SOLVING THE

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 book and the show, talks to Emily Simpson.

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 fitted 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.

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?

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.

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.