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phial that reads “DANGER: OVERDOSE IS FATAL” (48), thus placing Ellis in
immediate danger.
Additional improvements include turning separable scenes into brief
flashbacks for a more fluid narrative trajectory and creating new dialogue to
enhance scenes, thereby deepening characterization. Stage directions were now
more vivid and precise: “JANE comes in carrying MOUSA” in the earlier
version (15) became “JANE stumbles in with MOUSA in her arms” in the final
draft (6). A handwritten marginal note “Jean-Pierre a charming shit” became a
full paragraph analyzing character: “JEAN-PIERRE is a complex, multi-layered
character. Superficially, he is attractive and charming. However, we will soon
learn that he is dishonest and unreliable. Finally, we will see him as a tragically
misguided idealist” (6). In short, during the 35 months that the project involved
him, Follett had created a screenplay that, in its final version—and assuming
competent acting and directing—should have resulted in a coherent and
reasonably entertaining adaptation of the book.
Curiously, when an adaptation of Lie Down with Lions was finally produced
by Reeve some five years later—in 1994—it was as a television miniseries for
Lifetime, with a script by Guy Andrews and Julian Bond. Both Andrews and
Bond had worked as actors and television writers. Andrews had been a comedy
writer who would go on to write television episodes for Prime Suspect and
Poirot. Bond, whose career had begun in the late 1950’s, had adapted Love f o r
Lydia for television and was the screenwriter on the Geoff Reeve production The
Far Pavilions. It was their first collaboration.
Andrews and Bond made wholesale changes to the setting and storyline of
Lie Down with Lions: instead of France and Afghanistan, the setting was now
Luxembourg and Azerbaijan. Jane was now American, with a name change to
Kate, and Jean-Pierre was now Czech and called Peter Husak. Ellis was now
Jack Carver, and nominally still American, though played by the Welsh actor
Timothy Dalton, who labored to deliver lines such as “Democracy . .. real
seductive. ... If 1 ever had any ideals, I lost them real quick.. . . ” Because an
affiliate of Reeve’s company, Reeve & Partners, was based in Luxembourg at
this time, some of the changes to the original story may have been influenced by
the availability of actors and locales. But the desire to avoid writing about a
constantly shifting contemporary situation must also have been a factor in the
decision to abandon the Afghan setting entirely.
When Follett began writing the novel Lie Down with Lions in 1983, the
American government was actively supporting the leaders of resistance to Soviet
occupation, and Ronald Reagan called them “Heroes of Freedom” and
“Champions of Freedom” in 1985. Follett, in fact, was initially attracted to the
Afghan setting because of the lack of moral ambiguity: “I chose Afghanistan
because there, at least, most people could identify who were the good guys and
who were the bad guys,” he stated to Publishers Weekly the year of his book’s
publication (Baker 55). A decade later, when the Andrews-Bond television
script was being developed, such moral clarity was gone and the depiction of the