If they go ‘Wow, that sounds fucking amazing!’ you go ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to write something amazing now’ and if their response is like ‘Huh’, you go, ‘Oh fuck, that idea’s terrible’. If I tell you, and you go ‘Huh’, then that’s it, that’s my ideas ruined! Honestly, I never tell anyone anything, or as little as possible I try and not tell anyone, because what happens is, the moment you tell someone, every part of you is attuned to what the response is and any response can be bad. If you tell me the whole plot now, that’ll ruin it. I haven’t quite closed the door on it, I haven’t quite gone ‘that’s something I’ll never do’.Īnd you don’t want to burn your bridges. I don’t know at the moment, who knows? There’s always a possibility of going back. If you decided you were never to go back to it, would you ever reveal what those ‘interesting places’ are? Now, I’m a different person from the person that wrote that. It was difficult at that time not to finish the story because I think it was going to go to some interesting places. You’ve always got to think about what your reasons are for going back. There’s always a danger that if you go back you’re a different bunch of people with different criteria and often, going back, you end up with something that’s a bit of a shadow of what it was, or a shit version of what it was. I think it would be difficult to go back now because everyone’s a lot older.
Is it final that you wouldn’t revisit the UK Utopia, given the chance? You can do a new version and there will be a lot of people that will go ‘it’s not as good as the original’, and there’ll be a lot of people that will go ‘it’s better than the original’. My view on it was always, what you can’t ever do is harm the original.
UTOPIA UK TV TV
TV and film are very, very different, you only really do one version, but if you wrote a play… I’ve got a play that’s been done 40 times in Germany alone – I haven’t seen all those productions by the way, I’ve only seen two or three but you see that they’re really different, so I do think the world’s a big place, I do think there’s room for lots and lots of different things. My background is theatre and I’ve been lucky that a lot of my plays have gone on in other countries, so I feel like you can do different versions of a script. Some might feel a bit protective of it, like ‘who are these Americans ruining it? Watch the original!’ What would you say to that? The original might not have had as broad an audience as Channel 4 wanted, but the people who loved it, loved it. Banks’ Phlebas TV adaptation at Amazon no longer happening By Louisa Mellor Just before the Fincher version of the remake fell apart, you said it had been changed in some really clever ways? She’s making her show, even though some of the ideas might be taken from mine, it’s her show and if it were me, I wouldn’t want someone else to be around. She was always really lovely to me, but I felt like the last thing you want is ‘that bloke’ hanging around going ‘do it like this’. I’ve had a few chats with Gillian, who’s adapted it but my sense of it was that she obviously wanted to make it her own.
I really liked them, I thought they were great. The last time I read the scripts was probably back when David Fincher was involved.
But I’ve seen a couple of episodes and they look really good. I’ve not really read the scripts in probably four or five years. Even though I’m an exec on it, I’ve not really had much input at all, but it looks really good and it’s going to be really interesting to see how people feel about it. I’ve not really had anything to do with it. I’ve seen two episodes and they look great. I don’t know how people are going to take it.
You’re right, it feels like it’s exactly when it was written for in some ways! It’s a strange thing. How does it feel for the Utopia remake to be arriving at a time that couldn’t really feel more apt, in that viruses and vaccines are daily news headlines now?
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