Someone made a movie of my first book, <em>Semana Santa.</em> It's pretty much like every movie based on a book. Nothing close to the original. In the book the protagonist is a sensitive woman academic brought to an anonymous Spanish city during Holy Week and trapped inside a cycle of murders which she can understand because, for personal reasons, she has a special insight into what's going on.

In the movie she's Mira Sorvino in Seville, a cop to boot, has a different name and a somewhat changed personality. The movie contains this exchange between her and the other principal protagonist, a male cop, Quemada.
<blockquote>Quemada: Women have been known to throw their panties at him.

Maria Delgado: I'll be sure to wear some for the occasion.</blockquote>
I did not write those lines. Or anything else in it. I don't think it's a great movie but then I would say that. Still, it doesn't stop people asking me all the time.. will there be a Costa movie? Who would you like to play him? Is it going to turn up on TV?

Here are some honest answers.

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Maybe. But you won't hear me talk about the possibility until there's some serious sign it might actually happen. Authors get approaches from the movie business all the time. If I wrote here about every informal discussion I had people might think a movie was around the corner and that simply wouldn't be true. Lots of approaches are tentative. Some are from people who don't really have the backing or experience to take the project any further (anyone can and will call themselves a 'producer').

Getting excited every time someone 'from the movie business' expresses an interest in my work would be downright ridiculous. I've lost track of how many times these people come and go over the years. In any case 'signing a movie' deal is not what it seems. The first step is signing an option. This simply allows a producer to go away and try to drum up the initial seed money for the next phase of a project, usually writing a screenplay. It normally involves a small amount of money for the author. Last time I checked something like ninety per cent of optioned books never get turned into movies. See what I mean about not getting excited?

The next step after option is so-called 'development', the phase of getting a script made and a cast and production team assembled. This requires more money. In the case of <em>Semana Santa</em> that process took four years and involved a lot of on-off moments. It is entirely possible for a project to get to the end of this phase, have a completed screenplay and willing cast and crew, <em>and still not get made.</em> Note the excitement comment above.

The final step is going into production. This will usually mean the movie will be completed. Most of the time it will mean the movie will be completed <em>and</em> released. On occasion the whole thing will collapse part way through and everyone will be scratching around trying to get paid out of the mess that follows. Or the movie may be made, get turned down by theatrical distributors and go straight to DVD.

None of these processes is remotely entertaining. In fact they're hellish and any author who decides to get involved in them will discover his or her book-writing time savagely diminished by work that may not lead to anything the public ever sees. Writing books is simple. I finish them, I sell them, they get published. Movie making is a long string of semi-related catastrophes-in-waiting, any one of which may sink a project for good after years of work, some of it unpaid for a few people in all probability.

And even if a movie based on a book does get made what are the chances of it being good? What, for that matter, do I mean by good? Should it reflect the original book, as readers expect? Or should it be aimed at the tastes of movie-goers, most of whom probably don't know there was a book in the first place and even if they do doubtless don't care?

I know where my sympathies lie: with movie-goers. I'm more interested in having a good movie that works than 'being faithful to the spirit of the original'. Books are books and films are films. There is no halfway house. The only point in turning a book into a movie is making a good movie, not paying homage to the literary source. A movie that accurately reflects the texture and complexity of a book is probably a movie that's going to fail. These are different media, one complex and internalised, the other simpler, faster and more dramatic. You can't have it both ways.

The <em>business</em> of movie-making, on the other hand, is prolix, fragile, unpredictable and horribly prone to accidents and failure. It's a miracle films get made at all, and a greater miracle that any of them turn out to be in the least entertaining. Any author who pins his or her hopes on commercial success through the movies is living in cloud cuckoo land.

More importantly, why on earth should any author feel they need a movie or TV series to validate their work? Books should do that by themselves. The movie of <em>Semana Santa</em> didn't make me a better or worse writer, and wouldn't have done if it had worked well either. Money apart, which was nice, it's largely irrelevant to the way my writing has developed over the ensuing years.

If a TV or movie company comes along with a serious offer that I think has at least a flying chance of turning into something worthwhile on the big or small screen then I'm happy to entertain it. That hasn't happened so far. Maybe it will in the future. But I'm not on tenterhooks about the prospect and I rather hope readers will start to feel that way too. After all when a movie of the book is made most of them think it's an injustice because the characters aren't how they pictured them or the narrative has been simplified (which is usually essential in the transition from page to screen).

Because I'm silent on these matters don't assume that discussions aren't taking place. But until I have some firm and genuine news I will always keep schtum. There's enough hot air in this business already without my adding to it.

And... <em>Cut!</em>