Why? When there’s a great novel, a complete work of art, a pleasure ground for the imagination of the reader to explore, gently guided by the author, or a gripping thriller to keep one up till the small hours greedily turning just one more page to find out what happens next, then why oh why must those lumbering, leaden-witted film people come along and turn it into a major motion picture? (Wouldn’t it be nice to pick up the tie-in just once and have it say now a minor motion picture? But that, like the moderate-selling book, will never happen: it’s major, best or nothing in marketing speak.)

Since I make my living largely by adapting books for the screen, large and small, it seems only reasonable that I should have an answer to this frequent and frequently indignant question. And although the Mary Whitehouse response – you don’t have to watch, you can switch off or not buy a ticket – has some validity, there is something so invasive about the adaptation that this won’t quite do. Who now, for instance, can picture the Harry Potter characters without their film counterparts springing unbidden to mind? Or, for an older generation, George Smiley without seeing Alec Guinness?

The truth is no one complains about a successful adaptation, especially if the source material was not in itself stellar, just as nobody outside academia bothers with the source material of Romeo and Juliet. Casablanca, The Godfather, Kes, LA Confidential: these are films first and foremost. The best adaptations are works that stand alone and succeed on their own terms, regardless of how close or far they are from the original material.

John Le Carré, in his first Smiley novel, describes Smiley thus:
“Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”
This does not sound much like Alec Guinness who, though no great beauty, had an understated elegance and was always slim. But these are unimportant details compared with the truth of his characterisation: he captured the sad, intelligent heart of the man, and the scripts, adapted by John Hopkins and John Le Carré, richly conveyed the shadowy world of the Circus with its Old Etonians and dirty tricks, in spite of the strictures of BBC budgets and schedules.

One of the great advantages of the television adaptation compared with film is having time to tell the story. Famously, the Granada Television version of Brideshead Revisited (adapted by John Mortimer) took twelve hours to spin out Charles Ryder’s obsession with the Flyte family, whereas the recent film version (screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock) had only 133 minutes of screen time to cram in what they could. Perversely, recent classic adaptations on television have aped the film format (perhaps in pursuit of foreign sales) and squash delicate novels of manners like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park into an action-packed hour and a half.

For the last couple of years I have been engaged in adapting Wuthering Heights for the big screen. I am by no means the first and will no doubt not be the last screenwriter to attempt this quixotic feat. For most of that time there has been the lurking presence of the “other” Wuthering Heights – an adaptation for ITV by Pete Bowker – and not surprisingly I have kept an eye on its progress. Now apparently tangled in ITV’s financial meltdown, the two-parter was shown with some success in the States a few months back. But why a two-parter? One of the huge challenges for adaptors of this novel, which is in almost every way a challenging text, is that there is so much story. I was jealous of the TV format which would allow scope for events to unfold without turning into a crazed Yorkshire soap opera of births, scandals and deaths – most of all deaths. But no, the whole thing has been shoehorned into two and a half hours.

The film version will not even be as long as that, certainly less than two hours, which means pretty brutal decisions have to be made. They almost always do. One of the few recent adaptations I can think of that was able to include everything from its source material is Brokeback Mountain, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx’s short story. Almost every sentence in the story is used as the basis of a scene or a moment in the film, which won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Unsurprisingly Annie Proulx thought it was a wonderful adaptation and was charmingly and openly furious that it didn’t win Best Picture too. Perhaps more impressively, it is one of the all-time highest grossing romantic dramas: a story about a failed gay relationship between two smalltime modern cowboys, strung out over twenty largely uneventful years. Who could have predicted that?

Although I have written screenplays based on true stories, court records and mediaeval poetry (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), the usual source material for adaptation is the novel. Your average novel is unlikely to come in under 200 pages and a classic, the “loose baggy monsters” of Henry James’ disparaging phrase (his own novels often tip over 500: glass houses, Mr James, glass houses), may easily be twice as long. Wuthering Heights is not especially long (300 pages in my edition) but it is packed with events – and what is more challenging, with an atmosphere and poetry which could easily be lost in the process of compression.

So when I consider a book with a view to adapting it, I certainly reckon its weight in the hand. In order to make a screenplay out of this novel I will have to effectively rip out more than half the pages. What will be left? Will it still represent what was special and thrilling about this book? If the book is Jaws – a great idea, a few strong characters, a monster we hadn’t met before – then the answer is a resounding yes. If it is, for example, one of my favourite books of recent years, Cold Mountain, I think the answer has to be no.

Even though Cold Mountain was adapted by Anthony Minghella, a brilliant writer who had proved himself the master of unlikely source material with his epic version of Michael Ondaatje’s highly literary novel The English Patient, Cold Mountain the movie was a considerably less interesting artistic piece than Cold Mountain the novel and, unless you are a big fan of Nicole Kidman’s wardrobe changes, not much fun to watch either. The novel is picaresque in construction: a string of incidents along a journey, with more than a nod to the Odyssey. As in its classical forebear, the hero and heroine are not reunited till the very end of the story. The pleasure for the reader is in the journey itself, the myriad details Charles Frazier weaves in of the flora and fauna Inman passes on his travels and the quotidian struggles of the women to farm under difficult and primitive conditions. This is all gone from the film, which is left with a set of almost unconnected scenes: set piece battles and encounters with a string of British character actors arrayed in artistically dirtied costumes and unconvincing accents, while Nicole waits, pale and lovely, alongside Renee Zellweger’s strange comic turn as a salt of the earth countrywoman.

Often I read a novel and though I enjoy it I feel the essence of it will not translate well into a film. Novels can wander, take interesting detours, never come to a resolution. Writing for film is more like servicing a shark: it can never lose momentum or the whole thing dies. That’s not to say the only films you should write have to be hectic action. One of the books I was lucky enough to be sent with a view to adaptation was a then-unpublished novel by a then-unknown writer – Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. This is the imagined story of the young girl in the eponymous painting by the enigmatic seventeenth-century Dutch artist Vermeer.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, like Vermeer’s paintings, relies for its effects on the rendering of tiny details, on pregnant pauses and stillness, the judicious placing or removal of a single precious object. Yet I read this novel without breathing, or so it felt, and was immediately convinced that not only should this be a film but that I had to be the one to write the screenplay. With its intense concentration on an artist’s process, and such a cinematic artist at that, it is an obviously visual piece, but I also felt that the story’s tight focus on a single household in which all the characters had powerful motives driving them towards an inevitable but highly dramatic conclusion was a perfect film story.

Although it isn’t a long novel I still had to shed a great deal of material, losing a painting, several siblings (in Vermeer’s family and Griet’s), an outbreak of the plague and, inevitably but to my regret, much of the fascinating detail about the process of painting. Once we reached the editing stage, even more of the rich context fell away to highlight the romance between the main characters. The final film is, I think, very faithful in tone and spirit to the original novel but surprisingly far removed in terms of the specifics. There is hardly a line of dialogue or even many scenes that follow the book exactly, though the gist of both is clearly recognisable. Audiences who loved the book have generally loved the film too and those who have not read the book have not had trouble engaging with the film. Tracy Chevalier refers to the film as a sister to the book, alike but not identical, each existing happily on her own.

When I first started working on Girl with a Pearl Earring, the novel had not been published and it took some time before it became the worldwide bestseller it is now. It was a classic word-of-mouth success, everyone who read it passing it on to a friend. This meant that I did not feel any pressure from the reader, real or imagined, in my approach, and was able simply to offer my personal response to the novel in the form of a screenplay.

By contrast Wuthering Heights is not only one of the most famous books in the world, a set text, a regular on every top ten list, a keystone of the Bronte mythology, it has also been adapted a great many times – as film, TV series, play, pop song, rock opera… So in this case there is not only the pressure of tackling such a well known and loved work, there is also the trail of previous assaults, like the garbage that lines the route to Everest base camp. Not only: how can I fashion a coherent film of this extraordinary book, but what can I say that no one else has managed to say before me?

The single most famous adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the 1939 film, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. It is certainly the one I know best, though I have seen a couple of television versions in the distant past. William Wyler’s film is delightful, swooningly romantic, but nothing like the novel. Olivier is wildly different from Bronte’s Heathcliff and the whole thing is presented in a Hollywood Victorian packaging that is a long way from the bleak moorland farmhouse and the sheer savagery of the novel. Famously, a “happy ending” was stuck on with acting doubles, but, like many adaptations, the film only dealt with half the story as told in the novel. Catherine Earnshaw, the most fascinating, infuriating, elusive anti-heroine in fiction, is dead halfway through the novel. Her daughter, also Catherine, is the focus of the rest of the story, as Heathcliff grinds his way through a slow-burning revenge on everyone who he deems to have wronged him.

I began my adaptation determined on two points. First, the main characters all had to be teenagers, not the thirty-year-olds of the various screen versions. This is a story that makes absolute sense when one reads it at fifteen and seems borderline psychotic at forty. Cathy and Heathcliff have to be of an age when love and death seem almost synonymous – she is married at sixteen, dead at nineteen. Even Heathcliff, who outlives everyone else, dies in his early thirties.

This turned out to be a hard fight, for although everyone involved was very excited by this idea, putting flesh on it in terms of casting was more problematic. I think we got there, but till the film is actually made I can’t be sure!

My second realisation, from reading the novel, was that Heathcliff is clearly not white. Not like Laurence Olivier, nor any of the dark-haired but thoroughly white-skinned and Caucasian actors who have portrayed him over the years. In every description of him, Emily Bronte harps on his colour and exoticism: he is “a Lascar”; “a dark-skinned gypsy”; “an American or Spanish castaway”. “Who knows but what your father was Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen?” says Nelly Dean, who hasn’t much multi-racial experience to base her ideas on. Yet the power of the filmed versions is so strong that people are astonished or disbelieving at any suggestion that Heathcliff is not pure WASP.

Neither of these choices answers the original question of why do it at all, but they go some way towards an answer. Although there have been many films before, I don’t think there has been a version so definitive that it precludes all future attempts (there would not, to my mind, be any point in making a new version of Cabaret, for instance). And I feel I have something to add by way of a dramatic rendering of this strange story that may excite a new audience, thrill them in the cinema, and yes, encourage them to read the novel.

I heard that Stephanie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ vampire novels, now filmed or filming, boosted sales of Wuthering Heights, thanks to her frequent references to the grandmother of all twisted love stories. If a new generation can feel the power of this story through the movie and then discover the complexity and strangeness of the novel, that would be wonderful. If any viewer watches this Wuthering Heights and feels transported for an hour or two to a world of heightened emotion, of agony and ecstasy, regardless of the novel, that will be even better.

Olivia Hetreed started her career as a documentary, drama and film editor, and later began writing a series of family films for ITV. Her first feature film, Girl With A Pearl Earring, was nominated for multiple Oscars and BAFTAs, including Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2008, Ecosse Films produced her adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

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Olivia Hetreed