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Anita & Them: Turning a best-selling novel into a hit feature film
Photo: Fiona Fouhy
Meera Syal after her SCENE London 2002 Masterclass
Screenwriter/novelist Meera Syal & producer Paul Raphael in conversation with The Script Factory Co-Director Briony Hanson
AUDIENCE MEMBER
Is there a screenwriting method you particularly subscribe to, McKee or Syd Field?
MEERA SYAL
I find the coffee, fags and impending deadline (LAUGHTER) is a very good method. I’ve done the Robert McKee course actually, ahem, who hasn’t? And it was sort of interesting to go to something that is so prescriptive, I mean obviously you’ve done it and the way that he deconstructs Casablanca and you go ‘oh that’s a second act turning point’ and I suppose it’s very easy to do things in retrospect, it always is, it’s interesting how many films are brilliant and work and actually break quite a lot of those rules very consciously. In way it’s sort of like Jazz improvisation, you sort of need to know what the structures are in order to break them so I think those courses are very useful but, I don’t know, I suppose, certainly the difficulty I think I have as a writer is that I always start with characters and that’s, apparently, not good. One should start with a brilliant plot and then worry about the characters later, so they say. All my stories, all my interests always spring from a personality that fascinates me. In a way the stories tend to emerge from them and what I imagine they would do with their lives. I don’t start off with a very structured plan and a first draft is almost like a bit of a free-for-all for me and I do let the characters meander and I’d never give in a first draft actually, to be honest. I need to know where they are going and it’s rather like the way that I write books, the book goes off into loads of different tangents because it’s Meena’s head and she can. So I’m not sure I really cracked it, cracked the discipline or the structuring of it. I think you have to find what works for you actually, in the end, if you get a good script in the end it doesn’t matter a damn how you got there, I don’t think anyway. That’s not very helpful is it…? I’m really sorry!
Meera Syal's Anita & Me AUDIENCE MEMBER
Could you tell us more about the adaptation process? What did you leave out?
MS
Well interestingly there are scenes in the film that never appear in the book and they emerged quite late on through the adaptation where I realised that there were gaps in the arc of the story, there were certain things. A small example is, there is a very tiny scene of the girls in the summerhouse, in the den, and we inserted a scene there which is basically giving a background of a row. It wasn’t there in the book but in the arc of the story it really needed to be there, in fact thank god we had the footage.
Paul Raphael
It was shot for a completely different reason.
MS
It was a really strange process of adaptation, I don’t want to spoil it for people but there is a drowning, or what you think is going to be a drowning at the beginning of the book, really a big plot point. In the book a completely different person who drowns. Completely. Now, that is a major change and that’s really quite a good example of what completely made sense and you could accept in the book because you had all that time to build up that character but it just really didn’t work at all.
PR
But it also needed to be about one of our main characters and in the book it wasn’t and in the film it is.
MS
Yeah, and it is odd, it’s a very odd feeling because you think ‘this is the story I wanted to tell and surely I should be able to tell it this way’. All I can say is it kind of makes story sense when you get there and what I would say is really feel free to put in stuff that isn’t necessarily in the book because ultimately you’re telling the emotional truth of your story and filmicly anyway if you can do that in the right way it can be quite liberating, it shows your arcs and shapes in the story you might never have got in the book.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
What lessons did you feel you learnt in making the film?
MS
Well, it’s a humbling process when you find that twenty five pages of finely crafted prose can be done in a look; why did I bother? That’s a major thing that you find out, I mean literally swathes of scenes which were about the relationship between Mama and Papa and the passion and la la la… It’s just like, oh we’ll get him to look at her that will do it… and it did. It translated on to film.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
How did you integrate the voice-over in the script and how did you use it to tell the story?
MS
This was a very contentious issue I have to say; the voiceover’s been in, the voiceover’s been out. I did several versions of that. You can get away with voiceover if it’s good voiceover, that sounds very trite but, you know, my sort of particular role model on that was Woody Allen, I think. Radio Days and movies like that where you think, ‘my god! Woody’s been talking for a full two minutes and I really haven’t noticed because all of it is so funny’ and not as in ‘it’s so funny it’s tangential’, you know, the fatal mistake to make with voiceovers is that you’re explaining what people are actually seeing, when what you should be doing is giving them subtext or working against what the pictures are doing, so their minds are actually going two ways. It’s like writing a good monologue, Alan Bennett monologues work exactly that way, the characters never say what they mean, ever, the audience always has to do all the work ‘what do they really mean?’ Ideally, good voiceovers should do that and also because Meena is such a particular character with such a quirky world-view, the film just didn’t seem to work without hearing that chirpy little Midlands voice.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
How many drafts of the script did you end up doing? Was writing the script a cathartic experience for you?
MS
I think it was about eight. Eight and a half - half for revised voiceover. This is spread over four or five years and three or four different regimes, all of whom wanted another re-write.
PR
And we actually did re-writes for one person and then re-wrote back in the one that was in the one before that, for the next person, so you kind of go forwards to go backwards.
MS
I’ll tell you what would save you and awful lot of time, you know, keep your first or second draft because you will find that draft eight strangely resembles it.
PR
It’s really true.
MS
Very odd that - seems to work every time. And catharsis, well because I suppose that some of it was very personal to me and therefore I think that that did give me this real urge to try and authentically recreate what I felt growing up like that and wanting to translate that to film. It’s a great little motor, I don’t think using films as therapy is always great but I think you’ll find that most peoples’ first or second movie tends to be an extremely personal story because it’s what has been driving them for years. They have to tell this one, it’s been there waiting to be told.
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