On unfamiliar turf with his own book

The temperature in the Mojave Desert hit 120 degrees. The dust storms were blinding. The onions were inedible. Yet the biggest challenge in bringing the children’s bestseller “Holes” to the screen didn’t happen on the set but on a novelist’s word processor.

Nine-year-olds can recite from memory nearly every scene in Louis Sachar’s instant classic, published in 1998. The darkly humorous tale of the terrible juvenile detention facility Camp Green Lake and its even more terrible staff promptly won both a National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. It’s a favorite of third-grade teachers and middle-aged parents. In other words, perfect material for a broad-appeal family movie -- as long as the book isn’t trashed in the process.

“Louis had heard horror stories about what happens when Hollywood turns books into movies,” says Andy Davis, director of the film being released today. “He was very nervous.”

With good reason, on two counts. Tampering with a kid’s favorite means proceeding at your peril. Yet the pressure to stay true to the source material is so strong that filmmakers can turn overly literal, a criticism aimed at the “Harry Potter” films.

So how do you take a book as complicated and tonally precise as “Holes” and bring it into another medium? Very carefully, and with the novelist’s continued involvement. But that didn’t mean there weren’t disagreements and compromises.

Like the young lawbreakers in his book forced to dig numerous holes for seemingly inexplicable reasons, Sachar realized early on that making a movie out of his book would be backbreaking (albeit financially rewarding) work with little immediate gratification. At first, he tried to remain at an emotional and geographical distance, helping from his home in Austin, Texas, to select an experienced screenwriter for the adaptation. He plowed through writing samples and gravitated to Mark Childress, author of the novel and screenplay of the 1999 film “Crazy in Alabama.” But Davis had a different idea: Sachar himself.

It was a bold pick. Sachar had no experience writing scripts, and Davis had to send him several how-to books. But Sachar understood the characters and complex, intersecting story lines better than anyone else, and his participation gave the film an essential seal of approval. “I told him, ‘You are a revered author of children’s literature and I want you involved,’ ” Davis recalls.

Sachar wasn’t so sure. “My first reaction was, ‘I don’t know how to write a script. This is my book, and I want it to get a real professional. I shouldn’t write it,’ ” Sachar says. “I said, ‘Keep on trying to get Mark Childress. But in the meantime, I’ll give it a try.’ But as soon as I started working on it, I really enjoyed it. I called back and said, ‘Stop trying to get anyone else.’ ”

Like any novice screenwriter, Sachar needed to learn about character arcs and scene structure, but that wasn’t all. He also was taught that unlike in book publishing, where the author reigns, Hollywood writers work for the director.

“I didn’t have the final say, ever,” Sachar says. “Which is hard to get used to. I would say, ‘This is the way I want to do it.’ And Andy Davis would say, ‘Well, no. I want it this way.’ ”

The debates mostly involved small changes that only close readers of the book -- tens of thousands of kids -- will notice. But entire scenes from the book either had to be eliminated or streamlined, as they were either too costly or long. The more spirited discussions centered on the book’s nuances, part of what makes “Holes” such a distinguished novel.

Readers may love shades of gray, but moviegoers rarely see anything that is not black-and-white. The filmmakers hired screenwriter Brent Hanley (“Frailty”) to revise Sachar’s draft. “He did a version which I did not like at all,” Sachar says. “But to be fair to him, he was told to try certain things. He made everyone a lot meaner than in the book. He made the other boys a lot meaner, he made [camp superintendent] Mr. Sir very sadistic, and a lot more violent.”

The new draft had the book’s central figure, the wrongly convicted Stanley Yelnats, telling his family’s history around a campfire -- something Sachar said Stanley would never do. “I think they wanted him to be more of a hero. I kind of preferred the way he was in the book,” Sachar says.

Davis went off to direct “Collateral Damage.” “Holes” languished. “The script was sitting there for about a year. And I wasn’t too happy about it,” Sachar says. “So I wrote a long letter to Andy and [producers] Theresa [Tucker-Davies] and Lowell [Blank] outlining what I thought wasn’t right” in the script.

They all started over, essentially returning to Sachar’s earlier drafts. Screenwriter Dan Kopelman (the sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle”) was brought in to add some humor, but Sachar ultimately was awarded sole screenwriting credit and says few if any of Hanley’s or Kopelman’s contributions remain.

Sachar believes he improved upon his book in writing the adaptation. He added someone who does not appear in the book, Stanley’s grandfather, to help explain the family’s rotten luck. “That was a character that I realized I should have had,” he says.

Despite their debates about the script, Davis says he and Sachar are planning on collaborating on an original idea for another movie. Like so many before him, the novelist returned to his desk with a new understanding of how movies are made. It wasn’t a cakewalk.

The production last year was hot and dusty and exhausting. The prop food wasn’t that good, either. As part of the story, two hungry and dehydrated kids escaping the camp stumble into a field of onions and munch the vegetables to survive. All sorts of varieties were tried, but the filmmakers ultimately had to use apples covered with rice paper.

“I went home for a week, and someone asked me, ‘So, are you having cocktails with Sigourney Weaver?,’ ” says Sachar, of the actress who plays the warden. “It was such an odd question, but probably one I would have asked myself. But after seeing these people work 16-hour days in the desert, the last thing you think about is sitting around the pool, drinking cocktails.”