For the fifth feature in our War of the Worlds coverage we speak to Writer and Executive Producer Peter Harness.

Doctor Who and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell screenwriter Peter Harness has taken on the challenge of adapting H.G. Wells’ classic tale for TV. Nick Joy spoke to him under a tarpaulin on a rainy beach near Liverpool.

This is all pumped down from high altitude by drones [Laughs].

I guess the first question everyone is going to ask is about how close your adaptation is to Wells.

It’s not massively faithful to be honest. When I do adaptations I try to follow the spirit of the original and have an experience that feels how reading the book feels. Not all of the things that happen in the book happen for the same reason or at the same time or with the same characters. But I think that the set pieces that people will remember from the book and the spirit of it are there. I also wanted to make it new and feel as if it was unexpected.

So there are twists that people won’t expect?

There might be…

What makes War of the Worlds timely for adaptation now?

The book and the adaptation are about what it must be like to be going about your everyday business and suddenly get blindsided by a war landing on your doorstep, with weapons you don’t understand, becoming refugees and suddenly having to leave everything and being terrified by an enemy you don’t know. So I think it’s incredibly relevant. It’s always going to be relevant somewhere in the globe. It’s stuff that we’re thinking about a lot at the moment and also it’s set right at the high point of the British Empire and I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to be British at the moment and what remains of the Empire. It’s quite a nice place to park it.

As far as I’m concerned sci-fi and fantasy are about reflecting the real world back in a way that entities you to raise questions that might be rather on the nose to raise in another form. I think you can bring things up and still be very entertaining and weird and interesting. I like to have some politics in stuff that I write. I like to crowbar it in.

When you adapt a popular text are you concerned that the hard-core fans will come at you?

Hey, I’ve written for Doctor Who! I’ve survived hard-core fans! I can only do my best in terms of what I think the book is. You can’t just copy a book out straight onto screen because it would be very slow and very strange. In this instance, neither of our two lead characters would have a name and one of them would get dropped off by her husband in Leatherhead within the first ten minutes and miss the entire story. I’m trying to give people who love Wells and the book what they want, and everything in the book is in there. It’s easy to forget that The War of the Worlds is a very brutal and scary book. It’s not a nice easy piece of Victoriana. It’s genuinely quite unsettling – that’s what I took away from the book and hopefully that’s what I manage to get on screen.

Do you rate any of the previous versions?

Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds is my key text. It’s the one that I grew up with and remember listening to in the back of the car. I’m genuinely very fond of it – it’s a good thing.

How does writing something like this compare with say your work on the Doctor Who two-parter The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon Inversion?

You can kind of go anywhere and do anything like with Doctor Who, but this is a specific time period and it’s a bit more adult than Doctor Who. You can be a bit more violent and slightly sexy.

You previously adapted Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for TV, which is a beast of a book. Was it a case this time of what to add rather than what to take out?

In a way. The book is about 120 pages long I think and that’s a good length for three hours. Strange and Norrell was 1,000 pages and we still had to lose a lot to squeeze it in to seven hours. With Strange and Norrell I tried to get as much of the book as possible into the TV series because I love the characters so much and a lot of her dialogue is perfect. That was a different kind of thing.

With this you’ve got much more room for invention. Wells reports and sketches a lot of things. It’s interesting to read a couple of sentences of his and turn that into ten minutes on screen.

How do find the ending of the novel? Some find it anti-climactic.

I think that as an end point it is fascinating. It’s not an action-filled ending but it’s a great ending. It must have been very surprising at the time and I think the key to adapting this has been to keep that element of surprise with an ending that people already know what it is. A lot of people [watching the series] won’t know what the ending is and will find it surprising. A lot of people are surprised that it’s a book and think it was made by Orson Welles or Steven Spielberg. A lot of people think it was made by Jeff Wayne – that we’re adapting an album into a TV series, which would have been quite funky. It’s preserving the surprise for those who have not seen it before or read the book, while still making it different and new for those who know exactly way happens.

Who do you think your audience is for this show?

I’m hoping to attract a period drama audience and a horror audience. I’ve thought of it as a period horror film more than anything else. You would need hundreds of millions of pounds to realise exactly what was in the book, so you’re forced to be more creative and rely on tension and horror and unsettling, spooky things. That way, like Doctor Who, you have to think of efficient and reasonably cost-efficient ways to be scary and to put some action it.

How would you describe your version of the Martians?

Excellent! Iconic! I’m very chuffed with them and when we saw the first test that the VFX house did, I thought ‘Wow!’ I was very happy. I’m not going to tell you any more than that.

Prior to now, probably the closest the BBC has got to Martian fighting machines is The Tripods. Are you glad that BBC hadn’t tried filming the book before now, because modern technology means that we can have good looking aliens now?

Yes, because I got the chance to do it now. I would have only been about 8 at that time. I hope this has got scale and that the effects look fantastic… I’m very glad they waited. It’s a good job to do it properly.

What’s your role on set? Are you making last minute script changes?

Not really. Most of my stuff is done after the first couple of weeks. For the last episode I’m holding off for a bit to do some rewrites because I’ve been waiting to see how Rafe, Eleanor, Robert and Rupert play their characters. There’s a nice chunk of good character stuff in that episode and I wanted to work out how that would play, so I’ve just left that for myself. I’m changing dialogue, not adding any major scenes. I did that as well with Strange & Norrell. I left off writing the final episode until we’d been shooting for a while because it’s good to see what people’s strengths are and how they’re playing off one another

Are you planning on writing any more Doctor Who episodes?

I don’t think I’m doing any more Doctor Who. I’m not doing any for this new series – they seem to be quite keen on having a team of new writers. It might change, and I’d love to do some more Doctor Who at some point, but it’s also nice to have a couple of years off. I’m waiting for an answer on something, which is another sci-fi thing, so I might have something new to be doing.

The character of Eleanor is a very strong female, and most different to what Wells wrote. Was that part of the project’s appeal to you?

That primarily was the biggest thing I wanted to do with it – to have a female lead, to be our guide through the story, and to have a slightly different dynamic between her and her husband. Eleanor [Tomlinson]’s character is much more of an action character, more capable of dealing with the world as it changes, whereas George [Rafe Spall] is much more sensitive and has a harder time dealing with it.

Was the British setting important for you?

Yes, at least in terms of what I’m writing about, which was notions of being British and colonialism. I think I could have set it whenever and wherever I wanted, but there hadn’t been a proper period adaptation before and I like mashing genres up. I wanted to do a faithful adaptation but with a strong female lead, which I suppose is enough.

 

Follow Sci-Fi Bulletin’s War of the Worlds coverage, with a set location report, interviews with actors Rafe Spall and Rupert Graves, director Craig Viveiros and Visual Effects Producer Angie Wills.