Seeing the light
HOW THE STARS ALIGNED FOR EPIC ADAP THE LUMINARIES…
There are challenges, and then there are 850-page Booker Prize winners set in 1860s New Zealand that explore astrology and faith, fate and science, love and death. So it’s probably no surprise that the person best placed to unravel and then reconstruct Eleanor Catton’s dense, complex epic The Luminaries into a six-part series was… well, Eleanor Catton.
“I really enjoyed the collaborative aspect,” says the novelist-slashscreenwriter. “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, so the problem-solving nature of adaptation really appeals to me. But it was definitely frustrating at times. By the time we started The Luminaries, I had written almost 200 drafts of the first episode alone.”
“There was rigorous debate,” laughs director Claire McCarthy. “We decided that, whereas Anna was the object of the book, surrounded by this constellation of men, it felt more contemporary and interesting to turn it inside out and make her the subject of the series. She’s no traditional Victorian ingénue; she comes with secrets.” ‘Anna’ is Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson), an Irish adventurer just off the boat to start a new life in a nation gripped by Gold Rush fever. On meeting fortune hunter Emery
Staines (Himesh Patel), the connection is instant but, having caught the attention of fortune teller and brothel madam Lydia Wells (Eva Green), she is swindled out of both money and a star-crossed romance with Emery, her “astral twin”.
What follows is a twin narrative, with one strand tracking Anna’s often harrowing journey through New Zealand society in booming, relatively opulent Dunedin. The other half of the tale is a murder mystery set in the hardscrabble frontier town of Hokitika nine months later. The natural beauty of New Zealand all but guarantees breathtaking visuals, although the absence of Victorianera buildings meant the sets
– 93 of them – were built from scratch just outside Auckland. “The world-building was challenging but wonderful,” admits McCarthy. “We put in the hard yards on period research on everything from