Typically, literary works are adapted into screenplays; witness the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, this year won by Christopher Hampton & Florian Zeller for adapting Zeller’s play “Le Père” into the feature film “The Father.”
But local writer Michael Whatling has just done the reverse by adapting his screenplay “Pâtisserie” into a new novel: “The French Baker’s War.”
Set in Occupied France in 1943, one day André Albert returns home from the daily hunt for the rationed ingredients necessary to keep his family pâtisserie open, and finds his four-year-old son in the street, his wife gone, and an emaciated Jewish woman cowering behind the pastry display case.
Michael and I recently had the following email exchange:
Michael Korican: Congratulations! Is this your first novel? Because I know you foremost as a screenwriter.
Michael Whatling: “It’s my first “real” novel, I suppose. I say “real” because when I was 15 I sat in the back yard at one of those round metal tables with the umbrella in the middle and typed out a book on an old Royal typewriter I found in the basement. I called it “The Song No One Heard.” It ended up being the book no one read.”
MK: I believe you overheard the germ of the idea for this story in a Montreal bakery. How long did it take you to write the screenplay?
MW: “The screenplay didn’t take long — it was all the rewrites that were interminable. It was optioned twice: Once by two-time Academy Award nominated best actress Isabelle Adjani, and by Francis Lawrence, the director of “I Am Legend,” “The Hunger Games,” “Water for Elephants,” etc. Unfortunately, like is often the case, the options lapsed.”
MK: How did you turn the screenplay into a novel?
MW: “I wrote the novel based on my screenplay because I felt there was so much more of the story to tell that a 100 page script couldn’t. I used the screenplay as a detailed outline. As you know, in novels you have to go inside the heads of the characters. That was a very different skill from the ones needed for writing a script. That took getting used to.”
MK: But why turn a screenplay into a novel? Was it the intellectual challenge, or does it now make the screenplay more marketable? Or, did you in effect abandon the script but not the idea and use the lockdown to re-express it in another creative medium?
MW: “By bringing the novel to a different audience, I’m hoping it will also make it more visible to someone who’d want to see it as a film.”
MK: How long did it take?
MW: “Writing the novel took much longer. Writing novels is hard work. You have to consider EVERY. SINGLE. WORD.”
MK: What else have you been up to, and what’s next?
MW: “An award winning independent film I wrote, “The Dancing Dogs of Dombrova,” is currently available on Optik TV and iTunes. It’s about estranged siblings who travel to Poland to fulfill the dying wish of their grandmother. Another of my screenplays, “Cut for Stone,” has been optioned by Ezeqial Productions of Toronto. It’s about doctors who slip into Syria during the current civil war to provide medical aid to civilians.”
My take: turn your screenplay into a book; how novel! Congratulations, Michael!
