‘Howards End' gets a TV adaptation
“Howards End,” the four-part miniseries adapted from E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel, isn’t Kenneth Lonergan’s first foray into TV. That would be the animated Nickelodeon kids show “Doug.”
Before Lonergan was one of the most acclaimed playwrights and filmmakers of his generation, he was like most young writers: hunting for work and for money. He and his friend Andy Yerkes wrote a pair of 1993 episodes for “Doug.”
“Howards End,” a BBC production that Starz will premiere Sunday, may be Lonergan’s second TV credit but — no offense to “Doug” — it’s his most substantial small-screen effort.
Lonergan wrote the fourhour series, directed by Hetti MacDonald, while working on “Manchester by the Sea,” for which he won best screenplay at last year’s Oscars. Exhausted from the rigors of that Oscar campaign, Lonergan opted not to direct the British series and instead concentrate on adapting the book about three rungs of society in Edwardian England.
In a recent interview, Lonergan discussed making “Howards End” — which was also a 1992 Merchant-Ivory film, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
AP: Was Forster’s book meaningful to you?
Lonergan: No, it wasn’t, actually. I had tried to read it earlier in life and not been engaged by it. But I read it when they offered me the assignment, and it’s something I actually came to admire more and more as I worked on it.
AP: What do you admire about it?
Lonergan: When you put his dialogue into scene form, it really comes to life quite beautifully. Possibly because it’s a different time and place, a lot of the humor is more evident when you put it into teleplay form than it is when you’re reading it. It’s really kind of an amazing structure. And it has a great feeling of kindness and humanity to it. Some of it’s a bit schematic and some of the characters are better drawn than others, but as you’re working through your teleplay looking for material to plumb, you just find more and more.
AP: Did the movie of “Howards End” intimidate you at all?
Lonergan: Not so much. I had only seen the film once. I liked it but it wasn’t a film that loomed large in my life. “A Room With a View” is a film that I’ve seen many times and that I love. The tone that they strike in that movie is so specific and so lively and so full of feeling and humor and beauty. “Howards End” is obviously very different and it can be a bit more ponderous. And the form is so different. The original film isn’t over two hours long. They just have to pare away so much.