FILM

Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel and featuring a cameo appearance by Clevedon Pier, ‘Never Let Me Go’ arrives on the big screen this week with the likes of Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan heading up the cast. Robin Askew holds on.

Writers tend to have widely differing responses to screen adaptations of their work. At one extreme, Alan Moore refuses to get involved with films based on his graphic novels, restricting himself to sniping from the sidelines. Others prefer to distance themselves more politely, perhaps mindful of such hideous car-crashes as Mike Newell's 'Love in the Time of Cholera', asserting that they have let go of the material and the film version is entirely the work of the screenwriter and director. A minority embrace the production wholeheartedly. Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps alone in becoming so rhapsodic after seeing what screenwriter Alex Garland and director Mark Romanek had done with his Booker-shortlisted 2005 novel 'Never Let Me Go' that he was quoted as saying he wished he could go back and cut 100 pages out of it.

"Not only that," he beams, "I felt I learnt a lot about the story from watching the film, and in particular the performances of the actors. It's a fantastic screenplay, but I kind of expected that. There's only one of me when I'm writing the book, and I can't pay attention to all these characters. I've got other things to worry about. So if you have a situation where you have very creative, highly talented, highly intelligent actors pondering for hours about their particular character, they're bound to make interesting, profound new discoveries. So for me, it was a wonderful revelation watching the early cuts. I think that's how it should be. I don't think the story should be a fixed thing, fixed at the point of the book. I feel more like a songwriter. I've written a song. I want people to take it into new areas, do new versions."

A dystopian parallel universe drama, 'Never Let Me Go' centres on a trio of young people (played by Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield) who have been raised in an idyllic English boarding school. Only as they prepare to leave do they become fully aware of their gruesome fate. Mulligan had always wanted to be involved in any adaptation of the novel. "I read the book when it came out and I loved it," she enthuses. "I loved it first and foremost as a love story about people who want very simple things from life and can't get them. Keira and I did 'Pride and Prejudice' together. We've done lots of adaptations of Dickens and Austen, where the author's not around to tell you off if it's rubbish. And so this was doubly intimidating because we had Ish with us, and you want to be everything that he imagined when he wrote it."

Knightley, by contrast, confesses that she had never heard of the book. "The first thing I knew about it was the script that came through my door. I thought it was a completely unique piece. I'd never read anything like it. I then started talking to friends and saying, 'I might do this film. I think it's really interesting.' And tons of them were saying, 'This is my favourite book in the entire world.' One said the most terrifying thing: 'It sums up our generation' – which now, having read the book, I find a bleak prospect indeed."

It's easy to see why the story appealed so strongly to Mulligan, as it fits her acting style so closely ("I cry all the time," she jokes. "It's my modus operandi"), but it's something of a departure for Knightly who plays the closest thing 'Never let Me Go' has to a villain. "It was great," she grins. "I thought that the character was fascinating. For me, it was a study of jealousy and fear. I think she commits harm and it was an interesting thing trying to get into her head. I didn't like her. It’s tricky playing people that you don't like and finding a way to empathise with them. That was challenging and very exciting."

A former pop video director (David Bowie, Morrissey, the Red Hot Chili Peppers) who made his feature debut with the impressive 'One Hour Photo' nearly a decade ago, American Mark Romanek is, on the face of it, an odd choice to helm this very English story. "I tried not to start every morning crippled by fear and the responsibility of doing justice to this book I loved," he laughs. "I tried to focus on the tasks at hand, because that isn't a constructive way to think about it. I also had an enormous amount of help. This was a very collaborative process. I wasn't brought in to behave like I was the 'auteur' of the piece, whatever that means. That also speaks to the authenticity, or Englishness. I feel I have an affinity for English things. I spent a lot of time here. I went to school here briefly and I've lived here on and off. I live here now, actually. I also thought a lot about Ang Lee's 'The Ice Storm', which depicted my childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of Chicago. I thought it was unbelievably authentic. And he's Taiwanese. So sometimes I guess someone from outside has a perspective on things."

It would not be unfair to say that 'Never Let Me Go' completely stiffed on release in the US last year, taking a pitiful $2.5m. This perhaps explains why none of the anticipated major awards nominations materialised, since Oscar hates commercial failure. The film's prospects are certainly better in the UK, though audiences here are just as likely to be troubled by the characters' curious passivity in the face of their unpleasant destiny. Ishiguro mounts a spirited defence of his story. "When I was writing the novel I wasn't interested in a story about the triumph of slaves over a cruel system," he asserts. "I was interested in trying to find something that paralleled our natural human lifespan and how we couldn't really escape from the fact that we're mortal, that we would all move from childhood to adulthood to old age. The question was: what's most important to human beings when they realise time is running out? Is it embedded in human nature to seek revenge on old enemies? Do we want to accrue private possessions? In a sense, I think this story was trying to put a positive light on human nature – to try and say as convincingly as possible that when people feel they're trapped and their time is running out, the things that become important are things like friendship and love. That was my intention and I believe the people who made this film wanted to say the same thing. So that's why the emphasis falls very much on how people accept their fate."

'NEVER LET ME GO' IS OUT NOW. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.

Copyright Robin Askew 2011 

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