Feature: Interview - Author Deborah Moggach talks to Gerald Isaaman

Published: 29 September, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

SHE has written 16 novels and a fistful of screenplays for small and silver screens, among them Pride and Prejudice, Love in a Cold Climate and The Diary of Anne Frank, which have earned her accolades.

But Deborah Moggach showed off a sparkling new talent on Saturday when she delved into the madcap world of film-making and proved herself to be a stand-up comedienne who can have an audience howling with laughter.

“Tom Stoppard adapted my novel Tulip Fever,” she told a packed literary festival audience. “And lovely though it is, it’s rather like someone rifling your knicker drawer when you are not there – even Tom Stoppard – though I’d rather like him to rifle my knicker drawer, anyway.”

Deborah was on a trip from her home in South End Green, in Hampstead, to Marlborough, to help out her novelist friend Mavis Cheek, who has launched a fledgling literary festival in the Wiltshire market town.

And she revealed that you might as well throw away your original novel and start from scratch when it comes to creating a screenplay because, in the end, that’s what usually works.

“The default for the producers is always to sack the writer, and if that happens it’s horrible and not much fun,” she admitted. “You can walk off with the money.

“But you are the person without whom the movie wouldn’t exist. You just have to be pragmatic. You can’t be precious about your work, because everything is going to be changed all the time.”

She pointed out: “The first draft of a screenplay is often very faithful to the book. But what I do is literally throw the book away after the first draft and never go back to it.

Otherwise, you are being regressive, you are going back into that interior world of the novel.

“Your first draft is the genesis of the film.It is what you work on and each draft makes it more into a screenplay.

“I would liken it to turning a noun into a verb. A novel can be completely static, largely filled with dreams, the past and speculations – stuff which is very interior, with no action at all. And that is not what the film producers want. They want to turn the interior world into an exterior one, where things are happening so that you learn the story through what happens.”

The process, alas, is fraught with problems as well as excitement and fun.

Hollywood proved to be “full of fear and Chinese whispers” when Steven Spielberg called on his car phone and announced he wanted to make a $48 million epic version of Deborah’s novel Tulip Fever.

Within a week she was flying off to Los Angeles, bumping into her milkman, Ron, a great film buff, as she walked down her garden path to the taxi.

She revealed she was off to meet Steven Spielberg and, as she always pops up as an extra in her films, suggested the two of them might end up as merchants selling fish in the market in Amsterdam when the film was made.

“When I returned I found a photograph on the front page of the local paper of my milkman Ron saying ‘Milkman to star in Steven Spielberg movie’.

“And before I had unpacked the phone rang and the Daily Express were on the line saying they had just been interviewing milkman Mr Ronald Penrose and he suggested they ought to interview me too,” said Deborah, adding: “After all, I only wrote the bloody book.”

It was one hilarious moment that followed another when Deborah recounted sitting opposite the film critic Barry Norman en route to LA and telling him she had the first copy of Tulip Fever with her to hand personally to Steven Spielberg.

“He asked to read it,” she said. “At the end of the flight he handed it back and said: ‘I’ve written somewhere in the book that Steven Spielberg is a wanker!”

The film was abandoned when Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, wiped out the tax loophole that provided benefits for foreign film investment, and a nursery in Thames Ditton found itself with 12,000 tulips in pots being specially grown for the movie.

Five hundred of them ended up in Deborah’s garden, most to be given away to friends and neighbours, some no doubt still growing as a legacy of her lost movie.

She became interested in writing for television and the cinema “because a novelist’s life is a lonely one, solitary, and you’re all by yourself,” she explained. “I am rather gregarious and I hanker to be one of the team, which I am pathetically longing to be all the time.”

She flew to India last November to be on set for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the movie version of her latest novel, These Foolish Things, due out in March.

It stars Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Celia Imre and is based on her comic idea of outsourcing Britain’s elderly to a retirement home in Bangalore and seeing how it transforms their lives.

She felt resentful at first when she saw how someone else had totally altered one of her novels, but this is how the world of film fantasy works.

“When I saw the film, it has great oomph to it and is really very good,” she enthused. “But, in the end, it isn’t recognisable as anything that I wrote.”

There is a serious sociological aspect behind the novel’s humour.

Deborah, who is now 63, explained: “I thought: Who is going to go look after us all when we get older? Nobody will be able to and it’s going to get worse. So I thought, why don’t we outsource the elderly? We outsource everything else, so outsource us, and the best place to outsource anyone is obviously India.

“Some people say it still resembles Tunbridge Wells in the 1950s, and Britain is now quite a foreign country for a lot of old people who feel very frightened and alienated and don’t want to be shoved into a hideous old people’s home in the middle of a ploughed field.”

Meanwhile, Deborah concluded: “If you get fed up because producers constantly sack you or mess you about and you get really pissed off, then you can go back into that private world where nobody is looking over your shoulder, nobody is changing things and nobody is saying ‘we can’t possible shoot that in Hawaii’.”