Fans of Douglas Adams's cult classic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, are eagerly awaiting the decades-in-gestation film version. Donald Clarke visits the film set, gets a first peek at Marvin the Paranoid Android, Slartibartfast and Zaphod Beeblebrox and talks to keeper of the flame, executive producer Robbie Stamp and Martin Freeman aka Arthur Dent
The late Douglas Adams, who made his name blending the mundane with the fantastic, might have enjoyed the scene. A huddle of journalists - one Austrian, two Germans, an Englishman, me, others - are squinting curiously at a tiny triangle of grass barely visible beyond a high fence and a jumble of close-circuit cameras. "I think I see an elbow," somebody says hopefully.
It's June of 2004 and we are examining the back of the Big Brother House at Elstree Studios on the outskirts of London. Every Friday night, shooting the film version of Adams's immortal radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has to be suspended while a phalanx of morons arrives to hear whether Biff, Zippy or Fernando (actually, what were their names?) will be transported, via a brief tarry in tabloid wonderland, to eternal oblivion.
The Hitchhiker's Guide famously begins with Arthur Dent, a man as ordinary as men get, seeing the Earth destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Were he able to see what has become of us, Adams may consider a visit from the Vogon destroyers long overdue.
Eventually we are led through the Big Brother control centre to a small, bakingly hot room in which Hitchhiker's executive producer Robbie Stamp, once a friend of Adams and now, as we shall see, the worryingly zealous curator of his memory, shows us an intriguing collection of drawings, models and blueprints. Here are the initial sketches for this century's Marvin the Paranoid Android. Elsewhere, we see plans for the Heart of Gold Spaceship. I know men in basements who would sell their own mothers (easy enough to do, as they live upstairs) for a glimpse of such artefacts.
"Now is anybody not familiar with the story at all?" Stamp, a middle-aged, enthusiastic man, asks. "Does anybody not know anything about Hitchhikers?"
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. Full of big ideas and fantastic jokes, it rapidly became a cult when that word still meant something. Unassisted by a huge marketing budget or the wageless efforts of young fellows with broadband access, the series was enthused over in playgrounds and saloon bars. Adams subsequently expanded Hitchhiker into a successful trilogy (sic) of five novels and then - these were the days when the BBC special effects department still used sticky-back plastic - a not wholly satisfactory TV series.
The plot does not comfortably accommodate summary, but let's try anyway. Arthur is rescued by his old friend Ford Prefect, who, it transpires, is not only an alien, but a correspondent for an enormously comprehensive electronic book named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After escaping on a spaceship crewed by the horrific Vogons, whose poetry is renowned throughout the universe for its hideousness, the two pals set out on a series of adventures which bring them into contact with Marvin the Paranoid Android, Slartibartfast, a Magrathean designer of planets, and Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy. Along the way, they discover the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. It is 42.
"I was involved in the original sale of the film rights to Disney back in 1997," says Stamp, once Adams's partner in multimedia company The Digital Village. "But the history of the film goes back even longer than that. When Douglas died in 2001, aged only 49, I asked his widow, Jane, if she would like the movie to go ahead. She and his mother and sisters said that it had always been Douglas's desire to see the movie made. But when people write books about films going through development hell, they will talk about this."
At the time of Adams's death, the director attached to the project was, somewhat unpromisingly, Mr Meet the Parents himself, Jay Roach. And nobody had yet produced a script that held the essence of the original project while offering digestible pleasures to an audience outside the fanatical hardcore fanbase. Then Roach caught a glimpse of the Aardman animation Chicken Run. He felt the script, by one Karey Kirkpatrick, showed a grasp of the same eccentric, English humour that illuminated Hitchhiker's. Kirkpatrick was hired and produced the first screenplay that looked as if it might work.
"But then Jay felt he couldn't do it," Stamp says. "Now we had the right script but no director. Whereas, before then, it had always been the other way around." Then, fortuitously, the team happened upon Spike Jonze, the former pop video director, who had recently found success with Being John Malkovich. "Spike was a huge Hitchhiker fan. 'But it's not right for me now,' he said. 'What you really need is me five years ago. What you need is Hammer and Tongs.'"
Hammer and Tongs are Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, the men behind such singular pop videos as Blur's Coffee and TV (the animated milk carton) and Fatboy Slim's Right Here Right Now (single cell creatures evolve into lazy humans). With Jennings as director and Goldsmith as producer the project finally began to take shape. Martin Freeman - Tim from The Office - was cast as Arthur Dent. Indie queen Zooey Deschanel would play Trillian, the female lead. And Sam Rockwell was pencilled in as Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Most of the casting decisions were well received by the faithful, though some negative internet postings about rapper Mos Def - "Excuse me, isn't Ford Prefect white?" - had an unwelcome flavour of racism about them. The producers had, it seems, set themselves a difficult task. As happened with the recent successful revival of Dr Who, they would have to produce a modern, thrusting entertainment without alienating those who had treasured the old material for decades. In particular, many fans were concerned that the new Hitchhiker's might, with all this American involvement, lose its quintessential Englishness.
"Luckily, Garth and I live on a boat and we drink a lot of tea so, that Englishness will still be there," Nick Goldsmith says. "Hammer and Tongs may not be quintessentially British in its work, but we are in the sense that we drink a lot of tea. We are not demonstrative, so there is a Britishness in that."
Robbie Stamp sees Martin Freeman's role as significant in this regard. "We decided that it would all happen from Arthur's point of view," he says. "And we are not going to reveal any information that would not be apparent to Arthur. The film remains his point of view throughout." And, to be fair, you can't imagine a more English everyman than Martin Freeman.
"That is partly true," Freeman says when we meet later over lunch. "And what I am discovering is that what being an everyman means now is different to what it meant 20 years ago. Twenty years ago an everyman was a bit posher."
He makes an interesting point. Simon Jones, the excellent original Arthur Dent, was much more middle-class than Freeman. "But humour does change. If you can find somebody now who genuinely finds a Shakespearean nob joke funny, I'll give him a million pounds. It's just not funny. And some of the Pythonesque stuff in the original scripts, Douglas knew, would have to change for the film."
This will send shivers down the spine of the hardline Hitchhiker Taliban. But such fans might be impressed to hear the - to my ears, slightly creepy - way everybody on set talks about Adams as if he were a minor deity. "I had a dream the other night," Stamp says. "I got a message to say Douglas wanted to see me and I thought: he's dead. So we went to a bar and drank champagne - he liked champagne - and he asked me how things were going. Sometimes the unconscious can be as subtle as a brick."
The film will feature a massive model of Douglas's nose. The Heart of Gold spaceshipis decorated with an elaborate frieze ("It took four months to design, but will only be seen for a few seconds") which includes images of the author. It seems, as with the huddle at the back of the Big Brother house, as if we are experiencing a concept that Adams himself might have dreamt up: a comedy film that seeks the apotheosis of a late atheist.
After lunch we are led into the interior of the Heart of Gold and, immediately, a significant realisation sets in: it exists. Having become used to science fiction films being constructed inside computers, it is a delight to potter round a real - well, realish - spacecraft hammered together by men with utility belts. Everything is coloured the soft, matt white of an iPod ("Douglas was an Apple fanatic") and the surfaces have a satisfying rigidity to them.
I spot Warwick Davis, the hardworking little person who has appeared in Return of the Jedi, Willow and Harry Potter, being strapped into Marvin the Paranoid Android. It all feels very reassuringly old-school.
There is a movement away from computer graphics among some of Hammer and Tong's contemporaries. Michel Gondry, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who also started in pop videos, revels in the use of solid, clanky objects, for example.
"Yes, absolutely," Goldsmith says. "I have nothing against special effects. But, once you have seen The Matrix, you get terribly used to them. Even my Mum can tell a bad computer effect now. So the Vogons are actually there in this film. The only things that won't exist for real with be the external of the ships. We are hiding wires. We are using bits of string. It's amazing what you can do with bits of string. We even have the cast running backwards and forwards across the ship during buffeting, like in Star Trek."
This brief visit suggests that the production team is, if nothing else, pushing in the correct direction. Those elements of the project that clearly needed updating have been tweaked. Trillian's character, very sketchily drawn in previous versions, is significantly fleshier. "She is clearly intelligent," says Deschanel. "So I don't see why she should be played as this girl who is just along for the ride." Arthur has become a little less home counties. (Though the voice of the Guide itself is still a posh one: Stephen Fry's.) And the general public-school larkiness seems to have been toned down a little.
Most encouragingly, the innovations that Adams himself brought to earlier version of the screenplay before his death - John Malkovich turns up as a deranged missionary named Humma Kavula - all sound promising. But can something so odd achieve a mass audience in the US?
Martin Freeman is optimistic, even if he has concerns about what any potential success might mean for him personally. "I did pause a little when it was offered to me," he says. "Just when people have stopped calling me Tim from The Office, will they start calling me Arthur Dent? It does damage your anonymity when people shout Tim at you in the street. Will they just start shouting Arthur?" That might make a nice change.
"Well, for about 10 minutes."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens on April 29th
