Tim Hatley is no stranger to film-to-musical adaptations.
The set and costume designer has worked extensively on productions on the West End and Broadway, including shows like “Shrek the Musical” and “The Bodyguard,” an adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name. One of his more recent works is “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the iconic 1985 movie directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale.
“Back to the Future” follows high schooler Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) on an adventure through time after his best friend, a quirky scientist named Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), invents a time traveling DeLorean. Hatley has worked on the musical from its debut in Manchester, England in 2020 to the most recent tour, which is coming to the Fox Theatre Sept. 23 and running through Sept. 27.
Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Hatley about his work on the musical, including what goes into adapting a film for the stage and, of course, creating the iconic DeLorean. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I was looking at some of your work before “Back to the Future,” and noticed that you’ve done a lot of film-to-stage adaptations. I read a quote from you where you said that it can be a tricky thing, moving the design of a film to the stage. I wondered if you could elaborate on what specifically you find tricky or difficult about that?
Tim Hatley: It’s not tricky or difficult, it’s just that the consideration of moving a property from the film to the stage is, I think – when you’re presenting something on the stage, you have to celebrate what works in a theater, which is not the same as what works, necessarily, on a moving screen.
For me, taking a film as the starting point – and often it’s also a book, so there’s also that there as well, if the book goes to a film, and the film goes to the stage – I absorb both the book, if it’s there, and the film. Then I try to put it in a box, and I start designing my own version of it for three dimensions and for telling the story in a theatrical way. That often involves work with the writer, who isn’t necessarily just copying the screenplay. You have to turn it into a theatrical version, which often means you have to simplify some of the locations. There’s no point in going back to a location repeatedly in the arc of a story of a stage show, because you’ll just end up changing the set all the time, and it’s not moving the story forward. There has to be a collaboration with the writer, who will also have the same issues that I have of turning it into a stage adaptation. None of it’s a problem. It’s just a way of thinking about it. For me, you don’t just copy a film and put it right on the stage. It needs to be reinterpreted and reinvented. That’s what I mean.
Some people say, “I don’t bother looking at the film. I’m doing my own thing.” I also think you do need to look at the film, especially when you’ve got a property like “Back to the Future,” where there are so many sacred moments in the film. You have to choose what you think the fan base would really, really, really appreciate seeing, and what you think they might not miss. I think you have to respect that. I think it’s foolish to throw out the DeLorean and turn it into – I don’t know, a refrigerator or something.
When I did “Shrek” as well, you have to take what you know the audience is going to love. They want to see “Shrek.” He’s got to be green. He’s got to look like he does in the film. Once you decide that, then the rest of the characters all fall into place. It’s always just a question of picking the elements that you feel are relevant and will work on stage, and not getting too involved in the smaller areas that actually aren’t going to go for anything on stage, and the fans aren’t going to be too cross with you if you don’t have it there.
The other thing is add musical flair, and add things that you will not see in the film. The DeLorean is a good example. In the film, the DeLorean does not travel in the same way that we make it travel on stage, with moving video, and lights and all of those linear lines that we have when it speeds around. That’s not in the film, nor is our environment that we have. You have to add to it too, to make it a three-dimensional experience.
I’m glad you brought up that idea of fan investment in different aspects of the film. “Shrek” is a great example, and I’m sure there was that sort of added pressure there too. With properties like “Shrek” and “Back to the Future,” what are the specific things you’re thinking of when you’re balancing making this something that you’re designing and has your handprints on it, along with this added aspect of what fans want to see?
Hatley: It’s a juggling act. “Back to the Future” was a bit of a gift, in a way, because it’s so well documented, and the fans are so vocal. There are fan sites and blog sites all over the place, talking about people’s favorite moments in the movie. So it’s quite easy to research that and find out what all that was. I made a list of the top 20 moments. We need to make sure we’re addressing these things. Not necessarily they’ve got to be identical, they need to happen.
I learned it really early on, how obsessive people are to detail – which is completely fine. Before I started getting right into the design, we did a teaser photo shoot to go out online. We had the original actor playing Marty dressed, and he was with a skateboard, and we had a guitar … The photos went out, and within seconds there were fans going, “Oh my God – this is going to be terrible.” … I thought, oh, crikey. That was a really good lesson to learn. From that moment on – which was early days, thankfully – I realized detail was a really big thing.
The DeLorean is a really good example. We had to have the DeLorean. [It] had to look like it looks. People would be very disappointed if it didn’t look how it looks. People would be comparing and contrasting. It felt sacred to me that we actually built that. But then, of course, it’s a DeLorean for a musical. The DeLorean in the movie, you don’t have girls jumping up and down and dancing on it. But we do. Our DeLorean has to do many, many things. It has to travel, it has to tilt, it has to turn. The wheels have to go around. It has to be full of sound effects. It has to emit CO₂ and lighting effects. It has to be strong enough to be danced on. It has to be strong enough to lift, and we have to tour it. We have to get it in and out of theaters, often on a weekly basis. We have to get it on the road, and we have to move around the country. That’s a tall order.
Bob Gale, who’s the original writer of the film, also wrote the book for this musical. Having him there must have been a boon, and I read that he was able to show you original imagery from the movie. I assume that’s not really something that usually happens, so I wanted to hear more about that relationship.
Hatley: Bob was great, because he is “Back to the Future.” He’s the fountain of all knowledge. Any questions we had, any details, he was able to provide us with the answers for absolutely everything, and continues to as we do more and more productions. There’s always things that you notice that you find you haven’t quite got right, and you fine tune. He is a stickler for detail, which is great. It’s like our number one fan is in the room with us. He’s been a real, real pleasure to work with and collaborate in that way. In terms of all the film stuff, if you’re working on a production that has the support of the studio and the original creators, as indeed, “Shrek” did … then the access to the original material is never a problem.
With this show, through that original run, and then transferring to Broadway, and now with this tour, how does your job change and evolve from production to when the show starts to run? What is it like transferring everything to different theaters and making sure things still work right in a different space?
Hatley: My involvement is enormous at the beginning, obviously, conceiving the idea. Our first production was in Manchester, England, and then we moved that production – with a pandemic in the middle – we moved that then to the West End in London. I’m exclusively involved in that, 100 percent. When we’ve done big flagship productions on Broadway, I was over in New York for three months mounting that and getting everything right, because it was a brand new build. It was all built in the U.S., so that needed supervising and making sure it’s completely right.
The touring version was all designed in my studio. As you can understand, you can’t tour absolutely everything that you’ve had on a Broadway stage that sits down for over a year, when we’ve got to get it all into a number of trucks, and we have to get it into the theater in a number of hours, and we have to get out of the theater in a number of hours. We’re very limited with what we can actually achieve manually, in doing that. Therefore, the design has to adapt and evolve. Some things that, for example, might have been built as solid, hard pieces of scenery to store in a large wing on Broadway or in a dock area, you can’t do it necessarily on the road. It takes up a lot of space in the truck. So you have to think, how are we going to create that piece of scenery? So, some things move to soft cloths … because we can then roll that up, put that in a lorry, and it’s job done. There are changes that have to be made.
However, it’s very important to me that people are getting a similar or the same experience, in a way, that you get on Broadway. So again, it’s a question of keeping the elements that you know you can’t do without. The DeLorean is the key thing in the show. We have that moving, we have that flying, so that element has remained. That has taken priority over some other areas. But all areas of the show have to shrink down. Lighting has to have a reduced amount of lights. Costumes have to come down … It’s a very cutthroat world now. Touring shows is expensive, and we have to be considerate as to how the books balance. Otherwise, the show simply won’t last.
Once [the show] is touring, I don’t go to every venue. I saw the very beginning, went in and checked it was all looking right and working well. Then it’s handed over to a massive team of brilliant production managers, stage crew coordinators, and they take it on the road. I keep in touch with it. I have show reports every day of what’s going on and see where things have been a problem. If we have repeated problems, we all get onto a Zoom, and we talk about how we’re going to solve that.
Speaking of key elements of the show, you mentioned earlier that when you first started, you watched the movie and picked the top 20 moments that you had to get right. I’m curious as to what some of those are.
Hatley: The DeLorean is one. Obviously, the costume looks were another key element that absolutely had to be right. Doc’s lab seemed very important to me, his environment and the detail that he had in all of that. I would say that the school dance is really quite iconic, and that whole look. The barn felt really important to me, when the car speeds and it lands in the 1950s. That actually wasn’t in Bob [Gale’s] original [musical] script. That was an interesting one, because he changed that to try and make it easier to stage. We pulled that back – let’s bring the barn back. Obviously the jump from the 1980s to the 1950s was key – getting that to really read.
Those are the key things. The DeLorean was a massive one, and all the things that it had to do. Key lines – “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” You’ve kind of got to have that so you’ve got to have a car that’s going to deliver. You’ve got to deliver that taking off.
There are elements that are not in the film. “The Power of Love,” for example, the song and Marty McFly performing that. That’s very much a musical moment. That was a moment we could make our own. That wasn’t from the film at all, the staging of that. But that’s become quite iconic, and people love how we’ve ended the show with that number. [There are] other areas that are a complete invention – the DeLorean girls, they’re not in the film. Doc has his backup singers and support act in the DeLorean girls. That was all invented by us. The other big number that was an invention was the top of Act 2, the “21st Century” number, which was nothing to do with the film, but that was something that worked well for the musical.
It’s interesting that Bob thought the barn sequence would be difficult to stage. Was there anything else like that, that either he thought about changing, or maybe you thought would be too difficult to stage? I’m sure the DeLorean comes to mind.
Hatley: The travel of the DeLorean was a key one. That was written into the script, but I went back to the movie, actually, because that was an area that I thought was quite iconic, and we have to get it right – we would be foolish to ignore the drama of that from the film. I took it upon myself to really study that sequence in the movie and freeze frame it, and take the bits that I felt we needed and also insert the song into it. I sort of reimagined that, in a sense, and redirected that and worked that out. I storyboarded all of that, and added the video looks. We worked with Finn Ross – he was our video designer – and he then took that to another level and improved on the quality of those images. But the actual idea of that and how to stage that was a design invention.
I showed that to Bob Gale, and then Bob said, “Great – if we’re going to do it like that, then we can just snip to this, and we don’t need all of that.” That was a good example of all areas collaborating together, because what’s on stage is not what was originally written. What’s on stage is not what’s actually the film – it’s all “inspired by,” and it’s become its own thing.