THE BOY IN THE BEDROOM

I could see he had movie-star glamour, that unbought, untouchable sheen which fame, style and a certain self-consciousness bestow on few people.

Dear Readers,

There will be no blog this week as I am hard at work developing the feature film of Shattered.

Writing a film is a tricky business; in fact I wrote about adapting The Buddha of Suburbia in an essay in 1994, called The Boy in the Bedroom, which I am attaching below.

Tomorrow, I will be releasing details for my spring writing competition, so keep an eye out for that.

All my love,

H

I hadn't intended to write the scripts for the BBC's version of The Buddha of Suburbia. My wish was to hand the book over to someone else, forget about it, and watch the series when it appeared on TV. After all, I'd written and re-written the book, and promoted it in several countries. It was time to move on. Sometimes I wish I were better at doing things I don't really want to do, but it can also be a strength.

The first writer hired to make the adaptation took my text and presented it as Karim's voice-over, with accompanying pictures. I could see the point of the narration, and later, when Roger Michel and I were writing the script, we discussed it constantly and experimented with it. (There are, after all, scores of good films which use a first-person voice over.) In the end, however, it seemed lazy and had a deadening effect, as if the events were not happening in the present. If the serial wasn't to be like watching an illustrated talk, the first-person point of view had to be abandoned. The challenge was to dramatise everything.

The second writer was, apparently, instructed to 'capture the spirit' of the novel. Consequently, opening the script at random, I saw a scene set in a chip shop, featuring characters whose names I didn't recognise, as if this 'spirit' was not necessarily present in the scenes I'd created, of which only a minimum remained.

Directors came and went, having refused to shoot the scripts. Finally, having been informed that at this rate the project would never get made, and being made to feel that my misgivings were obstructing it, I agreed to write it. An office would be provided at the BBC. The latest director, Roger Michel, and I, would collaborate.