Marc Klein: The Writer’s Guide to A Very Good Year

By Kathy A. McDonald
(Moving Pictures Adaptation & Awards issue, Dec. '06/Jan. '07)

"Will build to suit." Essentially, screenwriters who adapt another's story are doing just that: remodeling plots and characters, to not only fit the screen, but the actors who inhabit those roles.

Former New Yorker, Los Angeles-based screenwriter Marc Klein has found his métier in adaptation. Klein is now one of Hollywood's go-to guys for romantic comedy, based on his original script for Serendipity that endearingly brought John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale together...eventually. That film's success translated into numerous offers for Klein, from adapting the best examples of "chick lit" (such as The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing) to attracting the notice of veteran director Ridley Scott, who offered him the job of adapting Peter Mayle's bestseller, A Good Year. Icing on the cake for Klein and audiences: The film stars Russell Crowe, in his first romantic comedy lead.

"Russell (Crowe) said, ‘Make me more of a prick, more of an asshole'," says Klein, sharing his favorite note from Crowe. The Academy Award®-winning actor portrays British bond trader Max Skinner, who grudgingly inherits his uncle's vineyard in the south of France. The character is a real "bugger" at the film's outset. Klein elaborates, "There's a self-awareness of how bad he is; he's so smart, he even knows he's an asshole."

The essence of A Good Year as book and film is Max Skinner's re-education. Emphasizing that transformation gives the film its humor and appeal, Klein explains, "It's about a guy who's lost touch with a lot of things, even his core self. And that character arc is so much more extreme and interesting if he goes from being really bad; then the discovery moment is so much more powerful."

Klein found the book "adorable," but initially didn't consider himself the right writer to take on the much sought-after assignment. But months of research, involving trips to Provençe, meetings with local vignerons (estate winemakers), wine tasting and soaking up the arguably glorious atmosphere, only made him even more perplexed. "I started writing, and it was really, really difficult as I wasn't sure how I should write this movie. Is it a French farce? Romantic comedy? Is it a comedy of manners? Bedroom comedy?" While the questions might seem conceptual, the answers would determine how Klein would structure the movie. After he threw out his first version, a French farce, he found himself at an inspirational impasse.

In the middle of the night, Klein imagined the script's opening scene: Uncle Henry and his 12-year-old nephew Max play chess as Henry sermonizes that winemaking is "the art of bottling truth." "I walked to my computer and wrote the scene verbatim, and it was shot that way. From that scene, I understood the whole movie," says Klein. Adapting the novel required much rethinking, notes Klein, as well as a certain amount of confidence and imaginative reconstruction. "The characters weren't created in me but re-created in me," adds Klein, who confesses to changing Russell Crowe's character enormously from the book. "My idea was to make him more of a Gordon Gekko junior, a greedy guy, and make the inheritance more of a nuisance than anything else. He sees it as a way to make a few extra million pounds."

However, Max's adult experiences in the south of France reconnect him to a more authentic world, to his childhood, to a place where he lets his guard down and even falls in love. Crowe also asked Klein to make his character more romantic. "It became the entryway into the character's soul. As we see him being a prick and a bugger, we also see how easily he can be seduced by a beautiful French woman. Everything drops and he becomes a charmer," reveals Klein.

In addition to Russell Crowe, the film stars Albert Finney and, as young Max, Freddie Highmore (Charlie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and otherwise known as "that incredible kid from Finding Neverland"). Presently, Klein is writing an original love story for Tom Cruise (working title Sunday) as well as editing his debut directing effort, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. For the independently financed film, Klein adapted just two of author Melissa Bank's multiple short stories, focusing on the tale of Brett Eisenberg (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her relationship with seasoned, and sexy, older editor Archie Knox (Alec Baldwin).

While Klein might seem an unexpected choice to both write and direct the seminal chick-lit tome, he contends that a man telling a woman's story is a long-standing cinematic tradition - and this is coupled with the fact that there aren't a lot of bankable women writer/directors. "I think of Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen and how much women interest them. I'm much more interested in women than men; I find men to be simpler to understand. I find women multidimensional; and from a writer's point of view, that's more of a challenge."

Klein prefers to adapt books that don't read as screenplays, ones where there's "space to fill in." He also credits the talented cast of both The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and A Good Year for helping enhance or find the joke in scenes. "For the first time in my career, the actors asked permission to change lines," he recalls of his on-set experience throughout the filming of the former. He encouraged the actors to improvise, especially when they made dialogue funnier or more colloquial.

Although he believes that the script is "everything," he also acknowledges that, 90 percent of directing is casting. "If you have the right cast, pretty much everything works itself out." He wondered at first if Russell Crowe could be comedic in A Good Year. Although Russell contributed some funny ideas before production, it wasn't until cameras rolled that Klein saw "he got it in a way that he was bringing all his force of talent to the comedy as well." Crowe filled in the character so thoroughly it still amazes Klein. "He got into the character so quickly and on such a deep level that, after a couple of weeks, I was asking him, ‘What would Max do?' so I could rewrite some of the scenes."

Perhaps the most important reason Klein has gravitated toward adaptation concerns the economic reality of today's studio system. "If I came up with the idea for A Good Year as an original pitch or wrote it as a spec, I couldn't sell it for five cents," he suggests. "Whereas, if they come to me with a book they've optioned, that gives me the opportunity to write something and explore more mature, interesting themes - all with the approval of a studio, because they know what they are getting."

And, as adaptations seem to be the projects of choice for A-list directors, Klein concludes, "As a writer, you always want to write for the best director!" -MPM