A concise and practical master’s lesson on the art of film adaptation of novels. That’s what Isona Passola’s speech at the entrance to the Royal Academy of Good Letters of Barcelona, ??last day 9, consisted of.
And she developed it by focusing on three films that she produced, and that Agustí Villaronga directed: El mar, based on the homonymous novel by Blai Bonet (2000); Pa negre , based on the text by Emili Teixidor (2010), and Incerta glòria , based on the classic by Joan Sales (2017). This “trilogy of the civil war”, as he called it -although the texts by Bonet and Teixidor are properly post-war stories-, generated between the producer and the Mallorcan director who died in January, and to whom the intervention was dedicated, “an artistic tandem and friendship that has given us recognition and a good international impact” (especially Pa negre, with nine Goya awards and thirteen Gaudí awards).
Passola started by wondering “why did I choose this profession, I who had studied Modern and Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona”. And precisely one of his professors at the time, Borja de Riquer, today president of the Academy, was the one who presented him with the academic diploma and medal, which previously belonged to the monk Alexandre Olivar, head of the Montserrat library and president until his death. , aged 99, from the Catalan Society for Liturgical Studies. That the emblem is transmitted between two figures with such different profiles indicates the variety of orientations that this institution devoted to humanistic culture houses.
Passola analyzed the mechanisms involved in turning a narrative into a film. Beginning with the delicate acquisition of copyright: “The feeling of loss and betrayal that the author usually has when faced with the script resulting from his novel is even stronger than when a literary work is translated into another language. But it is that adapting in the cinema is more than changing the language, it is changing the language”.
In the script -he added- “there is plenty of literature. It can be badly written from a literary perspective and, on the other hand, give an outstanding film”.
He recalled that El mar arose from a proposal by Villaronga, who had written a script together with Biel Mesquida and Toni Aloy. The one with Pa negre was written by the production company itself, before knowing who was going to direct it. The text of Incerta glòria, “full of literary and philosophical references and written in epistolary form”, required significant adaptation work. Scriptwriter Coral Cruz and the director made momentous decisions: suppressing the Cruells character and promoting the widow Carlana, “a natural loser”, as a central figure, “providing a point of view different from that of the author”.
In this regard, he evoked the explanation of Leonor Dekoven, assistant to Elia Kazan, his professor at New York University: when it comes to building characters, “there are only two primal motors that move human beings to act: the survival instinct and self-esteem ”.
Passola convinced Villaronga to shoot El mar en catalán, which cost him an argument with Pedro Almodóvar, who was going to be a co-producer and finally withdrew from the project. Bonet’s adaptation was carried out “in the Majorcan dialect variant”, with rewriting by the writer himself; for Pa negre they counted as actors with children from Osona schools, “especially from small towns”; they contributed expressions that sounded “as if in terms of language we had not moved from the 40s”.
In the dialogues of Incerta glòria, the author’s granddaughter, the editor Maria Bohigas, “knows the language of Sales like no one else” intervened.
Music, photography, special effects, editing (“the most exciting of the processes involved in a film”) paraded through the talk. For Uncertain glòria they tried two different ones. “The first, more contemplative, more interior; and a second more linked to the action, faster”, which was imposed because “the perception of the subject in the cinema has changed a lot in the young generations, it goes much faster”.
The challenge of adapting a novel implies for Passola, “among other things, finding in images the stylistic resources that go beyond what is obvious.” And for this, the directors use metaphor, etopeya, irony, hyperbole, ellipsis, parallelism, antithesis, allegory, synecdoche, tropes that he successively commented on.
Although in the end, the conclusion was simple and forceful: “When they ask me how to make a good movie, I can only answer: with my life!”.
