A correction was made to this article on Sept. 21, 2004.
It's a conundrum right up there with the chicken and the egg. Which came first: "Millions" the movie, directed by
Danny Boyle from a script by
Frank Cottrell Boyce; or "Millions" the novel, also written by Cottrell Boyce?
Strictly in order of public appearance, the answer is the book, just published in Blighty to rave reviews and snapped up by Harper Collins in the U.S. for a six-figure sum. Yet the movie, due out this fall via Pathe in Britain and Fox Searchlight in America, is not an adaptation of the novel.
If anything, the book is a novelization of the film, but that's not how it's billed. The publishers are pitching it, and the critics welcoming it, as an original work of fiction in its own right.
A similar path was taken by the 1970 pic "Love Story," which was first a screenplay, then a bestseller, and later the same year, a hit film.
Cottrell Boyce, whose credits include "Hilary and Jackie" and "24 Hour Party People," first wrote "Millions" as an original screenplay. Two young Liverpool brothers, still recovering from the recent death of their mother, stumble across a sack of stolen cash, and have just one weekend to spend it before it becomes worthless (for reasons too arcane to explain). Realism blends with something more magical: The younger boy is visited by saints who tell him stories that he uses as a guide to life.
Over dinner on the night the movie was greenlit by Pathe, it was Boyle who suggested Cottrell Boyce should rewrite it as a novel. So while Boyle was shooting, Cottrell Boyce was scribbling prose at the side of the set. Instead of setting out to transcribe the movie experience, he created the story afresh with a first-person narrative (from the viewpoint of the younger brother) that's absent from the film. His new inventions, in turn, fed back into the making of the movie.
"I wrote the book during the actual filming, so I was aware of what was working and what wasn't working," Cottrell Boyce explains. "I had a much freer hand than I would have if I'd been writing a novelization. I didn't feel answerable to the movie, and the movie isn't answerable to the book. Then Danny read it and really liked it, and there were things in the novel that he wanted to film."
In the book, there was an encounter with St. Peter that Cottrell Boyce had left out of the screenplay, "because I thought it was really uncinematic." Boyle seized upon it: "Of course he's so brilliant he made it work," says Cottrell Boyce. "I suppose I was aiming too low by leaving it out in the first place."
Nonetheless, despite this ebb and flow of mutual influence between book and film, Cottrell Boyce believes they have ended up with distinct identities.
"I didn't want the film to be like the book, although the plot is exactly the same. The difference is in the tone. The film has all this thriller stuff that's really sweaty, which Danny does so well, and the book is more of a comedy."
Cottrell Boyce says the core audience for his novel is 9-12 years old, whereas the film plays older.
The novel has already taken on a life of its own in the publishing world. It was the children's hit of last year's Frankfurt Book Fair, selling to all the major territories. Several publishers, including Harper Collins, also paid big money for Cottrell Boyce's second, unwritten novel, another children's book. With seven kids of his own, it's a market he's well qualified to write for.
Even though Harper Collins and Fox are both part of the News Corp. empire, the publisher won't cramp the book's potential by linking it too closely with the movie. Yet if the book can establish its own fanbase, that will create a ready-made audience that the filmmakers couldn't otherwise have dreamed of for such a quirky little Britpic.
A similar path was taken by the 1970 pic "Love Story," which was first a screenplay, then a bestseller, and later the same year, a hit film.
"From Danny's point of view it's great, because this is a hard film to define," says Cottrell Boyce. "It's not a genre piece, it's not a romantic comedy. So it will be good to have the book to define it."
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