Swords, plotting and the final cut

What is it about 'The Count of Monte Cristo' that inspires endless film versions, asks Robin Buss

More films have been made of Alexandre Dumas's novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, than of almost any other work of fiction. It is not hard to see why. First published in 1845-46 (and the subject of at least half a dozen different adaptations for the theatre before the end of the 19th century), the novel tells a gripping story of injustice and revenge – a story of more or less universal appeal, still much read 200 years after its author's birth.

It does, however, present distinct problems for anyone who tries to adapt it to another medium. The book runs to 1,000 pages and involves some 60 characters in the main plot and sub-plots. Since the earliest American silent film adaptation, made in 1908, the first thing writers have had to decide is what to cut out. The recent mini-series for French television (shown on BBC2 over Christmas 2000), relegated Edmond Dantès' imprisonment in the Château d'If to a flashback, missed out the Roman episodes and concentrated on the Count's revenge on his reappearance in Paris. The new cinema version directed by Kevin Reynolds (who made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), gives full weight to Dantès' imprisonment, but ruthlessly hacks away at characters and subplots in the later part of the story.

I wanted to know how and why the decisions had been made, so I asked the scriptwriter, Jay Wolpert, if Dumas has been easy to cut. "Easy would be selling myself short, but if I said to you 'difficult', I would be overselling myself. It was as if we shook the book on top of a filter and only certain things came dropping out of it. The 'spine' comes falling out of the book and the challenge now is how to write it in the most natural way, not in fidelity to the book. Forget that this is a literary icon. What you must do is make a movie, not film a book."

Cavalier? Well, the movie that he and Reynolds have made belongs to a classic Hollywood genre: "Yes, I do see it as a swashbuckling adventure. If you put my back to the wall, I'd say a swashbrainer. There are themes in this picture that are contemporary, with a little more psychological relevance. I view it as something a little more textured than just a swashbuckler."

It is not all loss, however. Wolpert has slipped in a few characters of his own, notably a sadistic governor at the prison ("I thought it would be great to have a personification of the evil of the system"). He has also made significant changes to the plot. Dantès' arch-enemy Fernand, who has married his fiancée, Mercedes, has a child who turns out in Wolpert's version to be Dantès' own son, conceived just before he went into prison. Wow! Did Dumas miss a trick there? "Yes, I think he did. It's like one shoe dropped and you're waiting for the other." There are also several swordfights ("in the book, everyone wears a sword, but nobody uses it") and a happy ending – which will come as a surprise to readers of the novel, which has us with the Count vanishing alone over the horizon, leaving only an injunction to "wait and hope".

Wolpert has a background in television, as a producer, and his script arose out of a contract that he had with a television studio, allowing him to write a script every year, on a "play-or-pay" basis. "After the first year, they paid me the money and said that they didn't need anything. In the second year, the head of the company wanted to do a TV movie of The Count of Monte Cristo. I was under contract and they had to pay me anyway, so they said: let's let him do it. Everyone loved it except the guy who'd first suggested the idea; so the script reverted to me and my agent submitted it to Spyglass [the co-producers of the film]."

He suspects that the reason the TV studio head didn't like his script was its lack of fidelity to the novel – the man was a big fan of Dumas. You might expect me, as Dumas's translator, to feel the same, but I don't. Here is a film adaptation that makes no claim to give you the full 19th-century novel – the "Monte Cristo experience" – while slipping in a sex scene or two, as a concession to audience expectations. Nor does it, on the other hand, treat this piece of popular fiction with defensive irony. "Producers habitually lose their nerve," Wolpert says. "They start sending it up. It's all done with this tongue-in-cheek humour. But what we have is a serious, straight period adventure with a compelling story. People know they're not watching a send-up." Dumas would surely have applauded, and said: "Now read the book."