Andrew Davies was born in 1936 in Rhiwbina, Cardiff. He has written original series and single dramas for television, plays for stage and radio, and novels for adults and children.
Since 1975 he has amassed more than 50 screen adaptation credits, including dramatisations of novels by Kingsley Amis, Jane Austen, John Banville, Maeve Binchy, Joanna Briscoe, John Cleland, Dennis Danvers, Daniel Defoe, R.F. Delderfield, Charles Dickens, Michael Dobbs, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Helen Fielding, E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, George and Weedon Grossmith, Alan Hollinghurst, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Victor Hugo, Angela Lambert, John le Carré, Boris Pasternak, William Makepeace Thackeray, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Sarah Waters, Evelyn Waugh, Mary Wesley and Angus Wilson.
Four of his TV adaptations have won BAFTA Drama Serial or Single Drama Television Awards, and he was jointly nominated for the BAFTA Best Adapted Screenplay Film Award for Bridget Jones’s Diary.
In December 2018, he was the subject of a BBC documentary, Andrew Davies: Rewriting the Classics.
Approaches to Adaptation
Do you think adaptations involve a completely different set of creative gears to original screenplays?
Not entirely, but yes, substantially. I think one of the reasons I do a lot of adaptations is that actually thinking up stories is something I find quite difficult.
Do you always agree a mission statement or direction of travel with whoever has commissioned the adaptation?
No. They’re getting me because either they love working with me, or they love my work, or they think it will give them a better chance of getting the thing on. I mean, of course we discuss it beforehand and confirm that we have a similar approach to the subject.
Do you usually produce an outline or treatment before you start writing the script?
Yes, there has to be one. I need one. Recently I’ve been working with the same people, so we have a lunch and we talk about it and someone starts batting an outline about – it might be me, it might be them – and it goes back and forth a few times – sometimes only once or twice – until I feel ready to start writing.
If you’re offered material to adapt which has been adapted previously, do you take account of any previous versions when writing yours?
Yes, I do. It can be bad, but I generally find that I’m not too swayed by theirs. The thing you have to watch out for is unconscious plagiarism: you think you’ve come up with an original idea – and bloody hell, there it was in some adaptation by someone else that you saw years ago. So I do usually look at existing ones if I can bear to.
If the author of the source material is living, do you find it useful to have their input on the script?
Oh, yes. It’s only courteous to meet them, and often I’ve found it extremely helpful. It’s good to find out what they feel, and what they think is particularly important. Sarah Waters is a prime example, because she was writing about a world I knew little of. She’s also someone who’s extremely movie-literate, and understands that adaptations are not going to be literal copyings-out of the novel.
In fact, in the BBC documentary, she says that seeing your screenplays of her novels, and how you get to the heart of scenes, has been an education in terms of her own writing.
Yes. Gosh. I thought, ‘That’s good!’ Novelists don’t often view storytelling in such a ruthless way – which you have to when you’re writing scripts. Elizabeth Jane Howard [author of Falling] was rather disappointed, I think, that I didn’t use all of her dialogue and do a kind of setting-out of her book in script form.
Is it easier to navigate notes from directors, producers and script editors when you have a piece of source material to measure the screenplay against?
It can be, yes. You’re more likely to understand what they’re on about. Sometimes, especially if it’s your own original piece, notes come in and you think, ‘What on earth is going through their heads?’ So yes, it is easier.
Have you ever started work on an adaptation and found it harder to adapt than you anticipated?
Almost every time [laughs]. Some have been more difficult than others. Doctor Zhivago was an exceptionally difficult one. Of course I was very familiar with the David Lean movie, which tells a wonderful story and has some wonderful scenes in it – then you read the book and you realise there are hardly any scenes in it, he just lightly refers to things. So it was a question of making up a lot of the scenes in accordance with what Pasternak must have imagined happened, and also steering clear of what David Lean did. So that was a very hard one.
Have you ever been offered material to adapt which you felt couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be adapted?
Well, often in the sense that I didn’t think it was worth doing. But things that exist very much on the page? No. No one’s ever asked me to adapt some of the more obscure Virginia Woolf things, and I’d turn them down. One of the ones I’m working on now, A Suitable Boy, I read ten or fifteen years ago because someone wanted me to adapt it, and I found it an absolutely lovely read but I thought, ‘It’s probably much better if it stays the way it is.’ And then, more recently, the people at Lookout Point, who I did War & Peace and Les Misérables with, were so enthusiastic about it and said we’d have such fun doing it – and indeed that turned out to be the case. But it’s such an enormous book that you can’t really represent the whole complexity, the whole panorama, the vast number of characters and plots in it. What’s come out is six hours, but it should have been eight, and it would have been really good at ten or more. It’s going to feel very tight at six. But it’s such a beautifully written book and so funny, that it was a joy to work on.
Are there any screen adaptations which you think are especially good or you particularly admire?
I can think of a couple off the top of my head. One is Christopher Hampton’s script for Dangerous Liaisons and another is Hossein Amini’s version of The Wings of the Dove – a terrific adaptation and extraordinarily moving. I’m not a great reader of Henry James, but it felt of its age and somehow very modern as well. I should also mention two by Tom Stoppard: Anna Karenina and Parade’s End. The film of Anna Karenina was disappointing, but the screenplay was exemplary. And Parade’s End was so much better than the book: incisive, sharp, funny. And some of the big old traditional things, like David Lean’s Great Expectations. I can’t remember who actually wrote the screenplay for that, but with a David Lean movie you think of him having a big input into the script. So those are a few I particularly admire.
Adapting Fiction
Some writers try to include as much of the novel as possible by boiling scenes down to their essence. Others are more ruthless in editing it down to a sort of greatest hits, but being true to the spirit of it. Do you favour either of those approaches?
No, not really. What I tend to do is ask fundamental questions like, ‘What is this book about?’ and ‘Whose story is it?’ and ‘Who do we care about?’ and ‘How can they carry us through the story?’. Then I’m hoping to find stuff in the book that I can lift out and make it do the job, and if not I’m just going to have to make the scenes up. But when I do make scenes up, people don’t say, ‘You made those scenes up,’ they say, ‘That was so true to the book!’
Well, if you’ve got it right, they’ll say that. If you’ve got it wrong, they’re more likely to notice.
I suppose that’s true, yes.
If a novel has an unusual structure, would you try to reproduce that in adapting it?
Not necessarily. But sometimes it can be something good and something that’s a bit of a revelation because it’s not something I would have thought of. The Line of Beauty has got big gaps between the three sections of the narrative, and Nick [lead character in the novel] almost seems to be a different person because he’s in a slightly different world in each one, but of course he’s not different. So the construction of the novel was very clever, and I did follow that and I think it worked.
Do you try to avoid voiceover in adapting a first-person narrative, or do you see it as another tool in the toolbox?
I do see it as another tool in the toolbox, but I know it can be used in a very lazy way by people who can’t make the effort to do it in actions. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in an adaptation – though it was a film which was very well liked – was the Edith Wharton film, The Age of Innocence, which has a past-tense voiceover. That immediately tells you, ‘This is old shit. It’s not happening now. It all happened long ago,’ and holds you back as an audience from entering the story. There were some lovely performances in that film and some very beautiful cinematography, but if a movie is anything it’s in the present tense. So I suppose you could call it a boldly original use of voiceover, but I just thought it was a mistake.
Do you use the language of the novel in writing the dialogue, or do you put the whole thing in your own words?
It depends. Some novelists write dialogue that plays well and some don’t. Jane Austen, you can just copy out. She writes too much for a scene – she was very skilful at dialogue and enjoyed exercising that skill at length – but I think you’re a fool if you don’t use her language. It makes the job so much easier, really. Vikram Seth is another one who writes lovely dialogue: very funny, very apt, very neat. Other people, it seems like good dialogue when you’re reading the novel, but when you put it down and imagine someone actually speaking it, it doesn’t work.
Do you keep the novel beside you throughout the adaptation process, or do you try to internalise it and set it aside somewhere along the way?
I keep it pretty close. [Sees me eyeing a battered book on the table] That’s not a novel, actually, but I’m keeping it pretty close. It’s a book about the last Empress of China, by Marina Warner. Terribly hard, that, because you have the facts, in a sense, but every time I start to write a scene I have this voice inside me saying, ‘You’ve got no idea what these people are like!’ But yes, I do keep the book by me to refer to. There was a producer who was very much a mentor to me years ago, Louis Marks – I did Middlemarch with him, amongst other things – and he said that when you reach a problem with an adaptation, if it’s a great writer then you’ll find the answer in the book. I think that’s true.
I was quite surprised to see the Marina Warner book there, because among your many adaptations almost none are of nonfiction.
Mr Selfridge was based on a biography, and what we could find out about his life and his business. But yes, generally I would rather adapt a novel.
Perhaps because nonfiction is closer to original material: you have to invent more of the story, which you said you find difficult.
Yes, I expect so.
How much pressure do you feel when adapting a well-known and much-loved novel, knowing that you won’t be able to please everyone with the finished product?
When I first started Pride and Prejudice I was feeling that pressure, but not so much these days. I certainly don’t want to disappoint myself, because presumably it’s a book I love too, but that’s really all I think about when I’m adapting it. Of course, I hope everyone’s going to like it – but if they don’t, I don’t care.
Three Decades of Adaptations: House of Cards to Les Misérables
Between the late sixties and the early nineties you mainly wrote original material. Since then, you’ve mainly written adaptations. Do you feel that the material you choose to adapt, and the way you choose to adapt it, reflects your own voice as much as original work would?
Probably not quite as much, but it can’t help doing so. It’s one of those things that’s easier for other people to tell me: ‘This is just like you.’ And you think, ‘No, it’s just a job I was doing.’ But I was quite struck in that documentary by what Jane Tranter [former Controller of Drama Commissioning at the BBC] was saying about what I did. I thought, ‘Oh!’
House of Cards and its sequels are comparatively unusual among your work in having contemporary settings – even the modern fiction you’ve adapted is often set in the past. Do you find period pieces more interesting?
No, I don’t, though for the purposes of long-form television nineteenth-century fiction is often much better because there’s more story to it, combined with really deep and interesting characters, and some subtlety and reflection of society. So that’s the reason. I’ve written quite a lot of scripts that are contemporary which never got made.
So it’s dictated by the market? Period pieces are more popular?
And famous books – well-known titles. They’re just easier to raise money on.
Do you approach classic and modern fiction in the same way, by asking the same questions: what is this book about, whose story is it?
I think I do, yes.
You’ve written for the stage as well as the screen, and Francis Urquhart’s monologues in House of Cards are strongly reminiscent of Richard III’s soliloquies. Do you think there’s a theatrical element in other adaptations you’ve done?
Sometimes. In House of Cards it was something I felt needed doing, and I was heavily encouraged to do that by Michael Wearing [former Head of Serials at the BBC] and really enjoyed going for it. Using talking to camera in television is a dangerous thing, but I come back to it from time to time. In fact, I’m doing it with this [points to The Dragon Empress]: she talks to us from the nineteenth century, understanding that we’re in the twenty-first century. Might be great, might be a disaster. It’s going to be six parts and I’ve written two so far and those seem to have gone over well, so fingers crossed.
You’ve adapted several authors more than once, but the one you’ve returned to most often is Jane Austen. Do you feel a particular affinity with her work?
I’ve always loved her work, ever since I was a boy. I just think she’s brilliant. Actually, another of the things I’m working on is Sanditon [Austen’s unfinished final novel]. The ambition is to do it rather like Mr Selfridge and turn it into a returning series. In fact, I only found enough material in the novel for half of the first episode. It’s about 100 pages, and all she does is introduce the characters and give us the setting – but what characters and what a setting, because it’s such a departure for her. There’s an entrepreneurial businessman trying to turn a seaside town into a fashionable resort, making plans and borrowing money and courting celebrities. There’s the old town and the new town. There’s a West Indian heiress with a huge fortune. Fancy that: Jane Austen, on her deathbed, writing her first black leading character. So that’s the world of the novel, and I’m really excited about it.
Your approach to Pride and Prejudice was to tell the story as much through Mr Darcy’s eyes as through Elizabeth Bennet’s. How important is point of view in your adaptations?
It’s very important. In War & Peace it was a big decision. You couldn’t say there was a single person at the heart of it. I guess Pierre slightly edges it over Natasha and Andrei, but Natasha and Andrei are also important, and the people close to them are almost as important, and so on. I was consciously thinking that the ideal was to have a scene with the three of them in, but I kept each of them very much in the foreground, and if they’re not in a scene it helps to have someone talking about them or thinking about them.
If I had to pinpoint the leading character, I think I would have said Pierre, and not just because Paul Dano is top billed. The way his story threads through all the rest makes him a kind of Candide figure.
That’s a good analogy. No one else has said that. But it’s true. He’s a bit of a holy idiot, isn’t he? He makes all these mistakes…
But he never stops being lovable.
That’s right. Andrei can be a bit of a cold, sarcastic shit, but he loves Pierre, so you think, ‘We won’t dismiss Andrei, because he’s got a heart.’ But he’s so misogynistic, Andrei.
In the book, or in the adaptation?
Well, both, really. You can’t escape it. He’s so contemptuous of women. He gets it from his father. I suppose, like Darcy, deep inside he’s just longing for love.
I saw you interviewed at the Hay Festival not long after your TV adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and in the Q&A an audience member pointed out that it opens with a sex scene, which isn’t in the novel – and you said, ‘No, but it’s where I felt Jane Austen was heading.’ It’s a characteristically irreverent answer, but it reflects one of the jobs of an adapter, doesn’t it, which is to dramatise subtext – even to write the scenes which the authors perhaps would have written if they could have?
There’s more of a justification for starting Sense and Sensibility with a sex scene, because you learn late on in the novel that this happened, that Willoughby seduced a 15-year-old girl, had a great time with her in this cottage, then rode off and forgot all about her, which is a very Regency thing to do. There’s lots of dark and bad sexual behaviour in Jane Austen that is always kind of there but never makes it into the scene, and I thought, ‘If it happened, let’s get it on the screen.’ I also wanted to meet that girl again when she’s had her baby – she’s still hoping that Willoughby is going to come back, and Colonel Brandon has to disillusion her – because I wanted the audience to think as badly of Willoughby as I do. I think he normally gets away with it.
So you don’t necessarily love all the characters you write?
He’s a bit of an exception, Willoughby. Usually I do try to love all the characters, but I thought Jane Austen herself was far too gentle with Willoughby. I saw him as someone who carried a kind of seduction kit with him, with the appropriate poems and things like that: ‘This one will do. This one will get this girl on her back.’
Bridget Jones’s Diary is probably your most prominent feature film credit, and an appropriate one given the novel’s debt to Pride and Prejudice. What insights were you able to bring to the former adaptation from the latter?
When I was asked if I’d like to write a draft of this – and there were many drafts – I think it was me who tilted it in the direction of romantic comedy. Helen Fielding had written a first draft and it was very funny, but she was of the view that it was a movie about the urban family and how important these friendships were. I thought that in terms of what the story was about – or should be about – her friends were an irrelevance and that it was really a comic modern version of Pride and Prejudice. And that’s the way it went. But I don’t think a single line of dialogue I wrote survived.
Another author you’ve returned to several times is Dickens, and your take on Bleak House was like a nineteenth-century soap opera: speedy, gritty, half-hour episodes, full of twists, turns, conflicts and cliffhangers. Did you have in mind the original serial form of the novel, and did you in any way try to mirror its episode structure?
Yes, we did. When I say ‘we’, it was principally me and the producer, Nigel Stafford-Clark, but we were encouraged by Jane Tranter, who more or less challenged us to come up with a new way of telling these classic stories. We looked first at doing it in 20 half-hour episodes, and that shrank to 18 and then to 16 – not wholly for budget reasons, it just made it tighter and stronger. So yes, we were aware of the serial structure, but we didn’t try to follow Dickens’ episodes, because Dickens doesn’t get the story started until you’re about 100 pages in, and I wanted to get the story started on page one. The director, Justin Chadwick, was also very influential in getting across the feeling we wanted.
And Susanna White, presumably, who directed the last seven of the eventual 15 episodes.
Yes. The thing is, when you’re doing the later episodes you’re getting into the deeper bits of the story and things coming to an absolute crunch, and she did that beautifully. But really she had to match Justin’s style, which was revolutionary for a period piece, with a lot of handheld cameras.
To what extent was that style already present on the page? Do you try to guide the camerawork via the stage directions?
Absolutely I do. Directors will say, ‘I’m not going to work with this bugger,’ if you try to write shots, but I do try to write what the audience will see, and I do try to write what the characters are feeling – to indicate that I don’t want some great wide shot. I try to influence the director as much as I can through the script, because I’m not going to be able to do it afterwards. So my scripts do clearly indicate how you could shoot it, but I know that there are other ways – and I like to be surprised in a good way by a director.
The 30-minute, twice-weekly format remains unusual. Do you feel that British TV drama is still too much in thrall to the one-hour Sunday night slot?
No, I don’t. Well, I don’t know – it suits me! It suits me as an audience member as well. I preferred watching Bleak House in one-hour chunks.
Because the two episodes were repeated back to back on the Sunday of each week?
That’s right. Now, of course, and it’s happened so quickly, you’ve got the bingeing thing – and I binge along with the rest. But I do like going out in weekly intervals because it gives it a chance to sink in, and people – you hope – are going to talk about it – and the papers – you hope – are going to pick up on it, not just review the first episode and then forget about it. Such a lot of effort is put into making something like The Crown, and it’s gone in a weekend if you’re not able to control yourself.
Your more recent adaptations have all been in a six-part, six-hour format – though the last episode of Les Misérables was feature length. Is there an overarching three-act structure to that? And do you use three-act structure within episodes?
Six hours just tends to be what people can afford and what people like. Less than that is hard to sell, I think, and more starts being too expensive. But no, I’ve never found three-act structure very helpful. I sometimes wonder where it came from. And actually, most things that people say have a three-act structure, you could say, ‘No, they’re not, they’re one act,’ or, ‘They’re five acts.’
You just let the stories find their natural shape?
Yes. I mean, obviously I’m very traditional about liking a good cliffhanger ending to an episode, so you leave people thinking, ‘Wow! Now what?’
War & Peace is possibly your most ambitious adaptation to date. A thousand-page novel, even over six hours, doesn’t give you the luxury of being leisurely. Would you have liked it to be longer?
Yes. It could have been a good eight episodes, really. It’s amazing how things spread in the filming. Some lovely stuff got written and not filmed, and some lovely stuff got filmed and didn’t make it in the edit.
What struck me most about it was not the big sweeping scenes but the small intimate moments, which have more impact because of the amount of time you get to spend with the characters. You get to know and care about them, and feel as if you’ve been on a real journey with them, which is harder to achieve in a two-hour feature film.
That’s absolutely true. I guess you do get that feeling with great movies, and great movie directors take the time to just be with characters – and often I think the most important thing is to be with them when they’re not saying or doing anything.
Do you think it will always be a struggle to condense a novel of more than 300 pages into a 120-page script? That the novel will inevitably require more radical reinvention to fit into feature length?
It depends on the novel. Some modern novels, however long, have barely enough in them for half an hour’s drama. But yes, it’s tricky. Brideshead Revisited is about 300 pages, but there’s a lot in those 300 pages, and it’s difficult to do as a movie – though I quite enjoyed having a crack at it. Evelyn Waugh, by the way, is one of those people who writes great economical dialogue.
And Brideshead is a project where you definitely have to take account of a previous adaptation.
My notion was to write a sort of counter-text: interpreting it in a way that Evelyn Waugh would have disliked strongly. My take on it was that it was about some people who had been completely fucked up by their version of the Roman Catholic religion, so the mother was the villain of the piece and I wanted Charles to be more straightforwardly atheist. I was very pleased with my screenplay, but it was a tough business and there were a lot of drafts – more than I usually care to do!
Which is how many?
About three, really. And I aim to finish up with something as close to the first draft as possible.
With more epic novels, do you employ any strategies for introducing large casts of characters? In War & Peace, for example, we meet a lot of characters in a single scene at a party right at the start.
That was perhaps a bit ambitious in terms of remembering it afterwards. Pierre, I guess, is the crucial character there, and people are going to realise that, but you get to know Andrei a little. But I also needed to get across St Petersburg society, which was very un-Russian and French-ified, so there was a lot to do at the same time – and you just hope that the audience is going to keep up with it.
And continue to keep up with it – which means that you as the dramatist can’t afford to lose track of any one story strand for too long.
Yes. Even though Tolstoy goes in for a lot of not very useful subplots and supporting characters, he’s actually very helpful in that way. You can see he has it in the back of his mind: we’re going to need to come back to Natasha, or we haven’t heard from Maria for a bit, so let’s think of a plot twist, like an army manoeuvre, to bring Nikolai into that part of the country, and so on.
Les Misérables is equally epic, but, initially at least, as fast and fleet as a thriller. Do you often have a particular screen genre in mind when adapting a piece of fiction?
No. It’s just that when you’re doing it, it sometimes turns out that way.
There’s more than just character and plot in Dickens, Tolstoy and Hugo, there’s history, politics and ideas as well. How do you incorporate those things, which may be intrinsic to the author’s intentions, without detracting from the story you’re telling?
Well, if they really are important, they have to be important to your favourite characters, so you have to find a way of introducing them. Tolstoy’s ideas, for example, are expressed to a large extent by Pierre as he’s fumbling his way towards them.
How do you avoid melodrama – in other words, plot driving character, rather than character driving plot – when compressing these huge incident- and coincidence-packed narratives into just a handful of episodes?
I think by reminding myself that character is the most important thing, and by finding ways to make sure that what the characters want – or what they’re trying to avoid – has led them to a certain point. There are still loads of coincidences left in Les Misérables. We drastically reduced them, but weren’t able to do without them completely.
You have more than 50 adaptations to your credit, not counting unproduced scripts, the vast majority of those in the last three decades. Are you still learning things about the art of screen adaptation?
I hope so. It would be nice to think I was. I feel like I might still be getting better. But I may just be going into a gradual decline [laughs].
War & Peace would suggest otherwise.
Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind!