Chuko Esiri’s adaptation keeps Woolf’s skeleton, swaps the society around it, and lets the edit finish the writing.
LAGOS, Nigeria (Screenplay Biz) – Adapting a canonical novel invites two opposite mistakes: copying it so faithfully that the new setting feels like costume, or abandoning it so completely that nobody can tell why it was chosen. Clarissa, which Arie and Chuko Esiri adapted from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, offers a reasonably clear route between the two. Chuko Esiri is credited with the screenplay and has just been named a Gotham Awards nominee in the adapted category.
A fan of the book who saw his own family in it
In a conversation reported by Screen International around the film’s Directors’ Fortnight showing, Chuko described himself as a longtime reader of the novel who recognised his parents, uncles and aunties in its characters. He also argued that the two societies are comparable.
“London in the 1920s is not too dissimilar from Nigeria today.” – Chuko Esiri, Screen International
The idea is the whole justification for the adaptation. The film follows Clarissa, a Lagos socialite played by Sophie Okonedo, as she prepares a party at which old friends reunite. The cast also includes David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, and the production shot on 35mm in Nigeria in late 2025, moving between Lagos and flashbacks to the brothers’ hometown of Abraka in Delta State, according to What Kept Me Up’s report on the Neon distribution deal.
Keep the skeleton, change the body
An interview in Film Comment’s summer issue, which includes the film’s editor Blair McClendon, indicates that the film follows the novel’s structure and characters fairly closely while relocating them. Clarissa’s party-hosting world mirrors the postcolonial Lagos elite. Woolf’s shell-shocked war veteran becomes a working-class figure living with the country’s coups, political crises and the conflict with Boko Haram. The veteran and his wife are reimagined as Nigerians of different faiths, and their love is treated as stable rather than questioned.
These are not decorative substitutions. Each one answers the question of what Woolf’s original element did in the story, then asks what would do the same job in the new place. Class remains the engine, as Chuko told TheWrap, but the specifics change.
Letting the source characters go
At the Toronto festival, where the film premiered in September, TheWrap’s interview with the cast about the Lagos adaptation recorded Chuko saying that the theme of class conflict carried over from the novel, but that once he began building characters, Nigerian society and culture became the main source of inspiration. He described a moment when he had to release his grip on Woolf’s figures, and found it freeing.
That change of authority is a common turning point in adaptation. At first the source is the rulebook. Later the new world pushes back, and the writer has to decide whether loyalty belongs to the book or to the characters now on the page. The sources do not say when in the writing this happened, so no timeline should be inferred.
Where the script met the edit
The Film Comment interview also shows that writing continued into postproduction. The editor says that the central challenge of Woolf’s shifting perspectives is the transition, which the film handles with bridges of sound, matched images and rhyming images in place of the novel’s paragraph-by-paragraph hops between minds. The production struggled to find a suitable Lagos house for Clarissa because many colonial-style homes are being demolished for high-rises, and the filmmakers worked that change into the story. A theme of construction and a night-time security guard scene were developed in the edit.
The article does not describe drafts or rewrites in detail, and it does not break down which brother wrote which pages. It does report that the brothers kept tactile details from the screenplay on set, even on a small production, and that McClendon asked before shooting for small physical touches such as condensation on glasses.
Film Comment also covers the language choices. Dialogue moves between English, Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa and Igbo, which brought subtitling decisions into the conversation. For a screenwriter this is a reminder that casting a society in several tongues is a writing decision with consequences for how scenes are built, how much each line must carry, and what a subtitle can and cannot convey.
The same interview describes how the film follows ordinary people through the start and end of a working day, a thread that echoes Woolf’s technique of passing briefly from one consciousness to another. Even a rigorous adaptation, in other words, found new connective tissue instead of copying the novel’s prose rhythm. The article leaves open how much of that thread was on the page and how much emerged on set or in editing.
Market and awards context
Neon holds US distribution and international sales rights, and the Wrap piece says it will release the film in December. In its coverage of the Gotham nominations, The Film Stage lists Chuko Esiri as an adapted-screenplay nominee, next to Ryusuke Hamaguchi for All of a Sudden, Rashida Jones and Will McCormack for The Invite, Simon Lyashenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, and Ajon Singh for Primetime.
What working writers can take from it
The following is analysis based on the reported facts.
- Map each element of the source to its function before you choose a replacement.
- Give a real setting real problems, such as the loss of old houses, and let the plot use them.
- Expect the cut to rewrite your transitions, and write scenes that give an editor options.
- Decide early whether you are serving the book or the new characters.
Anyone who wants Hollywood’s habits explained with a laugh can try Bohiney Magazine, which looks at film and television from the comedy side.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/