Tipping the classics one more time

NICK BOND
www.bnews.net.au

Screenwriter Andrew Davies has, in a career spanning 40 years, adapted many of the classics: Pride and Prejudice, Brideshead Revisited, Emma. Even more impressively, he’s made them interesting and relevant for contemporary audiences.

Back in the UK, he regularly teaches at his local university. What do young screenwriters ask him most?

For a lot of young screenwriters, especially those getting close to production, it’s a question of, -˜Do you do what you’re told or not?’ I’ve never done what I was told, I encourage them to stick up for themselves, Davies said.

If you’ve got a strong instinct and they [producers] don’t really understand what it is, you’ve got to stand up for yourself.

In a career filled with period pieces, Davies may have seemed a surprising choice to work on the screenplays of both Bridget Jones films. But he insists Bridget’s story isn’t too far removed from the bodice-ripping classics he’s made his name on.

There were clues in the book, he said. Bridget is a tremendous fan of the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice [which Davies wrote].

Helen Fielding had written a draft for the movie herself, which was very funny, but strangely unfocused. It couldn’t make its mind up about whether to be a romantic comedy or a screwball comedy about urban living in the modern age.

It’s interesting, Helen Fielding was arguing for the -˜urban family’ theme, but I was arguing that once Bridget finds her man, the urban family is going to fade into the background. As it turned out, despite all she [Fielding] said about the urban family, after the film, off she went with a new bloke to LA, and goodbye urban family.

Queer audiences will likely be most familiar with another of Davies’s works, Tipping The Velvet. His screen adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel became one of his most enduring successes.

Sarah Waters wanted to write a novel that she’d enjoy reading herself. In fact, what I thought she’d written was something that would appeal to everybody. It was an exciting opportunity to make a gay heroine accessible to everyone, he said.

One of the things that pleased me so much about it was the way it went over. I was in my local town and this very conventional-looking woman came over and said, -˜We’ve just been watching Tipping The Velvet and we’re so glad she chose Florence instead of the other girl.’ I thought, this is great -” you’ve got these conventional families rooting for gay women.

Velvet fans, here’s some good news: there is another Sarah Waters adaptation in the pipeline.

I’ve actually just adapted another of her novels, Affinity. It’s a lesbian love story set in a Victorian-era prison, Davies said.

You’ve got the brutal world of a female prison, which has got its own kinky appeal, he chuckles. And there’s a very touching love story as well.

A 70-something straight male might seem an unusual choice to adapt Sapphic love stories but, again, Davies’s experience with period dramas holds him in good stead. Gay or straight, he insists, in the Victorian era, any passion was taboo.

The amount of tension that is there in those novels is quite something, he said. It’s difficult to write compulsive love stories these days, because there’s the argument, -˜what’s to stop them?’