Teacup's Showrunner talks Adaptation
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00I'd met with them several times over the years. They knew my work. I, of course, knew who they were, and they came to me with this book and said,
00:08Are you interested in adapting this? And I read the book and I said, Yes, but I'm going to change everything.
00:16And here's the script that I've written that changes 90% of the book. And for some reason, they went, Oh, great.
00:25And they fell in love with it, thankfully, and we went from there.
00:31Yeah. Well, I mean, that answers it.
00:33That is an answer.
00:34That is an answer.
00:36That's an answer.
00:37It's one of them, right?
00:39Yeah. So James, it had already been in your world then by that point.
00:42Yeah. We're a big fan of the book, of the world of the book, and then when Ian came along, we really loved his take on it,
00:48and so it felt like the right thing to sort of jump into with him.
00:53Until we met him, and we were like, Oh, shit.
00:55Oh!
00:58That's all right. We'll cut it out.
01:00That's all right. We'll break it out.
01:02Well, that answers it. I was going to ask how close of an adaptation it was, and I guess the answer is not close at all.
01:07Yeah. It's a very different version. The book is a very big book. It's got a lot of set pieces, a lot of characters, an entire town,
01:17and what I wanted to do was take all that away and keep the ideas of the book, and an adaptation where you can read the book,
01:28I wanted to make something where even if you read the book, you don't know what's going to happen next,
01:33and part of that had to do with making it a minimal story.
01:40It was a maximalist piece of fiction, and so I made it very grounded.
01:45Instead of a town, it's three families. Instead of a large area, it's one secluded farm,
01:52and that way, keeping it very, very grounded so that when things start to go wrong and start to go strange and start to go supernatural,
02:01we're starting from a level of very relatable human characters at ground level.