11/24/2023 0 Comments Any human heart title sequence![]() So in a way, you park your novel."Īnd of course Boyd is lucky in that he didn't have the author's feelings to take into consideration. It's all about film-making and not about reverential attention to the source. ![]() I approached Any Human in the way that I would approach the adaptation of any novel - what would work on screen? - rather than saying 'let's be as faithful as we can to the book'. ![]() "I keep saying this, but it's worth saying again, the novel and film are two entirely different art forms. "I can bore for England on this subject," says Boyd. What it resolutely won't be is the novel of the same name. "Even when you throw money at it, like in that film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, there's something odd about Brad Pitt being 10 or being 85, so we thought - everybody knows it's a movie, they're all actors - everybody knows that - let's just say we're going to use three actors."Ĭlaflin, Macfadyen and Broadbent are part of a well-judged cast that also includes Freddie Fox (son of Edward Fox) as Mountstuart's lifelong friend Peter Scabius Hayley Atwell as his great love Freya Deverell, Kim Cattrall, Julian Rhind-Tutt and (uncanny as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) Tom Hollander and Gillian Anderson.įrom what I have seen - the opening episode and a showreel of the remaining three - Any Human Heart is going to be a treat. you end up looking at the makeup," he says. "We had a 25-year-old Robert Downey jr trying to play an 80-year-old man under 7kg of plastic prosthetics. Having three actors to play the same character gets over the need for tricksy makeup, Boyd pointing to Chaplin, the 1992 biopic of Charlie Chaplin (which film's screenplay he co-wrote), as the effect he was trying to avoid. And they delivered on that promise, with Sam Claflin ( The Pillars Of The Earth) playing Mountstuart in his student days, Matthew Macfadyen then taking over for his middle age, and Jim Broadbent portraying him in later life. Of his books that have been filmed, Stars And Bars (1988) starred Daniel Day-Lewis as an art expert at large in the deep south of America, the Bruce Beresford-directed A Good Man In Africa (1994) had Sean Connery in the title role, and Armadillo was made by the BBC in 2001.Īny Human Heart was one of his novels, however, that he considered unfilmable (" The New Confessions is another") because of its episodic nature and sprawling length.Ĭhannel 4 and Carnival Films (makers of Downton Abbey) changed his mind when they promised him six hours in which to tell the story. "I was never paid for them, so the screenplays all belong to me," he says in his soft-spoken, Gordonstoun-Scottish accent. journalism, marriage, children, drunkenness. But all these writers conformed to Cyril Connolly's theory of "Enemies of Promise" (Connolly's 1938 treatise on the obstacles to literary output). He published his last novel in 1940 and died in 1977 - so 37 years of silence. "Logan's career rather echoes Gerhardie's - he had huge success in his 20s with his first two novels and the rest of his life was a long slide into oblivion and poverty. "And the one who everybody has never heard of, William Gerhardie, who was the most famous young novelist of the 1920s, the Zadie Smith of his day, and who Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Graham Greene all confessed to being hugely influenced by. "Lawrence Durrell, Henry Green, Cyril Connolly. Written in the form of a journal, it is the story of a life and a series of snapshots of the 20th century as experienced by one quixotic man of letters.ĭespite sharing some autobiographical traits with his creator - such as a fondness for the game of golf, and a poor opinion of Jackson Pollock and Virginia Woolf - Mountstuart is an amalgamation of a generation of British writers with whom Boyd has long been fascinated. We're here to discuss his latest adaptation of one his novels (he only allows himself to turn his own books into screenplays), Any Human Heart, the sprawling saga that follows writer and journalist Logan Mountstuart from boarding school in the 1920s to his exiled dotage in 1990s France, by way of encounters with such real historical figures as Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. "Dubai," suggests Boyd, several of whose novels - A Good Man In Africa, for example, or Brazzaville Beach - have been set in distant, sweatier climes. It could be a passenger lounge at some far-flung airport, we both agree. There is something very right about the room where I meet author William Boyd - a rather functional box at an office in Soho, seemingly stripped back for redecoration and the aluminium Venetian blinds drawn. ![]() Gerard Gilbert hears how its author - the new James Bond novelist William Boyd - adapted for TV a work that he once considered unfilmable. Any Human Heart is the sprawling story of a writer’s life and loves, spanning the 20th century.
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