Anticipation - The Book Becomes The Movie Of The Book

This week the film of David Nicholls' book, One Day,  is released. The book has sold a gazillion copies. It doesn't speak to a generation it shouts. I don't know why other people identify with it - so much of it is patently about me, why would people be interested in what I got up to during the 80's and 90's. And that's the thing, Nicholls has hit the mother load, men and women of a certain age read it and think it's about them. And they're right. It is.

But it's also about all of us.Universal truths and specific truths have become one.

It is the only novel I have ever read - EVER underlined - that made me gasp. If you've read it you'll know the bit. If you haven't I'd say read the book before you see the film.

There's been so much anticipation for this film, unsurprising given its following. There's also been much whinging about the casting. American actress Anne Hathaway cast as Emma is almost as outrageous as English Vivien Leigh cast as Scarlett O'Hara. Except Leigh's approximation of Scarlett's Southern drawl drew less criticism than Hathaway's tilt at the mother tongue of Geoffrey Boycott and Fred Trueman. Emma is from Yorkshire and Yorkshire folk take no prisoners, especially when it comes to the way they talk.

That aside, I've also heard women say Hathaway is too pretty, too thin and too tall. It's because they've done with Emma what I did with Dexter - we've projected ourselves onto these characters. And that's what novels allow us to do. We use our imagination to create Emma and Dexter in our minds, to create the world in which they live, the rooms and restaurants, holiday apartments and TV studios they inhabit. But when they make the movie it's someone elses ideas we're looking at.

I've met David Nicholls once, there isn't a more handsome, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, clever writer out there - and for that we all hate him. I'm delighted he's had the success he's had because the stories he tells, the scripts he writes are peppered with humour and drama in the way life is. His works breathes because of it. I loathe TV shows that rant at me and create bubbles of comedy from the 'comedy characters'. Likewise comedy that has no dramatic tension can so often fall flat. Nicholls understands we should write in three dimensions.

But to adapt his own successful novel will have been torture. As we know, the two things are not the same. Leave out too much of the book and you'll upset the faithful readership who now go on pilgrimages to Edinburgh to see - to touch -  the places Emma and Dexter inhabited. But to stick to closely to a novel's text can horribly screw a screenplay.

Except...

I doubt there has ever been a novel better structured for transfer to the screen. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he's done with it. How much has stayed, how much has gone, how much he needed to create anew.

But I'm not just going as a writer, I'm going as someone who wants to see the special story brought to life.

The anticipation is building, we don't have long to wait.