Last week I attended a very interesting
interview. It was one of those rare occasions on which you have the opportunity
of learning a bit more about a person whose work you admire: Nick Hornby. As I
pointed out some months ago literature and cinema are closely linked and very
often, it is impossible to understand films without the direct influence of
literature. I dare say that this English writer has become a household name for
the people who are interested in contemporary fiction but the work of this
author has been influential in the lives of cinema-goers who are not familiar
with his novels. In brief, most of his novels have been adapted for the big
screen and perhaps the name Nick Hornby doesn´t ring a bell but what about the
following films: High Fidelity, About a Boy or Fever
Pitch?
The official trailer for About a Boy.
If you´re into cinema and especially into
comedies, I´m sure you´ve watched some of these films. Probably one of the
reasons why Horby´s stories appeal to viewers/ readers is his ability to create
characters whose concerns, emotions and attitudes are so universal. His novels
may take place in England
but the readers in Germany, in Spain
or in the States feel moved in the same way as British readers do. And that´s why,
his stories are usually adapted for the big screen by American people and take
place in the States but as Nick Hornby recognises, it doesn´t matter because
however British his characters may look, the important thing is to be able
to translate the worries, aspirations, dreams and failures that define every
character to the screen. In this sense, Nick Hornby feels grateful to
film-makers, producers, musicians and all the people involved in making films
for their effort and work because making a film is such a difficult business
that it is not easy to gather the right group of people - at the right time – in order to work together on the creation of
a story . And that´s one of the lessons
that I learnt from Nick Hornby: we often take films for granted. I must confess
that I had already reached that conclusion myself but sometimes we do need to
be reminded of the more obvious things. We have a look at the newspaper or on
the Internet and we find out that there´s a new film at our local cinema and
next week there´ll probably be another one but we must be aware that beyond the
pictures on the screen which move us in very different ways, there are lots of
people working really hard and those people are part of the film industry, the
industry that trades in images and emotions, invisible but powerful currency,
don´t you think?
Have you
watched any of the films based on the novels by Nick Hornby? What do you think
about them?
