He admitted that he had never read it before, that he chopped it to bits with scissors and that he deliberately 'sexed it up' - but when Andrew Davies's BBC adaptation of War and Peace finally arrived, it was met with five-star reviews.
And to a packed audience of De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) staff, students and members of the public, the 79-year-old screenwriter revealed his tricks and tips to making the kind of TV which draws in millions of viewers across the world - even those without a passion for Tolstoy.
Andrew - who is famous for adapting works like Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House and Bridget Jones's Diary for TV and film - said he wrote for people with no previous knowledge of the works he was trying to adapt.
To guests at the public talk held at DMU's Clephan building, he said: "When I'm adapting I'm thinking of someone who has never read the book and who will probably never read the book and who might find themselves surprised to be watching Tolstoy.
"In many 19th century novels you have young characters who are making big love mistakes, who are struggling against their parents and never more so than in War and Peace. These characters are very fresh even today so it's my job to present them in the most appealing way."
Andrew, who last year gave his archive of manuscripts, unfinished work, notes and unpublished material to DMU's renowned Centre for Adaptations and Centre for Textual Studies for digitizing - explained how he and the BBC had approached serialising Tolstoy's epic for TV.
He said: "I'm not on my own when I do this; I have script editors and producers. The first question is how many episodes and we thought either six or eight.
"I was in favour of doing it in as few episodes as possible, so we settled on six. In retrospect, it could have been seven. Maybe eight. That last episode was ruthlessly edited, there was so much to get in."
Once the work started on the script, Andrew said he took drastic measures on the text.
He said: "The next stage is quite simple: you just chop the book up into however many sections. I try and end each episode with a cliffhanger so I look for those.
"I like to work with the physical book but War and Peace wouldn't fit in my pocket. So I took a pair of scissors to it, crunch crunch down the spine. It was thrillingly sacrilegious."
He said he spent six month coming up with the first draft: one month per episode, which prompted further work and editing before going into production.
While he did visit the set on occasion, Andrew said he found the process of filmmaking "fantastically boring".
He said: "As a writer you are the only one without anything to do. And I find myself always getting in the way of the shot or the actors' eyeline."
But he said he had been "blown away" by the acting - in particular Lily James as Natasha Rostova. And he said he had been impressed - and amused - by the reaction to the series when it aired.
He said: "The whole "Phwoar and Peace" thing came out right at the start and did take me a little by surprise. I had said in an interview with the Daily Mail that I was examining the incest implied in the book and of course they seized on that."
He told the audience that his next project would be an adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables but that he wasn't sure which network it would be on.
He said: "I would always want to be on BBC 1 at 9pm on Sunday and they know that. It's the best spot to be in. We'll wait and see; perhaps we will do it some other way, with Netflix maybe."
Posted on Tuesday 22 March 2016