Characterisation

Interviewer: Your Gatsby character is a seahorse and Daisy is a flighty bird. How did the ideas for your characters come about?

Nicki Greenberg: The ideas for the characters was the first thing that I worked on. From the first time I read the book I felt that I knew the characters intimately, it was as almost as though they were people that I'd interacted with, that I knew. I'd thought about them for years but I realised I'd never actually thought to myself what they looked like as humans even though I felt that I knew them intimately. I didn't think, was Daisy a blonde or a brunette? When I started thinking about doing this adaptation I wanted to have representations that showed those larger than life personalities. Something that went almost beyond the human in Fitzgerald's characters. So, I created these creatures whose physical form, every aspect of their shape shows that personality. Gatsby for example looks like a seahorse. Gatsby is that mysterious, enigmatic creature who sort of cobbled himself together from nothing, presented himself as he'd like to appear and he's made largely of lies. And the seahorse to me looks like a beautiful but preposterous creature that's been patched together by a mad inventor. It looks gorgeous and glittering but also slightly wrong and this is really what Gatsby is like.

Interviewer: What other adaptations would you consider doing?

Nicki: Well, I'm working on 'Hamlet' at the moment. Just for something short, sweet and cheerful. Hamlet's going to be an even longer work than Gatsby. It'll be about 400 pages and it will look quite different. But that's a very large, absorbing piece of work.