IN DEPTH
London Book & Screen Week Stephen Smallwood
Smallwood’s secrets of the small screen The producer of Sky Atlantic’s
lauded ‘Patrick Melrose’ discusses the ups and downs of adaptation and what grabs his attention when searching for material
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Natasha Onwuemezi @tashaisblue
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n an era of peak TV, with players such as Netflix and Amazon pushing through big budget projects, produc- ers and production companies are eager to find stellar
books to bring to the small screen. The London Book Fair has been a big proponent of books’ potential to be successful as screen adaptations, illustrated by its various panel sessions, the Cameo awards, and the recent addition of London Book & Screen Week. This year Stephen Smallwood, producer of the critically acclaimed “Patrick Melrose” (a five-part Sky Atlantic adaptation, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, of author Edward St Aubyn’s series) will be speaking at LBF’s Quantum Conference about how the industry can work with television and film producers.
Throughout his 30-year career, Smallwood has produced book adaptations including “Cadfael” and “The Day of the Triffids” as well as original work such as “Ripper Street”. While adaptations mean producers have the advantage of bringing fully realised works, with guaranteed audiences, to screen, they are not without their challenges. “One of the principal problems with adapta- tion is that authors have expectations which oſten we can not fulfil”, says Smallwood. “The author of Cadfael had created an interesting world but [all the books] had plots that were rather similar. Audiences find that irritating. Books which are published in no less than a year’s cycle can get away with that, but TV can’t. We had to change some things, but the author [Ellis Peters] wasn’t happy about it…”
However, working with St Aubyn was a positive experi- ence. The author was “extensively consulted” by the team, and both the director [Edward Berger] and Cumberbatch met with him to “get to the root of the characters in an atempt to faithfully re-create them and re-create his intentions”. Smallwood adds: “When he viewed the cuts of the first three episodes, he said that writing the books was excruciating, but living through the process of film production and handing it over to a team was liberating
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and exciting. He seemed to love the work.” Generally, when looking for material to adapt, producers
are interested in titles that conform to the classic three-act structure, reach a satisfying conclusion and, for the most part, have “eventfulness”. Yet the interior thoughts of characters, represented so well in literature, can be “very difficult to represent in film”. However, working with writer David Nicholls, the producers of “Patrick Melrose” were able to bring the titular character’s “dark interior world” onto the screen, says Smallwood, who adds: “I think the contribution of the writer is underestimated. This sort of subject mater is the very hardest to adapt.” As well as “Patrick Melrose”, there have recently been a raſt of successful adaptations including “Game of Thrones” and “Les Miserables”, and Smallwood believes this is set to continue: “The introduction of much higher production values from HBO and Netflix has raised audience expectation enormously. [Although] if you’ve got a very well told story, it doesn’t have to be expensive— Netflix’s ‘Sex Education’ wasn’t hugely expensive but it was very entertaining. It was based on good writing and good characters.”
If you’ve got a very well told story, it doesn’t have to be expensive— Netflix’s ‘Sex Education’ wasn’t hugely expensive but it was very entertaining
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