Gabriel Bergmoser on writing The Hunted for the page and the screen

Gabriel Bergmoser is an award-winning Melbourne-based author and playwright. He won the prestigious Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award in 2015, was nominated for the 2017 Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing and went on to win several awards at the 2017 VDL One Act Play Festival circuit. In 2016 his first young adult novel, Boone Shepard, was shortlisted for the Readings Young Adult Prize. A film adaptation of his new novel, The Hunted, is currently being developed in a joint production between Stampede Ventures and Vertigo entertainment in Los Angeles, with a screenplay written by Gabriel.

Today, Gabriel is on the blog to tell us all about the process of adapting The Hunted for the screen … all while he was still writing the novel itself! Read on.

Gabriel Bergmoser

On the weirdness of writing the same story for the page and the screen

It won’t be surprising to anyone who reads it that cinema has been part of The Hunted’s DNA from day one. The sunburned landscapes, worn down roadhouses, shotgun-toting blokes in utes and the central narrative of a twelve-hour siege all arguably owe more to ’70s thriller films than what you’d typically find on the pages of many recent novels. In fact, during the earliest stages of developing the idea, it was going to be a screenplay. But, maybe ironically given that my training is in screenwriting, I’ve always been more comfortable with prose and so I decided to write it as a book.

When film rights for The Hunted sold before the book was picked up for publication, I found myself in the unique position of developing the screenplay side-by-side with the novel. The earliest draft of The Hunted script was basically a beat-for-beat replica of the book, with swathes of dialogue and action literally copied across. It quickly became evident that this approach wasn’t going to work.

Different mediums have different requirements. For example, the novel is written in limited rather than omniscient third person, meaning that at any given time you’re only seeing one character’s perspective on events. This allows you to link their view on the unfolding drama to memories of their past, in the process shedding light on their motivations as the action unfolds. On screen, though, short of packing the film with flashbacks or voiceover, you can’t pull off the same thing in the same way. So memories had to be replaced with suggestions; lines of dialogue hinting at complex histories, objects with personal significance; alluding to what drives them without resorting to exposition or momentum-slowing depictions.

One thing I was determined not to do in the book was to ever show the perspectives of the antagonists; I wanted to create a sense that they were this unknowable force unleashed upon our heroes. All the same, I needed the audience to know what they were up to at certain moments, so I came up with the kind of weaselly character who could take their side early on and essentially provide some eyes into the enemy camp. I worked hard to ensure that his backstory and personality helped to explore the core themes of the book, so as to make him an integral part of the overall tapestry and that the end of his story was key to the way the overall novel wrapped up. In writing the screenplay however, it became apparent that he wasn’t serving the same functions. There’s little argument for the relevance of a supporting character’s past in a pulse-pounding ninety minute thriller when the relevance is thematic rather than essential to the storytelling, and beyond this I didn’t need his perspective on events. In film, there’s not really such a thing as limited third person; you just show what you want to show. Early on I tried to include him, but with every passing draft he began to feel less essential, his direct involvement in the action gradually being taken over by other characters. The book wouldn’t work without him. The film wouldn’t work with him. So out the door he went, living on only in print form.

There’s a domino effect to making changes. George R.R. Martin has often spoken about this in regard to Game of Thrones, how even seemingly minor alterations to his A Song of Ice and Fire series have necessitated bigger ones later on. But that’s the nature of the beast. You can’t write a movie or TV series the same way you’d write a book – something that really needs to be learned by every person still complaining about The Goblet of Fire film cutting Hermione’s House Elf Liberation subplot.

Maybe the biggest lesson that’s come from the simultaneous redrafting of book and screenplay is that if you’re an author who wants to see your work adapted for the screen, then you can’t be too precious – even if you’re the one doing the adapting. It’s okay for some of the specifics to look a bit different as long as you arrive in the same place. The most important thing is that The Hunted, in both book and film incarnations, provides a gritty white-knuckle roller coaster ride of a story centred on heroes you can root for and villains whose demises you can cheer at. Sometimes achieving that means getting used to the thrilling weirdness that is telling the same story in two totally different ways.

—The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser (HarperCollins Australia) is out now – signed copies are available at Booktopia!*

*While stocks last.

The Hunted

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Gabriel Bergmoser

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

Frank is a service station owner on a little-used highway who just wants a quiet life. His granddaughter has been sent to stay with him to fix her attitude, but they don't talk a lot. When a badly injured young woman arrives at Frank's service station with several cars in pursuit, Frank and a handful of unsuspecting customers are thrust into a life-or-death standoff...

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