Shades of Elizabeth

It was in the early 1990s that Neil Jordan first raised the possibility of a collaboration between us on a film of Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September. I had not read the book, but when I did, it was love at first sight. Bowen wrote it when she was just at the end of her twenties, and it has a freshness and, despite the sombre themes, a subtle gaiety that she would not quite match again. The fine pale hand of Henry James rests a little heavily on its pages, perhaps, yet the writing overall is extraordinarily light and evocative. No novelist, including Bowen herself in subsequent attempts, would ever catch with such wistful accuracy the languid yet curiously valiant mode of life at the Big House just as its demolition was at hand. When I began work on the screenplay, I was surprised to discover what a filmic eye and ear Elizabeth Bowen had. Entire scenes, even some of the most delicate and intricate in the book, fell straight on to the page for me. Her dialogue was, I found, perfectly suited to the screen, for she had a fine sense of the dramatic and a profound psychological insight. Much of Bowen's characterisation is effected through dialogue. The talk in her books, eccentric, oblique, full of odd cadences and unexpected elisions, expresses an inner richness of motivation and intent that few contemporary novelists could manage. Even the narrative and descriptive passages in the book have such a strong "voice" that they could be compressed and transformed into dialogue with relative ease. This was fortunate, since the plot is at once complex and delicate.

One of the prime challenges for the screenwriter is to tell the story through the mouths of his characters without making them sound like simpletons who have to keep telling each other what is going on. In my first draft I made the mistake of not trusting Bowen's own plot and structure, and changed them. Neil Jordan read my version, and gently suggested that I return to the book as Bowen wrote it. I took his advice. However, alterations there had to be. The Last September is a clear-eyed and tough portrait of a country at war and a class in decline, but the touches by which Bowen suggests the savagery of the times were too glancing and finely wrought to be entirely effective on the screen.

Film is a vulgar medium, in the best sense of the word, and the subtleties of an essentially poetic writer such as Elizabeth Bowen, when they are transferred to the screen, are in danger of being either coarsened into melodrama, or refined out of existence. In the novel, the heroine Lois's main encounter with an IRA man is written in the manner of light comedy. This device works on the page, mainly because of the contrast it makes with the violence which, though it occurs offstage, is described tellingly, with economy and shocking flatness. For the screen, it seemed essential to bring to the foreground the ferocity of human motivations which in the book is suggested through a range of understatements and ironic conjunctions, effects which are entirely literary. The brief but intense love affair in the film between the 19-year-old Lois and the IRA man Peter Connolly is my invention, and may shock readers of the novel. I think it is justified and, more importantly, credible.

THE second draft was finished in 1993, and then, as so often happens with movie projects, everything slowed down, to the point that it seemed the film would never be made. Neil Jordan went on to make Michael Collins, and I was busy with a new novel. Then a couple of years ago Jordan telephoned to say that he had offered the script to Yvonne Thunder to produce, and had asked the English theatre director, Deborah Warner, to direct. Deborah and I met, and decided that a new draft of the screenplay was needed. It is always easier to work with a specific director in mind, and the revised version was soon completed. In Deborah Warner I was pleased to discover a fellow obsessive. She has an almost fanatical concern for the minutiae of plot and character. On and off, over a period of months, we laboured together at refining and honing the script. It was for me a fascinating, invigorating and revelatory experience. I had never collaborated so closely with anyone before. We had few disagreements; the process was always positive, always pressing upon the text, seeking to make it give up its hidden potentials. We used to joke that it was worrying how harmonious our collaboration was; shouldn't we be having at least the odd shouting match? At last, when we had a script that we considered sufficiently dense yet workable, the casting began. From the start I had hardly dared hope for the ideal combination of Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon as Lord and Lady Naylor, and Fiona Shaw as the pivotal figure of Marda Norton. Lois, I felt, was going to be hardest to cast. However, from the first frames I saw of Keeley Hawes's screen-test I knew that, simply, she was Lois. I am sure Elizabeth Bowen would agree.

It was a peculiar, giddy sensation to sit in the little ballroom of a country house hotel in County Meath one crisp morning at the beginning of last September, listening to the cast giving a first read-through of the script. Fiction writing is a solitary business, in which all the voices speak in one's head; here, suddenly, was animation; here was the human moment, the word made flesh. As the reading progressed, I imagined, sitting amongst us, a handsome, elaborately coiffed figure in tweeds, cigarette in hand, listening with rapt attention. If adapting another writer's work for the screen is a little like falling in love - the same sense of intimacy with another sensibility, the same gratifying discovery of shared enthusiasms, and, of course, the same faint undertow of resentment at having to accommodate the beloved's quirks - then I hope this posthumous affair she and I had together brought Elizabeth pleasure and fulfilment, as certainly it did to me.

The Last September will receive its world premiere on the closing night of the festival, Sunday, April 25th, at 8.30 p.m. in Virgin 5