Page 12 - 06_Bafta ACADEMY_Winners_ok

Arts And Crafts
PROLIFIC SCREENWRITER ADRIAN HODGES TALKS TO QUENTIN FALK
There’s nothing quite like a bit of a deadline to sharpen your writing skills. But then again, having just six weeks to turn Dickens’ sprawling David Copperfield into a three-hour, two-part, all-star BBC filmed ‘special’ for Christmas might have taxed even the most resourceful scribe.
The last-minute assignment - happily resulting in one of 1999’s more memorable television treats with the likes of Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins and Pauline Quirke – had arrived, recalled Hodges, diplomati- cally, with a “very murky history.”
More to the point, and since he had neither time nor the inclination to dwell on what was strictly bygone, it was now March and production was slated for June.
“Of course, it meant dropping every- thing else, in one case, quite literally mid- sentence. Luckily that was for the BBC too, so they were understanding. I simply didn’t have enough time to get frightened. It probably also helped that Dickens is my favourite writer and David Copperfield one of my favourite books. I was working from the 850-page plus Penguin edition and if I had thought about having to get it all in, I’d probably have had a heart attack.”
Happily he survived – even shame- lessly taking the odd liberty with Dickens’ original structure - and Hodges, whose busy, network-straddling career to date has encompassed film and TV adaptation (Tom & Viv, Metroland, Amongst Women), original drama (Just Tell Me You Love Me, Heaven On Earth) and some episodic TV (Kavanagh Q.C.) has yet another pair ready for imminent transmission. Appropriately enough, one’s an adaptation (Lorna Doone for the BBC), while the other’s an original (The Hunt for ITV).
Deadlines, the bane of every screen- writer, were hardly an issue when Hodges, now 43, first started out after university as assistant editor (on a staff of two) of the bi-monthly BP Forecourt Dealer News.
From such humble beginnings, with a bit of freelancing for music magazines to boost the coffers, he moved swiftly on to Screen International ending up there as co-editor. After four productive years at Screen, Hodges, a film enthusiast but no anorak, now had a clear choice: to contin- ue as a regular journalist – and there was “the whiff of a job” as a junior showbiz hack on The Sun – or try and move over on to the industry side.
The latter won the day and what might have started out as sounding a rather unpromising job as a “video acqui- sitions person” at the then thriving Thorn- EMI soon became a marker for the future.
“Originally, the job was to watch films that had already been made and see if they were suitable for video release on our label. Very quickly, because
the market changed and
became so intensely competi-
tive, there was no longer any
way you could wait until a film
was finished before deciding
whether to buy it. It was now all
about reading scripts. Every
film in the film seemed to be
coming into our office...
Rambo, A Room With A View,
Platoon, The Terminator... I saw them all at script stage. It was a great treat.”
From reading scripts to developing them was the next stage when he, rather serendipitiously, succeeded his old Screen colleague, Colin Vaines, as head of British Screen’s National Film Development Fund.
“At the NFDF it was all about devel- oping talent and giving people a chance. I think I’m proudest of a short film scheme we ran with Channel 4. Out of that came some directors of real talent like Mark Herman and Peter Chelsom. All in all about 12 films were generated dur- ing my time there.”
Hodges had also, by now, made his own halting first attempt on screenwriting – “a tragic David Hare rip-off, with lots of middle class people going around looking extremely gloomy, talking about the state of the nation” – which he sent off, unso- licited, to various television companies.
“I got three replies over the period of a year. Two were at least encour- aging while the third was a ter-
rifyingly brutal rejection from the BBC. If that had been the only one I may never have writ- ten anything ever again.” That script, however, remains res- olutely in the bottom drawer.
Another five years would pass before Hodges, now past 30 and determined to have
one last crack at writing if only to say “I’d done it”, finally did it in 1991 with a little period film for C4 called The Bridge.
Since then he seems to have become unstoppable even if the odd pro- ject has, like a personal favourite, The Wakeford Case (based on a famous Episcopalian scandal of the 20s) hit a brick wall, production-wise.
Now recently relocated to deepest Oxfordshire (“though clearly not deep enough to qualify for BAFTA’s country membership”, he smiles through gritted teeth) with his wife and young daughter, Hodges continues to beaver away tireless- ly. He’s presently writing a romantic thriller for the BBC and also has a feature film – his fourth – about Robert Graves’ tangled love life in the pipeline.
Hodges would admit that his ulti- mate career path was probably smoothed by his involvement in devel- opment. “I did get to know a lot of peo- ple and I’d be naïve if I thought that it didn’t have something to do with it. It obviously helps to have access to peo- ple reasonably quick.
“But that only gets you so far. It can even act against you in the sense that some people may only see you as the per- son you were before.
“There are, I think, some producers to this day who don’t take me seriously as a writer because they just see me as ‘the person at the NFDF.’ Of course,” he laughs, “they may also think I’m crap...” ■
INHISOWNWRITE
Photos from left: Adrian Hodges; scenes from Lorna Doone, Amongst Women and David Copperfield
10