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“The biggest problem with a lot of Australian films is there are no ideas in them, no great heroic gestures,” screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli said before the announcement last night of the AWGIEs, the Australian Writers’ Guild prizes for excellence in screen, television, stage and radio writing.

“This is partly because, once you’re working in Australia, you’re restricted to Australian novels. The big agencies buy the rights to everything that comes out.”

Monticelli won an AWGIE for her film adaptation of Disgrace, the 1999 novel that won South African writer JMCoetzee the Booker Prize.
Although film rights had been taken very early, they included a condition that Coetzee had to approve the script.

“A number of different people tried to get the project up but weren’t successful,” Monticelli said.

“I had to wait in a queue, and I knew I was up against bigger guns.”
Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002, which made it easier for Monticelli to approach “the greatest writer of our generation”.

“The book was so perfect I didn’t want to bastardise it,” Monticelli said. “I haven’t changed anything but the ending, and that took a little bit of negotiating, but Coetzee was very generous.”

This is Monticelli’s first adaptation, although she wrote the screenplay for La Spagnola, directed by her husband, Steve Jacobs, who also directs Disgrace.

The film stars John Malkovich as David, Coetzee’s ageing university professor, whose illicit affair with a student ends his career and leads to him moving to his daughter’s farm, where a terrible event occurs. The film will be shown in Sydney next month after debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Source The Australian