yearbook 2004/05 - The European Film College

about seeing and being seen, which is the heart
of cinema.
M Le F: What adjustments did you make in
adapting the story?
O H: The book is written in the first person
and constantly describes what the heroine feels
about what is going on. So the first question
was how to put these emotions into film. It
seemed to be very important not to use voiceover,
because voice-over suggests a degree of self
analysis and awareness - a distance to the situation,
and none of this seemed appropriate for
the character of the heroine, Griet. The emotions
had to be translated through her physical
surroundings and through interaction with the
other characters. Luckily I didn’t notice how
difficult that would be until I was too far gone
in the project to go back!
M Le F: Were you guided more by the book’s images
or by the narration?
O H: I almost always start with what to me is a
compelling image. Here for example it was the
image of the girl standing on the star in the middle
of the town square trying to decide which
way her life was going. And I was rather thrilled
that we were able to go to that square in Delft
and film it just as it took place in the book. At
other times I make things up. There was sometimes
something that I needed an equivalent for
that wasn’t there, and I had to find it. For example,
the scene where Griet is holding the silver
bowl, and the light is reflected from it onto a
nearby wall: I made that up to “put over” Griet’s
revelation about light and painting. It was fairly
easy to invent things, because the novel is full
of manual work – the scene is always busy; the
characters never just sit around chatting.
M Le F: We know that screenplays go through a
number of drafts – it can be a huge number. How
many in this case?
EVENTS
O H: Not all that many. You see these yellow
tabs I’ve attached to the pages of this proof copy
of the novel? They represent the novel’s different
scenes. I break them down one by one. The
time line in the book is quite convoluted; it goes
forwards, then back three months, then forward
again, then back a month, and so on. I sorted it
out into a linear time scheme, and I got rid of all
the scenes that I could until I was left with what
I thought I needed: it was like dealing out playing
cards. What I was left with formed the basis
of my Treatment. A treatment is a sort of ten
page document in which each paragraph represents
a scene of the film. This may sound like a
brutal way of getting the story out, but it gives
you the essentials. You don’t get trapped into
writing nice bits of dialogue that aren’t going to
be used in the end. You can tell from it whether
the story is working in the broadest terms. Then
it is a matter of writing a draft and showing it
to people. I come from a background of filmmaking,
so I really enjoy the kind of collaborative
process this entails. A first draft went to
Andy and his production partner, and they gave
me notes, and I produced a polish on that; it
then went to the financiers who gave their own
notes; then there was a second draft, and rather
amazingly, this was the draft that went to the
director. Of course there was more to be done. I
Andy Paterson