Interview (Written): Phyllis Nagy (“Carol”)

A Creative Screenwriting interview with Phyllis Nagy, nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Adapted screenplay for Carol:

It’s been almost twenty years since you began writing Carol. What enabled you to persist with the project for so long?

Carol was the first script I was hired to write, in 1997, and the first script I said “yes” to as an adaptation.

Initially, it was that I knew Pat, and this project came to me a couple of years after she died. So I felt a strange responsibility to take it, and to make sure that it wasn’t screwed up in some fundamental way, because she so disliked many of the screen adaptations of her work.

Some quite good, famous films, she just had no time for, because they fundamentally changed the nature of her source material, which to me is a huge no-no in adaptation. If you’re going to go out of your way to take on the translation of a vision of a piece of underlying source material, and you’re going to change that so profoundly, why don’t you just write a story with the same plot? Because that’s essentially what you’re doing, you’re borrowing plot: the least, least interesting element of any piece of dramatic writing. And, making a novelist, poet, or whoever you’re taking from very unhappy. So I felt that burden — and not a negative burden, just a burden — to Pat.

Also, the story held personal resonance for me; I found its treatment of the sexuality of the two female characters quite radical, especially for something that had been published in 1952. There’s not an ounce of guilt, there’s not an ounce of regret, over the nature of their attraction for each other. I also found Highsmith’s notions of what makes a good mother to be quite radical — the choices that people have to make in order to make the lives of their children better seemed really fresh, and radical. And still do, to this day, actually.

In choosing or agreeing to adapt a book, what are you looking for? Are you repeatedly drawn to anything?

I think it’s just quite tricky books where other people say, “Oh, I can’t see how you could ever put that into a film!” I’m like, “Oh, I’ll read that one!”

I’ve done one of those recently, which is a novel called The Lüneburg Variation, which is an Italian novel, which is, I don’t know how to describe it — a very slim volume written almost in aphorism. It is a Holocaust revenge thriller set in the world of international chess, and it’s full of men. So, this is quite different, obviously, from Carol. But it’s another “problem” novel.

And I’ve just taken one on for TriStar, a “problem” thriller — which is yet to be published in English, but will be next summer — a novel called The Trap, by a German novelist, about a woman who hasn’t left her house in twelve years, but has to, in order to elicit a confession from the man who murdered her sister. So, it’s quite an interesting psychological thriller.

So, when you say tricky, you mean not only psychologically —

Structurally. Yes, because again, there is a lot of interiority going on in The Trap. And a lot of reverse positioning. The point of view shifts as it does in Carol. And plus, I like where I can — not improve the book, that’s not what I’m trying to say — in some way, enhance the experience of the book for people who know the material. And if people don’t know the material, then it’s an entertaining, hopefully meaningful, ride.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

You may download the script for Carol here.