Fan Sam Mendes recruits Christopher Hampton as key player for US cricket film

Movie adapation of Netherland hopes to win the sport a place in American hearts
Christopher Hampton
Christopher Hampton. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

For most Americans, the game of cricket defies explanation. Yet this month two leading British talents have joined forces to bring the sport to cinema screens and, they hope, to earn it a proper place in American hearts.

The Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes has asked the playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, acclaimed for his screenplay for Atonement, to adapt Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a novel that celebrates the efforts of a group of expatriates who play cricket in New York City.

Hampton, who has agreed to take on the project in the past few days, acknowledges the challenge ahead of him. Not only must he tackle the infamously arcane rules of cricket, he also has to do justice to a book hailed by many critics as the greatest piece of American literature since The Great Gatsby.

The film rights to O'Neill's story are owned by Oprah Winfrey, the influential American chat show host. Her company, Harpo Films, snapped up the title this year and began negotiations with Mendes. The director, who won an academy award for American Beauty and is married to Kate Winslet, has a heavy line-up of theatre commitments next year, but is determined to film Netherland.

"It is a beautifully written book and I quail at the idea of adapting it," Hampton said this weekend. "This is a very difficult project, I know that. When Sam first asked me, I said it was too difficult and that I could not do it. But Sam was very persistent and quite eloquent too."

Hampton, like Mendes, is a big cricket fan, but admits he is not obsessed with the sport in the way of fellow playwrights Tom Stoppard and the late Harold Pinter. "I don't know why Sam wanted me to do it, but I do know he feels that he has to make it. He told me there really isn't anybody else who could make this film, since he is both a film director and an expat cricket-lover living in New York," said Hampton.

O'Neill, a former barrister, spent seven years writing Netherland and his manuscript was turned down by many publishers before the New York publisher and cricket enthusiast Sonny Mehta read the book and recommended it to booksellers.

Within four days, O'Neill has said, his life was changed forever after a series of highly flattering reviews. New York magazine annointed him "the king of New York" and he was compared not just with F Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, but Saul Bellow and V S Naipaul.

Set in the aftermath of 9/11, Netherland is about the attempts different communities ought to make to understand each other. "Well, if they can't understand cricket, how on earth are they going to understand the rest of the world?" O'Neill argues.

Hampton finally agreed to adapt Netherland when he read it again. "It is a most seductively written book. I am still not quite sure how I am going to do it, but I did think eventually, 'Ah yes, I can see a way'."

He concedes that cricket is still a mystery to many English people, let alone to a US cinema audience.

"I don't think it is possible to make cricket clear to people who don't understand the game. But luckily there isn't very much ball by ball stuff in this novel and it is actually more popular in the US than we imagine it is," Hampton said.

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