Andrew Davies Talks About the Art of Screenwriting

Here are tips from Andrew Davies on how to adapt literary classics for TV as it appeared in The Telegraph. Andrew was the screenwriter for the 1995 Pride and Prejudice as well as Middlemarch and Little Dorrit, among a host of others:

1. Read the book, or better still, listen to an unabridged recording, and immerse yourself in the characters, the language, the emotions the book calls up in you. You’ll note the high points that simply ask to be dramatised, and also problems that will need addressing.

2. Ask yourself: why this book, and why now? It may simply be that the book (Pride and Prejudice, for example) deals with themes of perennial interest: love, sex, money, class, generational conflict, and so on. But sometimes a particular note will reverberate across decades and even centuries... (South Riding is set in the Thirties, in a recession, with lots of parallels to the situation we are in today.)