How the Doctor Who and Sherlock mastermind is digging into Audrey Niffenegger’s timey-wimey stuff for HBO.
The novel has been adapted to the screen before, in a critically maligned 2009 film starringRachel McAdamsandEric Bana.
Just what was it about the story that captured your imagination?
Theo James and Rose Leslie.Macall Polay/HBO
These are the things that fiction tends to favor.
It’s extraordinary how seldom anyone writes about that.
Divorce isn’t a mystery.
You know why that happens.
Why the hell wouldn’t it?
Heartbreak isn’t a mystery because you know how that happens too.
Given that love, did you really actively pursue this project?
Well, it wasn’t really like that.
I read the book and loved it.
It wasn’t long after it came out.
And so, I did, which was “The Girl in the Fireplace.”
But all I’d done in Doctor Who was use the wonderful, fantastical element of an out-of-sequence relationship.
At that stage, I wasn’t in the position to be the person who wrote it.
Although, I remember thinking about it back then, and my immediate instinct was a TV show.
A film is too short.
If you know the book, it rambles a bit because it’s not a jeopardy-driven, plot-driven piece.
It’s a prose poem about love, longing, and loss.
It doesn’t shrink well into the three-act structure of a conventional movie.
If you reduce it to what happens, you’ve boiled away everything that’s interesting about it.
We did chase it.
And I was very interested.
Why does time travel as a concept appeal to you so much?
Non-linear narrative appeals to me massively.
Is your memory in sequence?"
The time travel functions very differently fromDoctor Who.
How did you work out the parameters for the series?
It bears no resemblance to anything I’ve done in terms of time travel before.
Here, Audrey is saying to her reader, “Keep up.
Make an audience pay attention and they will be rewarded.
So, I went with the Audrey principles of it, really.
We’re not going to make it easy for you.
You are going to pay attention.
Why were Theo James and Rose Leslie the right choice for you for Henry and Clare?
It was a simple matter of auditioning.
With Clare, I said, “Look, it’s got to be a redhead.
She’s a redhead in the book.”
For some reason, that is a detail you are not allowed to change.
Sometimes in a story, some details don’t matter and some do.
James Bond can’t suddenly be 006.
Sherlock Holmes can’t live in a street other than Baker Street.
These might seem unimportant details, but they’re not.
So, Clare has to be a redhead.
We ended up, of course, casting a couple of Brits.
But they were outstanding in their auditions.
Rose Leslie, it’s a tricky part, Clare, because she’s not at all passive.
But it would be easy to make her seem passive.
She has to actually rebel against it.
There were a lot of rather sweet, very good, but slightly passive players.
And there was Rose Leslie’s Clare, who was just totally in the moment.
She is just strikingly right, and it’s not that easy to do.
Clare is the main character.
It’s not about the time traveler, but about the time traveler’s wife.
He can make himself a different Henry just in such small details.
So, has that been a new challenge for you?
How did you approach that?
It used to be all I ever wrote.
I used to do rom-coms, but they were sitcoms.
As I was saying earlier, romance tends to end at the altar.
But because they’re nuts, they can’t do that.
They have to engage in a game of mutual torture.
Now, that’s a caricatured piece of what people are like together.
All those things come out in an exaggerated, mad, operatic way with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.
There’s never anybody else.
I don’t find it very hard work at all.
I know what hard work is like.
God knows it’s not that.
Yes, there’s some promises you have to keep, but they’re good promises to keep.
So, can you tell me more about that scene in general?
We wanted that episode to just be joyous because there are some very sad and upsetting things happening.
All that stuff is sometimes quite heartrending.
There’s the underlying doom.
But we just wanted to do an episode that ended on an entirely joyous note.
How closely will your series hew to the novel?
I was watching it this morning and wondering what an absolute purist would make of this.
There are places where we’ve altered things.
Television proceeds as a series of short stories.
Each episode has to be complete in and of itself.
You need a little three-act story each week.
So, sometimes, you have to move things around.
It tells the same story.
I’m not going to change that.
I don’t think that honors the original.
You are adapting it to a new landscape; that’s all you’re doing.
Hopefully, the television show feels the same as reading the book.
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