What were your feelings when you heard that someone wanted to option the book and when it actually began happening?
The initial process was relatively slow. What happened was that Amit, the director, came to see me when I was in New York a few months after the book had been published and I had been doing quite a few readings and he told me he’d enjoyed it and I gave him a copy, knowing that not all books do have potential for the screen, he kindly said yes after reading it on the plane, and said he wanted this to be his first feature film. I’ve been involved in some way from the early stages, but until you’re walking onto the set you don’t really get an idea of how you will react. The nice thing was that a novelist has a wide range of responses and emotions toward their stories and novels being translated onto screen, but for some reason, early on I was able to leave the novel behind and focus on retelling the story, but with a really different edge, which as a writer really excited me; especially as it happened so quickly, so I was really forced to write quite quickly as principal photography began only last October.
The story seems to have landscape as quite integral to it; how did you have to adapt the way in which it was treated?
Well, it’s a really interesting question actually because in the novel the landscape is in a way one of the most important characters. The way [the landscape] lives in the novel and the film is very different. My job as co-writer of the screenplay and script with Amit was to find a tone and a voice in the screenplay that would fit everyone working on the film in the right direction. Obviously you can have pages and pages of beautiful exposition about landscape in a novel that may only be given one panning shot, so partly the treatment of the landscape was out of my hands. But actually one of the reasons I do like the adaptation is that it’s a bold adaptation in terms of the story that did try to remain faithful to the tone of the novel.
To me, part of that was how quiet the film seemed to be – the tension between landscape and characters is increased as there’s little dialogue.
Well obviously my creative input stopped at the script and the script was pretty sparse in terms of dialogue to be honest – only 90 pages. Actually one of the things with Amit about was, one of the reasons I love poetry is that there’s so many spaces for the reader to fill and bring your own, so I actually like films that ask something of the audience and engage them in the spaces of the film. There was probably about half of the finished script in the film, but Amit has allowed that concept of absence and of silence to permeate the film. So what I think is interesting about that is not only that it is a quiet film to watch and has I suppose a European sensibility, but also that the characters are able to live and inhabit the landscape because of the space opened up by the lack of dialogue. Me and Amit really wanted dialogue, when it happened, to really count, which is probably a good touching stone for most screenplays.
Do you think that the words actually functioned as resistance themselves?
Yes definitely, there’s a restraint in the script and in the film. I hope that is there to evoke the same restraint in the conflicts which the characters are experiencing. Also, there’s the sense that speech and communication is very precious in this awful, imagined version of WW2 where in this tiny village the stakes are hugely high. Essentially the air is taut with tension so I think those are all qualities we’re keeping in mind.
How essential to the fabric of the film is Wales and Welshness? Or is it something accidental? Do you think notions of absence and collaboration are particular to Wales in this case?
I think the story is inherently Welsh in many ways – the story grows out of the landscape and the relationship to the land in many ways. The epigraph of the story is to do with the concept of Hiraeth and the sense of longing for something or somewhere you may have never owned. And I think Welsh culture has been formed partly by a series of invasions around the Welsh border. The Welsh language itself is a great act of resistance against waves of invasion, but also much more evident in the novel is that many of the ideas such as that of the sleeping army or people literally buried in the landscape, are far wider, more universal themes. So as a writer, I think it’s a Welsh story, but often you want to write from specifics and if it doesn’t resonate universally in some way, you have failed. Those I read it to in New York didn’t necessarily relate to or see it as a specifically Welsh resistance but did pick up on the themes such as what is resistance, what sacrifices have to made, and in the context of war, how the title can apply differently to all those characters. I absolutely hope there are these universal Welsh themes, but they’ve very much been grown from a fertile Welsh soil.
Do you think we do ourselves an injustice then when Welsh films are too self-enclosed and self-referential?
Yeah, I was actually reading something by Dylan Thomas about Welsh artists, and I agree with what he says that the most important thing as an artist or writer is your art, writing and the music. There’s obviously cultural/national history to that, but in any realm of the arts, the danger is to become constrained by those national borders. Once that happens it may not end up being as fertile soil. I don’t really care how Welsh an artist or their work is, I just care how good it is.
How important is the relationship between people and landscape in the adaptation?
My interest in landscape in the novel was in my engagement with places and the emotions evoked when I’m in the Black Mountains. I think the importance is that the landscape isn’t just where the Welsh live and inhabit – it becomes a place of refuge but also of danger. On the other side – the German soldiers – it’s the landscape which unlocks the main character, Albrecht, and re-awakens him to the man he was before he was a soldier. And the people in the valley are kind of forced to find a position of mutual dependency which raises up a question mark over the concept of war. It is an old question, but one which still raises the idea that the enemy has as much humanity as we or I do.
How has your relationship with the characters changed? Do you see it as a completely different project or did seeing the actors catch you off guard?
Well it was one of the strangest experiences. Walking up on set I wasn’t really prepared for it – seeing characters who I’d thought up many years before and had a very clear image of and here they were flesh and blood and lending their nervous system to the characters, doing so much acting with their faces. Tom has moved close to me, and I was with him on the tube the other day and said to him, “I just had a really weird moment – I never thought I’d be taking the central line with Albrecht.”