Legacy: Whose book is it anyway?

Whose book is it anyway?

Alan Judd

A book is a book and a film is a film.  Keep saying that to yourself if you’re ever lucky enough to have a book filmed.  And remember that a film is not better the more closely it resembles your book, just as your book is not better the more closely it resembles real life episodes which may have inspired it.  In each case it is internal dynamics that count.  Art reveals life by distillation, not by repetition.  Otherwise there’d no need for art at all, just microphones and cameras.

Legacy is the second of my books to be filmed for TV.  The first was its thematic predecessor, Breed of Heroes, published 20 years before and featuring the same central figure, Charles Thoroughgood.  I no more intended to write a sequel to Breed than I intended to follow Legacy a decade later with the third in the Thoroughgood trilogy, Uncommon Enemy.  When you write you know not what you may have wrought.

People often ask whether it is traumatic to see your book translated into another medium over which you have no control and little influence.  It is easy to see how it could be: you’ve given your baby to someone else to bring up as they please.  But you have to accept it’s their film, they are making it, they’ve put the money into it, they’re taking all the risks and are working to constraints and demands in terms of time and audience perception which the novelist is blessedly free of.  Also, a novel is almost always a solo venture.  There’s one god and it’s you.  A film has many gods and the most powerful of all is probably the cutting-room god.

Thus, the film Legacy differs significantly from the novel, not only in content – cramming it into 90 minutes meant leaving a lot out – but in ending and in the drama.  People don’t run around with guns and poisons in the book, or get rubbed out because they know too much.  But that doesn’t make the film better or worse than the book, just different.  The requirements of the medium are different and it should be judged by how far it meets its own aspirations and whether those aspirations are good. 

Having watched it grow from first draft of Paula Milne’s script to the final day of shooting only a few months later, it seems to me the film succeeds on all counts.  Very well acted, tightly directed and impressively produced, it is a taut, tense drama of Cold War spying.  It works.  It may seem odd that when I sit down to watch it I tell myself to forget the novel on which it is based, but that’s what you have to do in order to judge it as a film.  Otherwise, you’re judging by criteria – is this bit in my book or what’s happened to that character? – that are not reasonably applicable.  You’d be judging it for not doing that which it never set out to do – repeating your novel on screen.

If you ever write a novel and see it filmed, the best advice I can give is to sit back and enjoy it.  Marvel at the frightening logistics, the numbers involved, the pressures they work under, give advice when asked but don’t make impossible demands and take pleasure in the fact that your solitary work, sweated over long ago, gives lots of people jobs and even more, you hope, pleasure.  Novels can have an after life, a resurrection long after publication, and they can even earn you money.  That’s the other thing to remember about films.       

The film of Legacy will air on BBC 2 on 28th November as part of the channel’s Cold War Season. Click here to order Alan Judd’s fantastic original novel.