Philip Pullman is taking a distinctly hands-off approach with the films of his books. He will have no creative input into their production, no advisory position. The following interview is adapted from an Q&A session given at the Balliol College English society on 6th November 2002. It illuminates Mr Pullman's sanguine philosophy on filmmaking and shows why he will not be taking a more active role in the movies.
Well, some films work and some don't. It's more true of modern books than of classic ones, because unlike the classics modern books like mine tend to lean more on the human sensibilities than on the storyline, as a rule. I'm quietly hopeful about the film - it's to be made by New Line Pictures, the ones who made the "The Lord Of The Rings" movies, so they should be quite sensitive to the spirit of the books. Plus, Tom Stoppard is currently writing the scripts - what more could you ask for?
Note: Sir Stoppard has since been replaced by Chris Weitz as the film's script writer.
Only a minimal one, and I think that's the way it should be.
Authors generally know nothing about the practical process of film-making, and the way that films are made [unless they practically make the film themselves] really prevents them from having any influence on anything other than the broad form that the film will take. The details are out of their hands - and left to the experts.
I haven't the time to be creative controller of a film. "His Dark Materials" was written over the course of seven years, and I've got other stories, including a spin-off featuring characters from the original trilogy, that I'd like to write. Inevitably, film-makers for reasons of practicality are going to want to abridge the plots of the books in order to create their screenplays: and that can be hard on an author. But, whatever happens to the film, I can rest assured that the book will still be there in its entirety for people to read.
Well, of course, the art of storytelling dates right back to ancient times, but it still continues today. Then we had written stories, and printed ones, and they still continue even with the advent of plays such as Shakespeare's, and later cinema and television. No one medium can supplant all the others: once a book has become a movie, the book doesn't become redundant; but each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. Take the stage plays of my books, which are going to be performed at the National Theatre. Now, there's a particular sequence in the third book where one of the characters, puzzled by something, "taps his thumbs together". That's the sort of close-up which works both in a book and on film, but has to be represented some other way on stage, otherwise it's not noticeable. The location of a camera's viewpoint - literally in the case of a film, metaphorically in the case of a book - can make all the difference in how a story is told: Jane Austen and Howard Hawks, each in their own ways, use this to great effect, cutting between 'long shot' and 'close-up'. Or, there are situations where the camera is deliberately absent from the action as something shocking happens - one can draw parallels between an unseen domestic row in Trollope's "Barchester Towers" and an ear-amputation in Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" that's more heard than seen. In their different ways, both are equally effective.