Written words have continually fueled the movies, but this period of book-to-screen adaptations seems keenly aware of nuances of mood and feel. Perhaps the most obvious is the greenlight for You Are Here, the bestselling novel by David Nicholls that is about to be adapted into an eight-part series for the BBC and Starz. Led by Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen, Marnie and Michael are two mismatched travelers, forced into each other’s company by a shared friend and soon traversing the English coast to coast.
What begins as an awkward trek together burgeons into a relationship neither foresees: The book has been adapted by Nicholls himself and Lenny Abrahamson, who directed the TV adaptation of Normal People, is in the director’s chair. Element Pictures, the company behind the Normal People adaptation, are on board to produce. They will be filming the Lake District and around Manchester, which are more than just the setting in the book.
The long walk in the novel is both challenge and deliverance, where loneliness, wit and tentative connect can happen at a human scale. Nicholls has said the ambition is both epic and intimate, and that it’s ‘a rom-com that still feels real.’ With Foy and Macfadyen in place, it shares the iconic and well-chosen casting tones of the best book-to-screen adaptations. This announcement is part of a larger trend. Both publishers and streamers are still digging into modern and classic works of fiction to find stories with a ready-made emotional architecture.
During the past few months, there’s been more news about adaptations of psychological thrillers, romantic epics, and graphic novels over the final few pages. Some are more spectacle-driven, others are more occupied with the quiet interior worlds that made them appeal to readers initially. The through-line between a number of them seems to be a feeling that audiences want comparable qualities on screen: attentiveness to relational life, texture of place, characters who seem complex. Nicholls specialises in one section of this terrain. His previous novel One Day, which rather famously has already gone from book to film, then to a Netflix series, has shown that the same narrative can take on different forms over a span of years and formats. You Are Here unabashedly continues his theme of likeable characters who are caught between the life they hoped for and the one they are currently living.
Choosing to make the adaptation at series length, rather than a compressed feature, pays dividends for this story; slower emotion shifts are a strength of novels and Abrahamson’s previous work illustrates a director with the patience for that kind of burn. Of course, not every adaptation works. It is common for camera or character voice to stray or be lost entirely, or to artificially inflate a work to what feels like unwarranted lengths. The most recent, promising adaptations are those which seem to approach the books as a dynamic dialogue rather than a prescriptive guide. Writer involvement, as provided by Nicholls here, increases the probability of tone preservation, as does embedding a project within the system of directors and producers with reputations for delicate treatments of literature.
