Nicholls was already comfortable with this process, though, as he’d been writing for TV shows in Britain before he turned to prose fiction. “When you work in television, you become very tough about throwing things away, about discarding material,” he explained, “and that’s something I’ve had to do in adapting my own work. The emphasis always has to be on story, always has to be on moving things forward.”
The novel also keeps Emma and Dex apart in some early chapters, staying in touch with each other through letters. (Remember, it’s the late 1980s and early 1990s, before email.) But, as Nicholls puts it, “there’s nothing cinematic about a letter,” so he came up with a short scene, set the year after their first night together: Dex helps Emma move into her London apartment, even though he’s in a hurry to get to the airport for an international flight. It’s a quick bit of business, but it tells viewers everything they need to know about how their friendship has progressed.
One thing that didn’t change in the transition from book to film, though, is the structural constraint of only seeing the characters on July 15. On the printed page, that gives every chapter a built-in cliffhanger, but how would that translate to the big screen? Would the year-long gaps come off as disjointed and choppy?
It works: Not only does the film make smooth transitions from one year to the next, but Hathaway and Sturgess are able to age gracefully into their parts, giving Emma and Dex’s emotional journey a compelling credibility. If you’ve read One Day already, you will recognize the core of the novel underneath the layer of cinematic alterations. If this is your first experience with the story, you’ll quickly find yourself sucked into the drama, anticipating the changes of each coming year and wondering how Dex and Emma will handle the latest developments.
—Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. His most recent book is Getting Right with Tao, a print edition of his popular online “translation” of the Tao Te Ching into modern vernacular.
He is also the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to ’70s Hollywood, and a contributor to several anthologies, including the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens, and Secrets of the Lost Symbol.