On adapting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for an animated half-hour
Martin Lamb and Penelope Middelboe
It was the story that attracted us – the unexpected ending combined with the nightmarish ‘Catch-22’ situation in which Gawain finds himself at Hautdesert. Once we had decided that the controlling idea of the film was that in the real world things are not always black and white but more often grey, we knew what we had to keep and what, sadly, we had to lose in order to condense the material for a 24-minute screenplay. And if we were to concentrate on making Gawain’s dilemma credible, we knew we had to preserve the formal etiquette of the medieval court in which he becomes ensnared.
Since we were adapting a poem, we initially assumed that we would have to use narration as well as dialogue, and there was talk of using Marianne Faithfull as the narrator and then revealing her at the end as the voice of Morgan La Fay. But eventually we realised that the animation could show what the narrator might have told, and that dialogue could do the rest.
Adapting anything from one medium into another for which it wasn’t ever fashioned – in this case written, alliterative poem into short, dramatised, animated film – usually involves changes. Often events need to be re-ordered or speeches re-assigned to serve the demands of drama.
What struck us though was how well and cleverly structured the poem was in terms of dramatic development. The pattern of the ‘heroic journey’ as expounded by story analysts such as Joseph Campbell was clear to see.
We listened to academic pleas for the inclusion of the poem’s ‘book-ends’ but in the end two reasons led to us cutting them. One, today’s audiences, more story-literate than their medieval counterparts, expect to get to the meat of the drama quickly and, secondly, having managed to avoid narration for Gawain’s journey the only way we could see to include the ‘book-ends’ would involve possibly ponderous and portentous voice-over. And we didn’t want that sort of ‘the poet speaks’ effect: bookends are heavy, but we didn’t want dead weights.
Alliteration is an odd element to have to deal with. There’s a general rule of screenwriting that says, ‘if you write a line that calls attention to itself, a line that says “how clever is that?” then cut it’. Alliterative lines, though, seem to be designed to say ‘Look at me, listen to me, aren’t I gorgeous?’ So we were wary to begin with, and then, as part of our background ‘reading’ we listened to cassettes of Terry Jones reading the Tolkien version of ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. The Monty Python team’s resident medievalist is a great populariser of Chaucer, Arthuriana et al, but, and this is a big BUT, he has an unfortunate speech quirk. Let’s put it this way, he’s not a ‘hard r’s’ man. Not quite Jonathan Woss, but not quite what you want to hear when you’re listening to deliberately wepeated whymes.
We were now even more wawy – sorry, wary.
Our response was to produce a first draft that avoided alliteration completely. This actually helped, since it meant we forced ourselves to put sense before sound. When we had convinced the commissioners, the director and the producer that the sense of the story was right, we began to lift our alliteration barrier, but all the time asking the question, ‘Could an actor actually say this?’
At recording stage it was a relief to find that they could. But that’s more to do with their skill than ours.
We consulted many academics, one of whom pointed out to us that a recent thesis claimed that the story was about ‘a frustrated love-affair between Bertilak and Gawain’. We are very happy not to go down that road.
