[on Le patient anglais (1996)] Michael Ondaatje's novel has the deceptive appearance of being completely cinematic. Brilliant images are scattered across its pages in a mosaic of fractured narratives, as if somebody had already seen a film and was in a hurry trying to remember it. In the course of a single page, the reader can be asked to consider events in Cairo, or Tuscany, or England's West Country during different periods, with different narrators; to meditate on the natures of winds, the mischief of an elbow, the intricacies of a bomb mechanism, the significance of a cave painting. The wise screen adapter approaches such pages with extreme caution. The fool rushes in. When I was writing the screenplay I thought, 'My God, what am I doing!' My friends told me the book was unadaptable. Fortunately, Michael Ondaatje was our greatest ally. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. I didn't do this to subvert what he'd done, but to me there was no obvious way I could make a conventional adaptation of his work. The process of adapting The English Patient required me to join the dots and make a figurative work from a pointillist and abstract one. Any number of versions were possible and I'm certain that the stories I chose to elaborate say as much about my own interests and reading as they do about the book.
