From Full Monty and Slumdog to Hunger Games 2: Rise and rise of Yorkshire’s Simon Beaufoy

Winning an Oscar and then being nominated for another the following year gives anyone in the film industry more than a little bit of clout.

Ask Simon Beaufoy, the Yorkshireman behind The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire (for which he won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2009) and 127 Hours has just been hired to write Catching Fire, the second book in the series by Suzanne Collins which gave the world The Hunger Games.

At the last count, the movie had taken a whopping $155m at the box office in the US alone. Suddenly rising star Jennifer Lawrence – Oscar-nominated for Winter’s Bone and then nabbed to headline The Hunger Games – is being criticised for being too fat. It’s a by-product of fame and fortune.

Beaufoy doesn’t have to go through all that nonsense. His problems are rather more serious. Having landed the job of adapting Collins’s second book – she did the first – he was shaken when the film’s director, Gary Ross, abruptly left the project.

Beaufoy is prevented from discussing the Ross scenario and is awaiting news of his replacement. Various names, from David Cronenberg to Alfonso Cuaron, have been rumoured. In the meantime Beaufoy continues his trans-Atlantic phone calls to Suzanne Collins as he works his way into her world.

The story of Katniss Everdeen, heroine of a televised fight to the death, in The Hunger Games was released in 2008 and became a publishing phenomenon.

“Suzanne knows a huge amount about warfare,” says Beaufoy. “She’s absolutely fascinating about what the subtext of these stories is all about – that it’s a war trilogy, an examination of different forms of warfare and countries under different kinds of states of war.

“The first one is a survival story. The second book is underground revolution and the price one has to pay as a country when you decide to rebel. The third one is about all-out war. She’s brilliant, very funny, and she knows her stuff.”

She’s also fiercely protective of her creation, its landscape and the characters that inhabit it. Beaufoy sees that as a benefit, not a detriment. I liken Collins’s fan base to Tolkien aficionados and suggest that having an existing author around must be akin to a big, hairy fly in the ointment. Beaufoy disagrees.

“My approach to adapting has always been to take work that can be radically adapted. So far, the authors have been very understanding of that process. Sticking very closely to the work is actually the hardest thing to do.

“Paul Torday – author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen – gave us his blessing and said ‘Good luck with it’, so let’s get on with ruining his book! I’ve been rather cavalier, to be honest, in the past in order to turn (a book) into something cinematic. But with this that’s the wrong approach. You can’t be cavalier with a massive and deeply loyal fan base, which is what The Hunger Games audience is. You have to respect that. This is a whole new challenge for me – of making something cinematic without wholesale change.”

He adds: “You have to be very respectful of the people who love the books. And I mean love the books and believe in the characters. But, at the same time, it’s got to be a completely beguiling piece of cinema and to do that, things have to change. I’m trying to find a way of doing that in a quite subtle way.”

Beaufoy began his career writing original screenplays, such as The Full Monty. More recently his scripts have been adaptations of existing books such as Vikas Swarup’s Q&A, which became Slumdog Millionaire, American climber Aron Ralston’s 2004 memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place which became 127 Hours and Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. The change in his raison d’être is, he says, quite simple.

“The industry has become very, very risk averse,” he says.

“Writing adaptations is a way of mitigating risk because you’ve already got a piece of work that everyone can sit around and discuss before you even start the process. And quite often that piece of work has already been successful in its own genre – a play or a novel.

“But there are also only so many original ideas that you can have. For me they come once every three or four years. My interests tend to range very widely and for that adapting is very good because you can leap from one genre to another and have the safety net of a previous work there already to ground you and help you.”

I reminisce about his early scripts for films like Among Giants and The Darkest Light. The former dealt with black economy workers; the latter with foot and mouth disease. Hardly box office gold. Beaufoy agrees.

“My career has taken some strange paths but I’ve never set out to be a blockbuster person,” he says. “None of the films that I’ve ever done have been. They’ve still been very character-based, unusual pieces. Neither Slumdog Millionaire nor 127 Hours or The Full Monty were ever pieces that were looking for the Oscars but they sort of all ended up there.

“As I’ve got older I’ve moved more towards that single person that drives a piece of work. With ensemble pieces you don’t quite get that same sense of kinetic forward motion because you’re sharing things out amongst a group. The second book (in Collins’s trilogy) is a character study [and] I can completely get inside those characters.

“The original pieces of work that I’ve done have been very personal, whereas with adaptations I feel freer to go into all sorts of different worlds. If I move back to doing an original it will be much more likely to be based in Hebden Bridge...”