Jude the Obscure - screenplay

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Jude the Obscure was the first full length script I ever attempted, based on Thomas Hardy's deeply pessimistic last novel that so enraged Queen Victoria and others he abandoned further novel-writing thereafter and stuck to poetry.

Bizarrely, I wrote it in the Namib Desert while working on the Dawn of Man sequence for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rooting about an old Nazi bookshop in Swakopmund, I was surprised to find an old second-hand copy, and because I'd loved Tess, grabbed it and spent the next two months tapping out the script on two fingers in my tent during the sweltering day when we couldn't shoot. I was very naive (doubtless evident in these pages) and didn't realise Hardy was then still in copyright. But when I got back England in June, the agent for his estate at Curtis Brown read it, and kindly gave me a year's option for a mere shilling,

My first choice for Jude was Michael Crawford, later to play the Phantom of the Opera. Julie Christie was up for playing Sue Brideshead, but I still needed an Arabella.

That August of 1967 I went to work for the Beatles on their Magical Mystery Tour. I had my eye on Jane Asher for Arabella, and asked her then boyfriend Paul McCartney if he could slip her a copy. He looked at the title.

Jude the Obscure? What does it mean?

I explained that it was the name of the main character.

Paul seemed surprised. "You mean Jude is a name?"

I spent a further few months trying to set it up with myself as director, but given my age (21) and the searingly unhappy storyline, it was hardly surprising that I couldn't get funding for the large budget needed, so instead headed off to Spain to work on a Michael Caine picture.

End of my Jude.