McEwan's Hollywood ending, 24 years late

Ian McEwan has been writing movie scripts for almost as long as he's been writing fiction. The apex of his film career came in 1993, when three of his screenplays arrived in theatres: The Cement Garden, based on his 1978 debut novel; The Innocent, starring Anthony Hopkins, adapted from his 1990 novel; and an original thriller, The Good Son, starring a young Elijah Wood, as well as the biggest movie star in the world at the time: Macaulay Culkin.

"I had a brief, and I think typical, British writer's experience of believing that you could transform Hollywood by being both commercial and high quality," said McEwan, nursing a coffee in his hotel restaurant on the first morning of the Toronto International Film Festival last week. He continued: "For two or three years, I was an A-list writer – got to sit right at the front of the airplane, sat around the Bel-Air [Hotel] et cetera. And it just went the usual way." The usual way being he couldn't get any other of his screenplays produced. "By then I thought I'm just wasting my time – I could have written two novels in this time! So I turned my back on the whole thing for a good while."

A good while, in this case, was 24 years. Yes, there were those unproduced screenplays, and of course adaptations of the Man Booker Prize-winning writer's work – 2004's Enduring Love and 2007's Atonement, for instance – but there was not, between 1993 and now, a film in which the credits stated screenplay by Ian McEwan.

That's why he was amused, and slightly dumbfounded, to find himself attending the Toronto festival with not one but two films he'd written enjoying their world premiere: the bittersweet On Chesil Beach and the thought-provoking The Children Act, based on novels of the same names published in 2007 and 2014, respectively. (The BBC adaptation of his 1987 novel The Child in Time, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, for which he did not write the screenplay, is also forthcoming.)

"It's the London bus principle," he said, dryly. "They all come at once."

On the surface, the two films couldn't be more different – The Children Act concerns a London judge (played by Emma Thompson) who is charged with deciding whether a teenaged Jehovah's Witness should be forced, against his wishes, to undergo a blood transfusion that might save his life, while On Chesil Beach is the melancholic story of two young newlyweds (Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle) honeymooning on the British coast. Yet they make a compelling double feature – one looks at the start of a marriage, the other at a marriage's possible dissolution, and both are about the ways intimacy, or the lack thereof, can threaten a relationship.

"Whatever similarities they have are just the unconscious result of the same consciousness creating them," said McEwan, although he pointed out there were more practical parallels between the two movies. "The weird thing about it was they went into preproduction on the same day [and] started shooting within a day of each other at Pinewood" Studios, outside London, on neighbouring soundstages. "I was, quite happily, running back and forth between these two different worlds."

The two films wrapped up within 48 hours of each other, McEwan said, and even the parking spaces reserved for the directors – "Writers don't get a parking space," he added – were adjacent: "There was Dominic Cooke's right next to Richard Eyre's."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. McEwan wrote the screenplay for On Chesil Beach years ago, with Sam Mendes attached to direct. "He'd always warned me that there was a possibility that he would go and make a Bond movie. And, lo and behold, just when we were more or less ready with the script, that's what happened. (Mendes went off to make 2012's Skyfall, followed by Spectre in 2015.) McEwan's script languished; a few producers were interested, but the film remained in limbo.

Meanwhile, after publishing The Children Act, McEwan decided that it would make a perfect movie for his old friend and collaborator, Eyre, whom he had first worked with on the 1980 BBC production of The Imitation Game – "Richard and I thought it was far superior to the other film by that name, and written a whole generation earlier" – as well as 1983's The Ploughman's Lunch. "When things work out well – and I'm happy with these two movies, enormously happy – there's a pleasure of collaboration and achieving something together. It's a very different kind of satisfaction from sitting alone with your ghosts and writing a novel."

Part of the satisfaction, McEwan believes, comes from the fact that both Eyre and Cooke have roots in the theatre – Eyre is the former director of the Royal National Theatre, while Cooke served as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre and is currently an associate director at the National Theatre. "Which means more respect for writers. It's so much easier to work with a director as if you were making a play – how do we bring these words to the screen? What's the best way? And it's a very different way of collaborating when you're working with a Hollywood movie director, and you're just a kind of amanuensis … who could be replaced at any time."

Didn't that happen to McEwan when he was working on The Good Son?

"It most certainly did."

In brief, McEwan found himself caught in a power struggle: On the one side was the film's director and producer and on the other was Macaulay Culkin's father, Kit, who, after the success of Home Alone, had the power to demand any role he wanted for his son, and he wanted Culkin to play Henry, the film's psychotic child. The director and producer left the project, a new director was brought on, and McEwan found himself increasingly marginalized.

"It was quite hilarious, at least in retrospect. Suddenly, your calls are not being answered, and three weeks later you find that you're off the movie, and the director has gone with some old friend to take your place."

McEwan fought for his name to remain on the film, to the point of going through an arbitration process with the Writers Guild to defend his involvement. "You write a memorandum, defending your whole credit, a piece of work I think I wrote with great earnestness and intensity. And rightly, I still receive, four times a year, a cheque from The Good Son. So that was well worth sticking with."