questions; and the result of it all was a very Stoppardian script that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, it wasn’t what the studio wanted, so the process began again.

I should say at this point that my involvement in the development of the film has been tangential, entirely by my own choice. I guessed that to be involved in a formal way would take up far more time than I had to give, so I chose to remain at a distance, but it was a friendly distance much tempered by e-mail. When the next name appeared, that of Chris Weitz, I watched his film About a Boy on DVD, from which I could tell that he knew how to direct children, and what’s more he put the camera in the right place. I was pleased that he was going to direct as well as write.

Meanwhile, we were playing fantasy casting. This was the best bit. I wanted Nicole Kidman for the part of Mrs Coulter, and Laurence Olivier (c 1945) for Lord Asriel. I was aware that neither of these was particularly likely, but persistence pays off and we got one of them. Kidman has the extraordinary quality of being able to play cold and warm, terrifying and seductive, passionate and calculating, all at the same time; and she is perfect in the role of Mrs Coulter. Asriel was actually a difficult part to cast: it requires someone who has the physical presence of a man of action and the quick intelligence of a scholar, and the cha-risma to dominate the screen while apparently doing nothing. When the name of Daniel Craig was mentioned, I leapt at the idea, and he is ideal. I couldn’t have wished for a better leading pair.

In fact, the cast is superb all the way down. But the central part would have to be played by an unknown actress, and the search for the right Lyra involved looking at no fewer than 10,000 girls from all over Britain. Many of them had one Lyra-like quality, some had a few, but only Dakota Blue Richards, who was offered the part (and who took about a second to accept it) had them all. She had never acted before, but even when seated on the hydraulically operated, electronically controlled and software-guided armoured bear — that will later be replaced in the computer, with the image of a “real” bear so that she will appear to be riding at top speed across the Arctic waste — she was in complete command.

Those bears, those special effects, those computers . . . The one thing that everybody who knows the story is curious about is how the dæmons are going to be represented. In Lyra’s world, each human is accompanied by their own dæmon (pronounced demon), who is an aspect of their self that has the form of an animal. Computer-generated imagery has reached such a high point of development that the question was not whether it would be possible to show the dæmons, but how they could best be integrated into the action and the mise en scãne . In the novel, the dæmon idea works because I mention a character’s dæmon only when it has something to do or say: otherwise the reader can forget they are there.

But it’s harder to ignore something if it’s always there on the screen, and nobody wants the story to look as if it were taking place in a zoo, with a lot of meaningless animals slinking and fluttering about and getting in the way. One of the many things that Weitz and his team will spend time on in the next few months will be getting the balance right between the actors and the special effects. “Less is more” is a good maxim here, as elsewhere.

So it’s possible to say already, at this early stage, that the film will look spectacular, that the cast is superb, and that it sticks pretty closely to my story. What more could I ask for? Maybe a walk-on part; but I don’t want to spoil it. I’m greatly looking forward to the premiere.

Copyright Philip Pullman

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Philip Pullman talks about turning The Golden Compass into a film with its producer, Deborah Forte, at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, March 24, at 2pm

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