TEST OF TIME
The small-screen version of TheTimeTraveler’sWife will sweep us off our feet, showrunner Steven Moffat tells Siobhan Duck
SHERLOCK and Watson. The Doctor and his companion. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Time after time, Steven Moffat creates small-screen magic with his impeccably cast double acts. But ask the celebrated screenwriter and he’ll credit the stars for his lucky streak of serial hits.
“People might admire a TV show for its writing or its direction or its production design, but they don’t love anything other than the people in it,” Moffat explains.
“Love… we reserve love for other human beings, and probably hate, too, to be honest. We reserve our connection for the actors. That’s what you fall in love with. So, you can do the best James Bond film in the world, but if you don’t like the guy playing James Bond, you’re screwed.”
As such, Moffat gave us Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as modern-day Baker Street sleuths, brought the Tardis into the 21st century with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, and charged Cold Feet’s James Nesbitt with becoming a new generation’s Jekyll. Now he’s at it again, this time placing Rose Leslie ( The Good Fight) and Theo James ( Sanditon) at the heart of his reimagining of Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling book
The Time Traveler’s Wife. Yet in Moffat’s view, a good adaptation “isn’t just rendering something in a different medium,” he insists. “It’s about saying, ‘How about if we did it this way?’”
Moffat was on holiday in Australia when he first read Niffenegger’s tale about a man struggling with a genetic disorder that causes him to travel unpredictably through time. It struck such a chord that Moffat eventually wrote it into Doctor Who – with the Doctor using the book as a place to hide his spare Tardis key.
“I absolutely adored it. I mean, I love time-travel stories anyway, obviously,” he says.
“But this was such a different use of time travel, not as an exciting gateway to adventure but the impediment to a grand, ordinary love. It was amazing, as is the way you get to use the device of scrambling up the order of their days to make something new and vital and interesting about what is basically a very happy marriage. It’s a phenomenon that writers don’t write about often, even though we very often live them. We don’t write about happy marriages because, fundamentally, it’s undramatic. Love stories tend to end at the altar or in divorce.”
Although the novel has already been made into a 2009 film starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, Moffat says television does the story more justice. “I didn’t see [the movie] for many years because I loved the book so much, but it does a good job of adapting it,” he offers. “But the trouble is, if you abbreviate it to two hours, the time travel pushes out the rest of the story.”
That isn’t the case with Moffat’s adaptation, which, in addition to giving more scope to the romance, also injects a bit of levity into the adventure, just as he did with Sherlock and Jekyll.
“Humour is a good way of integrating happiness on screen,” he explains. “I also think real life resembles a sitcom more than it resembles a drama. Real life is never appropriate. It never rains when you’re sad. Nothing ever happens when it should. You always end up with a bucket on your foot at the funeral.
“If you want to write what
I call a grand, ordinary love, then you should have lots of time for the fact it’s funny,” Moffat adds.
“I mean, even if you’ve been told you’re going to die in a week, something funny will happen. Life is inappropriate, silly and funny more often than it is sombre.”
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE
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