Pope Gregory the Great would not have cared much for the cinema: “What books
are for the reader, pictures are for those who cannot read,” he said at the
end of the 6th century. In order to read words, you had to be clever or
grown-up or educated, whereas anyone could understand pictures, so they were
fit for lesser people such as slaves or children or the poor.
That attitude lasted a very long time. It’s still common among people who
think, for example, that media studies is not a fit subject for academic
study but a joke. And for much of my lifetime it has been a comfortable
assumption that of course a book will be better than the film that’s made of
it – better in the sense of being worthier, more respectable, somehow less
common. That is unless the book is trash in the first place, in which case a
clever director might make something interesting out of it.
Either way, the author of the original is expected to regard the
Hollywoodisation of their novel with resignation, despair or outrage. The
only alternative seems to be indifference. James M Cain, author of the novel
that was turned into the Billy Wilder film Double Indemnity, said: “People
ask 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. They paid
me and that’s the end of it’.”
So I find myself in what seems to be a rare position: now that the film of my
novel Northern Lights is about to be released as The Golden Compass, I can
say with perfect truth that I like it. The studio, New Line Cinema, has done
a fine job. It looks spectacular, the performances by an outstanding cast
are excellent, the special effects are beautifully integrated and the story
is told swiftly and clearly.
There were fans of the book – many of them – who let me know they expected me
to watch over the process with a beady eye and pounce at once to correct any
errors, omissions or general backsliding on the part of the film makers. But
I wasn’t interested in doing that. In the first place, I judged that the
people in charge of making the film were men and women of integrity and
intelligence and I was happy to let them get on with it without my
interference. In the second place I had plenty of other things to do. And in
the third place it’s neither productive nor interesting to nag, fret and
fuss over something that you haven’t got very much influence over anyway.
Besides, I thought the story was robust enough to survive its transfer from
book to screen. It ought to be robust: it has been told many times already,
starting with chapter three of the Book of Genesis and continuing with
Paradise Lost. And although my version of it started as a novel, and it was
as good a novel as I could make it, I’ve never regarded it as being so
precious and exquisite that it would shatter at a touch.
My attitude towards any proposal to adapt it to a different form was not to
cradle it tenderly and wince at every little cut, but to say: yes, why not?
Let’s see how it looks on the stage/sounds on the radio/turns out on the
screen. And while you’re at it you could cut this bit, which never really
worked, or combine those characters because they have much the same
function, or save a lot of time by joining this bit to that bit.
I enjoyed watching Nicholas Wright, the playwright, and Nicholas Hytner, the
director, taking it apart and putting it together again for the stage of the
National Theatre, and I enjoyed the deconstruction and reassembly necessary
to make it into a film.
One example of such carpentry is the ending. When it became known that the
film ends three chapters or so before the book does, the director Chris
Weitz found himself under attack from some fans who declared (without having
seen it) that he’d ruined the whole thing and they weren’t going to watch
it. My attitude was: what a good idea to end the film like that. It’s quite
the best place to stop. The book is fine as it is, but the opening of the
second film would be a much better place for the complex, ambiguous drama of
the last chapter; and it was much more likely that the second film would be
made if the first one ended on a clear, strong and immediately
understandable note.
So the film makers earned my trust by being good at what they were doing. They
also earned it by not being deflected by the so-called “controversy”
nonsense. A small American group called the Catholic League, which seems to
be an organisation mainly devoted to the self-promotion of its president,
has tried to whip up a boycott of the film on the grounds that whereas the
film itself may be unobjectionable it will lead children to read my books,
which (as the work of an atheist) are naturally too dangerous to be put
anywhere near the young.
It has taken the league only 11 years to discover this; The Golden Compass
(the US title of Northern Lights) has been on the shelves of many a Catholic
school in the United States since it was first published in 1996.
The league’s activities are having the usual effect, which is that far more
people are now going to see the film and read the book than would otherwise
have done. But what has impressed me about the reaction of New Line has been
its clear commitment to the democratic value of openness and free expression.
It knows full well (it bought the rights and read the books) that the tendency
of the story is towards celebrating those very qualities, and other values
such as humane-ness, kindness, intellectual curiosity and a sense of the
wonder and the beauty of the physical universe, and it is not afraid to tell
a story that criticises religious intolerance and hypocrisy.
So I find myself in the happy position of being content with the treatment of
my story on the screen and with the craftsmanship and integrity of the film
makers. The movie isn’t perfect, but then neither is the book: if you want
perfection, go and read a haiku. This satisfaction of mine may be rare. I
still disagree with Pope Gregory on the subject of words and pictures
because (quite apart from the point about who they’re for) I don’t think
they work in the same way in any case; but that’s another argument for
another day.
