An interview with Eleanor Catton on The Luminaries21st June 9pm, BBC OneOFFICIAL PRESS RELEASENEWS PROVIDED BY BBC One Eleanor Catton is the writer, creator and executive producer of The Luminaries. Describe the story of The Luminaries. This feels like a very female story, and a very female production team. Was this a conscious decision? And if so, what did this bring to the work? The show brings these two women, and their relationship, to the fore, and adapts the plot of the novel quite considerably in the process. Actually, the show departs so much from the book that I think of it more as a companion piece than as a straightforward adaptation. I am very proud that the show foregrounds the work of women - not just of the two extraordinary lead actresses, but of the director, producer, and production designer, among many others. But I am much prouder that as a story, The Luminaries is such an unlikely candidate to have been created by a largely female production team. I would love to see more female artists entering territory that has traditionally been considered the province of men. But I’d also love to see more male artists entering territory that has traditionally been considered the province of women. What was the thought process behind bringing Anna Wetherell to the forefront for the adaptation? The job of the adaptation was to settle on one of the characters as a central point of view. Anna’s journey is in a way the most epic, and so it made sense to choose her as the central perspective to follow. It could easily have been somebody else - except that I’m very glad it wasn’t, for the sheer pleasure and privilege of having been able to spend so much time with Eve Hewson over the course of the story. How has it been to collaborate with a huge production team, compared with the more solitary experience of writing a novel? Nearly all the actors offered ideas and suggestions, most of all Eva Green. There are several very good plot ideas in episode six that are entirely hers - but ideas came from other departments as well: the script was constantly changing in response to what other people had thought of, and had made. I found that very inspiring. Touching the fabrics in the costume workshop, and wandering the sets while they were being built, and watching extras mill around between takes, I often had to pinch myself to remember that once upon a time The Luminaries was just a vague idea in the back of my mind. Do you approach writing a novel and a script in a similar way? Or are they very different disciplines? This freedom isn’t always a good thing of course - there is a discipline to screenwriting that a lot of novels could learn from, and film has an emotional immediacy through the score and sound design, not to mention the presence of the actors, that can make it feel more immersive and emotionally affecting than the experience of reading a book. There are many exceptions, but generally it’s true that each form can do things that the other can’t. The other big difference between them is that a novel is complete, whereas a screenplay, when it’s finished, is still only an architectural plan for a story that will then get rewritten twice over, first in the shoot, and then again in the edit. So a screenplay has to be suggestive: it’s written for the actors and the director and the cinematographer, proposing how the story could be embodied in its final form; it’s not written for an audience. Do you imagine the characters from the novel in a new way, since you’ve seen them embodied by actors? This is a period piece but there are themes which feel very modern. Do you think particular themes of the series will resonate with a modern audience? Why is New Zealand an important back drop to the story? But I think that the character of the country shapes the story in other ways too. One of my uncles once used a phrase that stuck with me: the wilderness of the mind. The idea was that national parks and wild spaces are important even if you never visit them, because simply by knowing that they exist, your imagination is reassured in its own potential wildness, and therefore freed. I think that New Zealand occupies a place like that in the minds of many people. It’s important even if they’ve never been there. What was the inspiration behind structuring the story on the celestial? Is this a belief system that you follow personally? Who can say, really, why a major chord sounds happy, and why a minor chord sounds sad? I can’t, but I definitely feel satisfaction at a perfect cadence, and melancholy at a plagal one, and I definitely feel uplifted and enlarged when a pop song changes key, and I definitely feel irritated when someone plays a note that’s out of tune. Astrology is very similar: it’s an interpretive system that involves emotional and psychological harmonies that are ultimately mysterious. I have never been astonished to discover anybody’s astrological sign; it’s a piece of information that always makes sense and feels true. It doesn’t really bother me that I couldn’t tell you why. What would your advice be to any aspiring writers putting pen to paper during lockdown? Learning how to read yourself as a reader is, in my opinion, the most important skill you can cultivate as an aspiring writer. This applies to watching television as well: don’t just zone out in front of the TV, read what you’re watching and read yourself as you’re reading it. Invention always begins with imitation, and the better you are at observing things, the more closely you will be able to imitate them - and the better your inventions will eventually be. *more interviews with the production team to be added - 13/06/2020
Source BBC One
June 12, 2020 11:55am ET by BBC One |