Rare interview with the star behind The Luminaries

Friday, 15 May 2020

Based on Eleanor Catton's novel, The Luminaries is a tale of love, murder and revenge set amidst New Zealand's 1860s gold rush.

The most famous novel to come out of New Zealand this millennium has been turned into a TV series that debuts on our screens tonight. In a rare media appearance, Eleanor Catton, the writer behind the Man Booker-winning novel — and now the screenplay — answers a few questions about the process.

The usually media-shy Eleanor Catton gives a rare interview on the day of The Luminaries television debut.

Writing the novel The Luminaries must have been a long solitary exercise — how did you find shifting that story to a collaborative process?

I really enjoyed the collaborative aspect. So many different kinds of artistry combine to create even a single frame of any film or television show. Every moment has been shaped by dozens, if not hundreds, of artists in different departments, all of whom influenced me and inspired me in countless ways. What was hard was having to learn to write in a way that fit the budget and the schedule, both of which got tighter by the day. I like puzzles, and so the problem-solving nature of adaptation really appeals to me, but it was definitely frustrating at times.

* NZ score world premiere for Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries TV series

* Behind the scenes: The Luminaries wraps filming on the West Coast

Catton says Himesh Patel brought more to the character of Emery than she had imagined in the writing process.

* Adaptation of The Luminaries to shoot on West Coast and other NZ locations

You would have had vivid impressions of the characters in your head, what were the pros and cons of seeing those characters embodied by actors?

Contemplating the planets: Eva Green and Eve Hewson (daughter of Bono) star together in the series.

They exist separately for me. When I read and write, I don’t really experience characters from the outside. I have more of an internal sense of who they are and how they think and feel. Watching actors is external: you’re looking at them rather than through them. Also I think that even when you believe completely in a character on screen, there’s always a part of you that is admiring the actor’s performance. There’s a marvellous pleasure in that doubleness - to think, at the same time: “I’m falling in love with Anna!” And also: “Eve is amazing for making me fall in love with Anna!” But it’s very different from the experience of reading a book.

Catton is currently working on her third novel: 'A thriller, I hope.'

There were a couple of elements in the screenplay that you’ve said you wish you'd done in the book. Can you tell me more about that?

When I saw Himesh Patel’s audition for Emery, I felt at once that I’d made a huge mistake in the original novel by not making Emery ethnically Indian. The Luminaries is about learning to walk in someone else’s shoes, and I think that would have had much more resonance if it had happened across ethnicities as well as across genders. In Himesh’s audition, he read Emery’s testimony from the courtroom scene in Episode Six. It absolutely floored me — I felt, like I often did during the course of the production, that he knew the character much better than I did, or could. He brought an essence to the lines that I hadn’t known they could possess.

The Luminaries is set in 1866. The Victorian era seems to resonate quite strongly right now, why do you think that is?

The series was filmed entirely in New Zealand, and partially in Hokitika.

I think the imperialism and industrial expansion of the Victorian era have their parallels today. But our relationship with every age of history is always partly fictional, I think. We tend to remember the past in ways that flatter our understanding of the present.

Is The Luminaries primarily a love story?

I’d like to think so — actually I think that every story is a love story, or at least, that it ought to be. But the book and the show are very different. The relationship between “the luminaries”, Anna and Emery, is deliberately occluded in the novel, but it’s brought to the fore in the show.

You recently adapted Jane Austen's Emma for the screen. How would you compare adapting the work of another novelist to adapting your own?

Oh my God, it’s so much easier to adapt work written by someone else. When I read Emma for the first time, I was fooled, amused, moved, and ultimately satisfied; adapting it for the screen was relatively straightforward, because the job was simply to try and recreate those feelings, as best I could, in a different form. I love and admire Emma so uncomplicatedly; if anyone criticised the novel, I would know at once whether I agreed or disagreed. My relationship with The Luminaries is much more complicated. I doubt it more, and question it more, and although I know what my intentions were at every stage, I also know that what the author intends is not always what the reader experiences. By the time we arrived at the shooting script of Emma, I think I had written maybe eight or nine drafts. By the time we started Luminaries, I had written almost 200 drafts of the first episode alone.

Astrology underpins the characters and the plot in The Luminaries. I feel like astrology has had a bit of a resurgence in the years since you wrote the book — it's gone from being kind of bogan to having more hipster cred. Do you feel like people are more open to it as a creative device now than they were then?

Yes, perhaps. Astrology does lend itself very well to being memed, which maybe accounts for the recent boost in popularity. But I am not an authority on hipster cred.

Halfway through the production of the TV series, you shifted the filming to Hokitika, where the story is set. What was that like?

I think it would be impossible for anyone to visit Hokitika and not be influenced by the grandeur and sublimity of the landscape. Ngāti Waewae were very gracious in their hospitality and in their thoughtful consultations with us during pre-production. The production gifted pounamu from the Arahura River to all the actors, and was very special for them to be able to dip their pendants in the water to be blessed.

You've now written two major screenplays — telling stories entirely through dialogue and visuals — do you think that will influence you as a novelist?

One surprising thing I’ve learned is that dialogue is actually relatively unimportant to a good screenplay. Structure matters far more. Writing my new novel, I’m paying attention to the structural foundations of the story in a way that I probably wouldn’t have before I studied screenwriting. But there are so many things that each form can do that the other can’t, and I think it’s the job of any writer to focus on what their chosen form does best. A novel wouldn’t be a very good novel if it was only a screenplay in disguise.

Are you writing another novel?

I am, very slowly. The new book is set in New Zealand in the present day. It’s a kind of thriller, I hope.

The Luminaries starts tonight on TVNZ 1 at 8.30pm, and is available on TVNZ OnDemand.