Treasure Island Kids

Treasure Island Kids was the overall title for three children’s movies I wrote for Daybreak Films about a group of children at a summer camp on an island in the Pacific which turned out to be the place where the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island had actually taken place. In The Battle of Treasure Island, the first movie, which I directed, the kids arrive at the ramshackle camp and are not impressed with the facilities or the eccentric old couple running it. So much so that they want to...

War and Peace

    One of the delights of working on the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an eight hour mini series was that the director, Robert Dornhelm,is a brilliant cook, so script sessions became long leisurely talks over the best combinations of food and wine imaginable. And because writing the script required me to be in Rome for many weeks, staying at the hotel where Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway had been guests and strolling across the city to the offices of Lux Vide, the production company every day, the hardship...

The Borrowers

After I had sold Small Soldiers to Spielberg I was asked by Working Title to write a movie based on the characters in Mary Norton's wonderful "Borrowers" books: possibly because I was regarded as the expert on little people! I created a modern story about a Borrowing family who had the save the house they lived in from the depredations of a lawyer who ended up being played by the inestimable John Goodman. Directed by Peter Hewitt, it looked gorgeous and is still popular with kids today. Hugh Laurie, now...

Small Soldiers

Small Soldiers was the first film script I sold, and was written while I was still living in England - although by then I was commuting to arin County several times a year to work on The Young Indian Jones Chronicles. I had been working on the idea for years but was never able to find a story to fit the concept. But when I got an agent in LA and began pitching my ideas around the town, this one aroused enthusiasm. Nobody hired me to write the script, but...

Mists of Avalon

I felt truly honoured when TNT asked me to adapt Marion Zimmer Bradley's extraordinary saga of the Arthurian saga as seen through the point of view of the women of the era. Women in particular award it the same enthusiasm that's usually reserved for The Lord of the Rings, and I was profoundly relieved that I didn't face a barrage of criticism for the fairly large structural changes I had to make. But I did them in the spirit of the book and everyone seemed to accept them in good...

Jules Verniana

Here are some of the colourful colours used to help make Verne's works bestsellers in 19th century France. His publisher Hetzel certainly had a flair for the eye-catching. I'm sure these jackets had the same sort of impact as the covers of Tintin comic books have in France today. ...

Jules Verne – Canadian article