The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (22 page)

RS:
Very
Hitchhiker’s.

ZD:
It’s really perfect for describing the relationship between all of them. Just thinking about that makes me aware how much fun I had working on this movie.

Interview with Bill Nighy—Slartibartfast

Credits include
Love Actually, Magic Roundabout
(the voice of Dylan) and
Shaun of the Dead.

Robbie Stamp:
Did you know
Hitchhiker’s
?

Bill Nighy:
Yes, I was very familiar with
Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy.
I read it when I was a youngish man as had everybody I knew on the block, because it was a huge book. I had enjoyed it enormously, laughed and appreciated it, and then subsequently—almost more satisfyingly—I bought it for my daughter, when she was about thirteen or fourteen. If you ever wanted to put something on a cover of
Hitchhiker’s Guide,
not that anybody should pay particular attention to me and my daughter, you could put “my daughter fell off her chair,” because she did . . . there was a bang behind me and I turned round in a slight panic thinking something terrible had happened. In fact what had happened was that she’d literally fallen off her chair laughing. The other thing which was very appealing and nice about that particular experience was that she found the book so beautiful, funny and kind of funky that she read me almost all of it in order for me to share it. And it was just such a treat to watch her face and see her reading enormous chunks. I bought them all then:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
and
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish.
I think they are a remarkable achievement. I think he was a seriously, seriously gifted man and his books are more than just funny, they’re more than just sci-fi. He was a very, very intelligent man and these books are informed by that. I’m very, very glad that they’re in the world.

RS:
You are absolutely right; they’ve just got a very rare mixture of humour and intelligence. My daughter, age ten, has just discovered them and she loves them. I think that that bodes well for the movie and I really hope that we will hit a whole new generation of teenagers and that next summer we should be the funny, hip, cool movie to go and see.

BN:
Well, that’s what I thought when I read the script. I thought I just wanted to be in it because I love the whole thing. It’s very superior. The jokes are world-class. It is profoundly amusing and exciting and interesting and thought-provoking— all those little things he throws in like the definition of flying being throwing yourself at the ground and missing, things like that which just tickled me. I think the kids will go mad.

RS:
So how did you come to be involved?

BN:
First time I knew anything about this was when a mutual friend of Garth Jennings and me was getting married in Scotland. My friend said, “Oh and by the way he’s a director and I think he might want to talk to you about a job on
Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy.
” I nearly got a lift to the wedding with Garth, who I’d never met, but we didn’t travel together in the end. We didn’t even talk at the wedding. Maybe Garth thought it would be unethical! We probably held hands to Irish music before we ever discussed the project. I received the script shortly afterward and read it immediately and of all the things I’ve read, and there have been a few, there was absolutely no question in my mind. The minute I put the script down I phoned my agent and said if it was at all possible I would seriously like to be in this movie. I figure also from a practical point of view that it’ll be a hit, but who knows? Well, we all think it’s going to be a hit otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Then again, maybe we would actually. I think I probably would, I’d be here. But I do think it will travel and I think it’s got real appeal for everybody and it’s got everything, you know, because it operates on every level. The script is very clever, a very good representation of the book. It’s a great adventure, it’s a fascinating journey, a sweet love story and it’s a great resolution and as for an opening, you can’t do much better than blowing up the Earth in the first ten minutes. Most movies like this are about stopping that happening. So, yes, I read it and loved it. It was that simple, really. I made the phone call, then as is the way of these things lots of other things happened and we hadn’t done any kind of deal and then I remember doing a red carpet in Los Angeles where you had to speak to lots of different microphones and at the end the last question is always “What will you be doing next?” and you have to waffle because you don’t know anything or either you know some stuff but you can’t say anything and on the very last one I ran out of waffle and I said, “Well, I’m hoping to be in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
” and it was the BBC and my agent phoned up the next day and said words to the effect of “What the flaming hell do you think you’re doing?” because we haven’t done any kind of deal. It ended up on the front page of the
Independent
newspaper. I wasn’t bothered at all. I said, “Well, you know I want to be in it,” so that was it.

RS:
And now we’re in Slartibartfast’s trailer! One of the things that’s intriguing I think is the physical look of Slarti, because we’ve really moved away from the archetype of man with the white beard.

BN:
The thing about beards in the movies, and I’m sure there are a million exceptions to what I’m about to say, is that often they make it slightly difficult for the audience, because you lose an area of expression, you can’t read the person’s face quite so clearly. That was mostly why we wanted to get away from the “old man of the west” look. A lot of the design I just went with because Sammy Sheldon and Garth Jennings had come up with a pretty good thing. I didn’t feel I needed to fiddle around much. The only thing that we all agreed on was that the beard was probably more obstructive than helpful and the sense of me being a kind of corporate man is just very witty, as are all the costumes. You’re not ever going to hit the image that popped into the reader’s mind the moment they heard about Slartibartfast or Ford Prefect or Arthur so you can only come up with one that you think works and that is amusing or clever that you feel confident in.

RS:
What about your characteristic little snort? It’s almost like a compressed laugh, it’s just such a lovely little intimate thing to do.

BN:
I don’t know if this is going to make any sense but it’s born of the slightly innocent quality that people sometimes have when they are unaware of themselves to a certain degree. They do make unlikely noises sometimes and it just seemed to fit.

RS:
One of the things I’ve liked most is watching everybody inhabit their characters. We’ve brought a level of humanity, which I think is quite rare out there in the Galaxy.

BN:
That’s a large part of the appeal for me and I think probably will be for newcomers to
Hitchhiker’s
as well as enthusiasts like me. You don’t get heroic behaviour all of the time from everybody. You get mundane human flaws and a kind of intimacy and a kind of colloquialness that you don’t associate with the genre. It probably is a kind of genre to itself almost.

RS:
Slarti has this nice mix of pride and diffidence. He’s happy to be able to talk to Arthur about his job. But there’s also a tension there because he is aware that the mice plan to try to take this rather nice Earthman’s brain and his job is to deliver him on a platter.

BN:
Yes, exactly, I don’t suppose he gets out much in terms of meeting folk from other places. The bloody Vogons, literally ten minutes later and he’d have been free and clear and they blow the bloody computer planet up. I love the idea that they needed a race who would do all the boring jobs in the galaxy so they built Vogsphere for the Vogons and some clever clogs put in this mechanism that prevented them from ever having an interesting idea by smacking them in the face with a paddle, which is a very witty reflection on what happens to people who have to do boring jobs.

RS:
The paddles were a brand-new idea that Douglas had for the film on a flight coming back from LA. He came into the office the next morning and read it out because he liked to gauge people’s reactions. The team who were lucky enough to hear it hot off the press were rolling around laughing.

BN:
Well, it’s fantastic and several million years of evolution have also turned the Vogons into relentless blighters who do the next thing it says in the manual, which is a funny reflection on bureaucracy generally. By way of contrast, I think Slarti’s just a benign figure, a nice man with a healthy compassion, who is proud of what he does. It’s like when people who make things, they show you around their workshop, their special-effects shed or model shop, and they don’t often get a lot of thanks for what they do but they are quietly proud. It’s a very sweet idea of Douglas’s, that the makers of the Earth are like this . . . I love the notion that there were men who planted the fields, who pumped the water into the oceans and painted the White Cliffs of Dover and Ayers Rock. In Douglas’s world that’s how you build Earth. It’s so touching, so funky and funny.

RS:
And the iconic Norwegian fjords are one of the things people remember best from the whole of
Hitchhiker’s.
Such a strange wonderful, idea, somebody winning an award for designing the fjords in Norway, it’s a classic moment.

BN:
Everyone I’ve spoken to recently, that’s what they recall. Most of them are my age and they haven’t read the book for twenty years or something and that’s the bit, even before I tell them who I’m playing, which they usually guess anyway, they say, “Fiddly bits” and “Norway” and “Didn’t he get an award?” And they remember that bit, everyone remembers that bit— they love it.

RS:
I suppose you’ve worked most with Martin?

BN:
Working with Martin is a joy. He is an extremely clever young comic and actor and effortless to deal with both performing and in between times, and when I heard that he’d been cast, I thought, “Tim from
The Office,
Arthur? Of course, of course.” He has every quality required for Arthur. He has a world-class comic touch. But apart from that he has that kind of appeal you need. He’s watchable. You need that because Arthur is receiving an incredible amount of information on behalf of the audience, so they have to experience it through him. You need somebody really very accomplished in order to be able to deliver that kind of performance. You don’t get to do all of the party tricks all the time, you have to just be the receptor. He makes it look easy but those central roles where you have to be the audience’s eyes and ears are famously difficult.

RS:
I agree. And as for your experience, what were the moments that stood out for you during filming?

BN:
Yesterday Martin and I were in our cart travelling through the Planet Factory Floor. It was rather good fun, with us trying to act with water cannons and wind machines operating at the same time. Grown men were feeding the water cannon with plastic cups of water, and then this enormously high-pressured cannon would shoot the spray towards us. The director was helping with the water and enjoying himself so enormously that he forgot to hold on to the cups, which got sucked up into the machine and all of a sudden there were plastic cups bouncing off Martin’s face! That was quite Hitchhikery, in my view, and summed up the fun and the energy that has gone into making this movie.

Self-interview by Karey Kirkpatrick—Screenwriter

Credits include
The Little Vampire, Chicken Run
and
James and the
Giant Peach.

A version of this interview was originally written for and published on the
Hitchhiker
’s
Guide to the Galaxy
movie web-log. Karey Kirkpatrick kindly gave his permission for the interview to be reproduced here and added some new questions for himself about the filming period.

The
Hitchhiker’s
Guide to
the
Galaxy
Interview with Myself

I decided to interview myself because a) I think I’ll be harder on myself and know what sort of questions an interviewer might ask and b) no one has asked to interview me. And why should they? Who am I?
Not
Douglas Adams is the answer that concerns most people. So with this in mind let’s proceed. Here are some of the questions I imagine most fans of the book (and the radio series and the TV series and the Infocom game) are asking at this point.

Who the hell are you and what gives you the right to
muck around with this treasured piece of literature, you
American Hollywood hack?

Ah. Good one. Yes, I can see why a lot of people might be wondering this. So let’s see . . .

My name’s Karey Kirkpatrick. You can Google or IMDb me to find my credits (incidentally, I’m a guy—not the female news anchor in Buffalo, NY). But the short answer is no one has the right to muck around with this treasured piece of literature. I didn’t seek it, it found me. The story goes something like this.

Jay Roach was at one point attached to direct the film. He had worked with Douglas for many years on several different drafts of the screenplay, and after Douglas’s sudden and tragic death the project ground to a halt for several months. But Jay, along with Robbie Stamp (an executive producer on the film, long-time friend of Douglas’s and his partner in
The Digital Village
), felt an obligation to not let the project die, to honour Douglas’s memory, and one day while he was watching
Chicken
Run
(with his sons? I don’t know. In my head, he watches it weekly) he thought, “Hey, that writer seemed to create a feature film that worked as a big studio movie while still keeping an existing and uniquely British sensibility.” (I was an avid Monty Python fan growing up, one of those guys who quoted
Holy
Grail
to the annoyance of all my friends, except of course for those friends with whom I was quoting Monty Python.) So Jay sought me out. When my agent called and asked if I’d ever heard of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
I said, “Yes, heard of it.” But let’s get the first horror out of the way immediately.
I
had never read the book or any Douglas Adams before I was told of this
assignment.
Now, some of you may have passed out at this point after shouting, “WHAT?!? BLASPHEMY!,” but I’ve come to believe this gave me a huge advantage in approaching the material. I had no preconceived notions in my head. When I was sent a draft of the script (which was the last draft Douglas worked on before his death) I got to read it as what it was: a blueprint for a movie. And without any knowledge of Babel fish and Ultimate Questions and Vogons, I was able to formulate an opinion of where it worked as a feature film and where it needed work.

You should know that my first reaction—literally, my very first reaction after putting the script down—was, “I can’t write this, this guy’s a genius and I’m no genius.” I thought to myself, “There is no way I’m going to try to write words that blend seamlessly with this guy’s words.” It was my
Wayne’s World
“I’m not worthy” moment. I mean, really, this is a guy who wrote “‘... there is an art to flying,’ said Ford, ‘or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.’ ” I’m not sure I could ever write a line like that. But I wanted to meet Jay Roach. So I took the meeting to discuss the script thinking, “Maybe he’ll ask me to write
Meet the Fockers
” (yes, I can be that whorish).

I gave Jay some of my thoughts, pointed out some structural and thematic concerns, and much to my surprise, he agreed with most of what I was saying. And when I told him of my “I’m not worthy” moment, he said, “I think you’re perfect for it and that attitude will probably help you.” And the more we talked about the project, the more excited I became. I mean, how can you not get excited talking about poetry as torture or nuclear missiles that turn into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias? Assignments like this don’t come along every day. Actually they
never
come along. So after pitching my ideas to the Disney and Spyglass executives and Robbie, who was there on behalf of Douglas’s estate, I got the job and started writing in September of 2002.

What gives you the right to decide what stays and what
goes, you formulaic chicken-writing bastard?

Hey, let’s keep it clean. My mother will probably read this.

Keep in mind, I started with Douglas’s last draft, so I not only had the new ideas and concepts he had invented specifically for the screenplay (brilliant ideas, too—truly humbling), but also some evidence of what he was prepared to let go of (and in many cases, I thought he had been too hard on himself and put things back in).

To familiarize myself with the material, I thought it best to go back and become acquainted with it in chronological order. It started as a radio play. So I was sent all of the radio plays on CD. I would listen to them in my car, and for those blissful fifteen to twenty hours was actually oblivious to the deeply loathed LA traffic. It was while listening to those radio plays that I first heard what was actually the opening to
The Restaurant at the End
of the Universe,
which was a
Guide
entry that started “The story so far . . .” It goes on to summarize what happened in
The Hitchhiker’sGuide to the Galaxy
and I realized that was what the script needed. That one summary expressed some ideas and themes more clearly than the screenplay did. And suddenly, it became clearer to me what the script was missing, and I suddenly had some hope that I might be able to fill in some of the missing pieces.

Next, I read the book with pen and highlighter in hand, underlining passages that had been left out that I wanted to try to get back in and making notes on characters and themes that were present in the book but not really playing as well as they could in the screenplay. I was going to watch the TV show, but Jay suggested that I not do that, just so that I wouldn’t have any of those images in my head. The idea was to try to
create
something rather than
re
-create (so for that reason, I never watched it. Do you hear me, BBC? I NEVER WATCHED THE TV SERIES). I did, however, buy a book that had the scripts for the radio plays.
¹⁶
When I started writing, I had the novel on one side of my G4 laptop and the radio playscripts on the other side. They are both well worn.

I was also given another invaluable piece of source material. Robbie Stamp, who became an integral ally in my writing process on this film as he was able to answer the “What would Douglas have wanted?” questions, forwarded to me electronic copies of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
files from Douglas’s hard drive; notes on his drafts, notes from him to the studio, random ideas and bits of dialogue exchanges, etc. Receiving this was a real thrill. I felt like Moses at the burning bush when I opened these files, a sort of “take the sandals off, you’re on holy ground” moment. It also gave me a peek into his process. There were unfinished scenes, character back stories and notes to himself on areas where he was having problems. I loved reading Douglas’s unedited musings and tried to put as many of them into the screenplay as I could.

My goal in the writing was to be like an editor on a feature film. If an editor has done his job well, you don’t feel his or her presence. That was my aim here. I thought, if people read this script—especially people who knew Douglas or knew the material well—and can’t tell the difference between what I created and what Douglas did, then I will have succeeded. I was never trying to put my stamp on this material or bring my “voice” to it (whatever the hell that elusive thing is).

I started reading his other works, reading biographies, watching documentaries (graciously sent to me by Joel Greengrass), and I found myself feeling an odd connection to the man I had never met. There were some eerie similarities between us: mutual love of Macs, wannabe rock guitarists, world-class procrastinators, avoidance a huge part of the writing process, love of satire, belief that nothing is so sacred it can’t be poked fun at— to name a few. The biggest difference, however, was that Douglas was an amazing conceptual thinker and I tend to be stronger with structure. This, as it turns out, was a stroke of good luck because many of the concepts were already there, they just needed a tighter structure in which to exist and thrive.

So . . . what exactly did you change? More importantly,
what did you think was worthy enough to add?

That’s a hard question to answer because it depends on whether you are comparing the final shooting script to the book or to the screenplay that I inherited from Douglas. If you compare it to the screenplay, then the answer is that I added very little. One of the things I really admire about Douglas is that he was willing to keep
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
an organic evolving entity. While reading the various drafts and familiarizing myself with the history of
Hitchhiker’s,
I noticed that most of the incarnations seemed to contradict themselves. Douglas had a very refreshing lack of faithfulness to himself, so since
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was in a constant state of revision by its creator, I felt a certain amount of freedom to continue carrying that torch, mostly with the new concepts, characters and plot devices that Douglas had already created. Naturally, there were holes that needed to be filled so some new material and dialogue was required. But I was always going to the source material to find the right voice and tone.

Was this a tough adaptation?

Douglas had a famous quote about deadlines and how he loved the whooshing sound they made as they rushed past. One of my favourite quotes about writing is “I hate writing, I love having written.” This seems to be my mantra, and I have hated, loathed or dreaded writing just about every draft I’ve ever been involved with, mostly because writing is such a lonely and demoralizing process (with the exception of
Chicken Run
—I did have an unusually good time on that one). And people have said to me, “Wow, adapting
Hitchhiker’s
must have been hard.” But I can honestly say I have never enjoyed writing a script more. And it is all because I had such amazing source material (and collaborators). Whenever I would get the least bit hung up on something, I would simply open up one of the books and either find what I was looking for or find the spark of inspiration I needed to create something new. I loved writing this movie, love having written it, and am still loving the writing I am doing today.

I finished my first draft just before Christmas 2002. It was 152 pages long.

152 pages!? What did you do next?

I played dumb to the studio. “What? You think that’s long? Compared to
Lord of the Rings
it’s a short!” They weren’t buying it. So I started the painful process of cutting. And I didn’t want to cut any of it. Didn’t know
what
to cut. Sent it to a couple of writer friends and asked “What
should
I cut?” And they each said, “I understand your dilemma. IT’S ALL GOOD!” And it was. I give a huge chunk of the credit to Douglas, obviously, because I was mostly rearranging, tightening and enhancing his existing concepts. And the studio was very excited about the first draft. They felt I had created a structure that finally worked. It was just too long.

First drafts for a screenwriter are usually the easiest because you don’t have any notes from the studio and there is nothing but hope and possibility ahead of you. And in this case, I didn’t have the blank-page problem because, as I mentioned, I had such excellent source material.

But second drafts are tough and third drafts are the toughest, mostly because you now know what
doesn’t
work and your choices are becoming more and more limited. But I knew it was too long. And as Jay rightfully pointed out, you can’t have a two-and-a-half-hour comedy. So I got Draft 2 down to 122 pages. Maybe one day, after the movie comes out, they’ll let me post my first draft on the Web so I can say to all the fans who want to drag me to the nearest stake and set it ablaze, “See! I wanted this in the movie, too! But they wouldn’t let me put it in, I tell you! They wouldn’t let me!”

It was during the trimming-down phase that I found myself facing what had been the dilemma that prevented
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
from becoming a feature film for the last twenty years, and this dilemma can be summed up in the words of an executive on the project (who shall remain nameless because . . . well, because I’m not that stupid). He said, “We aren’t going to make a $90 million cult film.” And I get that. I understand. If I had turned in a draft that could be made for $15 million, they would have more or less let us do what we wanted. But everyone knew the budget for this movie was going to be, at the very least, $50 million. And when that kind of money is on the line, those who are putting up the money tend to want a film that will appeal to as wide an audience as possible to ensure some return on their investment (and rightfully so). But it put me in the position of being the servant of two masters because on the one hand I desperately wanted to make sure that the integrity and distinctive sensibility of the book was being maintained, but on the other I wanted to be fiscally responsible to those signing my cheques.