As a global bestseller with rave reviews, set in New York, and with a cult following, A Little Life appears to have all the ingredients for a hit television show. But according to its author, Hanya Yanagihara, scripts for a screen adaptation of the hit novel have been rejected by numerous networks, streaming services and studios, with some network executives even requesting that she make the harrowing story “more like Sex and the City”.
Yanagihara said she started working on scripts for a 12-part show with three other co-writers four years ago. They created four different scrips for the first four episodes of the series and detailed outlines for a further eight episodes. But after getting a commission from the streaming service Hulu, it was not picked up and, she told the Observer, “since then it’s been pretty much rejected by everyone”.
Since its publication in 2015, A Little Life, which tells the story of university friends Jude, Malcolm, Willem and JB, and tackles trauma, abuse and suicide, has sold more than a million copies, been shortlisted for the Booker prizez, declared a modern-day classic, and adapted into a four-hour play by the acclaimed director Ivo van Hove. But Yanagihara, whose latest novel To Paradise has been compared to Tolstoy, said her attempts to create a screen version have led to rejections in both the US and the UK.
She blames her $60m budget and requirement to have creative control, as well as “discomfort with the subject matter”. “I have heard a couple of people say that they wanted it to be like Sex and the City – network executives – which really makes me worried,” she said. “Because there are other ways to crack this book and to interpret it and to bring it to screen.”
In 2016 A Little Life was optioned by producer Scott Rudin and theatre director Joe Mantello but it was mutually ended the following year.
Out of loyalty to its fans, she refuses to sell a version of the show that does not have her approval.
“This instinct that sometimes happens in Hollywood where you buy something and then make it into something else, I do feel that I would owe the readers and the fans of this book something, and it would not be just to sell it for the sake of selling it, and to have it made into something completely unrecognisable that betrays the themes and the tone of the book,” she said.
While she wasn’t shocked by the television industry’s response, she was surprised because, although it may not have the mass appeal of Game of Thrones, she believes it would attract a strong global audience. “I do think that it has a real earned audience and that it could really find an international audience as well,” she said. “But yes, it is not going to be a show for everyone. And in America we’re simultaneously at a point where there’s more content than ever needed and yet people are being also more careful about what they invest in.”
She worked on the 12 episodes with playwrights-turned-TV writers in key roles. Her collaborators recommended that she cast British actors, advising her that their classical training would keep them true to the script, that they were more affordable and not precious about nudity. “It was kind of a joke but they also meant it,” she said. “They had worked with a lot of British actors and they knew that they would have the sort of fearlessness to tackle the roles as we wrote them.”
The series would be filmed in New York, use some CGI to portray moments imagined by Jude, the lead character, and take some inspiration from van Hove’s stage adaptation. “Instead of just being a literal translation, it should be an interpretation and one that used the medium to its greatest investability. So we thought a lot about that, about how to actually visualise it and animate it and make it earn its place as a TV show.”
As well as hair, makeup and costumes, it would use light and colour to demonstrate the passing of time, she said. She also wants it to have the pace of a mystery or a thriller. “So in the first part of the series, the question would be ‘what happened to Jude?’, and the second part would be ‘will he survive it?’”
She said the “spectacular” stage production, which had its world premiere in Amsterdam in 2018, will be performed for the first time in the UK at the Edinburgh international festival in August before going to New York.
As Yanagihara toured the UK last week to promote To Paradise, she said she was struck by the enthusiasm and the youth of readers. “To hear people say in the signing line that they grew up with A Little Life makes me feel very old but it also is a reminder that once the book is published it isn’t your own any more, it becomes the readers’.
“And if you’re very lucky, as I have been, then a different group of readers finds the book and makes it their own and gives it a different life. And it’s been humbling to see and an honour and a real pleasant surprise too.”
