*Special Guest: TESS Screenwriter, David Nicholls! (1/5 to 1/12/09) [ Edited ]

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Hello, all, and Happy Holidays!

We are very pleased to announce that, as part of our arrangement with the PBS Masterpiece Classics series, we will have a special guest with us for our discussion of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  He is David Nicholls, the screenwriter for the film adaptation we will be viewing on PBS.  He will be with us to answer your questions and to discuss the film from January 5 to January 12, 2009.

Here is an article about David's work on the film.

Tess will air on Jan. 4 and Jan. 11, and you may, of course, have more questions after you view his work then.  Feel free to begin posting questions here for David as you think of them between now and then.

I hope you're as excited as I am to have this unique opportunity to discuss the novel and its adaptation with the screenwriter himself!

All best,

Message Edited by ConnieK on 12-23-2008 05:14 PM

[Everyman]

Very cool!

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ConnieK wrote:

Hello, all, and Happy Holidays!

We are very pleased to announce that, as part of our arrangement with the PBS Masterpiece Classics series, we will have a special guest with us for our discussion of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  He is David Nicholls, the screenwriter for the film adaptation we will be viewing on PBS.  He will be with us to answer your questions and to discuss the film from January 5 to January 12, 2009.

Here is an article about David's work on the film.

Tess will air on Jan. 4 and Jan. 11, and you may, of course, have more questions after you view his work then.  Feel free to begin posting questions here for David as you think of them between now and then.

I hope you're as excited as I am to have this unique opportunity to discuss the novel and its adaptation with the screenwriter himself!

All best,

Message Edited by ConnieK on 12-23-2008 05:14 PM

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[ConnieAnnKirk]

Welcome, David Nicholls!  Thank you so much for joining us here at the Classics Book Club at Barnes & Noble.com.

I'll throw out the first question to help get our members started.

This one's pretty obvious:

With Tess being such a long novel, what guided your decisions in condensing the story to screenplay-length?  Seems like it would be a difficult task!

Thank you!

[Everyman]

I'll toss in another question.  Actually, two related questions.

Unlike Austen, where much of the action of the books takes place in the form of dialogue, in Hardy, and Tess in particular, a great deal of the meat of the book, it seems to me, takes place not through dialogue but in Hardy's dissections of the characters, their motives, and their feelings.  For example, almost all of Tess's concerns about going to see her putative rich relations are described without dialogue, and most of the development of her feelings about Angel Clare are internalized (she doesn't discuss them with the other milkmaids the way, say, Jane and Lizzie discuss their love lives in Pride and Prejudice).    

Q1:  how did you deal with this aspect of the book, so that you could show the viewers what Hardy was writing through his descriptive passages?

Q2:  how much of the dialogue in the screenplay is drawn directly or very closely from Hardy's words, and how much of it did you have to create yourself?

[Peppermill]

David -- I'll go perhaps even more basic with this question:

Why this novel?  Because it was by Hardy?  If so, why Tess among his several masterpieces?

How involved were you in the selection?

Thanks for joining us here!

PS -- To give you a clue into the bias that may be behind those questions, I am one who would probably have preferred that the series have more Hardy and less Dickens.

PSS -- my monthly face-to-face book group read Tess this past year.  It was considered one of our stronger and particularly good selections.

[Brituk1776]

Thanks David for takeing the time to answer questions about your work.

As an actor, i am always compelled by language and dialogue.  Having watched and acted in many period peices, it remains a mystery to me how contemporary writers can create dialogue that seems to be "of the world".  How do you approach writng late 19th century dialogue?

Kevin "A Brit, living in the States" Stidham

[BOBREIDY]

DAVID, COULD YOU TELL ME WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE SELECTION OF MUSIC PLAYED DURING THE DANCE ON THE MAY DAY CELEBRATIONS?

[David_Nichols]

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ConnieK wrote:

Welcome, David Nicholls!  Thank you so much for joining us here at the Classics Book Club at Barnes & Noble.com.

I'll throw out the first question to help get our members started.

This one's pretty obvious:

With Tess being such a long novel, what guided your decisions in condensing the story to screenplay-length?  Seems like it would be a difficult task!

Thank you!

---

Condensing is always tricky, but four hours is pretty generous, especially in comparison with a 120 minute screenplay. Thankfully, we didn't have to leave out too many major events from the novel, though dialogue scenes are always distilled and cut back to their very essence - there are, for instance, some quite long theological and philosophical debates between Tess and Angel (and later Alec), which are not necessarily the most dramatic passages in the book.

The most significant omission in our adaptation is Angel's sleepwalking in episode three, though this was cut less for reasons of length, more for reasons of tone. It's a very strange, melodramatic incident, and also, to my mind, a rather clumsy way to suggest Angel's guilt and remorse after his rejection of Tess. 

The great benefit of adapting Hardy, as opposed to Dickens, say, is that there is no subplot in Tess. The central character is hardly ever off-screen, its always her story, so there's nowhere to 'cut to'. Most Victorian novels have a myriad of stories running in parallel. Tess has a singular, fast-moving single narrative strand, analagous, I suppose, to the traditional structure of a movie. In this sense, its a gift to adapt. 

[David_Nichols]

Hi there

There are several answers to this. Lets see.

The first reason is that Austen and Dickens have been rather overdone on British television. Hardy is a bolder choice because he's not hard-wired into the viewing psyche in the way that some other classics are - the Brontes for instance. If you've never read a book you still might have a notion who Heathcliff is. Consequently, there's less of a guaranteed audience for Hardy, its more of a gamble. And these things are expensive.

Secondly, more personally, I love this book, and I was lucky enough to be asked to adapt one of my favourite novels. I love Hardy's other major novels too but, to oversimplify, these are the reasons the others weren't chosen.

Jude - too grim. Without giving too much away, the novel contains one of the most shocking scenes in nineteenth century literature, one that would be extremely hard to show in peaktime on a Sunday night.

Mayor of Casterbridge - a wonderful book, but it seems to me its a novel about men. The romantic relationships aren't the best thing in it. If one's prejudice about Hardy was that he was gloomy and dour, I suspect this novel and Jude might confirm that feeling.

Far From The Madding Crowd. ITV, the rival UK TV company, produced this in the late nineties, a little too recently for the BBC. But I'm pleased to say that I'm currently writing a movie screenplay of the novel. It's a remarkable book, an extraordinary mix of romantic comedy, pastoral romance and psychological thriller. I think its a more uneven work than Tess, but still remarkable Who knows if the movie will ever get made, but I'm having a ball writing it.

Return of the Native? I think that may be produced soon. I might add that, personally, I don't think it has the grip and high emotion and tragic grandeur of Tess.

Finally, it felt like the time was right to reevaluate Tess as a character. Perhaps its because of Polanski's version, but there's a stereotyped notion of Tess as a passive character, a victim. Its undeniable that she suffers at the hands of men, but re-reading the novel I was struck by her intelligence, her courage, her passion, her eloquence. She's not a role model by any means, but I did think there was room for a version that showed her as a little feistier, bolder, braver. 

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Peppermill wrote:

David -- I'll go perhaps even more basic with this question:

Why this novel?  Because it was by Hardy?  If so, why Tess among his several masterpieces?

How involved were you in the selection?

Thanks for joining us here!

PS -- To give you a clue into the bias that may be behind those questions, I am one who would probably have preferred that the series have more Hardy and less Dickens.

PSS -- my monthly face-to-face book group read Tess this past year.  It was considered one of our stronger and particularly good selections.

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[David_Nichols]

Hm - yes, this is the other great challenge. Conveying information that Hardy provides in expositional prose. How do you dramatise those emotions? Sometimes you can slip it into dialogue. For instance, Hardy makes a great deal about Tess's love of learning and desire for an education, yet it's never mentioned in dialogue, in the early stages of the book anyway. I've stuck in one or two references into the spoken dialogue, and also invented a scene in a classroom, where Tess is working on her elocution. This is in the novel, but buried in Hardy's prose, and sometime in the past. We just show it. Also, there's a whole new scene - one of very few invented moments - where Alec lets Tess have access to his library. This allowed us to show Tess's love of books and also provide a necessary extra stage to Alec's seduction of Tess.

Thankfully, a great deal of unspoken work is done by the actors who, in this case, are very, very fine I think. There is, for instance, a moment in ep two where Tess throws herself down on the bed in frustration at her hopeless love for Angel. A wordless scene, straight from the novel, but performed and directed in such a way that it tells us everything.

So that's my main answer - good actors can work miracles.

Q2. The dialogue is very, very close to Hardy. In most cases its slightly paraphrased, to make it sound more natural, less verbose and 'literary'. Angel, in particular, sounds very pompous if you write him verbatim. He's just been made a little more colloquial.

Hardy writes fine dialogue, but he does tend to overdo the country slang and dialect. Clearly he was keen to get it right, but his dialogue for, say, Tess's parents, is so full of oohs and ahs and 'baints' instead of 'isn'ts' that it sounds a little corny spoken aloud. So that element was toned down.

The only other change is that I sometimes take a telling phrase from Hardy's prose and put it into dialogue form. For instance, I have Tess telling Alec that he is 'dust and ashes to (her) now'. This is an internal thought in Hardy, spoken aloud on screen. 

[David_Nichols]

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Brituk1776 wrote:

Thanks David for takeing the time to answer questions about your work.

As an actor, i am always compelled by language and dialogue.  Having watched and acted in many period peices, it remains a mystery to me how contemporary writers can create dialogue that seems to be "of the world".  How do you approach writng late 19th century dialogue?

Kevin "A Brit, living in the States" Stidham

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Complete absorption in the book's the key. I must have read it twenty times, and always read a passage before writing the dialogue. For the most part its pretty faithful, and its an exercise in editing, but if I do have to write an entirely new scene, I just read and read and read until I get the voice. 

I also have excellent editors and directors and actors, all on the lookout for anachronisms1 

[David_Nichols]

Hi Bob

I wish I could. The music, by Rob Lane, was largely based on old folk themes - a tune called 'The Snow It Melts the Soonest' provides the main love theme in ep. 2.  But I'm not sure about that dance. I'll do some digging and see if I can find out.

best wishes

D 

[Everyman]

Welcome, David.   I noticed a number of minor (or not so minor perhaps in some cases) changes made from the book to the movie.  I some cases I suspect I know why the changes were made; in others, I'm not so clear.  But before I ask any questions about those, I wanted to check whether this is part of what you're interested in talking about here, or whether you want to stick to the screenplay itself.

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Thanks so much again, David, for taking this time to answer viewers'/readers' questions.  Here in the States, many of us would have been able to view Part I of the film last night on our local public broadcasting stations.  Others of us may watch when we can online or watch a recording when we have time around work and family schedules.

I was able to watch Part I last night (enjoyed it!) and wished I could have seen it on our larger screen TV, which was unavailable to me at the time.  I wanted to see those wide sweeps of Tess's countryside as large as possible!  I found myself wondering, is scenery in the film a choice of the director or screenwriter?  Do you put something like "Tess walks across a wide field..." right in the script?  If so, were there moments you knew you had to include scenery into the scene?  The landscape is such a large part of this novel.

Thanks!

[Everyman]

Also, there's a whole new scene - one of very few invented moments - where Alec lets Tess have access to his library. This allowed us to show Tess's love of books and also provide a necessary extra stage to Alec's seduction of Tess.

Yes, as I watched last night I thought that was an invented scene.  But I see now why you did it.  

But you answered one of the other great questions of Tess by your almost aside here.  Rape or seduction?  It seemed to me that you made in the movie a clear decision that it was a seduction scene, not a rape scene. This, of course, is a question which readers and critics of Tess have debted -- even fought over -- since the book's initial publication.

First, while I would have to go back and re-read the sections more carefully, it seems to me that you made Tess more supsceptible to Alec than Hardy shows her.    Fopr example, the incident teaching whistling is the only interaction Hardy shows between Alec and Tess between the time she comes to work for (ostensibly) his mother and the time of the dance, but you show several other interactions which suggest a much more intimate relationship than Hardy presents.  Was the intent of this to strengthen the suggestion of a closer relationship between them that would validate the idea of seduction rather than rape?

Second, in the actual scene, which of course Hardy totally omits, you have Tess cry out, twice as I recall, but her cries are ambiguous; she never cries out "stop," or "don't," or anything else which would indicate unwillingness.  

Am I correct in my interpretation that you intend to present the scene as seduction rather than rape?  If so, why did you make this choice rather than leaving it, as the book does, ambiguous and up to the reader/viewer to make up their mind about?

[Everyman]

The first reason is that Austen and Dickens have been rather overdone on British television. Hardy is a bolder choice because he's not hard-wired into the viewing psyche in the way that some other classics are

I agree with this.  Hardy is certainly under-represented on those British shows that make their way to our shores.  (As is Trollope!)

 Secondly, more personally, I love this book, and I was lucky enough to be asked to adapt one of my favourite novels. I love Hardy's other major novels too but, to oversimplify, these are the reasons the others weren't chosen.

I'm right with you there!  (I also love some of Hardy's minor novels, but that's another issue!)

 Finally, it felt like the time was right to reevaluate Tess as a character. Perhaps its because of Polanski's version, but there's a stereotyped notion of Tess as a passive character, a victim. Its undeniable that she suffers at the hands of men, but re-reading the novel I was struck by her intelligence, her courage, her passion, her eloquence. She's not a role model by any means, but I did think there was room for a version that showed her as a little feistier, bolder, braver.

Absolutely.  Hardy certainly presents her as a victim of fate (I'll be interested to see how you handle the final paragraph of the  novel!), but she is not a tepid or insipid or meek victim.  She goes down fighting almost all the way.  So far (I only got to watch the first hour last night hope to watch the rest on line in the next few days) I think you have done an admirable job with Tess.   And I am one who tends to be fairly critical of screen adaptations of my favorite novels.  

[Everyman]

A few questions for David, which you are free to pass over if you think they would not be helpful to the group.

There seem to be several points in the first hour (all I watched so far) where you have simplified things a bit, perhaps to keep the focus more centered on the story.  Is this the reason for the changes?  For example:  in the book, Angel lingers at the dancing until dark and then hastens to catch up with his brothers; in the script, you have him leave with his brothers after only a few minutes at the dance and before, as Hardy notes, the "rustic youth" gradually start arriving (I didn't notice any change in the lighting to suggest evening coming on).  Mrs. Durbeyfield didn't bring her husband back from Rollivers's, as you have it; Tess had to send Abraham and, when that didn't succeed, had to go in to fetch them herself. I thought that showed a facet of her character as really the substitute mother to the family that I didn't see emphasized in the film.  Abraham goes with Tess on the fatal night journey that kills Prince, but you seen to have omitted him.

It seems that all these omissions are to simplify the story and take out extraneous materials not essential to the plot line.  Was this your thinking, or is there something more going on that I'm missing?

Who was the woman who came to see Tess after she returned home to have her baby?  I don't recall that in the book, and am not sure who she was or what the purpose of the scene was.

Why did you change the labor which takes place when Tess's sister brings the baby to her in the fields from the more interesting (to me, at least!) process of reaping and binding sheaves to the much more (to me) boring just hoeing the field in a fairly desultory fashion?   Was it because it would have cost too much to create the reaping scene with an era-appropriate machine, field to cut, etc., or for some other reason?  

It appears, unless I misremember the book, that the event in that scene where Tess goes to look at the girls dancing again was invented.  What was the basis or purpose of that?  

I'm not intending to be critical of your screenplay, which I think is excellent, but to understand why you make the choices you do to deviate from the book.  

[dulcinea3]

Hi David!  I just wanted to say that I am enjoying the adaptation and appreciate your taking the time to come chat with us!

Of course, when we discuss literary works here, it is always interesting to see how different people read the same work differently, and the same can be applied to the film.  For example, I agree with Everyman that you seem to have taken a point of view that Tess was much more attracted to Alec than I thought she was in the novel.  In my reading, I thought that she was never more than disturbed by his attentions, but in your adaptation, it is clear that she starts out that way, but that he gradually wins her over.  In particular, the action of her rubbing up against him as she passes by to leave the library seemed a rather brazen move.  Do you really see an attraction there when you read the novel, or did you introduce this variation on purpose, and for what purpose?  Everyman and I seem to have seen the pivotal scene differently, though, because I definitely considered it a rape, even if Alec had somewhat won Tess over beforehand.  I thought the nebulosity that they introduced was rather effective, although at times it looked computer-generated and unreal.

I was wondering how you would manage to convey the fact that the d'Urbervilles were in fact Stokes who had appropriated the family name, and I thought that you handled that quite well, with additional scenes involving Alec's mother.

I did miss having the scene with Tess' parents at Rolliver's, as I really enjoyed that scene in the book and thought that it really advanced our understanding of her parents, but I can understand that even some of the more important scenes need to be omitted to fit into the time you have.

I think I can anticipate your reply to one of Everyman's questions: the woman who attempted to visit Tess was her teacher.  She left a few books with Tess' mother and told her that she would be happy if Tess would contact her.  In the novel, Hardy does mention at one point that Tess had wanted to become a teacher, and the earlier scene with Tess saying her lesson and this scene emphasize that, as well as Tess mentioning her former ambition at one point.  I liked the character of the teacher in the adaptation; she seemed so kind and encouraging to Tess, which is not something that she found with too many other people, including her own parents.

I'm afraid that when we here at the book club are concurrently reading the novel along with watching the new presentation, we are going to tend to nitpick a bit more than if we had not read the novel for years!

I also thought that I would mention something that occurred to me when reading the reasons that other Hardy novels were not selected:  I don't know which network produced it, but there was also a fairly recent adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, starring Ciaran Hinds, so that might have been another reason it was not selected.

Thanks again for your participation!

[TumbleweedAlley]

David Nicholls---thank you for taking the time for our comments and questions.

While we know that reading a book generates careful film viewing, I beleive it is also true that viewing a film generates careful reading, thought, and discussion. Your thoughts?

(A funny aside: I watch OTA television, and the signal in my new digital conversion box left me viewing a beautiful, scenic Tess with no sound! I followed along quite comfortably for some time--then I switched to old analog--with a snowy picture. In spite of those technical difficulties, I reaped and gleaned a lot from your interpretation.)

[Laurel]

Strange! I saw the scene in the film as a very clear rape, whereas Hardy does not tell us Whether it is rape or seduction. I've always wondered why Hardy put such a mist over that scene--did he cut it out to get the book published, was it cut by the censers, was he aiming at ambiguity all along? I think the ambiguity is part of what makes the book great.

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Everyman wrote:

But you answered one of the other great questions of Tess by your almost aside here.  Rape or seduction?  It seemed to me that you made in the movie a clear decision that it was a seduction scene, not a rape scene. This, of course, is a question which readers and critics of Tess have debted -- even fought over -- since the book's initial publication.

. . . .

Am I correct in my interpretation that you intend to present the scene as seduction rather than rape?  If so, why did you make this choice rather than leaving it, as the book does, ambiguous and up to the reader/viewer to make up their mind about?

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