So we’ve set the scene with Bridport and what is going on in this diverse and beautiful market town. So how did the From Page to Screen festival itself come about?

In a series of incidents lost in the mists of time, and over numerous lattes at The Bull, From Page to Screen was born.  Brought together by Lindsay Brooks, at that time the new director of the Bridport Arts Centre, Steven Horner and Nic Jeune sat down together to discuss their ideas for bringing a film festival to Bridport. “I felt strongly that there was an audience and a need for film in Bridport” says Steven “we needed to find a way to give it an edge that was different to every other festival… how could we make it specific to Bridport?” The obvious answer was to embrace Bridport’s already established reputation as a centre for literature, with the Literary Festival and the Bridport Prize.With this in mind, the first event was a screening of John Fowles’ The Collector and The Last Chapter as part of the Bridport Literary Festival 2007.

A screening of the films and a Q&A with adapting screenwriter David Tringham were sellout events, and it became apparent that the marriage of books and film in Bridport could be something that would work. In 2009, came a pilot season of one film a day for five days, including Che, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Girl with a Pearl Earring with producer Andy Paterson and screenwriter Olivia Hetreed (now known as screenwriter on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and making a repeat visit to talk about this film at the festival this year).

The festival was gaining momentum; “Our biggest decision at the time was, it had to be an excellent film, it had to be an excellent adaptation, and it didn’t have to be a lot like the book, contrary to a lot of people’s views”.  For Nic and Steven as “film people” the main point of the adaptation was not how good the book was, but did the film tell the story of the book visually and still get across the essence of ideas, did it transcend the literature?  “It isn’t about mimicking the book into celluloid; it’s about could adaptation be an art form in it’s own right” says Nic. This is a question that still fuels the heart of the festival and comes up time and time again in festival discussion; there’s more to adaptation than just putting the book on screen.

Francine Stock (guest curator 2012) said recently;  “Adaptation is not all about words!  It’s mise en scene, also – surely that’s very much the point…  a 3 second shot of Diagon Alley can convey what JK Rowling takes 2 or 3 pages to describe”. With film able to do visually or through sound design in 30 seconds what it might take a book two chapters to say, the two forms are coiled together, with a huge range of interpretation and re-imagining that screenwriters and directors can, if they choose, bring to an adaptation. Exploring this is at the heart of From Page to Screen.

Things did not all run smoothly in the 2009 pilot season (a near disaster with distribution and speaker problems at Che “we were selling tickets for an event that possibly had no film and no speaker…” says Nic jovially, though I doubt he was so jovial at the time) but by the last night, spirits were high “we finished by thinking well, that wasn’t bad!” says Nic “well” puts in Steven, feet on the floor “we finished thinking it went better than we thought….”.

But for Nic the realisation of this pilot season really turning into something came as Olivia Hetreed pulled out her copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring; suddenly the adaptation process slotted into place; “here was that physical copy of the book that this screenwriter had absorbed, broken down… you could see people going ok… book, person, film, the whole process”.

This is the genesis of the entire From Page to Screen idea; the festival bug had bitten, and with the final night a huge success they were keen to begin to emulate this in future years.

Read Part Two tomorrow to find out what happened next!