John Dryden

Drama on Radio?

There’s a story about a famous film director (think of a famous shark movie) offering a talented British writer an opportunity to work on his next film. When the writer said he would have to turn the offer down because he was tied up working for the BBC, the producer was incredulous - “You would throw away the opportunity to work with me on my feature film for a TV project?!” “Oh no,” said the writer. “It’s radio.”

You can imagine the deathly silence at the other end of the line…

Yes, radio drama exists, it attracts many of the most talented writers, directors and actors, and the BBC commissions hundreds of them every year and they get audiences of up to 400,000. It was something I knew nothing about when I started to freelance for BBC radio as a reporter and documentary maker a decade ago - with the aim of somehow working my way into feature film production. But then I discovered a world of opportunity in radio drama.

I found I could write and direct drama projects for radio with little of the interference a filmmaker might get from financiers and distributors. With such a fast turn-over, I got a lot of experience developing scripts, setting up productions and working with actors. That is not to say getting a radio drama commissioned isn’t competitive - it is, and the idea and vision has to be strong. But the process is quicker, there is one funding body (the BBC) and it beats spending five years trailing around film festivals trying to attract interest in a single film project. Although actually, I was doing that at the same time - while radio drama was honing my creative instinct…and paying the rent.

An idea

Having come from a documentary background, my “idea” in radio drama quite simple: to record as much as possible on location (i.e. outside of the studio) like a documentary, but with actors. I wanted a very naturalistic sounding production, where the environment we recorded in could provide a rich backdrop. I followed this approach with several drama serials for BBC Radio 4 - including the period drama Bleak House for which we hired a huge country house in Kent and treated the drama like a documentary, with the actors moving about from room to room and the microphones following; and the futuristic The Handmaid’s Tale, for which we pretty much took over a small town outside New York - and with each production the ambition increased.

A crazy idea

A Suitable Boy, dramatised from the novel by Vikram Seth, was the most challenging of all. When I read the novel I knew it would translate into a sumptuous radio drama series set entirely in India. Even at that point I could also see it had great potential as a film. An integral part of the proposal I developed for BBC Radio was that the production HAD to be made in India - using Bollywood actors and real locations - this, I argued, would be the only way to bring the world of the story to life and retain the integrity of the work. Amazingly, they went for it.

Our location in Pune (a few hours train ride from Mumbai), was a huge house owned by HH Maharaj Siriraj of Dhrangadhara. It had a faded elegance - not to mention some unusual wiring and plumbing - and it provided us with a relatively quiet environment in which to create the world of the story. With a cast and production team of fifty-eight, we worked and slept and ate here for a month. The recordings were made in its rooms and courtyards as the actors physically acted out the story. The sound of the production contains not only their movement and voices but also the fabric and contents of the house, its garden, surrounding inhabitants and countryside.

Radio to film

Whilst working on these radio productions I was developing several original feature film projects. It was only when I realised that I could use the radio project to help develop a feature film that things really took off. The experience of making A Suitable Boy for radio - not only having the luxury of spending so much time getting to know the work, but being able to experiment with its dramatic potential with a full production in India - convinced me that it could be the perfect feature film project. I knew the film rights had become available - Channel 4 had planned a television series of it a few years earlier, but the project had been canned and the rights had reverted back to the author - but, I also knew that, given the profile and success of the novel, the rights were not going to be easy to get (or cheap). I needed a producer who could not only share my vision, but who had the track record and credibility to make it happen.

My first choice was Jane Scott whose credits include Shine, My Brilliant Career, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Strictly Ballroom and Goodbye Paradise. I contacted her with some samples from the radio production - including its exquisite score composed by Sacha Puttnam - and a treatment describing how I thought the film could work. She went straight out to get the book (she told me she had to hire a wheelbarrow to get this breezeblock of a novel home!). Jane instantly saw the potential for an event movie and then brought in co-producer Martin McCallum who had just left Cameron Mackintosh Ltd where he had been managing director.

Writing scripts

I went to India to write the first draft and was now faced with the challenge of how to turn a 1400 page novel into a 120-page film script. Having already written the radio adaptation, I knew the novel backwards. But the radio project had been a series and very different in structure and tone than the film we were aiming for.

There were some similarities though between writing for radio and film. Radio is often seen as a medium for words, while cinema a visual medium. But in good radio drama you are still striving to create images inside the listener’s head and to make the audience “feel”. So in many ways the writing “craft” is similar - certainly more so than between theatre and film. But in screenwriting the tool-box is so much bigger - there are more elements you can use to connect with the audience. For me, one of the most interesting and exciting aspects of screenwriting is the control you have over what the audience is seeing at any one time.

Developing scripts

The breakthrough draft of A Suitable Boy came as a result of an intensive five-month film development programme in Amsterdam at the Binger FilmLab in 2005-06. Here I was fortunate enough to have the brilliant German script editor Dagmar Benke working on my script, as well as a number of other great script-developers from the US and Europe. It transformed the way I thought of the script, helping me to discover the theme beyond the surface of the story, and how I could bring my own experience to this. I would recommend to anyone who has a script they ‘think’ is ready to go into production, to try putting it through a laboratory process, such as Binger FilmLab, Sundance, Equinox and Arista. In these environments not only are you working with others on a vast array of other projects, which inevitably feeds into your own script, you are also developing as a writer.

A Suitable Boy is going into production in 2007.

Links:

John Dryden
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/suttonelms/jdryden.html

A Suitable Boy
www.imdb.com/title/tt0451220/

BBC Writers Room
www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom

Binger Film Lab
www.binger.nl

Scripthouse
www.scripthouse.de

Pune
www.mapsofindia.com/maps/maharashtra/pune.htm

Bleak House
http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/bleakhouse/

Sony Radio Awards
www.radioawards.org/

Prix Europa
www.prix-europa.de/publish/

Jane Scott
www.imdb.com/name/nm0779280/

Gregory Whitehead
http://gregorywhitehead.com/vze4bsve/

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