Terry Pratchett: By adapting his films for screen, I discovered how he was so much more than a ‘fantasy’ writer

Foreseeing the financial crisis was just one way that he expressed his genius

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I have a lot to thank Terry for and so this is my thank-you to him for allowing me to muck about with some of the work created by his genius, in the hope of doing justice both to him as a serious literary figure and as the inventor of one of the greatest fantasy worlds we’ve ever seen.

To take just one example, in Making Money, Terry foresaw the financial crisis brilliantly. If you wanted to understand what was going on – from Gordon Brown selling off the nation’s gold to why some people started to believe that a Bitcoin might have a value – then it was all there in Terry’s writing some years before these things actually happened. Terry showed it to us in a place that came from his imagination - seeing what the rest of us could not. And he managed to do it while also making us laugh and sometimes even cry.

Terry had a profound effect on my professional life. He granted me the opportunity to achieve something on my list of things to dream of doing before I too pop my clogs: to make the first live-action adaptation of a Discworld novel – the stuff of dreams for a boy who used to play Dungeons and Dragons in Bristol.

I remember waiting for Terry’s reaction to my first attempt at the adaptation of Hogfather. He sat in a big leather chair and said to me, “It’s very good, because most of the words are mine.” I had successfully shoplifted the words from Britain’s most shoplifted author and mucked about with them in a way that made the man himself happy. I felt like an unworthy guardian of his genius. What an honour.

Vadim Jean is a film director whose credits include the adaptations of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather and Going Postal