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Jasper Jones creator: 'I starved for 10 years to get to this point'

Linda Morris

When Craig Silvey​ was called in to translate his book, Jasper Jones, to film he did what many authors in a similar position find impossible to do: he began from scratch.

With "fresh divination", he stripped back scenes and dialogue, keeping faith with his story of small-town prejudice in 1960s Western Australia without being slavish to it. 

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Trailer: Jasper Jones

Adapted from Craig Silvey's bestselling Australian novel and featuring a stellar cast including Toni Collette, Hugo Weaving, Levi Miller, Angourie Rice, Dan Wyllie and Aaron McGrath, Jasper Jones is the story of Charlie Bucktin, a bookish boy of 14 living in a small town in Western Australia.

The mother's role played by Toni Collette was fleshed out while others including that of mad Jack Lionel, played by Hugo Weaving, were curtailed and he reluctantly left other poignant book moments lying on the cutting floor. It was a painful but necessary exorcism. 

"Obviously, I was advocating for a nine-hour epic with a number of intervals, but ultimately I had to concede that elements of the novel weren't going to make it to the screen," Silvey says of the film adaption of the 2009 Australian book classic that has sold half a million copies and been likened in spirit to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird.

As the film makes its premiere this weekend ahead of its cinematic release in March, the Fremantle-born Silvey concedes fiction cannot be contained to book covers.

"As a novelist you are never quite finished with a manuscript, there is just a point where you need to leave off for your own sanity.

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"I've been touring this novel for a while, I give readings at events and constantly want to pause to edit and improve it. You are never quite satisfied so this [film] was an opportunity to get stuck in and make it better"

Rachel Perkins of Bran Nue Dae (2010) and Radiance (1998) directs a stellar local cast in the story of 14-year-old Charlie Bucktin​ who is visited one night by an outcast indigenous boy, the eponymous Jasper Jones, who has found a girl hanging from a tree limb and wants Charlie's help to find her killer.

The idea for Jasper Jones arrived a decade ago as an insistent voice in his head, much in the manner the character arrives at Bucktin's moonlit window in the novel's opening scenes.

Ploughing through his second novel, Silvey reluctantly set that project aside and spent 18 months following this unformed character of Jones into the dark underbelly of rural life in the fictional town of Corrigan.

Inspired by the southern gothic works of Mark Twain, Lee and Truman Capote, Silvey says the novel – and film – is about adults who refuse to grow up, and children who must. 

The hamlet of Pemberton stands in for Corrigan in the film version, a town where Silvey once spent summer holidays. 

"Having grown up as a sensitive and bookish kid in a country town, and feeling displaced on account of that; being terrified by anything from insects, girls, heights and magpies, it is hard to deny that a lot of my history and voice is echoed by Charlie.

"The older I get the more I aspire to be a little more like Jasper Jones, someone who is very thoughtful and patient and independent. There's a lot to admire about Jasper." 

Like Charlie, Silvey was "born to read". He eschewed university to write, and took on menial labouring and cleaning jobs to support the writing, and says his brother wore down his credit card "to the nub" for him. "I starved for 10 years to get to this point," he says.

Silvey shares credit for the screenplay with Shaun Grant, having been called in, he says, for a rewrite and the development of a shooting script.

The untried Silvey was "hungry" for the opportunity and had "six difficult weeks" of no sleep to meet deadline.   

"It was page one, I went right back, which isn't to say the preceding work was entirely abandoned at all. 

"Shaun is a very talented and experienced screenwriter and he was essential in identifying a lot of the challenges in translating the novel to screen, one of which is that Charlie, the book's narrator, is quite a passive character. 

"So Charlie becomes a little more of a detective in the adaptation, which doesn't undermine the truth of his character as seen in the novel, which describes a very inquisitive boy who spends a lot of time trying to understand things."

On set for every day of the eight-week shoot, Silvey watched the rushes come in and was "in and out" of the editing suite.   

Levi Miller's Charlie, says Silvey, is impressive and he predicts big things for Angourie Rice, who plays Eliza Wishart, object of Charlie's first crush. 

The author fought hard for the inclusion of the pivotal scene in which Charlie's friend, Jeffrey Lu, whom he considers one of his greatest literary creations, triumphs against the town bullies in a district cricket match. 

"I did have to use this passionate lobby of readers to inveigle the producers to let me have that moment." Silvey grins: "Let's be honest, the director Rachel Perkins is no fan of cricket."