After Christopher Hampton saw Zeller’s dementia drama on stage in
Paris, neither language, finance nor another film adaptation could thwart their collaboration on the screenplay
![‘Anthony Hopkins committed within five minutes’: how I wrote The Father with Florian Zeller](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/763a0d1bedfceed06cf279e7f1493322b18d6ced/0_353_6720_4032/master/6720.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=7ced57a9829c0db9cfbf1ba5da0e2d3b)
I first met Florian Zeller about eight years ago. It was in the foyer of the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, where I had just watched his play The Father, directed by Ladislas Chollet, with the astonishing 88-year-old French
Actor Robert Hirsch in the title role. I was pretty much overwhelmed by what I’d seen, but I think I was able to convey to Florian that I loved his play and hoped he would allow me to translate it.
The Father was not the first play of Florian’s that I had seen. The year before, also in Paris, I’d watched a very deft and amusing
comedy called The Truth and had been saying to whom it might concern that, providing a really gifted director could be found (because the play required razor-sharp precision and considerable wit and timing), I was confident a
British audience would embrace it. What struck me now, however, having seen The Father, was how remarkable it was that a playwright in his early 30s could have written two such radically different plays, with nothing in common beyond the skill of their construction.