James Swallow’s novel Splinter Cell Firewall has been dramatized as part of Radio 4’s Limelight strand (and is available on BBC Sounds). Paul Simpson chatted with co-writer Paul Cornell – who scripted episodes 3, 4, 7 and 8 – about the challenges of bringing a video game to an audio audience…

 

You’ve done audio previously, even if it’s not something people immediately associate with you. How did you come to work on this?

One of the producers and the director of Splinter Cell is Nadia Molinari who I’d done all my previous Radio 4 work with and she asked for me for this. I think, me and Sebastian [Baczkiewicz] were both regarded as safe pairs of hands because they didn’t have very long at all to get this done. The gap between Ubisoft saying ‘Yes you can do this’ and it needing to be on air wasn’t very long at all. So we both dived in and did it.

Basically, perhaps at the detriment to my career, I do whatever across media I think of as a new challenge or fun, and certainly, I’ve always loved working for BBC Radio. There’s something about the sheer professionalism in this, especially their way with actors that I find really enjoyable and it was again this time. We got the most stellar cast imaginable and watching Nadia go through her paces was, as always, incredibly satisfying.

Were you there for the recordings?

I was there for a day and I watched some amazing sessions of very physical acting. During the combats, they’ve often actually grappling with each other. In a good way, the theatricality of it, all that is good about live theatre is brought into these radio dramas. That sense of being in the moment and of actors being able to improvise a little and to bring added depths and to find new angles – it’s like being in a control room looking down on a very exciting theatre group.

How much were you aware of Splinter Cell beforehand?

I’ve played a lot of first person shooters but not this one.

One of the things I wanted to bring to it was, we have scenes where you’ve got to shoot the lightbulb and get around the corner before they see you and get under the train and I think that gives a real feeling of the game. And also the fantastic thing is we’ve got the sound effects and music from the games so this is a proper immersive experience for gamers.

I think this is actually a real breakthrough moment for BBC Radio; it was deliberately designed as such by Lorna [Newman] and Jessica [Mitic], the producers who’ve led on this. Basically, Audible have stolen a march on the rest of the field in terms of the new resurgence of audio and they’ve got lots of computer game licences. The BBC really ought to be at the forefront of this and can quite quickly regain that place. Splinter Cell is an attempt to fly a big flag and say, ‘Look, we can do this really well.’

I think those of us who play games, we all know that particular music cues can induce particular feelings in us. There was a time when I was so immersed in Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls games that a particular music cue would definitely have me looking up at the sky as I walked along to see if a dragon was going to come down at me! That feeling, the knowledge that we can influence the listener in terms of what they’re used to from the game, that’s pretty revolutionary and I want to be a part of this. It’s always my desire to be at the cutting edge of things and this is at the cutting edge.

In the same way that a Big Finish script will name the specific sound effect from Doctor Who that they’re using, were you naming effects from Splinter Cell in your script or was that added by directors?

No, we had very much a list of things in mind, although of course it’s a team game. But we were given things like the goggles, so there’s a big moment when the characters are in the dark and the goggles come on because that’s the central icon of the game really, that’s what you always see in the advertising. It’s just being aware of what the audience expects to hear and very much giving it to them, I think.

What is the process you go through in your mind to handle the lack of visuals from the game? Is it now just pure instinct to use dialogue and sound effects in order to get that across or do you still have to think, ‘Hell, how am I going to get the information across without it being “look over there at that giant monster coming at us”?’

Across the time I’ve been involved in audio, it’s gotten easier, That is, the audio audience has become a bit more sophisticated.

I listen to a lot of current audio from the BBC and those cues will quite often be missed now. If you listen to a drama from Radio 4 Extra, a drama of the past, you’ll quite often get what Tom Stoppard satirised as ‘Stop or I will shoot you with this gun I am holding in my left hand’ (laughs) but now you just miss out that completely and trust the audience to take it from context.

So there’s a bit of that and there’s a bit that the soundscapes have gotten so sophisticated now that we can solidly suggest most things. That’s actually been an evolving process. I do tend to put them in in the first draft and then we see what the actors do and what the soundscape does and 50/50 they come out because other people are doing it instead of my dialogue.

But it is still something that you are very conscious of as you’re writing?

You wouldn’t want to miss it – you want someone to do that beat.

How much leeway did you and Sebastian have in terms of changing the story or were you just converting what was on the Aconyte Books page?

We had a reasonable amount of leeway. Quite often it was about what works on audio – sometimes it was, ‘Do we need that extra voice?’ I’ve changed the ending quite a lot in order to open it up and suggest the possibility of sequels. I think I’ve changed the motivation of some of the bad guys because the book is set in a historical year. We did go with that on first draft and then we all thought, ‘We don’t get much out of it and the listener will tend to assume it’s set right now anyway, so let’s just set it right now.’ That changes the historical outlook of everybody and we were able to do some rather up to the minute stuff about Russia. So yes, it was really quite small but important things, I would say.

You were doing alternate blocks of episodes with Sebastian, two on, two off. Did the two of you sit down with the producers and work through the whole thing first?

The process was this: Jim [Swallow] had prepared a document with it divided into episodes. I think Nadia had shunted that into eight episodes; I think he had twelve or ten. We had literally one meeting, where I was halfway through the book and thinking, ‘Well, this is probably going to have a great ending’ and Sebastian was full of useful and artistic stuff about what he was going to do at the start, so I just said to him, ‘You play through, you do one and two and I’ll do three, four, you do five, six, I’ll do seven and eight.’ That was what they were looking for from us, that straightforward “we can do this”.

On a couple of occasions he ended an episode in a place which meant we had to do a little editing on either side, tiny stuff. It was all really smooth because it had to be; we didn’t have time for it to be anything else. We were both working at the plot at the same time!

So for you what was the biggest challenge of this project overall?

That’s a really good question. I think I put more comedy in. We didn’t really have a tone meeting but in the editing, we kind of settled on an even level of comedy throughout. I always think it humanises characters: as soon as they make you laugh, you like them. And Sam Fisher is so straight down the line, we know who he is and what he does, he’s an ensemble lead and you surround him with interesting people and he runs the show. So a lot of the characters around him, I gave them some side. Sebastian gave our main bad guy a little tic which I followed through with although when I followed through with his tic, it never landed. Sebastian gave him a love of Sinatra and I thought that was great and I could never land mine.

When we were cutting back and forth between two plots, both sides of the plot are talking to the same control. We’ve got two agents in the field doing two different things and we’re relying on one of them to do their thing before the other can do theirs. That’s a nice set up for back and forth, but you’ve got to time their movements really carefully so that they advance their plots at the right speed.

I started with having them being able to talk to each other and it just became sheer hell. So I gave them both a controller in the same place and then we could be more careful about the information they gave each other and they weren’t going to be emoting about each other’s situation unless the controller was on.

Would you like to return to Splinter Cell?

Yes, hugely. I had a great time and I like being regarded as a safe pair of hands. I seem to have gone from novice to that without anything in the middle! I would love to work with Jessica, Lorna or Nadia, all of them again. It’s a brilliant production team and yes, it’d be delightful. And I got to hang out with Sacha Dhawan…

 

New episodes of Splinter Cell air on Fridays at 2.15 pm on Radio 4; the entire series is available to download from BBC Sounds.