DEBORAH MOGGACH: How Camden author's books make it to the big screen
Published: 23 February, 2012
by RUTH GORB
We are bombarded with the cold facts every day. We are all living longer, the money for care is running out, retirement homes are closing – and we don’t much like the words retirement home anyway.
However, “The word hotel,” says one of the characters in Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things, “still has possibilities.”
And now we have the film of the book, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, where the possibilities are mind-blowing.
Never was such a disparate collection of people of a certain age gathered together – although they have all come to the hotel for one reason: India, they have been persuaded, is a better place to retire to than Eastbourne. It will be cheaper, there will be warmth and sunshine – and servants.
The hugely enjoyable book came out in 2005, the movie will be on release this week, but whatever the differences, at the heart of it all is Moggach’s brilliant idea. “It just came to me, a brainwave,” she says. “Older people don’t want to spend their retirement gazing at a rain-drenched ploughed field, or sit in a row of deck-chairs looking at the sea. Think how much more fun to be in a city, where there’s life, where things happen.”
Her group fetch up in Bangalore, where things certainly happen.
Yes, there is poverty and there are beggars in the teeming streets, but there is no street violence like there is here. “There is more gentleness, certainly towards old people, who are treated with respect and kindness. Look at the brutish behaviour of thugs in our city streets, the filth and the vomiting. I lived in Pakistan for two years and I never once encountered violence.”
She is dismissive about Delhi Belly. “You get stomach ache, then you get better. I didn’t get ill at all after a bit – I was drinking the tap water after two years.”
Heaven knows how the doughty band gathered together at The Marigold Hotel will cope with “all that” in the film. Marvellous characters all of them, man-eating Marcia, disgusting old lech Norman, gently reared Evelyn from Sussex, working-class Muriel who got fed up with being mugged in Peckham… As for the casting of her characters, wasn’t Moggach amazed when she heard who plays them in the film, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and all?
“I was stunned. I’ve got the best. To have actors of that calibre bringing my book to life – do look out for Bill Nighy trying to make a phone call. And Tom Wilkinson, who makes your heart break by doing nothing.
“They all bring an inner life to those characters. It’s what great actors do.”
Does it bother her – or indeed upset her – that her own screenplay was not used? After all, she did get a Bafta nomination for her screenplay of Pride and Prejudice. She is perfectly sanguine about it. “I wrote a script, it came and went, but that’s what happens. Pride and Prejudice went back and forth. It’s just a process. Each director wants to put their own stamp on it. Yes, they’ve left things out and got rid of a character – but I would have done the same.”
Is she happy with the result? Yes, she says, because it has a big heart.
It doesn’t shirk things like death and loneliness. It’s got some good jokes, and it shows you that India isn’t all about the Taj Mahal. A feel-good film? “Yes, because it shows the possibility of change at any time of your life.”
Her own life continues its dazzle of fun, family and hard work – she has 17 books under her belt and another comes out later this year, the story of an old actor living in a B&B in Wales, and called, would you believe it, Heartbreak Hotel.
Her ravishing Regency house on the edge of the Heath continues to delight her, its chaotic glamour what she always wants to come home to. One distant day, though, what about her brilliant idea – would she go and live in India? “Never. When I’m old I shall go and live in Soho, where it’s all happening.”
• Deborah Moggach will answer questions at a special breakfast screening of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in support of Keats Community Library, at the Everyman Cinema in Belsize Park on Sunday at 10am.
• The book is now available in paperback from Vintage Books, £7.99