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Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with Alan Parker
Alan Parker on stage in Hay
Hay Literary Festival, Hay on Wye
Sunday 1 June 2003
An extract from Alan Parker's conversation with producer Tanya Seghatchian
On adaptation…
Tanya Seghatchian
When you adapt a bestseller like Angela's Ashes, are there certain responsibilities that you have to take on board?
Alan Parker
There are. It’s really hard, actually. The difficulty with any successful book is that people love every single scene, or they have their favourite scenes. And you have to narrow it down to the ones that you think are going to go in. I kind of kept almost everything in. I was encouraged to do that, and then make a decision at a later date to get rid of things. It’s actually easier with Frank McCourt’s book, because it was very episodic. It’s very dangerous to put too much in, on a book where one thing leads to another. Because obviously, you pull away one of the cards in the house of cards and the whole thing could collapse. So it’s dangerous to over-write. In that case, I did over-write and I over-shot. And the first cut of the film was well over three and a half hours, and I cut it down to just over two and a half. So I got rid of an hour of film, all of which I quite liked. But it was not a three and a half hour experience. It is as a novel, well, a non-fiction book, because very rarely would you read it in one go. Whereas with a film, you do. You sit there and you watch it and in the main, it runs for two, two and a half hours. You get to three and a half hours, and it’s not the form that film should be in, really. Because you don’t come back next week – you have to watch it there and then. But I left too much in and I had to get rid of stuff, which annoyed me really, because I put a lot of pain into doing scenes that I then had to throw away. The good thing about DVD these days is that you can actually put them back in – and bore people silly with the three and a half hour version! (audience laughter).
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